The Bible as One Story: Images as the Holy Spirit\u27s Device for Making Scripture God\u27s Word Written

(Excerpt) My approach to scripture, you probably have guessed, is not that of someone trained by the biblical scholarship critical fellowship. I studied under them as you all did, too. I managed not to think too much about them, because I didn\u27t think much of them. When I was in seminary a number of us got together and wrote a series of four-line doggerel verses on the result of biblical criticism as we were receiving it when applied to the scriptures. I can only remember one of those stanzas: Of wilderness wanderings, there\u27d not be so many; of Abraham\u27s stories, we dare say, not any. The words of our Lord would no longer be dark, and they\u27d all be contained in six verses of Mark

The Bible and the Liturgical Movement: Scripture as a Voice in the Church, Not a Book Faxed to It

(Excerpt) I want to begin by telling you my own personal connection with the liturgical movement. It happened way back when I was twenty-one years old and entered seminary in 1946. Those were the bad old days when you went through high school, college, seminary, ordination, and under after that. Actually, we are recognizing they were in some ways the good old days, too, because we got a lot of service out of some of those types who started early and who maybe even learned something along the way

An inexact Newton method for systems arising from the finite element method

In this paper, we introduce an efficient and robust technique for approximating the Jacobian matrix for a nonlinear system of algebraic equations which arises from the finite element discretization of a system of nonlinear partial differential equations. It is demonstrated that when an iterative solver, such as preconditioned GMRES, is used to solve the linear systems of equations that result from the application of Newton's method, this approach is generally more efficient than using matrix-free techniques: the price paid being the extra memory requirement for storing the sparse Jacobian. The advantages of this approach over attempting to calculate the Jacobian exactly or of using other approximations are also discussed. A numerical example is included which is based upon the solution of a 2-d compressible viscous flow problem

Navigating public health chemicals policy in Australia: a policy maker’s and practitioner’s guide

Chemicals are ubiquitous in everyday life. Environmental health practitioners rely on a complex web of regulators and policy bodies to ensure the protection of public health, yet few understand the full extent of this web. A lack of understanding can hamper public health response and impede policy development. In this paper we map the public health chemicals policy landscape in Australia and conclude that an understanding of this system is essential for effective environmental health responses and policy development.   NSW Public Health Bulletin 23(12) 217-227 http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/NB1211

Real options for adaptive decisions in primary industries

Abstract The long term sustainability of Australian crop and livestock farms is threatened with climate change and climate variability. In response, farmers may decide to (1) adjust practices and technologies, (2) change production systems, or (3) transform their industries, for example, by relocating to new geographical areas. Adjustments to existing practices are easy to make relative to changes to production systems or transformations of an industry. Switching between production regimes requires new investments and infrastructure and can leave assets stranded. These changes can be partially or wholly irreversible but hysteresis effects can make switching difficult and mistakes costly to reverse. ‘Real options’ is a framework to structure thinking and analysis of these difficult choices. Previous work has demonstrated how real options can be applied to adaptation, and extends traditional economic analyses of agricultural investment decisions based on net present values to better represent the uncertainty and risks of climate change. This project uses transects across space as analogues for future climate scenarios. We simulate yields from climate data and draw on data from actual farms to estimate a real options model referred to as ‘Real Options for Adaptive Decisions’ (ROADs). We present results for the transformation of wheat dominant cropping systems in South Australia, New South Wales, and Western Australia. We find that farmers’ decisions, as much as a changing climate, determine how agriculture will be transformed. Please cite this report as: Hertzler, G, Sanderson, T, Capon, T, Hayman, P, Kingwell, R, McClintock, A, Crean, J, Randall, A 2013 Will primary producers continue to adjust practices and technologies, change production systems or transform their industry – an application of real options,  National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Gold Coast, pp. 93. The long term sustainability of Australian crop and livestock farms is threatened with climate change and climate variability. In response, farmers may decide to (1) adjust practices and technologies, (2) change production systems, or (3) transform their industries, for example, by relocating to new geographical areas. Adjustments to existing practices are easy to make relative to changes to production systems or transformations of an industry. Switching between production regimes requires new investments and infrastructure and can leave assets stranded. These changes can be partially or wholly irreversible but hysteresis effects can make switching difficult and mistakes costly to reverse. ‘Real options’ is a framework to structure thinking and analysis of these difficult choices. Previous work has demonstrated how real options can be applied to adaptation, and extends traditional economic analyses of agricultural investment decisions based on net present values to better represent the uncertainty and risks of climate change. This project uses transects across space as analogues for future climate scenarios. We simulate yields from climate data and draw on data from actual farms to estimate a real options model referred to as ‘Real Options for Adaptive Decisions’ (ROADs). We present results for the transformation of wheat dominant cropping systems in South Australia, New South Wales, and Western Australia. We find that farmers’ decisions, as much as a changing climate, determine how agriculture will be transformed

Algorithms and Complexity Results for Persuasive Argumentation

The study of arguments as abstract entities and their interaction as introduced by Dung (Artificial Intelligence 177, 1995) has become one of the most active research branches within Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning. A main issue for abstract argumentation systems is the selection of acceptable sets of arguments. Value-based argumentation, as introduced by Bench-Capon (J. Logic Comput. 13, 2003), extends Dung's framework. It takes into account the relative strength of arguments with respect to some ranking representing an audience: an argument is subjectively accepted if it is accepted with respect to some audience, it is objectively accepted if it is accepted with respect to all audiences. Deciding whether an argument is subjectively or objectively accepted, respectively, are computationally intractable problems. In fact, the problems remain intractable under structural restrictions that render the main computational problems for non-value-based argumentation systems tractable. In this paper we identify nontrivial classes of value-based argumentation systems for which the acceptance problems are polynomial-time tractable. The classes are defined by means of structural restrictions in terms of the underlying graphical structure of the value-based system. Furthermore we show that the acceptance problems are intractable for two classes of value-based systems that where conjectured to be tractable by Dunne (Artificial Intelligence 171, 2007)