Facebook faith - social networking in a faith based community

This paper views the increasing social networking as an efficient emerging ministry to the moveable generation. Through social network such as Facebook, ministry from a pastoral perspective can become more authentic and meaningful. Ministry is relational. Social Networking sites provide a strong platform to being part in other people’s life. Social networking and living online builds community beyond geographical boarders. Young adults and youths digital identity often reflects their faith, this is supported by research which suggests a practice of more openness to share and expose private issues online. Spiritual and religious views are freely shared, creating sacred spaces in the midst of life practising a holistic faith identity in a secular community. Providing a strong platform for information flow, Social Network is attractive in a postmodern society where inviting people to join in events are perceived as non threatening, making church community events transparent and available to people who do not attend church, inviting spiritual friendships and relationships. Social Networking strengthens relationship in a non hierarchical manner and invites the minister into lives where there previously would have been barriers, engaging in prayer and bible study as well as pastoral care through social networking, thus relationships deepens via social networking making people real. It has been observed that, although community building happens on the net, church affiliation loyalty remains to the local community. Therefore presence ministry though social networks emerges as a core form of ministry, where relations to youth who move from local church to university campuses are kept alive. The asynchronous nature of communication within social networking eases the minister in her work. The minister is able to engage with many individuals at the same time. Before the minister could visit one person at a time, now she visits 5-6 individuals at any given time. Therefore social networking not only increases the quality of the work, but also empowers the minister to be more efficient

Wigner crystallization in quantum electron bilayers

The phase diagram of quantum electron bilayers in zero magnetic field is obtained using density functional theory. For large electron densities the system is in the liquid phase, while for smaller densities the liquid may freeze (Wigner crystallization) into four different crystalline phases; the lattice symmetry and the critical density depend on the the inter-layer distance. The phase boundaries between different Wigner crystals consist of both first and second order transitions, depending on the phases involved, and join the freezing curve at three different triple points.Comment: To appear in Europhys. Lett. (11 pages in REVTEX + 2 figures in postscript

TCP over High Speed Variable Capacity Links: A Simulation Study for Bandwidth Allocation

New optical network technologies provide opportunities for fast, controllable bandwidth management. These technologies can now explicitly provide resources to data paths, creating demand driven bandwidth reservation across networks where an applications bandwidth needs can be meet almost exactly. Dynamic synchronous Transfer Mode (DTM) is a gigabit network technology that provides channels with dynamically adjustable capacity. TCP is a reliable end-to-end transport protocol that adapts its rate to the available capacity. Both TCP and the DTM bandwidth can react to changes in the network load, creating a complex system with inter-dependent feedback mechanisms. The contribution of this work is an assessment of a bandwidth allocation scheme for TCP flows on variable capacity technologies. We have created a simulation environment using ns-2 and our results indicate that the allocation of bandwidth maximises TCP throughput for most flows, thus saving valuable capacity when compared to a scheme such as link over-provisioning. We highlight one situation where the allocation scheme might have some deficiencies against the static reservation of resources, and describe its causes. This type of situation warrants further investigation to understand how the algorithm can be modified to achieve performance similar to that of the fixed bandwidth case

Flash ionization of the partially ionized wind of the progenitor of SN 1987A

The H II region created by the progenitor of SN 1987A was further heated and ionized by the supernova flash. Prior to the flash, the temperature of the gas was 4000 - 5000 K, and helium was neutral, while the post-flash temperature was only slightly less than 10^5 K, with the gas being ionized to helium-like ionization stages of C, N and O. We have followed the slow post-flash cooling and recombination of the gas, as well as its line emission, and find that the strongest lines are N V 1240 and O VI 1034. Both these lines are good probes for the density of the gas, and suitable instruments to detect the lines are STIS on HST and FUSE, respectively. Other lines which may be detectable are N IV] 1486 and [O III] 5007, though they are expected to be substantially weaker. The relative strength of the oxygen lines is found to be a good tracer of the color temperature of the supernova flash. From previous observations, we put limits on the hydrogen density, n_H, of the H II region. The early N V 1240 flux measured by IUE gives an upper limit which is n_H ~ 180 \eta^{-0.40} cm^{-3}, where \eta is the filling factor of the gas. The recently reported emission in [O III] 5007 at 2500 days requires n_H = (160\pm12) \eta^{-0.19} cm^{-3}, for a supernova burst similar to that in the 500full1 model of Ensman & Burrows (1992). For the more energetic 500full2 burst the density is n_H = (215\pm15) \eta^{-0.19} cm^{-3}. These values are much higher than in models of the X-ray emission from the supernova (n_H ~ 75 cm^{-3}), and it seems plausible that the observed [O III] emission is produced primarily elsewhere than in the H II region. We also discuss the type of progenitor consistent with the H II region. In particular, it seems unlikely that its spectral type was much earlier than B2 Ia.Comment: LaTeX, 23 pages including 4 figures. To appear in ApJ (Main Journal

Novel online Recommendation algorithm for Massive Open Online Courses (NoR-MOOCs)

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have gained in popularity over the last few years. The space of online learning resources has been increasing exponentially and has created a problem of information overload. To overcome this problem, recommender systems that can recommend learning resources to users according to their interests have been proposed. MOOCs contain a huge amount of data with the quantity of data increasing as new learners register. Traditional recommendation techniques suffer from scalability, sparsity and cold start problems resulting in poor quality recommendations. Furthermore, they cannot accommodate the incremental update of the model with the arrival of new data making them unsuitable for MOOCs dynamic environment. From this line of research, we propose a novel online recommender system, namely NoR-MOOCs, that is accurate, scales well with the data and moreover overcomes previously recorded problems with recommender systems. Through extensive experiments conducted over the COCO data-set, we have shown empirically that NoR-MOOCs significantly outperforms traditional KMeans and Collaborative Filtering algorithms in terms of predictive and classification accuracy metrics

Van der Waals effect in weak adsorption affecting trends in adsorption, reactivity, and the view of substrate nobility

The ubiquitous van der Waals (vdW) force, particularly discernible in weak adsorption, is studied on noble and transition metals. In calculations with the vdW density functional (DF) [ M. Dion et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 246401 (2004)], the atomic structure near the adsorption site is systematically varied, including dense fcc(111) surface, adatom, pyramid, and step defects. In weak adsorption the vdW force (i) is shown necessary to account for, (ii) is sizable, (iii) has a strong spatial variation, relevant for adsorption on surface defects, (iv) changes reaction rules, and (v) changes adsorption trends in agreement with experimental data. Traditional physisorption theory is also given support and interpretation

Context-based modelling of information demand: approaches from information logistics and decision support

Readily available information is a crucial basis for making decisions, solving problems, or performing knowledge intensive work. Providing such information meeting the needs of a user has to be based on an accurate, purpose-oriented and up-to-date representation of the demand in question. The paper is devoted to a study of different context-based models of user demand. The selected approaches from the fields of information logistics and decision support are based on enterprise models and objectoriented constraint networks (OOCN). Combining these approaches will allow for an orchestrated use of enterprise models and OOCN for decision support. Discussion and integration of these approaches is illustrated using an example enterprise model, a related information demand context and a corresponding decision support context