Are These Us? A Semiotic View of Mixed Iron-Clay Feet From Daniel 2 in the Age of Artificial Intelligent Technology

This research offers a semiotic interpretation of Daniel’s prophetic \u27mixed iron and clay feet\u27 interpretation from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. This prophecy may be used to predict a potentially mixed Human-AI culture and its impacts on Christian faith in the age of AI and cyborgs. The Christian faith traditionally has not applied Daniel’s iron-clay feet metaphor to a potentially mixed Human-AI reality. However, I will argue that by employing this semiotic interpretation, we can inform and guide Christ’s Church, which continues to remain grossly unprepared for the questions and challenges raised by a burgeoning Human-AI culture. Knowledge of this topic will prepare the church better to navigate its future. In a potentially blended Human-AI culture, a significant opportunity exists for the Church to define what it means to be fully human and to provide a redemptive, ethical, and theological framework for the benefit of humanity in the new AI technological age. This dissertation suggests how effective Christian faith can be communicated to a blended Human-AI culture with openness, with loving mission, and maintaining the belief that God—the Alpha and the Omega—is always in control no matter how advanced our technology gets. Chapter 1 presents a semiotic analysis of the metallic human statue from Nebuchadnezzar’s dream through Daniel’s interpretation in Dan. 2. This leads the reader into a historical journey through the earthly kingdoms represented by the different metallic portions in that human statue—the gold head, the silver chest and arms, the bronze belly and thigh, the iron legs, and the mixed iron-clay feet. Chapter 2 provides 1) an overview of Biblical scholars’ interpretations of the mixed iron-clay feet metaphor through the historical lens of humanity and 2) a view of the metaphor as a potentially mixed culture between humans and humanoid AI beings, as seen through my own semiotic lens. I will explain why I chose the clay metaphor for human beings and the iron metaphor for humanoid-AI beings and will suggest how this metaphor can be helpful to us today in contemplating our own current and future culture. Chapter 3 discusses the traditional Christian belief in God’s creation and the rise of humanoid-AI beings through the two most applicable stories controversially debated in our time—the story of the Garden of Eden and the story of the computer lab. This chapter supports my traditional Christian belief in the image of God, the matter of flesh, and the matter of the soul in responding to the question of ‘what does it mean to be fully human in the mixed Human-AI culture?’ Chapter 4 further explores the analysis of what it means to be fully human and asks how the ethical framework, the redemptive framework, and the theological framework of Christianity’s rethinking effectively might work in a mixed Humanoid-AI culture. Chapter 5 suggests how Christians can turn cultural challenges into opportunities in order to communicate Christian faith and the gospel with openness and with loving kindness by affirming what it means to be human in responding to the question “Are ‘these’ us?” The chapter will also affirm our faith in an Alpha and Omega God, who is always in control no matter what will happen in a future full of mysteries and brokenness. Chapter 6 will conclude with insights into what I have learned from both science and Christianity that could help us affirm the humanness of humanity in the midst of a potentially mixed Human-AI culture. This chapter will be an open invitation for people to continue discussion into this important area of research and will invite people within the Church today to seek answers for themselves not through human political power, nor through scientific and technological supper intelligence, but through the only Person— the Son of Man and the Son of God—“Jesus Christ who is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8 NRSV).

An Efficient Fuzzy Clustering-Based Approach for Intrusion Detection

The need to increase accuracy in detecting sophisticated cyber attacks poses a great challenge not only to the research community but also to corporations. So far, many approaches have been proposed to cope with this threat. Among them, data mining has brought on remarkable contributions to the intrusion detection problem. However, the generalization ability of data mining-based methods remains limited, and hence detecting sophisticated attacks remains a tough task. In this thread, we present a novel method based on both clustering and classification for developing an efficient intrusion detection system (IDS). The key idea is to take useful information exploited from fuzzy clustering into account for the process of building an IDS. To this aim, we first present cornerstones to construct additional cluster features for a training set. Then, we come up with an algorithm to generate an IDS based on such cluster features and the original input features. Finally, we experimentally prove that our method outperforms several well-known methods.Comment: 15th East-European Conference on Advances and Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS 11), Vienna : Austria (2011

THE CURRENT SITUATION OF TRAINING STUDENTS MAJORING IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION AT CAN THO UNIVERSITY, VIETNAM

The objective of the research is to evaluate the training process for students majoring in physical education at Can Tho University in the period between 2004 and 2020. Through carefully examining and summarizing documents and surveys, the research accurately and comprehensively provides an overview of the current situation regarding the process of training physical education students at Can Tho University. The study looks at four issues: the enrollment process, graduation outcomes, graduates’ employment situations, and employers’ satisfaction level. The findings indicate that the enrolment process has been under difficulties regarding the number of enrolled students in recent years, the training quality is very good, students graduate on time, and the training products satisfy employers.  Article visualizations

Study on the variation of seagrass population in Coastal waters of Khanh Hoa Province, Vietnam

