© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

Political theology as a normative discourse has been controversial not only for secular political philosophers who are especially suspicious of messianic claims but also for Jewish and Christian thinkers who differ widely on its meaning. These essays mount an argument for a "messianic political theology" rooted in an interpretation of biblical (especially Pauline), Augustinian, and radical reformation readings of messianism as a thoroughly political and theological vision that gives rise to what the author calls "diaspora ethics." In conversation also with (...) Platonic, Jewish, and Continental thinkers, Kroeker argues for an exilic practice of political ethics in which the secular is built up theologically "from below" in the form of public service that flows from messianic political worship. Such a "weak messianic power" practiced by the messianic body inhabits an apocalyptic political economy in which the mystery of love and the mystery of evil are agonistically unveiled together in the power of the cross--not as an instrument of domination but in the form of the servant. This is not simply a matter of "pacifism" but of a messianic posture rooted in the renunciation of possessive desire that pertains to all aspects of everyday human life in the household (oikos), the academy, and the polis. --Book cover. (shrink)

IN RECENT YEARS SEVERAL IMPORTANT PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES ON THE ethical and political character of Pauline messianism have been published by continental philosophers such as Alain Badiou, Stanislaus Breton, Jacob Taubes, and Giorgio Agamben. In contrast to the Weberian "secularization thesis," which interprets Paul's eschatological messianism as one of indifference to worldly conditions, these authors—more in keeping with Walter Benjamin and Karl Barth—interpret it as radically political: a challenge to conventional modern politics of human and especially national sovereignty. In this essay (...) I bring these studies of Paul into conversation with recent critical discussions of Christian political theology to consider how messianic ethics may or may not be relevant to contemporary political theory, particularly in reformulating a "secularity" that neither excludes nor privileges particular religious voices and traditions. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 274-282, March 2022.

In his landmark monograph, "The Politics of Jesus", John Howard Yoder challenged mainstream Christian social ethics by arguing that the New Testament account of Jesus's founding of a messianic community entails a normative politics, not only for early Christianity but for the contemporary church. This challenge is further elaborated in several important posthumous publications, especially "Preface to Theology", in which Yoder examines the development of early Christology with attention to its political and ethical implications, and "The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited", Yoder's (...) proposal for a renewed Jewish-Christian dialogue around the moral meaning of messianism. This article interprets these writings with reference to a range of critical scholarship on and about Yoder, Yoder and Augustine, and Jewish and Christian messianism, paying particular attention to questions of political ethics. (shrink)

Papers presented at an annual inter-disciplinary seminar held to facilitate the 60th birthday of Kalarikkal Poulose Aleaz, b. 1947, theologist from Kerala, India during 20-21 September 2007.

The ethical treatment of cancer patientsparticipating in clinical trials requiresthat patients are well-informed about thepotential benefits and risks associated withparticipation. When patients enrolled in phaseI clinical trials report that their chance ofbenefit is very high, this is often taken as evidence of a failure of the informed consent process. We argue, however, that some simple themes from the philosophy of language may make such a conclusion less certain. First, the patient may receive conflicting statements from multiple speakers about the expected (...) outcome of the trial. Patients may be reporting the message they like best. Second, there is a potential problem of multivocality. Expressions of uncertainty of the frequency type can be confused with expressionsof uncertainty of the belief type. Patients may be informed using frequency-type statements and respond using belief-type statements. Third, each speech episode involving the investigator and the patient regarding outcomes may subservemultiple speech acts, some of which may beindirect. For example, a patient reporting ahigh expected benefit may be reporting a beliefabout the future, reassuring family members,and/or attempting to improve his or her outcome by apublic assertion of optimism. These sources oflinguistic confusion should be considered injudging whether the patient's reported expectation isgrounds for a bioethical concern that there hasbeen a failure in the informed consent process. (shrink)

Introduction of deep neural networks to the machine translation research ameliorated conventional machine translation systems in multiple ways, specifically in terms of translation quality. The ability of deep neural networks to learn a sensible representation of words is one of the major reasons for this improvement. Despite machine translation using deep neural architecture is showing state-of-the-art results in translating European languages, we cannot directly apply these algorithms in Indian languages mainly because of two reasons: unavailability of the good corpus and (...) Indian languages are morphologically rich. In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation (NMT) system for four language pairs: English–Malayalam, English–Hindi, English–Tamil, and English–Punjabi. We also collected sentences from different sources and cleaned them to make four parallel corpora for each of the language pairs, and then used them to model the translation system. The encoder network in the NMT architecture was designed with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN). Evaluation of the obtained models was performed both automatically and manually. For automatic evaluation, the bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score was used, and for manual evaluation, three metrics such as adequacy, fluency, and overall ranking were used. Analysis of the results showed the presence of lengthy sentences in English–Malayalam, and the English–Hindi corpus affected the translation. Attention mechanism was employed with a view to addressing the problem of translating lengthy sentences (sentences contain more than 50 words), and the system was able to perceive long-term contexts in the sentences. (shrink)

A new model for the aether is suggested according to which it is a superfluid state of fermion and antifermion pairs, describable by a macroscopic wave function. The vacuum state of this superfluid pervades the entire universe and may account for the missing matter. The visible matter in the universe appears as excitations from the underlying superfluid vacuum.

