Early Christian Widows: A Study in Their Social-economic Situation, Support, and Contribution to the Church

This research focuses on the subject of early Christian widows mainly in the first two centuries (up to Tertullian) and seeks to explore the questions regarding their social-economic situation, means of support, and their contributions (if any) to the church. Through literary analyses of three different genres of early Christian texts – narrative, instruction, and apologetic texts – which exhibit similar patterns concerning the above questions, some tentative historical conclusions can be drawn, especially in light of the situation of widows in the Roman world and ancient Judaism (which provided a historical and cultural background to Christianity). In terms of the social-economic situation of early Christian widows, this study suggests that the majority of them were poor and vulnerable economically, socially and legally, although there were also well-to-do widows. As for their support, there were mainly three means of support for them – family support from children or other relatives; individual support from friends, benefactors, or patrons; and collective support from the church. The collective support additionally indicates the existence of centralised church funds through pooling of resources from the whole Christian community. Despite their poverty and vulnerability, widows in the early church should not be stereotyped as merely passive recipients of support. They played an active role in church ministry and contributed to the Christian community in various ways, such as prayer and intercession, hospitality, charity, patronage, nursing children (i.e., orphans), looking after the sick, and visiting the imprisoned. In addition, their purity and celibacy represented the peak of Christian commitment, as indicated by people’s reference to them as the ‘altar’ of God. And the establishment of the ‘order’ of widows further highlights their particular status in the early church

Network Sketching: Exploiting Binary Structure in Deep CNNs

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with deep architectures have substantially advanced the state-of-the-art in computer vision tasks. However, deep networks are typically resource-intensive and thus difficult to be deployed on mobile devices. Recently, CNNs with binary weights have shown compelling efficiency to the community, whereas the accuracy of such models is usually unsatisfactory in practice. In this paper, we introduce network sketching as a novel technique of pursuing binary-weight CNNs, targeting at more faithful inference and better trade-off for practical applications. Our basic idea is to exploit binary structure directly in pre-trained filter banks and produce binary-weight models via tensor expansion. The whole process can be treated as a coarse-to-fine model approximation, akin to the pencil drawing steps of outlining and shading. To further speedup the generated models, namely the sketches, we also propose an associative implementation of binary tensor convolutions. Experimental results demonstrate that a proper sketch of AlexNet (or ResNet) outperforms the existing binary-weight models by large margins on the ImageNet large scale classification task, while the committed memory for network parameters only exceeds a little.Comment: To appear in CVPR201

Wireless network security status in Oulu:war-driving

Abstract. Wireless networks have improvement not only in the timeliness, frequency, convenience and flexibility of connecting to the Internet, but also in economic cost and expansion of the number and location of access points that a user can connect to the internet. They have gained popularity especially after Wireless Local Area Network second evolvement about changing initial secure algorithm Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) to Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and WPA2. WEP has been found to have vulnerabilities in cryptographic techniques and can’t defend against brute force attacks for more than a few minutes and is considered broken nowadays. WPA, a stronger encryption algorithm than WEP, made Wi-Fi a reliable network connection method. Wi-Fi security issues have been found probably since the first wireless network was deployed, but it is widely known by people because of Peter Shipley’s wardriving experimentation and the statistic report which has been published in hacker conference in 2001. Several experiments have been carried out to reveal Wi-Fi security issues and to improve users’ awareness of Wi-Fi security. Wardriving is not a new concept, but only lately wardriving was becoming easier for wardrivers because of continued evolution of technology. The updated software and hardware that are utilized in wardriving have given this activity more economic value and attracted interest from other researchers too. But this method has not yet been used in Oulu, at least in academic research. No studies have reported about wireless network security status with wardriving method by flying a drone to discover wireless APs and most of wardriving has been done by car, walking, or biking. Furthermore, Oulu, as a technology hub with many ICT companies and citywide panOULU public Wi-Fi infrastructure, makes it an ideal location for this experiment. What is Wi-Fi performance and security status in Oulu? Author will scan wireless networks in Oulu center area with a tool kit setting up with Raspberry Pi, Wi-Fi adaptor, GPS receiver and drone using a method called wardriving. Wardriving is the act of discovering and mapping wireless networks in a certain area and restoring access points’ data, such as an encryption standard, network name and location. The fundamental purpose is to find general information about Wi-Fi networks performance and security in Oulu center area and report the issues to raise the awareness of Wi-Fi security. Mobile devices do not need to be connected to wireless networks to be tracked. The Wi-Fi signal is transmitted continuously while a phone device tries to search for available networks. Whether discovered wireless devices quantification is indicative of local personnel density is another research question to be answered. About 65.22% wireless APs have WPA-CCMP encryption standard and 4.2% Wi-Fi have unknown authentication in Oulu. The data showed that the majority of wireless networks in Oulu are secure. Less than 1% networks deployed WEP which has been found severe flaws in authentication method and 10% wireless access points had WPA-TKIP deployed which employed the same underlying mechanism as WEP, therefore it is vulnerable to similar attacks. The amount of insecure networks brings some concerns to the wireless network security state in Oulu. Wardriving by drone turned out to be a more efficient method to discover wireless networks compared to wardriving on ground by walking or biking. The result also found that wireless device quantification is indicative of local personnel density, as almost everyone nowadays has a smartphone. This finding makes the Pi setup more practically usage, such as searching for lost people in forest. Thus, it becomes one future research direction, to build a real time indicator to show the direction and distance between the Pi setup and a specific wireless network device, based on the detected strength of signal

