Thinking the Creator and Creature Together’: How Rāmānuja’s Account of Scriptural Meaning Encourages Unitive Language in Christian Discourse about God and the World

The interest shown by Christian theologians in the work of Rāmānuja has tended to focus on his doctrinal account of God and his embodiment cosmology. This paper explores instead Rāmānuja’s account of language in general and then those Vedāntic texts that grammatically identify the world with the ultimate reality, Brahman. It shows how Rāmānuja is able to affirm the primary meaning of these texts, but in such a way as to express the complete contingency of the world on the ultimate reality as well as their distinction. The paper goes on to develop a theological dialogue between Rāmānuja and the Christian Scholastic theology of Thomas Aquinas. Whereas Christian theology has tended generally to avoid language that identifies the world with God as being pantheistic and opposed to the doctrine of creation, an appropriation of Rāmānuja’s account of language encourages the use of such unitive language as a powerful way of expressing the unique relation that is creation

Impact of climate change on insect pests of trees

There are many interactions and it is exetremely difficult to predict the impact of climate change on insect pests in the future, but we may expect an increase of certain primary pests as well as secondary pests and invasive specie

How Do I Address You? Modelling addressing behavior based on an analysis of a multi-modal corpora of conversational discourse

Addressing is a special kind of referring and thus principles of multi-modal referring expression generation will also be basic for generation of address terms and addressing gestures for conversational agents. Addressing is a special kind of referring because of the different (second person instead of object) role that the referent has in the interaction. Based on an analysis of addressing behaviour in multi-party face-to-face conversations (meetings, TV discussions as well as theater plays), we present outlines of a model for generating multi-modal verbal and non-verbal addressing behaviour for agents in multi-party interactions

Effectiveness of tax incentives to boost (retirement) saving:theoretical motivation and empirical evidence

The adequacy of household saving for retirement has become a policy issue all around the world. The UK andUS have been in the vanguard of those countries that have tried to encourage retirement saving by providingtax-favoured treatment for particular savings accounts. We consider empirical evidence from these twocountries regarding the extent to which funds in some specific tax advantaged accounts (IRAs in the US,TESSAs and ISAs in the UK) represent new savings. Our best interpretation of this evidence is that: onlyrelatively small fractions of these funds can be considered to be ?new? saving and so these policies have been anexpensive means of encouraging saving; there has been some deadweight loss from the policies associated with?reshuffling? of existing savings. Continuing improvements in data on individual financial behaviour createscope for future empirical analysis of incentives to save, both within the standard economic framework that weexplain and exploit, and by considering extensions to and adaptations of it

A comparison of addressee detection methods for multiparty conversations

Several algorithms have recently been proposed for recognizing addressees in a group conversational setting. These algorithms can rely on a variety of factors including previous conversational roles, gaze and type of dialogue act. Both statistical supervised machine learning algorithms as well as rule based methods have been developed. In this paper, we compare several algorithms developed for several different genres of muliparty dialogue, and propose a new synthesis algorithm that matches the performance of machine learning algorithms while maintaning the transparancy of semantically meaningfull rule-based algorithms