Two Ideas of Human Nature: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Thomas à Kempis

One of the questions that many people contemplate in their lifetime is the idea of human nature. In this essay I will seek to examine and compare the idea of human nature in the minds of Christian humanists during the Renaissance to that of late Medieval Christian mystics. The Oration on the Dignity of Man, written by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (Pico) provides an insight into the mind of a Renaissance humanist, while The Imitation of Christ, written by Thomas à Kempis illustrates the thought process that was characteristic of a late Medieval Christian mystic. Pico believed that humans are a great miracle and it is within their nature and capabilities to become something great in the world, something just below the level of God.[1] à Kempis held the belief that human nature, like the idea found in Genesis, was corrupted by the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. It can be found in his writings that he believed that human nature is something that is detrimental to the individual and should be controlled by calling on the grace of God.[2] The different points of view found in the writing of Pico and à Kempis can be traced to the sources of their inspiration. In writing The Imitation of Christ, à Kempis drew his inspiration only from the Bible. Pico, like many other Renaissance humanists, looked for truth about human nature not only in the Bible but also by studying other classical works such as the ancient Greeks and Arabs. [1] Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). [2] Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (Chicago: Moody Press, 1958)

The forgotten missionary, Thomas Wood

1 online resource (v, 63 pages) : illustrations (chiefly colour)Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (pages 60-63).This thesis examines the eighteenth-century Missionary Thomas Wood, the first Anglican clergymen to translate religious texts in the Mi’kmaq language. The central argument of this Theses is that Wood influenced and shaped the material landscape after moving from Halifax to Annapolis in 1764. Along with this, it argues that Wood has widely been forgotten and misrepresented due to shifts in public memory through the centuries, beginning with how members of the Anglican Church interacted after his death with religious buildings he built. This part of the thesis was inspired by John Reid’s article, The Three Lives of Edward Cornwallis, where he demonstrates that over the centuries, each generation of people developed a new perception of the colonial leader. Along with this this thesis examines the value people gained from interacting with the material culture that Wood had a part in creating. Over the years Wood has become an apparition in an ever-changing world, this paper aims to shed light on his integral role in shaping material culture and constructing built heritage in the Annapolis Valley

Chemical and evaporative behaviors of synthetic liquid nuclear waste

In the 1960\u27s the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory designed eight 50,000 gallon storage tanks for the liquid nuclear waste. Each tank was designed with its own ventilation system to purge radiolytic hydrogen and oxygen from the tank. This design induced water removal and necessitated the additional requirement of entraining radioactivity from the exiting system by the use of demisters and HEPA filters. Up until the 1980\u27s this was a sufficient method, via the hydrofracture process, of disposing the liquid nuclear waste. However since then, this method has been terminated and the tanks are nearing capacity. In the transfer of the liquid waste to the holding tanks, large amounts of water are used to prevent line clogging and solid build up in the pipes. Utilizing the existing system, this thesis proposes the idea of sparging air into the liquid waste and increasing the tank temperature in order to eliminate excess water. Parameters such as increasing the sparging air temperature, and dehumidifying and eliminating carbon dioxide from the sparging air, are investigated theoretically and experimentally in small scale experiments. In addition, the effects of vapor pressure lowering and its simultaneous effect on the evaporation rate are investigated through the activity coefficient of sodium nitrate, the major component of the liquid waste. Precipitate blockage formations in the sparging tube have also been addressed

Permanent draft genome sequence of Vibrio tubiashii strain NCIMB 1337 (ATCC19106).

This is the final version of the article. Available from BioMed Central via the DOI in this record.Vibrio tubiashii NCIMB 1337 is a major and increasingly prevalent pathogen of bivalve mollusks, and shares a close phylogenetic relationship with both V. orientalis and V. coralliilyticus. It is a Gram-negative, curved rod-shaped bacterium, originally isolated from a moribund juvenile oyster, and is both oxidase and catalase positive. It is capable of growth under both aerobic and anaerobic conditions. Here we describe the features of this organism, together with the draft genome and annotation. The genome is 5,353,266 bp long, consisting of two chromosomes, and contains 4,864 protein-coding and 86 RNA genes.We wish to thank i-G Peninsula (Prospect Place, the Hoe, Plymouth, Devon, UK) for providing funding for this project, and NBAF Edinburgh for performing the sequencing

A Study on Visual Focus of Attention Recognition from Head Pose in a Meeting Room

This paper presents a study on the recognition of the visual focus of attention (VFOA) of meeting participants based on their head pose. Contrarily to previous studies on the topic, in our set-up, the potential VFOA of people is not restricted to other meeting participants only, but includes environmental targets (table, slide screen). This has two consequences. Firstly, this increases the number of possible ambiguities in identifying the VFOA from the head pose. Secondly, due to our particular set-up, the identification of the VFOA from head pose can not rely on an incomplete representation of the pose (the pan), but requests the knowledge of the full head pointing information (pan and tilt). In this paper, using a corpus of 8 meetings of 8 minutes on average, featuring 4 persons involved in the discussion of statements projected on a slide screen, we analyze the above issues by evaluating, through numerical performance measures, the recognition of the VFOA from head pose information obtained either using a magnetic sensor device (the ground truth) or a vision based tracking system (head pose estimates). The results clearly show that in complex but realistic situations, it is quite optimistic to believe that the recognition of the VFOA can solely be based on the head pose, as some previous studies had suggested

Barriers to home care for terminally ill Turkish and Moroccan migrants, perceived by GPs and nurses: a survey

BACKGROUND: Previous qualitative research proved that relatives of elderly terminally ill Turkish and Moroccan immigrants experience several barriers to the use of Dutch professional home care. The aim of this study was to explore how general practitioners and home care nurses perceive the home care for terminally ill Turkish and Moroccan migrants and their families in the Netherlands. METHODS: Questionnaires were sent to home care organizations and GPs working in areas where most of these migrants are living. 93 nurses and 78 GPs provided information about their experiences and opinions regarding home care for this group of patients. The data were analyzed by descriptive statistics. RESULTS: GPs refer relatively few patients from these migrant groups to home care. They often find it difficult to assess the needs of these patients and their families. In 40% of the GPs' cases in which terminally ill Turkish and Moroccan migrants were not referred to home care, the GP regretted this afterwards: the patients had not received sufficient qualified care, and their informal carers had often become overburdened. In addition, home care nurses often express dissatisfaction with the home care given to terminally ill Turkish or Moroccan patients, because of communication problems, the patients' lack of knowledge of the disease, or difficulties in making suitable appointments with the patient or with the family. CONCLUSIONS: Nurses and GPs cite chiefly similar factors influencing access to and use of home care as family members did in a previous study. However, according to GPs and nurses, the main barrier to the use of home care concerns communication problems, while relatives cited the preference for family care as the main reason for abstaining from the use of home care. (aut. ref.