The Conception of faith in the Christian religion of the New Testament

There Is a unique unity in the Biblical conception of faith. Of course, there are radical differences of time, place, emphasis, and purpose which must give faith a different cast. Basically, however, this unity Is to be found in the idea of revelation and response. God reveals Himself. He takes the Initiative, moving toward men. He did this in the Old Testament in the days of the Law and the Covenant. There was response to that revelation. At Its best, It involved unconditional surrender to Him, and the conviction that He had purpose for the world which would some day be consummated. Men built their lives on that conviction and that faith. With the coming of Christ, however, the action of God was clearly seen. In great Divine Events of Birth, Life, Death, Resurrection, and a promised Parousia God revealed Himself in Christ. To that revelation, the response of faith was demanded. It was a response that involved mental acceptance of certain facts, but it never ended there. To end at that point was fatal, as James indicates. It was a mental attitude that led to a life, a life beginning with an act of unconditional, whole souled surrender to Christ. That act established a new relationship, "union with Christ", which was evident In Christian living. That union brought certain qualities of life and of character which only God could produce. It established a right relationship with God, it brought forgiveness of sin, justification before God, peace with Him. Ultimately, God will complete the Divine action In the world when His purpose is consummated in Parousla. In the kerygmatic preaching of the early Church all this may be found in various ways from various men--Paul, Stephen, Peter, and others. The various components of faith found emphases which appear at times to be contradictory. But there is a basic unity at the heart of these divergent emphases which is neither arbitrarily assumed, nor produced by preconceived prejudice. The more one observes the thought of the early Church, the more the conviction dawns that the unity is there.Thus the Scriptures call us to faith, "The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is at hand, repent and believe the Gospel" is an unavoidable appeal to men today. Believe God, Believe Christ, give Him your life in complete abandonment—and LIVE

Big Data Analytics for Historical Document Processing

Historical Document Processing is the process of digitizing written material from the past for future use by historians and other scholars. It incorporates algorithms and software tools from various subfields of computer science, including computer vision, document analysis and recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning, to convert images of ancient manuscripts, letters, diaries, and early printed texts automatically into a digital format usable in information retrieval systems. Within the past twenty years, as libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions have scanned an increasing volume of their historical document archives, the need to transcribe the full text from these collections has become acute. Big Data Analytics and infrastructure will be essential tools in this field. This study compares performance analysis of two OCR systems, discusses an Historical Document Processing (HDP) workflow, and highlights the role of OCR software in a RESTful API for an HDPaaS (HDP as a Service) system.ECU Research and Creative Achievement Wee

Abolishing user fees for children and pregnant women trebled uptake of malaria-related interventions in Kangaba, Mali.

Malaria is the most common cause of morbidity and mortality in children under 5 in Mali. Health centres provide primary care, including malaria treatment, under a system of cost recovery. In 2005, Médecins sans Frontieres (MSF) started supporting health centres in Kangaba with the provision of rapid malaria diagnostic tests and artemisinin-based combination therapy. Initially MSF subsidized malaria tests and drugs to reduce the overall cost for patients. In a second phase, MSF abolished fees for all children under 5 irrespective of their illness and for pregnant women with fever. This second phase was associated with a trebling of both primary health care utilization and malaria treatment coverage for these groups. MSF's experience in Mali suggests that removing user fees for vulnerable groups significantly improves utilization and coverage of essential health services, including for malaria interventions. This effect is far more marked than simply subsidizing or providing malaria drugs and diagnostic tests free of charge. Following the free care strategy, utilization of services increased significantly and under-5 mortality was reduced. Fee removal also allowed for more efficient use of existing resources, reducing average cost per patient treated. These results are particularly relevant for the context of Mali and other countries with ambitious malaria treatment coverage objectives, in accordance with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. This article questions the effectiveness of the current national policy, and the effectiveness of reducing the cost of drugs only (i.e. partial subsidies) or providing malaria tests and drugs free for under-5s, without abolishing other related fees. National and international budgets, in particular those that target health systems strengthening, could be used to complement existing subsidies and be directed towards effective abolition of user fees. This would contribute to increasing the impact of interventions on population health and, in turn, the effectiveness of aid

ReHILAE: is the Re-ionisation of Hydrogen-I the sole consequence of Lyman-alpha Emitters?

The Epoch of Hydrogen Re-Ionisation (EoR) is an important stage in the evolution of the Universe, in which the neutral hydrogen in the Intergalactic Medium (IGM) becomes fully ionised. There are a number of ambiguities concerning the exact time period of the EoR, in addition to the exact nature of its causes. Previous methods describing this event use observations of Lyman Break Galaxies (LBGs), Lyman Alpha Emitters (LAEs - a subset of LGBs) or Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) as the predominant ionising sources of the EoR. With a few varying assumptions, galaxies appear to be the primary sources to consider. The UV-based framework currently used requires assumptions of the efficiency in converting between UV and Lyman-continuum (LyC) ionising photons (ξion), and the fraction of LyC photons that actually escape their sources (fesc). Direct measurements of these values using the UV-framework ap- pear to produce values far below what are require. Considering LAEs, which are a subset of the UV continuum-selected sources, we can use different observations to comfortably approximate them as the sources with the highest production of ionising photons per UV luminosity. Therefore, by only considering LAEs, we can eliminate the need for determining ξion entirely. Taking this approach, our own model for the fraction of ionised hydrogen in the Universe as a function of redshift (QHII ) is outlined. This model provided us with an approximate value of the LyC escape fraction as ~10%, which is a far more reasonable value than assumed in previous studies. Comparing final results for QHII directly to our own improved UV-framework model, we determined that the re-ionisation of hydrogen is very likely the sole consequence of LAEs

Processing punctuation and word changes in different editions of prose fiction

The digital era has brought with it a shift in the field of literary editing in terms of the amount and kind of textual variation that can reasonably be annotated by editors. However, questions remain about how far readers engage with textual variants, especially minor ones such as small-scale changes to punctuation. In this study we present an eye-tracking experiment investigating reader sensitivity to variations in surface textual features of prose fiction. We monitored eye movements while participants read textual variants from Dickens and James, hypothesising that readers may pay more attention to lexical rather than punctuation changes. We found longer reading times for both types, but only lexical changes also increased reading times for the rest of the sentence. In addition, eye movement behaviour and conscious ability to report changes were highly correlated. We discuss the implications for how such methods might be applied to questions of “literary” significance and textual processing

Heavy Lift Launch Capability with a New Hydrocarbon Engine

The Advanced Concepts Office at NASA's George C. Marshall Space Flight Center was tasked to define the thrust requirement of a new liquid oxygen rich staged combustion cycle hydrocarbon engine that could be utilized in a launch vehicle to meet NASA s future heavy lift needs. Launch vehicle concepts were sized using this engine for different heavy lift payload classes. Engine out capabilities for one of the heavy lift configurations were also analyzed for increased reliability that may be desired for high value payloads or crewed missions. The applicability for this engine in vehicle concepts to meet military and commercial class payloads comparable to current ELV capability was also evaluated