A precis of a study in the writings of Martin Buber with special reference to his conception of religion and human relations

Hasidism, a mid-eighteenth century mysticism of Polish Jewry, represents for Buber the heart of both Judaism and his personal way of being religious. In his essays on the Hasidim Buber sumo up their faith and his neo-Hasidist theology best in the term "pansacramentalism." God is believed to be everywhere present in our immediate world, and hence by turning to Him in every moment we are able to live in an intimate, free, and reciprocal relationship with God. And all human existence is made sacred by this joining together of man and God in everyday life. Buber argues in Ich und Du that man encounters God only through that mode of our being referred to as "I-Thou." Our "Thou" might be a person, a part of nature, and what Buber calls Geistige Wesenheiten. Furthermore, any one of these "Thous" might become, so to speak, a sacrament though which we meet the eternal Thou. Surely many problems arise out of such an "'I-Thou" theology, but we concentrate our critical attention on one, namely Buber's tendency to reject formal religion in favour of his rather mystical, individualistic relation to the eternal Thou. Fox him the Jewish laws and rituals seem to fall in the godless category of "I-It." Therefore, he affirms the supposedly non-ecclesiastical religion of Moses and the free prophets instead of official Judaism. He sees in Biblical Judaism a historical dialogue between Israel and their God. The history of faith in the Bible, according to Buber, centres around the struggle to establish the kingship of God in the national life of Israel. The divine kingship would be expressed not by a priesthood and a religious establishment but by actualizing the love and justice of God in the daily life and national affairs of the elect people of God. Jewish life and Hebraic religion are only properly fulfilled when Israel simultaneously becomes a community of faith and a nation. The "I-Thou" philosophy and Buber's interpretation of Biblical Judaism are both closely linked to his Zionist and socialist line of thought, The socialist society that ho envisages is established by the spiritual power of the "I-Thou" relation between men and with God. As opposed to the militant revolution advocated by the Marxists, Buber argues for a gradual social evolution towards true community. By community Buber means social relations based on spontaneity, mutuality, and trust rather than capitalistic exploitation and political power. He believes that the local communities would eventually federate into larger ones by means of purely voluntary association. The problems of trade and defence would be turned over to a restricted administration rather than a powerful, permanent State. Now, Buber views the theo-political experiment of Moses as the germ of true religious socialism. By identifying Biblical history with modern socialist theory Buber comes to the conclusion that both the destiny of man and the mission of the Jewish people are served by the development of a socialist society in Israel. Throughout Buber's writings we find him very confident in spontaneous association but distrustful of objectivity, formality, and permanency. In other words, order and freedom are set over against one another, and he tends to choose the latter. For Buber this priority involves disapproval of both government and organised religion. However, it seems that we might formulate a more balanced view that still takes the value of Buber's thought into account. Firstly, It is pointed out that "I-It" can be seen as an integral part of the "I-Thou" relation. Secondly, It is suggested that Goistige Wesenheiten, the third category of "I-Thou" relations, might be extended to include a just State and formal religion, i .e. liturgies, doctrines, and moral precepts. This accommodation of organised religion, however, does not imply the approval of authoritarian, doctrinarian principles, legalistic morality, and the perpetuation of outmoded rituals and irrelevant symbols. It is my opinion that liberal-minded Protestants must join with Buber in upholding religious freedom and in advocating the unity of religion and daily life

Accelerating Large-Scale Data Analysis by Offloading to High-Performance Computing Libraries using Alchemist

Apache Spark is a popular system aimed at the analysis of large data sets, but recent studies have shown that certain computations---in particular, many linear algebra computations that are the basis for solving common machine learning problems---are significantly slower in Spark than when done using libraries written in a high-performance computing framework such as the Message-Passing Interface (MPI). To remedy this, we introduce Alchemist, a system designed to call MPI-based libraries from Apache Spark. Using Alchemist with Spark helps accelerate linear algebra, machine learning, and related computations, while still retaining the benefits of working within the Spark environment. We discuss the motivation behind the development of Alchemist, and we provide a brief overview of its design and implementation. We also compare the performances of pure Spark implementations with those of Spark implementations that leverage MPI-based codes via Alchemist. To do so, we use data science case studies: a large-scale application of the conjugate gradient method to solve very large linear systems arising in a speech classification problem, where we see an improvement of an order of magnitude; and the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) of a 400GB three-dimensional ocean temperature data set, where we see a speedup of up to 7.9x. We also illustrate that the truncated SVD computation is easily scalable to terabyte-sized data by applying it to data sets of sizes up to 17.6TB.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, London, UK, 201