Physics Inspired Optimization on Semantic Transfer Features: An Alternative Method for Room Layout Estimation

In this paper, we propose an alternative method to estimate room layouts of cluttered indoor scenes. This method enjoys the benefits of two novel techniques. The first one is semantic transfer (ST), which is: (1) a formulation to integrate the relationship between scene clutter and room layout into convolutional neural networks; (2) an architecture that can be end-to-end trained; (3) a practical strategy to initialize weights for very deep networks under unbalanced training data distribution. ST allows us to extract highly robust features under various circumstances, and in order to address the computation redundance hidden in these features we develop a principled and efficient inference scheme named physics inspired optimization (PIO). PIO's basic idea is to formulate some phenomena observed in ST features into mechanics concepts. Evaluations on public datasets LSUN and Hedau show that the proposed method is more accurate than state-of-the-art methods.Comment: To appear in CVPR 2017. Project Page: https://sites.google.com/view/st-pio

Current Research Advance on Echinococcosis

Echinococcosis is caused by infection with larva (metacestode) of the tapeworms of the genus Echinococcus. Within genus Echinococcus, two species are known as public health concern worldwide: Echinococcus guanulosus causing cystic echinococcosis (CE) and Echinococcus multilocularis causing alveolar echinococcosis (AE). The co-evaluation due to the interaction between parasites and their hosts has been well known to be able to allow tolerating to maintain parasitism as long as possible. With many research advanced findings, scientists have been much interested in using either those molecules from parasites producing due to invading and surviving or those cytokines from hosts responding due to defenses to carry out immunotherapeutic practice that is not only against parasitic infection but also for cancer or other immunological related disorders. Taken advance of knowledge on Echinococcus genome research outcomes, recent attentions regarding the discoveries of targeting antiparasitic drug and/or vaccine were extensively discussed in this review

Design of exponential state estimators for neural networks with mixed time delays

This is the post print version of the article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright 2007 Elsevier Ltd.In this Letter, the state estimation problem is dealt with for a class of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with mixed discrete and distributed delays. The activation functions are assumed to be neither monotonic, nor differentiable, nor bounded. We aim at designing a state estimator to estimate the neuron states, through available output measurements, such that the dynamics of the estimation error is globally exponentially stable in the presence of mixed time delays. By using the Laypunov–Krasovskii functional, a linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach is developed to establish sufficient conditions to guarantee the existence of the state estimators. We show that both the existence conditions and the explicit expression of the desired estimator can be characterized in terms of the solution to an LMI. A simulation example is exploited to show the usefulness of the derived LMI-based stability conditions.This work was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Nuffield Foundation of the UK under Grant NAL/00630/G, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Education Committee of China under Grants 05KJB110154 and BK2006064, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 10471119 and 10671172