The six volume Psychology ann Religion set of the International Library of Psychology explores the interface between psychology and religion, looking at aspects of religious belief and mysticism as related to the study of human consciousness. Hindu Psychology looks at the relevance of Hindu belief systems and theories of perception for the West.

Mr. Raghavendrachar has undertaken the difficult task of representing the system to which he is bound by religion in the impartial way of an objective philosophical study. Philosophy to him means: to reveal the nature of the ultimate reality, but, on the other hand, he claims that philosophy has the practical and ethical ends of the world's uplift. Here already two different aims, a merely epistemological and a pedagogical one, are taken together. Further considerations come in from the religious angle. (...) As an orthodox Vedic scholar Mr. Raghavendrachar defines philosophy proper as philosophy together with the interpretations of the Veda. Besides, as a devout follower of the Madhva School of Visnuism, he propagates as a means of philosophy the study of Visnuite teaching. It is from these divergent presuppositions that Mr. Raghavendrachar's essay is written. While taking his starting point from epistemology, the author puts into the foreground the investigations of the ultimate reality and know- ability. Thus he emphasizes less those problems which are generally considered as the central ones of Indian philosophy, i.e. the problems of philosophy of religion, than those of philosophy general, of Consciousness and Ego, of Error and canons of Truth, etc. This results in an unusual explanation, or rather repudiation, of the term "Dvaita Philosophy." Mr. Raghavendrachar claims that the theological problem of the identity or difference between the Jlva, the individual Soul, and the Brahman, the universal Spirit, has not essential bearing. He asserts that the so-called Dvaitam is in reality a Brahma-Advaitam, not unlike the classical Advaitam, monism and identification between the highest and the individual Atman, and not unlike also the Visistddvaitam, the modified monism or dualism. Mr. Raghaven- drachar points out that Madhva, the founder of the so-called Dvaita-school, never himself used the term Dvaitam, but only draws the distinction between svatantram and a-svatantram, between independent and dependent entities. Brahman, which is here identified with Visnu, is interpreted as the only inde- pendent ground of the world from which originate all dependent, i.e. empirical, phenomena in which the Jwvas, the individual Souls, are included. Thus the religious question is turned into an epistemological one, and he strives to put Safikara, the pure Monist, logically in the wrong, as confusing through his identification of Brahman and Jiva the "condition" with the "conditioned." On the other hand, Mr. Raghavendrachar approaches the problem as a pro- fessed Realist. "Actual difference is the core of reality". Thus the very same empirical world which he beforehand claims as but "conditioned," becomes now for him the centre of his investigation. The confusion between "condition" and "conditioned," for which he blames Safikara, the Idealist, arises for himself from his realistic standpoint. Safikara, in the opinion of the reviewer, avoids the difficulty of such a confusion by proclaiming that all "conditioned," all empirical singleness, is only of lesser truth, is only a laukika expression for the understanding of the masses, while in reality all differentiation is non-existent. Madhva and his present interpreter, on the other hand, emphasize that even in the unifying stage of liberation differences between the Divine and the Jiva and among the single Jivas themselves are still upheld. Mr. Raghavendrachar's second definition of philosophy quoted above is that of philosophy as a practical means of betterment of the world. This peda- gogical purpose of philosophy gives the author the opportunity of advocating his own sectarian standpoint. The Vedanta is for him the best of all possible systems and reveals undoubtable and unquestionable truth. Thus it comple- ments, or it even corrects, the truth gained from empirical facts. Among the Vedantic Schools he considers his own, the Madhva School, the most accom- plished one. Consequently, he has to devalue ankiara's views from this angle also. Safikara, he claims, has only made use of mahdvdikyas, great sayings of the Upanisads; he has to concede to his opponent that he finds support for his interpretations in the most significant Upanisadic teachings. Not many other equally valid mahdvakyas, nor lesser Upanisadic sayings are, however, intro- duced by the author in favour of his own against Saikara's standpoint, Partly this omission is due to Mr. Raghavendrachar's basic dogma that the Veda as a whole is revealed truth and cannot be contradictory to itself; partly-at any rate as the reviewer sees it-it is due to the fact that Safikara's explanations are the most representative of the main Upanisadic doctrines. The difficulty of Mr. Raghavendrachar's self-imposed task of subjective and at the same time objective representation is clearly evident throughout his work. Equally evident, however, throughout Mr. Raghavendrachar's exposi- tions are his two remarkable gifts: genuine religious devotion and excellent training in logical discussion. Review by: Betty Heimann. (shrink)

Children’s exposure to the marketing of energy-dense nutrient-poor (EDNP) foods is a public health concern and marketing investment is known to be shifting to non-broadcast media, such as the Internet. This paper examines the perceptions of parents and children on ethical aspects of food marketing to which children are exposed. The research used qualitative methods with parent-child (aged between 8–13 years), from South Australia. Thirteen parent-child pairs participated in this research. Ethical concerns raised by parents and children included, the marketing (...) of EDNP foods, pester power and family conflict and the use of powerful techniques via the Internet. Their views on rights and responsibilities represented a complex mixture of idealistic and pragmatic positions. They appeared to be caught within the tensions of problematizing unhealthy food marketing to children, both as a social problem and as an individual problem. Their dilemmas are not dissimilar to the broader policy debate in Australia on the matter of food marketing to children. The stale-mate on statutory regulations to protect children from exposure to EDNP food marketing could be advanced by stronger use of ethical arguments to protect children from harmful exploitation and to protect parents from forces that undermine their authority. (shrink)