Grazing Impacts on Rangeland Condition in Semi-Arid South-Western Africa

The savannah biome, consisting of a dense herbaceous layer and a relatively open woody layer in competitive balance, constitutes 64% of the land surface of Namibia, an arid country in south-western Africa, and is used mainly for extensive cattle and sheep ranching. About half of the savannah area is affected by dense to moderately dense bush-thickening, resulting in a ten-fold decrease in the rangeland’s grass-based carrying capacity and a concomitant loss in meat production of about US$115 million per year (De Klerk, 2004). Bushencroached areas typically have densities \u3e 2 000 bushes/ha with \u3e 90% belonging to a single species. High grazing pressure by specialist grazers, such as domestic cattle, is often blamed for rangeland degradation. There is an urgent need to understand the dynamics of bush encroachment and devise grazing strategies to contain it

The effect of concentrate supplementation on the productivity of grazing Jersey cows on a pasture based system

The effect of concentrate feeding on milk production, milk composition, live weight, condition score and intercalving period of 60 Jersey cows grazing high quality pastures over two lactations was determined. Cows were fed at a no (NC), low (LC), medium (MC) or high (HC) level of concentrate. All cows received a mineral supplement of 300 g/day. The LC, MC and HC groups were fed an energy concentrate at 3, 6 and 9 kg/day, respectively from day 1 to day 150 of lactation followed by 1.5, 3 and 4.5 kg of energy concentrate per day from day 151 to day 300 of lactation. The energy concentrate consisted of 10.6% whole cottonseed, 42.1% rolled maize, 42.1% rolled wheat, 4.2% molasses, 0.5% feedlime and 0.5% salt on a dry matter (DM) basis. A protein concentrate consisting of 76.5% cotton oil cake and 23.5% fish meal was fed at 0.5, 1 and 1.5 kg per day to the LC, MC and HC group respectively from days 1 to 105 of lactation. The lactating cows grazed pasture allocated at 20 kg DM/cow/ day consisting of 43% perennial ryegrass/clover, 24% annual ryegrass/oats, 14% lucerne, 15% kikuyu and 4% other pastures during the experimental period. The fat corrected milk (FCM) production per lactation of cows fed NC (0 kg/day), LC (2.4 kg/day), MC (4.8 kg/day) and HC (7.2 kg/day) was 3741, 4645, 4868 and 5282 kg (s.e.m. = 146), respectively. Cows fed the high level of concentrate (HC) produced significantly more FCM and butterfat than cows on the other treatments. The FCM production of cows on the LC and MC treatments did not differ from each other and both produced more FCM than the control treatment. Cows produced 1.25, 0.78 and 0.54 L of FCM for each kg of concentrate fed at the LC, MC, and HC levels of concentrate feeding over two lactations. Concentrate feeding had no significant effect on milk composition, live weight and intercalving period of cows. The condition score of cows improved as the level of concentrate feeding increased. South African Journal of Animal Science Vol. 36(2) 2006: 105-11

Accelerating Large-Scale Data Analysis by Offloading to High-Performance Computing Libraries using Alchemist

Apache Spark is a popular system aimed at the analysis of large data sets, but recent studies have shown that certain computations---in particular, many linear algebra computations that are the basis for solving common machine learning problems---are significantly slower in Spark than when done using libraries written in a high-performance computing framework such as the Message-Passing Interface (MPI). To remedy this, we introduce Alchemist, a system designed to call MPI-based libraries from Apache Spark. Using Alchemist with Spark helps accelerate linear algebra, machine learning, and related computations, while still retaining the benefits of working within the Spark environment. We discuss the motivation behind the development of Alchemist, and we provide a brief overview of its design and implementation. We also compare the performances of pure Spark implementations with those of Spark implementations that leverage MPI-based codes via Alchemist. To do so, we use data science case studies: a large-scale application of the conjugate gradient method to solve very large linear systems arising in a speech classification problem, where we see an improvement of an order of magnitude; and the truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) of a 400GB three-dimensional ocean temperature data set, where we see a speedup of up to 7.9x. We also illustrate that the truncated SVD computation is easily scalable to terabyte-sized data by applying it to data sets of sizes up to 17.6TB.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, London, UK, 201