Divine and Imperial power: A comparative analysis of Paul and Josephus

The overall purpose of this study is to investigate Paul's construal of divine and imperial power in order to analyse to what extent he may be judged pro-Roman, anti-Roman or in some alternative relationship with Roman power. In order to provide development and sharper focus to this question Josephus and his work The Jewish War is examined alongside Paul and his letters to the Romans and the Philippians for the purpose of comparative analysis.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Recent evolution of China's virtual water trade: analysis of selected crops and considerations for policy

China has dramatically increased its virtual water import over recent years. Many studies have focused on the quantity of traded virtual water, but very few go into analysing geographic distribution and the properties of China's virtual water trade network. This paper provides a calculation and analysis of the crop-related virtual water trade network of China based on 27 major primary crops between 1986 and 2009. The results show that China is a net importer of virtual water from water-abundant areas of North America and South America, and a net virtual water exporter to water-stressed areas of Asia, Africa, and Europe. Virtual water import is far larger than virtual water export, and in both import and export a small number of trade partners control the supply chain. Grain crops are the major contributors to virtual water trade, and among grain crops, soybeans, mostly imported from the US, Brazil and Argentina, are the most significant. In order to mitigate water scarcity and secure the food supply, virtual water should actively be incorporated into national water management strategies. And the sources of virtual water import need to be further diversified to reduce supply chain risks and increase resilience

Will it Unblend?

Natural language processing systems often struggle with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms, which do not appear in training data. Blends, such as *innoventor*, are one particularly challenging class of OOV, as they are formed by fusing together two or more bases that relate to the intended meaning in unpredictable manners and degrees. In this work, we run experiments on a novel dataset of English OOV blends to quantify the difficulty of interpreting the meanings of blends by large-scale contextual language models such as BERT. We first show that BERT\u27s processing of these blends does not fully access the component meanings, leaving their contextual representations semantically impoverished. We find this is mostly due to the loss of characters resulting from blend formation. Then, we assess how easily different models can recognize the structure and recover the origin of blends, and find that context-aware embedding systems outperform character-level and context-free embeddings, although their results are still far from satisfactory

Zur Problematik der Gattung Hygromia RISSO 1826

Authors revise the Hygromla transsylvanica (WEST.) group from the environs of Békéscsaba, SE-Hungary. They describe and figure Hygromia kovácsi n. sp.; the subgeneric divisions within Hygromia RISSO is also discussed

Yield and chemical composition of plant parts of silage maize (Zea mays L) hybrids and their interest for biogas production

Silage maize (Zea mays L) hybrids bred in Martonvásár were tested for morphological traits, yield and chemical composition of the whole plant and the plant parts in three years (2010-2012). Biogas production of the hybrids was investigated in 2009 and 2010. The dry matter, protein, starch, water soluble carbohydrates, neutral detergent fibre, acid detergent fibre, lignin and in vitro digestible organic matter contents were measured by NIR spectroscopy. The ratio of ear attachment height to plant height was smaller, the leaf number above the ear and the proportion of the leaves in the total plant dry matter was greater for leafy hybrids. It was concluded that the differences in the chemical composition of the parts of the same genotype were greater than between the same parts of different genotypes. The leaves had the greatest protein content. The starch and WSC content in the ear was significantly higher than in the other plant parts. The ear had the lowest lignin content and the highest IVDOM content compared to other plant parts. NDF and ADF contents were greatest in the stalk below the ear. Significant differences were found for WSC content of the plant parts of leafy and non-leafy hybrids. Digestible dry matter yield (DDMY) was calculated from individual dry matter production, plant number per hectare and digestible organic matter content. The highest DDMY value was recorded for Siloking (19.18 t ha-1). Biogas yield was highest for Mv Massil (659 l kg-1 DM) with 61.38% methane concentration. Leafy hybrids produced significantly more biogas than conventional hybrids. Biogas yield proved to have significant positive correlations with starch and WSC content, and negative correlations with protein and lignin content

Sensitive electrochemiluminescence (ECL) immunoassays for detecting lipoarabinomannan (LAM) and ESAT-6 in urine and serum from tuberculosis patients.

BackgroundTuberculosis (TB) infection was responsible for an estimated 1.3 million deaths in 2017. Better diagnostic tools are urgently needed. We sought to determine whether accurate TB antigen detection in blood or urine has the potential to meet the WHO target product profiles for detection of active TB.Materials and methodsWe developed Electrochemiluminescence (ECL) immunoassays for Lipoarabinomannan (LAM) and ESAT-6 detection with detection limits in the pg/ml range and used them to compare the concentrations of the two antigens in the urine and serum of 81 HIV-negative and -positive individuals with presumptive TB enrolled across diverse geographic sites.ResultsLAM and ESAT-6 overall sensitivities in urine were 93% and 65% respectively. LAM and ESAT-6 overall sensitivities in serum were 55% and 46% respectively. Overall specificity was ≥97% in all assays. Sensitivities were higher in HIV-positive compared to HIV-negative patients for both antigens and both sample types, with signals roughly 10-fold higher on average in urine than in serum. The two antigens showed similar concentration ranges within the same sample type and correlated.ConclusionsLAM and ESAT-6 can be detected in the urine and serum of TB patients, regardless of the HIV status and further gains in clinical sensitivity may be achievable through assay and reagent optimization. Accuracy in urine was higher with current methods and has the potential to meet the WHO accuracy target if the findings can be transferred to a point-of-care TB test