Kyrie Eleison

I once heard a story about a new pastor in the early 1990s who was settling into his first call in Pembroke, Ontario. A man walked into his study and silently began perusing the shelves. The pastor noticed him, but carried on with his business. The stranger spent several minutes pulling books off the shelves, flipping pages, nodding and murmuring, and setting some books apart by laying them on their spines. Occasionally he’d hold up a book with a quizzical look on his face. “Required for class,” the pastor shrugged, and the man would scoff and shove it back on the shelf. Finally, the stranger came to a shelf with a few copies of the recently founded journal First Things. “You’re a subscriber?” he asked. The pastor nodded. The man smiled, walked over to the desk, stuck out his hand, and finally introduced himself. “I’m Richard Neuhaus. I’ve come to invite you and your wife to lunch next Sunday, but now that I see what you read, we’re going to have a nice lunch.” And he walked out the door

Deep Roots Are Not Touched by the Frost

As John the Baptist bore witness to the Light of the World, so too must the Church today. But there are many ways to talk about light. How should we speak about light when bearing witness to Christ? On which understanding of light should we draw? Light can refer to daylight or the light in a room—the physical phenomenon we perceive through sight. But light can also refer to objects that produce light, such as a floor lamp; we “turn on the lights.” We are familiar with scientific descriptions of light, such as its speed or its wavelength. Light can also refer to mental activities, as when we use the words enlighten or elucidate. As a father to a young reader, it seems I read Dr. Seuss’ Oh the Thinks You Can Think! almost daily: “Think of Light! Think of Bright! Think of Stars in the Night!”1 Christians have much to draw on when speaking of the Light of the World. But what exactly is light? I will sketch two competing answers to these questions, the Platonic and the physicalist. I will argue from this sketch that the Christian account of light is closer to the Platonic perspective than the physicalist. As such, Christians should return to a more ancient perspective of light because it offers a more compelling account of light and its role in God’s creation

Devotions for Lent 2023 Hymns of Lent

This Lent, we will continue reflecting on hymns of faith, namely, some of our most beloved Lenten hymns. 10 such hymns have been chosen to fill the 40(+) days of Lent. Therefore, this devotional, different from previous editions, does not proceed on a weekly basis, but merely flows from one hymn to the next. Also different from previous editions, the devotional reflections are specifically based on the stanzas of the selected hymns. Therefore, each day’s reflection features the text of the hymn stanza, a devotion based on that stanza, a prayer, and then a Scripture passage or passages for further meditation. I pray these reflections may be of edification for you during this Lenten season.https://scholar.csl.edu/osp/1022/thumbnail.jp

Measurement of differential cross sections for top quark pair production using the lepton plus jets final state in proton-proton collisions at 13 TeV

National Science Foundation (U.S.

Particle-flow reconstruction and global event description with the CMS detector

The CMS apparatus was identified, a few years before the start of the LHC operation at CERN, to feature properties well suited to particle-flow (PF) reconstruction: a highly-segmented tracker, a fine-grained electromagnetic calorimeter, a hermetic hadron calorimeter, a strong magnetic field, and an excellent muon spectrometer. A fully-fledged PF reconstruction algorithm tuned to the CMS detector was therefore developed and has been consistently used in physics analyses for the first time at a hadron collider. For each collision, the comprehensive list of final-state particles identified and reconstructed by the algorithm provides a global event description that leads to unprecedented CMS performance for jet and hadronic tau decay reconstruction, missing transverse momentum determination, and electron and muon identification. This approach also allows particles from pileup interactions to be identified and enables efficient pileup mitigation methods. The data collected by CMS at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV show excellent agreement with the simulation and confirm the superior PF performance at least up to an average of 20 pileup interactions

Pseudorapidity and transverse momentum dependence of flow harmonics in pPb and PbPb collisions

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Impacts of the Tropical Pacific/Indian Oceans on the Seasonal Cycle of the West African Monsoon

The current consensus is that drought has developed in the Sahel during the second half of the twentieth century as a result of remote effects of oceanic anomalies amplified by local land–atmosphere interactions. This paper focuses on the impacts of oceanic anomalies upon West African climate and specifically aims to identify those from SST anomalies in the Pacific/Indian Oceans during spring and summer seasons, when they were significant. Idealized sensitivity experiments are performed with four atmospheric general circulation models (AGCMs). The prescribed SST patterns used in the AGCMs are based on the leading mode of covariability between SST anomalies over the Pacific/Indian Oceans and summer rainfall over West Africa. The results show that such oceanic anomalies in the Pacific/Indian Ocean lead to a northward shift of an anomalous dry belt from the Gulf of Guinea to the Sahel as the season advances. In the Sahel, the magnitude of rainfall anomalies is comparable to that obtained by other authors using SST anomalies confined to the proximity of the Atlantic Ocean. The mechanism connecting the Pacific/Indian SST anomalies with West African rainfall has a strong seasonal cycle. In spring (May and June), anomalous subsidence develops over both the Maritime Continent and the equatorial Atlantic in response to the enhanced equatorial heating. Precipitation increases over continental West Africa in association with stronger zonal convergence of moisture. In addition, precipitation decreases over the Gulf of Guinea. During the monsoon peak (July and August), the SST anomalies move westward over the equatorial Pacific and the two regions where subsidence occurred earlier in the seasons merge over West Africa. The monsoon weakens and rainfall decreases over the Sahel, especially in August.Peer reviewe

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis