A Homily on Romans 10:14-15

In my studies within the course of Technology in Ministry, I was encouraged to use and promote the use of technology as a valuable means to proclaim the Good News to people where they are. In the “spirit” of Vatican II, the Church reaches out to her sons and daughters, especially the young, in an effort to make practical use of technology. Social media specifically comes into question when considering the use of high-tech communication to proclaim the Word. If we hold that the beauty of the feet of those who bring good news to the world from village to village is always a matter of significant value through the ages, how about the beauty of the hands and eyes of those who proclaim the Gospel of God through the use of this now ubiquitous technology? Can we indeed go so far as to state that the internet might be a divine gift, a means by which evangelization is made somehow more efficient and effective in the modern world

A COEXCEEDANCE APPROACH ON FINANCIAL CONTAGION

The paper sheds light on financial contagion within the Euro Area and Asia, and contagion from the Euro Area to Asia during two recent crises: the global financial crisis and European sovereign debt crisis. Applying the multinomial logit regression model, the paper investigates how the macro-finance variables affect the coincidence of extreme negative returns (coexceedances). In addition, I apply both original constant threshold i.e. 5% percentile of unconditional distribution of daily stock returns and Value-at-Risk to estimate extreme negative returns. These approaches offer a similar pattern. The empirical findings reveal that, in the Euro Area and Asia, the probability of the occurrence of coexceedances is strongly explained by the idiosyncratic risks: the changes in exchange rates, the regional stock market volatility, and global shocks: the changes in the U.S. long-term interest rates, the TED spread. The global volatility index is only significant to explain the likelihood of coexceedances in the Euro Area, not in Asia. These analyses lead to the conclusion that contagion in Asia is more important than in the Euro Area. Another important finding indicates the existence of contagion from the Euro Area to Asia. That is, the probability of coexceedances in Asia is predictable and depends on the number of joint occurrence of extreme return shocks in the Euro Area

Vietnam’s Accession to the World Trade Organization: Economic Projections to 2020

This study presents a set of assessments of the long term economic effects of Vietnam’s accession to the WTO. Generally speaking, our results indicate that Vietnam would benefit from accelerating its participation in more open multilateralism. However, it is also clear from our analysis that these benefits will remain modest in the absence of comprehensive and complementary domestic economic reforms. Passive external liberalization, even when coupled with determined domestic reform, is inferior to WTO participation combined with negotiated market access and other activist multilateral agreements. Finally, our analysis shows that capital insufficiency is a very serious constraint on Vietnamese economic growth and diversification. Capital market reform can play an essential role in dynamic and sustained economic development for the country.Vietnam, WTO, Trade

Design and Fabrication of Fiber-Optic Nanoprobes for Optical Sensing

This paper describes the design and fabrication of fiber-optic nanoprobes developed for optical detection in single living cells. It is critical to fabricate probes with well-controlled nanoapertures for optimized spatial resolution and optical transmission. The detection sensitivity of fiber-optic nanoprobe depends mainly on the extremely small excitation volume that is determined by the aperture sizes and penetration depths. We investigate the angle dependence of the aperture in shadow evaporation of the metal coating onto the tip wall. It was found that nanoaperture diameters of approximately 50 nm can be achieved using a 25° tilt angle. On the other hand, the aperture size is sensitive to the subtle change of the metal evaporation angle and could be blocked by irregular metal grains. Through focused ion beam (FIB) milling, optical nanoprobes with well-defined aperture size as small as 200 nm can be obtained. Finally, we illustrate the use of the nanoprobes by detecting a fluorescent species, benzo[a]pyrene tetrol (BPT), in single living cells. A quantitative estimation of the numbers of BPT molecules detected using fiber-optic nanoprobes for BPT solutions shows that the limit of detection was approximately 100 molecules

VFFINDER: A Graph-based Approach for Automated Silent Vulnerability-Fix Identification

The increasing reliance of software projects on third-party libraries has raised concerns about the security of these libraries due to hidden vulnerabilities. Managing these vulnerabilities is challenging due to the time gap between fixes and public disclosures. Moreover, a significant portion of open-source projects silently fix vulnerabilities without disclosure, impacting vulnerability management. Existing tools like OWASP heavily rely on public disclosures, hindering their effectiveness in detecting unknown vulnerabilities. To tackle this problem, automated identification of vulnerability-fixing commits has emerged. However, identifying silent vulnerability fixes remains challenging. This paper presents VFFINDER, a novel graph-based approach for automated silent vulnerability fix identification. VFFINDER captures structural changes using Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) and represents them in annotated ASTs. VFFINDER distinguishes vulnerability-fixing commits from non-fixing ones using attention-based graph neural network models to extract structural features. We conducted experiments to evaluate VFFINDER on a dataset of 36K+ fixing and non-fixing commits in 507 real-world C/C++ projects. Our results show that VFFINDER significantly improves the state-of-the-art methods by 39-83% in Precision, 19-148% in Recall, and 30-109% in F1. Especially, VFFINDER speeds up the silent fix identification process by up to 47% with the same review effort of 5% compared to the existing approaches.Comment: Accepted by IEEE KSE 202