From self-development to human solidarity: a critical study on the dialogical theology of "inter-" cultures

This dissertation questions the politics of contemporary cultural development known as "multiculturalism" and "particularism" which permeate the realm of theology, particularly in relation with non-Western theologies. It begins by examining the mechanism of representing "different others" within the modern subjectivity and its universal validity claim, in order to reveal the modernist's essentialism and reductionistic, totalising tendency. By arguing that reality is non-formalistic, ambiguous and contingent, and decentring of the subject, the study articulates the social source of rationality that exists in "in-between" people (subjects) against the philosophical metanarrative. From this standpoint, the focus shifts from the subject's ontological/epistemological emphasis to a dialogical event or relation with the other.Therefore, this study explores human desire on the relation of "I and the Other," with particular attention paid to Emmanuel Levinas' idea on the 'ethical responsibility for the Other' as the first philosophy. This argues that Levinas disrupts the philosophy of ontology by inserting a God who is infinite into the finite, and suggests a new modality (meontological) of ethical responsibility for the Other/other. It argues that Levinas' idea is concretised in Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism that perceives human consciousness not as a unified whole but one that always exists in a tensile, conflict-ridden relationship with other consciousness. It also argues that dialogism is not simply a textual or even an inter-textual phenomenon, but reaches beyond the text to the social world as a whole. It suggests that ethics exists in an open and ongoing obligation to respond and answer to the other, rather than as a consensus or philosophical end or rule. Ethics, as a reminder of the surplus in human dialogue, argues for the structural necessity of otherness in my solidarity with the otherThis thesis, then, explores the event of kenotic Christ as a fertile prototype for the leitmotif of 'the Word made flesh,' and the I/Other dichotomy, and as the consciousness of human development and dialogical orientation. It stresses a theological and religious affinity of creating an ethical space to experience the meaning of the future that interrogates the temporal reality and 'givenness,' a space which brings people into "radical communality and human solidarity" of the great time, the eschatological plenitude. From this perspective, I suggest theology as a critical engaging discourse and a cultural criticism within the public sphere, in creating a new world of human relation

Critical Issues in the Air Force Medical Equipment Procurement Process

The Air Force medical logistics community relies on multiple contracting offices to acquire medical equipment for the Air Force Medical Service. The perception is that burdensome regulations contribute to the challenges faced in the procurement process. This research takes a broader examination to understand the factors leading to long lead times and delayed procurements. Process mapping and interviews with the key stakeholders supporting medical equipment procurement determined that the critical issues were a lack of centralized medical equipment contracting authority, insufficient market research and inconsistent local knowledge on contracting processes. This research provides future recommendations for the Air Force Medical Service to improve the procurement process and reduce the contract backlog

MDCC: Multi-Data Center Consistency

Replicating data across multiple data centers not only allows moving the data closer to the user and, thus, reduces latency for applications, but also increases the availability in the event of a data center failure. Therefore, it is not surprising that companies like Google, Yahoo, and Netflix already replicate user data across geographically different regions. However, replication across data centers is expensive. Inter-data center network delays are in the hundreds of milliseconds and vary significantly. Synchronous wide-area replication is therefore considered to be unfeasible with strong consistency and current solutions either settle for asynchronous replication which implies the risk of losing data in the event of failures, restrict consistency to small partitions, or give up consistency entirely. With MDCC (Multi-Data Center Consistency), we describe the first optimistic commit protocol, that does not require a master or partitioning, and is strongly consistent at a cost similar to eventually consistent protocols. MDCC can commit transactions in a single round-trip across data centers in the normal operational case. We further propose a new programming model which empowers the application developer to handle longer and unpredictable latencies caused by inter-data center communication. Our evaluation using the TPC-W benchmark with MDCC deployed across 5 geographically diverse data centers shows that MDCC is able to achieve throughput and latency similar to eventually consistent quorum protocols and that MDCC is able to sustain a data center outage without a significant impact on response times while guaranteeing strong consistency

Cross-talk between ON and OFF channels in the salamander retina: Indirect bipolar cell inputs to ON–OFF ganglion cells