Khanh Hoa is among of a few coastal provinces where seagrasses are very abundant and form the large meadows in littoral zones, bays, lagoons. It is possible to consider that the coastal waters of Khanh Hoa has the most diverse of seagrass composition among areas of Vietnam. The investigation of seagrass beds in Khanh Hoa province (1996-1997) recorded 9 species of seagrasses, some of which were very interesting because of their large distribution areas, high density and biomass. Study on the variation of density, above ground biomass, leaf growth rate and leaf production of Enhalus acoroides and Thalassia hemprichii at two stations My Giang (Vanphong bay) and Dong Ba Thin (Camranh bay) were conducted two times per month in two years 1998, 1999. At My Giang station: the mean values of density and leaf production of E. acoroides were highest in September: 144±5shoots/m^2 and 5.96±0.3gDW/m^2/day, above ground biomass and leaf growth rate were highest in April 158±2gDW/m^2 and 1.57±0.2cm/day (March). The density of T. hemprichii was highest in May: 1050±30shoots/m^2, biomass was highest in October: 148±10gDW/m^2, leaf growth rate and leaf production were highest in September: 0.66±0.02cm/day and 5.55±0.3gDW/m^2/day. At Dong Ba Thin station: the mean values of density of E. acoroides was highest in November: 120±10shoots/m^2. The above ground biomass, leaf growth rate and leaf production were highest in September. The mean values were 383±15gDW/m^2, 1.8±0.2cm/day and 5.24±0.4gDW/m^2/day respectively. The density, biomass, leaf growth rate and leaf production of T. hemprichii were also highest in September, the mean values were 420±30 shoots/m^2, 110±10gDW/m^2, 0.66±0.05cm/day and 3.79±0.2gDW/m^2/day respectively. The studied results showed that the variation of density, above ground biomass, leaf growth rate and leaf production of seagrass beds depend on seasons in year and the environmental conditions. These values were often high in dry, sunny season (March-October) and often low in the rainy season (November-January). During the low tide (May-August) seagrass beds were exposed to the air that caused the decrease of density, biomass, leaf growth rate and leaf production of seagrasses

An efficient local region and clustering-based ensemble system for intrusion detection

International audienceThe dramatic proliferation of sophisticated cyber attacks, in conjunction with the ever growing use of Internet-based services and applications, is nowadays becoming a great concern in any organization. Among many efficient security solutions proposed in the literature to deal with this evolving threat, ensemble approaches, a particular family of data mining, have proven very successful in designing high performance intrusion detection systems (IDSs) resting on the mutual combination of multiple classifiers. However, the strength of ensemble systems depends heavily on the methods to generate and combine individual classifiers. In this thread, we propose a novel design method to generate a robust ensemble-based IDS. In our approach, individual classifiers are built using both the input feature space and additional features exploited from k-means clustering. In addition, the ensemble combination is calculated based on the classification ability of classifiers on different local data regions defined in form of k-means clustering. Experimental results prove that our solution is superior to several well-known methods

Acetate wheat starch improving blood glucose response and bilan lipid on obesity dyslipidemia mice

Resistant starch is particularly concerned with beneficial effects in regulating blood glucose concentration and lipid metabolism, reducing the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. This study aimed to validate the effects of wheat starch acetate containing 32.1% resistant starch on postprandial blood glucose response and lipid profile on obesity, dyslipidemia Swiss mice induced by a high-fat diet. The result showed that there was a restriction on postprandial hyperglycemia and remained stable for 2 hours after meal efficiently comparing with the control group fed natural wheat starch. Simultaneously, when maintaining the dose of 5g/kg once or twice a day for 8 weeks, wheat starch acetate to be able to reduce body weight and blood glucose, triglyceride, cholesterol levels compared to the control group (p<0.05)

Ammonia oxidation capacity of bacillus bacteria in swine wastewater after biogas treatment

Nitrogen removal with biological methods plays a crucial role in wastewater treatment technology. The treatment begins with the oxidation of ammonia to nitrite to facilitate the subsequent nitrification and denitrification. Various strains of ammonia-oxidising bacteria have been reported. In this study, we use three Bacillus bacteria isolated from swine wastewater to oxidise ammonia. Different initial densities (103, 104, 105, and 106 CFU·mL–1) of each strain were examined. The results show that the combination of all the bacteria at a ratio of 1:1:1 and a density of 105 CFU·mL–1 exhibits the most effect. The findings contribute to the diversity of ammonia-oxidising bacterial species and pose a great potential for applying these strains in wastewater treatment

Nitrite metabolism of several bacterial strains isolated from abattoir and swine wastewater after biogas treatment

In nitrogen treatment with biological methods, nitrite metabolism is an intermediate process that facilitates other processes involving different bacteria strains. In this study, we isolated two nitrite-oxidising bacteria strains from abattoir wastewater and wastewater from biogas tanks of an industrial pig farm in Ha Tinh province. The bacteria strains grow, develop, and metabolise nitrite at pH 6–8 and 30–37 °C. The samples with the nitrite concentration up to 750 mg·L–1 were oxidised within four days of incubation, and the nitrite metabolism rate was proportional to the concentration of nitrite tested. Under severe conditions (salinity up to 3% NaCl, a low dissolved oxygen level of 0.1 mg·L–1), the two isolated bacterial strains exhibited their effective growth and nitrite metabolism capacity. The results enrich the database of nitrite-oxidising bacteria and are prospective in wastewater treatment

High Temperature Symmetry Non-Restoration And Inverse Symmetry Breaking in the Z2×Z2 Model

The patterns of high temperature symmetry non-restoration (SNR) and inverse symmetry braking (ISB) in the Z2×Z2model are investigated in detail for a specified parameters