Making “An Unknown God” Known: A Narratne-Critical Reading of Paul’s Areopagus Speech (Acts 17:16-34) In Light of the “Ignorance-Knowledge” Theme of Luke-Acts

Kim, Hyo-Jong. Making \u27An Unknown God\u27 Known: A Narrative-Critical Reading of Paul\u27s Areopagus Speech (Acts 17: 16-34) in Light of the \u27Ignorance-Knowledge\u27 Theme of Luke-Acts. Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2015. 324 pp. This dissertation argues that a reading of Paul\u27s speech in Athens (Acts 17:16-34) through narrative-critical analysis helps the reader see how Lukan narration of Paul\u27s new teaching to make an unknown god known to the pagan philosophers marks a pivotal point for Lukan presentation of the ignorance-knowledge theme in Luke-Acts. This study examines how the speech, in its unique narrative setting and with its subtle rhetorical critique of pagan ignorance, partakes of Luke\u27s overall concern to show that Jews, proselytes, and outright pagans all stand in the same condition before the God of Israel, that is, in need of the divine revelation to change their ignorant state

Stephen\u27s Speech Missiological Implications of Stephen\u27s Speech In Luke-Acts

Stephen\u27s speech leaves us with many questions. Our study will help to answer some of these questions. Chapter One of this study deals with some background issues, i.e., Who Stephen is among the Seven Deacons, and Who the Hellenists are, whose complaint threatened the unity and harmony of the church in Jerusalem. Chapter Two seeks to determine how the reporting of speech in ancient literature is to be understood. This is an attempt to defend the authenticity, and thus, the reliability of the ancient records of various speeches. The third chapter, the main body of the work, handles the issues dealt with in Stephen\u27s speech. Special attention will be given to the following questions: How is Stephen unique in treating and understanding the three patriarchs at the beginning of the speech? How does Stephen use the Old Testament to highlight his points? Is Stephen suggesting that the tabernacle is more divine than the Jerusalem temple? How does Stephen relate his hearers with their ancestors? Chapter Four builds on Chapter Three by arranging and analyzing the speech under three distinctive themes, i.e., Pilgrim theme, Samaritan theme, and Rejection theme, which will lead us to see the missiological implications of the speech in the Book of Acts. We will seek to draw some points focusing on questions like, how the speech might have influenced the development of the first century mission, what the significance of this speech is for the church\u27s mission today, and what insights can be gained from this speech

Quality of Radiomic Features in Glioblastoma Multiforme: Impact of Semi-Automated Tumor Segmentation Software.

ObjectiveThe purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability and quality of radiomic features in glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) derived from tumor volumes obtained with semi-automated tumor segmentation software.Materials and methodsMR images of 45 GBM patients (29 males, 16 females) were downloaded from The Cancer Imaging Archive, in which post-contrast T1-weighted imaging and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery MR sequences were used. Two raters independently segmented the tumors using two semi-automated segmentation tools (TumorPrism3D and 3D Slicer). Regions of interest corresponding to contrast-enhancing lesion, necrotic portions, and non-enhancing T2 high signal intensity component were segmented for each tumor. A total of 180 imaging features were extracted, and their quality was evaluated in terms of stability, normalized dynamic range (NDR), and redundancy, using intra-class correlation coefficients, cluster consensus, and Rand Statistic.ResultsOur study results showed that most of the radiomic features in GBM were highly stable. Over 90% of 180 features showed good stability (intra-class correlation coefficient [ICC] ≥ 0.8), whereas only 7 features were of poor stability (ICC < 0.5). Most first order statistics and morphometric features showed moderate-to-high NDR (4 > NDR ≥1), while above 35% of the texture features showed poor NDR (< 1). Features were shown to cluster into only 5 groups, indicating that they were highly redundant.ConclusionThe use of semi-automated software tools provided sufficiently reliable tumor segmentation and feature stability; thus helping to overcome the inherent inter-rater and intra-rater variability of user intervention. However, certain aspects of feature quality, including NDR and redundancy, need to be assessed for determination of representative signature features before further development of radiomics

The Effects of a NAD(P)H Oxidase Inhibition on Matrix Metalloproteinases and TIMP-1 in the MDX Diaphragm