AbstractIt has been widely accepted that ON and OFF channels in the visual system are segregated with little cross-communication, except for the mammalian rod bipolar cell-AII amacrine cell-ganglion cell pathway. Here, we show that in the tiger salamander retina the light responses of a subpopulation of ON–OFF ganglion cells are mediated by crossing the ON and OFF bipolar cell pathways. Although the majority of ON–OFF ganglion cells (type I cells) receive direct excitatory inputs from depolarizing and hyperpolarizing bipolar cells (DBCs and HBCs), about 5% (type II cells) receive indirect excitatory inputs from DBCs and 20% (type III cells) receive indirect excitatory inputs from HBCs. These indirect bipolar cell inputs are likely to be mediated by a subpopulation of amacrine cells that exhibit transient hyperpolarizing light responses (ACHs) and make GABAergic/glycinergic synapses on DBC or HBC axon terminals. GABA and glycine receptor antagonists enhanced the ON and OFF excitatory cation current (ΔIC) in type I ganglion cells, but completely suppressed the ON ΔIC mediated by DBCs in type II cells and the OFF ΔIC mediated by HBCs in types III cells. Dendrites of type I cells ramify in both sublamina A and B, type II cells exclusively in sublamina A, and type III cells exclusively in sublamina B of the inner plexiform layer. These results demonstrate that indirect, amacrine cell-mediated bipolar cell-ganglion cell synaptic pathways exist in a non-mammalian retina, and that bidirectional cross-talk between ON and OFF channels is present in the vertebrate retina

Effects of adhesive thickness on global and local Mode-I interfacial fracture of bonded joints

AbstractThe interfacial fracture of adhesively bonded structures is a critical issue for the extensive applications to a variety of modern industries. In the recent two decades, cohesive zone models (CZMs) have been receiving intensive attentions for fracture problems of adhesively bonded joints. Numerous global tests have been conducted to measure the interfacial toughness of adhesive joints. Limited local tests have also been conducted to determine the interface traction-separation laws in adhesive joints. However, very few studies focused on the local test of effects of adhesive thickness on the interfacial traction-separation laws. Interfacial toughness and interfacial strength, as two critical parameters in an interfacial traction-separation law, have important effect on the fracture behaviors of bonded joints. In this work, the global and local tests are employed to investigate the effect of adhesive thickness on interfacial energy release rate, interfacial strength, and shapes of the interfacial traction-separation laws. Basically, the measured laws in this work reflect the equivalent and lumped interfacial fracture behaviors which include the cohesive fracture, damage and plasticity. The experimentally determined interfacial traction-separation laws may provide valuable baseline data for the parameter calibrations in numerical models. The current experimental results may also facilitate the understanding of adhesive thickness-dependent interface fracture of bonded joints

Color Capable Sub-Pixel Resolving Optofluidic Microscope and Its Application to Blood Cell Imaging for Malaria Diagnosis

Miniaturization of imaging systems can significantly benefit clinical diagnosis in challenging environments, where access to physicians and good equipment can be limited. Sub-pixel resolving optofluidic microscope (SROFM) offers high-resolution imaging in the form of an on-chip device, with the combination of microfluidics and inexpensive CMOS image sensors. In this work, we report on the implementation of color SROFM prototypes with a demonstrated optical resolution of 0.66 µm at their highest acuity. We applied the prototypes to perform color imaging of red blood cells (RBCs) infected with Plasmodium falciparum, a particularly harmful type of malaria parasites and one of the major causes of death in the developing world

GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark

We present GPQA, a challenging dataset of 448 multiple-choice questions written by domain experts in biology, physics, and chemistry. We ensure that the questions are high-quality and extremely difficult: experts who have or are pursuing PhDs in the corresponding domains reach 65% accuracy (74% when discounting clear mistakes the experts identified in retrospect), while highly skilled non-expert validators only reach 34% accuracy, despite spending on average over 30 minutes with unrestricted access to the web (i.e., the questions are "Google-proof"). The questions are also difficult for state-of-the-art AI systems, with our strongest GPT-4 based baseline achieving 39% accuracy. If we are to use future AI systems to help us answer very hard questions, for example, when developing new scientific knowledge, we need to develop scalable oversight methods that enable humans to supervise their outputs, which may be difficult even if the supervisors are themselves skilled and knowledgeable. The difficulty of GPQA both for skilled non-experts and frontier AI systems should enable realistic scalable oversight experiments, which we hope can help devise ways for human experts to reliably get truthful information from AI systems that surpass human capabilities.Comment: 28 pages, 5 figures, 7 table