Preaching in a Post-Truth Era

In this paper, the question of whether Christian preaching is implicated in the growing movement of populism is posed. The paper has identified three critical issues that call for investigation in homiletical hermeneutics. The first issue addresses the problem of biblical interpretation for homiletic practice. The second issue has to do with the impact of social media that often distorts the truth. Alarming dependence on the smart phone suggests that the task of the preacher in this rapidly changing visual and high tech culture is to deliver sermons that are critically aware of visual culture rather than literary culture. Finally, the paper calls for an approach to preaching that seeks to reveal missing, hidden and distorted truth as a way to speak against the demonic power of the profit-driven capitalism and the epidemic of gender-based violence against women and sexual minorities

Review: Andrew Gabriel’s Book The Lord is the Spirit

One of the most valuable contributions to this work of Andrew Gabriel in The Lord is the Spirit is to reveal its limitation of the classical theism which is heavily Christo-centric.  He thoroughly examines from the ancient theologians including  Thomas Aquinas to contemporary theologians including Karl Barth and Jurgen Moltman in order to demonstrate  the lack of or insufficient reference to the presence of the Spirit in the discourse of the doctrine of God

Green Environment, Mental Health, and Loyalty among Male and Female Patients

Existing studies revealed that exposure to green spaces within healthcare establishments has multiple physical and mental health benefits to patients. In this context, the concept of biophilic design has received growing attention among environmental psychology researchers. Several studies indicated that the positive effect of green environment may be different for males and females. Therefore, the present study sought to investigate the influence of biophilic design elements (i.e., green items and natural light) on patients’self-rated mental health value, satisfaction with medical care, and loyalty toward the healthcare establishment. The study also investigated the possible influence of gender differences in the relationships between the variables. Methods: A structural equation modeling was employed as a data analysis technique. Results: Our empirical result indicated that biophilic design elements significantly improved the patients’ self-rated mental health value, and this dimension had a positive effect on their satisfaction with medical care and loyalty toward the health care facility. Our findings indicated that the relationships among biophilic design elements, self-rated mental health value, satisfaction with medical care, and loyalty toward the healthcare establishment were substantially different across male and female groups. Moreover, self-rated mental health value and satisfaction with medical care acted as significant mediators between biophilic design elements and loyalty. Conclusions: Results of this study offer healthcare practitioners and researchers valuable strategies to effectively incorporate biophilic design elements into the interior spaces of a healthcare establishment

AesPA-Net: Aesthetic Pattern-Aware Style Transfer Networks

To deliver the artistic expression of the target style, recent studies exploit the attention mechanism owing to its ability to map the local patches of the style image to the corresponding patches of the content image. However, because of the low semantic correspondence between arbitrary content and artworks, the attention module repeatedly abuses specific local patches from the style image, resulting in disharmonious and evident repetitive artifacts. To overcome this limitation and accomplish impeccable artistic style transfer, we focus on enhancing the attention mechanism and capturing the rhythm of patterns that organize the style. In this paper, we introduce a novel metric, namely pattern repeatability, that quantifies the repetition of patterns in the style image. Based on the pattern repeatability, we propose Aesthetic Pattern-Aware style transfer Networks (AesPA-Net) that discover the sweet spot of local and global style expressions. In addition, we propose a novel self-supervisory task to encourage the attention mechanism to learn precise and meaningful semantic correspondence. Lastly, we introduce the patch-wise style loss to transfer the elaborate rhythm of local patterns. Through qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we verify the reliability of the proposed pattern repeatability that aligns with human perception, and demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 2023. Code is available at this https://github.com/Kibeom-Hong/AesPA-Ne

Physiological and Molecular Processes Associated with Long Duration of ABA Treatment

Plants need to respond to various environmental stresses such as abiotic stress for proper development and growth. The responses to abiotic stress can be biochemically demanding, resulting in a trade-off that negatively affects plant growth and development. Thus, plant stress responses must be fine-tuned depending on the stress severity and duration. Abscisic acid, a phytohormone, plays a key role in responses to abiotic stress. Here, we investigated time-dependent physiological and molecular responses to long-term ABA treatment in Arabidopsis as an approach to gain insight into the plant responses to long-term abiotic stress. Upon ABA treatment, the amount of cellular ABA increased to higher levels, reaching to a peak at 24 h after treatment (HAT), and then gradually decreased with time whereas ABA-GE was maintained at lower levels until 24 HAT and then abruptly increased to higher levels at 48 HAT followed by a gradual decline at later time points. Many genes involved in dehydration stress responses, ABA metabolism, chloroplast biogenesis, and chlorophyll degradation were strongly expressed at early time points with a peak at 24 or 48 HAT followed by gradual decreases in induction fold or even suppression at later time points. At the physiological level, long-term ABA treatment caused leaf yellowing, reduced chlorophyll levels, and inhibited chloroplast division in addition to the growth suppression whereas short-term ABA treatment did not affect chlorophyll levels. Our results indicate that the duration of ABA treatment is a crucial factor in determining the mode of ABA-mediated signaling and plant responses: active mobilization of cellular resources at early time points and suppressive responses at later time points.11Ysciescopu

Effects of Maxillary Sinus Graft on the Survival of Endosseous Implants: A 10-Year Retrospective Study

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine the survival rates of implants placed in grafted maxillary sinuses and compare the results obtained with graft materials, implant surfaces and timing of implant placement. Materials and Methods: Between January 1996 and December 2005, 391 implants are placed in 161 patients who underwent sinus grafting treatment simultaneously or separately at Ewha Womans University Hospital. According to inclusion critieria, 272 impants were placed in 102 patients with 112 sinus grafts (30 females, 72 males), aged 26 to 88 years (mean age 49.0±9.7). The follow-up period ranged from 12 to 134 months (mean F/U 47±32). Survival rates were evaluated according to graft material, implant surface and timing of implant placement, The Kaplan-Meier procedure and the log rank (Mantel-Cox) test were used to estimate survival rates and test for equality of survival rates between different groups of patients. Results: Ten-year cumultative survival rate for implants placed in the grafted sinuses was 90.1%. The survival rates for autogenous bone, combination and bone substitutes were 94.6%, 85.9% and 100% respectively (p\u3e0.05). According to implant surface, survival rates were 84.8% in machined group and 97.5% in rough group (p0.05). Conclusion: Ten-year cumultative survival rate for implants placed in the grafter sinuses was 90.1% Rough-shaped implants have a higher survival rate than machined-surface implants when placed in grafted sinuses. (p\u3c0.05)

BallGAN: 3D-aware Image Synthesis with a Spherical Background

3D-aware GANs aim to synthesize realistic 3D scenes such that they can be rendered in arbitrary perspectives to produce images. Although previous methods produce realistic images, they suffer from unstable training or degenerate solutions where the 3D geometry is unnatural. We hypothesize that the 3D geometry is underdetermined due to the insufficient constraint, i.e., being classified as real image to the discriminator is not enough. To solve this problem, we propose to approximate the background as a spherical surface and represent a scene as a union of the foreground placed in the sphere and the thin spherical background. It reduces the degree of freedom in the background field. Accordingly, we modify the volume rendering equation and incorporate dedicated constraints to design a novel 3D-aware GAN framework named BallGAN. BallGAN has multiple advantages as follows. 1) It produces more reasonable 3D geometry; the images of a scene across different viewpoints have better photometric consistency and fidelity than the state-of-the-art methods. 2) The training becomes much more stable. 3) The foreground can be separately rendered on top of different arbitrary backgrounds.Comment: Project Page: https://minjung-s.github.io/ballga

Transposable element distribution, abundance and role in genome size variation in the genus Oryza

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The genus <it>Oryza </it>is composed of 10 distinct genome types, 6 diploid and 4 polyploid, and includes the world's most important food crop – rice (<it>Oryza sativa </it>[AA]). Genome size variation in the <it>Oryza </it>is more than 3-fold and ranges from 357 Mbp in <it>Oryza glaberrima </it>[AA] to 1283 Mbp in the polyploid <it>Oryza ridleyi </it>[HHJJ]. Because repetitive elements are known to play a significant role in genome size variation, we constructed random sheared small insert genomic libraries from 12 representative <it>Oryza </it>species and conducted a comprehensive study of the repetitive element composition, distribution and phylogeny in this genus. Particular attention was paid to the role played by the most important classes of transposable elements (Long Terminal Repeats Retrotransposons, Long interspersed Nuclear Elements, helitrons, DNA transposable elements) in shaping these genomes and in their contributing to genome size variation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We identified the elements primarily responsible for the most strikingly genome size variation in <it>Oryza</it>. We demonstrated how Long Terminal Repeat retrotransposons belonging to the same families have proliferated to very different extents in various species. We also showed that the pool of Long Terminal Repeat Retrotransposons is substantially conserved and ubiquitous throughout the <it>Oryza </it>and so its origin is ancient and its existence predates the speciation events that originated the genus. Finally we described the peculiar behavior of repeats in the species <it>Oryza coarctata </it>[HHKK] whose placement in the <it>Oryza </it>genus is controversial.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Long Terminal Repeat retrotransposons are the major component of the <it>Oryza </it>genomes analyzed and, along with polyploidization, are the most important contributors to the genome size variation across the <it>Oryza </it>genus. Two families of Ty3-<it>gypsy </it>elements (<it>RIRE2 </it>and <it>Atlantys</it>) account for a significant portion of the genome size variations present in the <it>Oryza </it>genus.</p