Some Anti-Pelagian Echoes in Augustine\u27s City of God.

Among the solutions which Christians have offered to the problem of the origin of evil in God\u27s good world, St. Augustine’s City of God is still classic. The political development of the fifth century presented a situation which demanded some answer to this problem, and the Augustine who addressed his great apologetic treatise De civitate Dei to that development had been dealing with the problem of evil in a number of polemical treatises as well, namely, in those directed against the Pelagian heresy

Psychobiology of Resilience

Nurse managers experience high levels of stress due to the complex bureaucratic and chaotic nature of the job, which can lead to burnout. In nurse managers, burnout negatively impacts the ability to meet the strategic goals of the quadruple aim: patient quality, patient satisfaction, cost savings, and employee well-being. Strategies to address burnout include minimizing or removing unnecessary causes of stress and provide the skills to protect against burnout. Resilience is a competency nurse leaders must have to withstand overwhelming job-related stress. Resilience-enhancing strategies have psychobiologic underpinnings and can be easily incorporated into nurse managers’ work schedules

The Temptation of the Church: A Study of Matt. 4:1-11

This brief essay purposes to examine the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, not so much the problems1which this narrative poses for the area of dogmatics we call Christology (though these are considerable), but the way the story highlights some of the most profound temptations to which the Church and its ministers are subject. For in the three questions which the devil put to Jesus, as Dostoevsky observed, the whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together into one whole, and in them are united all the unresolved historical contradictions of human nature

Enhancing Nurse Manager Resilience with a Resilience-Enhancing Toolkit

Background: Nurse managers have one of the most stressful jobs in nursing leadership. They experience more burnout and are more likely to leave the job or leave the nursing profession altogether, leading to vacancies or burned-out leaders. Local Problem: The organization experienced high nurse manager turnover. Of 12 positions, four have more than two years of experience, three have less than two years, and five are filled with interims. Context: Strategies to address burnout are decreasing stressors or arming leaders with skills to withstand stressors. The organization offers programs that address burnout but are designed to be used outside of work. Intervention: An evidence-based, resilience-enhancing toolkit for nurse leaders was designed to be easy to use at work. The toolkit contained techniques on mindfulness, cognitive reframing, and gratitude, which are strategies demonstrated to enhance resilience. Methods: The program took place between August and December 2022. Pre- and post-surveys were created to evaluate the effectiveness of the toolkit. Results: There was no difference in the Connor-Davidson Resilience mean pre- and post-intervention score. Mindfulness (50.0% to 87.5%), cognitive reframing (40.0% to 75.0%), and gratitude practices (90.0% to 100.0%) increased. Conclusions: Although mean resilience scores did not change, resilience-enhancing practices increased. More time may be needed to develop resilience. Post-intervention surveys were administered at a relatively more stressful time than pre-intervention surveys. Using the toolkit, post-intervention scores may have been positively affected

Use of genetic algorithms with multivariate regression for determination of gelatine in historic papers based on FT-IR and NIR spectral data

Quantitative non-destructive analysis of individual constituents of historic rag paper is crucial for its effective preservation. In this work, we examine the potentials of mid- and near-infrared spectroscopy, however, in order to fully utilise the selectivity inherent to spectroscopic multivariate measurements, genetic algorithms were used to select spectral data derived from information-rich FT-IR or UV-vis-NIR measurements to build multivariate calibration models based on partial least squares regression, relating spectra to gelatine content in paper. A selective but laborious chromatographic method for the quantification of hydroxyproline (HYP) has been developed to provide the reference data on gelatine content. We used 9-fluorenylmethyl chloroformate (FMOC) to derivatise HYP, which was subsequently determined using reverse-phase liquid chromatographic separation and fluorimetric detection. In this process, the sample is consumed, which is why the method can only be used as a reference method.The sampling flexibility afforded by small-size field-portable spectroscopic instrumentation combined with chemometric data analysis, represents an attractive addition to existing analytical techniques for cultural heritage materials. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

An analysis of the local optima storage capacity of Hopfield network based fitness function models

A Hopfield Neural Network (HNN) with a new weight update rule can be treated as a second order Estimation of Distribution Algorithm (EDA) or Fitness Function Model (FFM) for solving optimisation problems. The HNN models promising solutions and has a capacity for storing a certain number of local optima as low energy attractors. Solutions are generated by sampling the patterns stored in the attractors. The number of attractors a network can store (its capacity) has an impact on solution diversity and, consequently solution quality. This paper introduces two new HNN learning rules and presents the Hopfield EDA (HEDA), which learns weight values from samples of the fitness function. It investigates the attractor storage capacity of the HEDA and shows it to be equal to that known in the literature for a standard HNN. The relationship between HEDA capacity and linkage order is also investigated

Stochastic stability versus localization in chaotic dynamical systems

We prove stochastic stability of chaotic maps for a general class of Markov random perturbations (including singular ones) satisfying some kind of mixing conditions. One of the consequences of this statement is the proof of Ulam's conjecture about the approximation of the dynamics of a chaotic system by a finite state Markov chain. Conditions under which the localization phenomenon (i.e. stabilization of singular invariant measures) takes place are also considered. Our main tools are the so called bounded variation approach combined with the ergodic theorem of Ionescu-Tulcea and Marinescu, and a random walk argument that we apply to prove the absence of ``traps'' under the action of random perturbations.Comment: 27 pages, LaTe