Spiritual growth through authentic worship

Frequent sharing of the Eucharist guarantees God\u27s grace for us.’ While this slogan which appears at a recent First Holy Communion for children has merit, it calls for deeper reflection. The truth is that years of mechanistic responses at Mass can set in place a spiritual lethargy that drains an enthusiasm to link the Eucharist to life in the real world. Of particular interest for his paper is the Sign of Peace and Presentation of Gifts. In Sacramentum Caritatis, Pope Benedict XVI notes the great value of the Sign of Peace especially in a world fraught with fear and conflict. However, he urges restraint in the liturgical exchange of peace lest it becomes a ‘certain distraction.’ To that end he has asked ‘the competent curial offices to study the possibility of moving the sign of peace to another place, such as before the presentation of gifts to the altar.’ The proposal to link the two activities is noteworthy in view of their potential to promote spiritual growth and Jesus\u27 teaching in Matthew 5:23-24, which the Pope cites. This short paper ponders on the reapplication of Amos 5:21-24 by Jesus in Matthew 5:23-24. It closes with a reflection on Karl Rahner\u27s insight on the inseparable bond between our liturgical life and life in the real world

Transverse momentum broadening of heavy quark and gluon energy loss in Sakai-Sugimoto model

In this paper, we calculate the transverse momentum diffusion coefficient kappa_T of heavy quark and gluon penetration length in the deconfinement phase of Sakai-Sugimoto model, which is known as a holographic dual of large N_c QCD. We find that for the heavy quark moving through the thermal plasma with a constant velocity v<1, the transverse momentum diffusion coefficient kappa_T is proportional to lamda*gamma^{{1/3}}*T^4/T_d, and the gluon penetration length delta x is proportional to E^{{2/5}}. These results are different from those calculated in N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory, where kappa_T is proportional to lambda*gamma^{{1/2}}*T^3 and delta x is proportional to E^{{1/3}}, respectively. In the high energy limit, the difference between the two pairs of results should be evident, so we expect that the future LHC experiments can tell us which model is more closely related to the realistic strongly coupled QCD at finite temperature.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figures, contents and references adde

Pantry: A Macro Library for Python

Python lacks a simple way to create custom syntax and constructs that goes outside of its own syntax rules. A paradigm that allows for these possibilities to exist within languages is macros. Macros allow for a shorter set of syntax to expand into a longer set of instructions at compile-time. This gives the capability to evolve the language to fit personal needs. Pantry, implements a hygienic text-substitution macro system for Python. Pantry achieves this through the introduction of an additional preparsing step that utilizes parsing and lexing of the source code. Pantry proposes a way to simply declare a pattern to be recognized, articulate instructions that replace the pattern, and replace the pattern in the source code. This form of meta-programming allows its users to be able to more concisely write their Python code and present the language in a more natural and intuitive manner. We validate Pantry’s utility through use cases inspired by Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) and go through five of them. These are requests from the Python community for features to be implemented into Python. Pantry fulfills these desires through the composition of macros that that performs the new feature

Favoritism: Ethical Dilemmas Viewed Through Multiple Paradigms

Favoritism is a controversial issue in many cultural settings. Related terms include nepotism and cronyism; all three are identified with misconduct in the merit-based business world. The flip side is ethics — the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group (Merriam-Webster, 2012). According to John Dewey (1902), “Ethics is the science that deals with conduct insofar as this is considered to be right or wrong, good or bad.” Since favoritism is perceived as being linked to workplace misconduct, it is necessary to use ethics in examining this issue. The current study applied four lenses of ethics identified by Shapiro and Stefkovich (2011) to help people deal with ethical challenges: justice, critique, care, and the profession. Findings have implications for criteria used to handle ethical challenges in the workplace

Oral History Interview with Pang Yang Hoong: Conceptualising SMU

This is an abridged version of the original interview. Please contact the Library at [email protected] for access to the full version of the transcript and/or audio recording.</p

Corner contributions to holographic entanglement entropy in non-conformal backgrounds

We study corner contributions to holographic entanglement entropy in non-conformal backgrounds: a kink for D2-branes as well as a cone and two different types of crease for D4-branes. Unlike 2+1-dimensional CFTs, the corner contribution to the holographic entanglement entropy of D2-branes exhibits a power law behaviour rather than a logarithmic term. However, the logarithmic term emerges in the holographic entanglement entropy of D4-branes. We identify the logarithmic term for a cone in D4-brane background as the universal contribution under appropriate limits and compare it with other physical quantities.Comment: 25 pages, 1 figure, discussions in section 5.2 improved, typos corrected and references adde