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is characterized by devastating muscle degeneration that includes oxidative stress, loss of contractile tissue, muscle weakness and increased fibrosis in respiratory muscles (e.g., diaphragm). The mdx mice diaphragm undergoes a progressive degeneration similar to that occurring in patients with DMD. We showed that apocynin, a NAD(P)H oxidase inhibitor, protects against reduction in diaphragm mass, oxidative capacity, and apoptosis. We hypothesized that apocynin (1.5mmol/L per day) would attenuate extramyocyte space and collagen content by ameliorating matrix metalloproteinases (e.g., MMP-2, MMP-9), tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (e.g., TIMP-1) and transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) in the mdx diaphragm. Eight to nine week old mdx mice and age-matched C57BL wild-types were divided into 4 groups: wild-type controls + water (WW, n=7); wild-type controls + apocynin (WA, n=7); mdx mice + water (MW, n=7), and mdx mice + apocynin (MA, n=7). After 8 days of treatment, the diaphragm was extracted. Both MMP-2 (-22.6%) and MMP-9 (-27.8%) were lower in MW than WW. TIMP-1 (+61.3 %) and TGF-beta levels (+39.4%) were higher in MW than WW. MMP-2 (-21.8%) and TIMP-1 (-8.5%) levels were significantly decreased with apocynin in the mdx diaphragm. Our findings indicate cell protection of apocynin against fibrosis in the mdx diaphragm by regulating the protein levels of MMP-2/9 and TIMP-1

Determination of Cutting Date and Interval on Native Grass Management of Agricultural Waterways in South Korea

Agricultural waterways provide a buffer zone between crop fields and adjacent rivers or streams. Waterways are important resource for agriculture water management, water quality and biodiversity conservation. The total linear distance of waterway in Korea is about 180,000 km, and about 40% are concrete and about 60% are grassed waterways. At present, the percentage of concrete waterways is increasing because of their water management efficiency. Some argue that continued expansion of concrete waterways is not sustainable because it leads to potential-degradation of the earth\u27s environment. This concern has led to renewed efforts to use grassed waterways as an alternative to concrete. In addition, grassed waterways enhance the environment-friendly image of agriculture that Korea farmers want to promote. The objective of this experiment was to determine the effect of cutting date and interval of native grasses for water management efficiency of agricultural waterway

Boosting Learning for LDPC Codes to Improve the Error-Floor Performance

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes have been successfully commercialized in communication systems due to their strong error correction capabilities and simple decoding process. However, the error-floor phenomenon of LDPC codes, in which the error rate stops decreasing rapidly at a certain level, presents challenges for achieving extremely low error rates and deploying LDPC codes in scenarios demanding ultra-high reliability. In this work, we propose training methods for neural min-sum (NMS) decoders to eliminate the error-floor effect. First, by leveraging the boosting learning technique of ensemble networks, we divide the decoding network into two neural decoders and train the post decoder to be specialized for uncorrected words that the first decoder fails to correct. Secondly, to address the vanishing gradient issue in training, we introduce a block-wise training schedule that locally trains a block of weights while retraining the preceding block. Lastly, we show that assigning different weights to unsatisfied check nodes effectively lowers the error-floor with a minimal number of weights. By applying these training methods to standard LDPC codes, we achieve the best error-floor performance compared to other decoding methods. The proposed NMS decoder, optimized solely through novel training methods without additional modules, can be integrated into existing LDPC decoders without incurring extra hardware costs. The source code is available at https://github.com/ghy1228/LDPC_Error_Floor .Comment: 17 pages, 10 figure

How to Mask in Error Correction Code Transformer: Systematic and Double Masking

In communication and storage systems, error correction codes (ECCs) are pivotal in ensuring data reliability. As deep learning's applicability has broadened across diverse domains, there is a growing research focus on neural network-based decoders that outperform traditional decoding algorithms. Among these neural decoders, Error Correction Code Transformer (ECCT) has achieved the state-of-the-art performance, outperforming other methods by large margins. To further enhance the performance of ECCT, we propose two novel methods. First, leveraging the systematic encoding technique of ECCs, we introduce a new masking matrix for ECCT, aiming to improve the performance and reduce the computational complexity. Second, we propose a novel transformer architecture of ECCT called a double-masked ECCT. This architecture employs two different mask matrices in a parallel manner to learn more diverse features of the relationship between codeword bits in the masked self-attention blocks. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed double-masked ECCT outperforms the conventional ECCT, achieving the state-of-the-art decoding performance with significant margins.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure