Tikit, a leading provider of technology solutions and services to legal and accountancy firms globally, today announced the launch of Carpe Diem Next Generation timekeeping software, a completely re-engineered, user intuitive, functionally rich timekeeping solution designed for busy legal professionals.
Legal IT Professionals' Rob Ameerun interviews Tikit's North American President Peter Zver and Development Director Mark Garnish about the latest version of the world's leading timekeeping application for lawyers Carpe Diem Next Generation, the philosophy behind the product, timekeeping metrics and what legal professionals can expect from next generation timekeeping.
Bellefield Systems, LLC, the leader in mobile time entry for firms of all sizes, announced today that Setterwalls, one of Sweden's leading full-service law firms, has chosen iTimeKeep as its firm-wide mobile time entry solution. After an extensive search and vendor selection process aimed at identifying the best mobile solutions, Bellefield's iTimeKeep came out on top.
Time capture specialist Rekoop has announced its latest mid-tier signing, underlining the sector's continued appetite for switching away from their PMS to specialist time recording systems. South-west firm Wollen Michelmore is set to deploy Rekoop to its 60+ fee earners across six offices, integrating with SOS Connect and its telephony platform.
Bellefield Systems, LLC, the leader in mobile time entry for firms of all sizes, continues to deliver on its commitment to innovation with the announcement of a formal Engagement Program.
Bellefield Systems announced today the availability of iTimeKeep for Coyote Analytics users. This announcement solidifies Bellefield's position as the most adopted Mobile Time Entry Solution for law firms of all sizes, virtually running on any time and billing system in today's legal space.
Intapp, a global leader in legal software, today announced that MTA Solicitors LLP, a nationwide law practice with solicitors in London, Bromley and Manchester, has implemented Intapp Time to enhance business efficiency.
Smart Time Apps, the provider of Smart Time, today announced that Stevens & Lee has selected Smart Time Mobile to modernize its timekeeping platform. Founded in 1928, Stevens & Lee is a full-service law firm with approximately 170 attorneys and 50 non-lawyer business and consulting professionals representing clients on a regional, national and international scale.
Bellefield Systems, LLC, the leader in mobile time entry for firms of all sizes, announced today that Kramer, Levin, Naftalis & Frankel, LLP has chosen iTimeKeep as its firm-wide mobile time entry solution, after a thorough evaluation of other top competitors.


When you get married, you have to realize that you do become one, even money-wise. All money decisions, especially the big ones, have to be mutually agreed upon.
Couples have their own personal bank accounts aside from the joint bank account which they contribute to. How much is contributed depends on your prior agreement.
Couples pool their money together and just get a certain amount of allowance periodically for their personal spending.
Two-income couples should also talk about kids and how that would affect their money decisions, whether or not one of the parent should quite the job and stay home, making them a one income family and changing the whole money management.
For a one-income couple or family, the money obviously comes from only one source. How to spend that income is something that must be settled even before the wedding itself.


The Stooges guitarist James Williamson has released a new digital single. It's called"Sickkk." New singer Maia handles vocals for the cut. Check it out below. A 7-inch single with "Sickkk" / "I Made A Mistake" will be out November 11.
Scare to release new EP "Fleshed Out"


The integration of the document and records management in the organizations allows the satisfactory organization of the information, reducing the physical file and the costs while increasing the efficiency of all the business processes.
Document management systems have evolved from the application concept made to benefit the end user, to "integrated systems" in the company's application network; that creates the platform of programs with functionalities at the service of the user, meanwhile providing applications for productive entities and the necessary tools for ad-hoc application developers.
In general, all companies are configured under a hardware and software ecosystem where knowledge is stored and distributed by different servers and specialized software solutions, including applications that range from ERP, CRM, workflow automation and electronic mail services, among others, as well as hardware solutions such as scanners, fax or scanning stations. What we would call the hardware and software ecosystem where the tangible knowledge of the company is supported while employees are the intangible knowledge.
Because whatever you need, the size of the company for which you work, or the sector in which it operates, the business processes are based on enterprise information and in many cases it is collected in documents and records. In paper or digital format, the documents allow the information to flow; when the flow of information is optimized, the company produces more benefits. On the other hand, current standards or regulations demand more guarantees when it comes to protecting privacy or demonstrating compliance with laws.
Having a centralized repository, with the necessary levels of security, but at the same time facilitating instant access to the essential electronic documents and information for the smooth running of the business, is a challenge that every company must face. Being able to efficiently distribute information and electronic documents among multiple users so that they can access and work simultaneously on the same files. This creates a direct effect on the productivity and performance of the company in any business.
To provide the possibility of integrating document management solutions within the organization, the OpenKM electronic document management software offers SDK'S in Java, PHP and .NET. These SDKs give the option of developing web services so that the business applications create a network of exchanges of information and documents in real time, for the benefit of the members of the company and its stakeholders. Because through the KCenter platform, the technical staff of the organization will have the possibility of creating new applications based on the open source technology of OpenKM. The developers will appreciate the powerful API in SOAP and REST of the OpenKM web-based document management system, which offers complete coverage of the system. The APIs allow developers to create a customized front-end, autonomously, that can be designed for upload and download of information from the document management system; that in this way will be completely transparent for the user. Thus our clients, suppliers or stakeholders will enjoy a tailor-made interface in which to obtain information or provide documentation, based on the company's business processes, reserving the classic interface of the system to the staff of the organization.
Maintaining integration is one of the great forgotten topics. Applications evolve, APIs change and it is quite common for new methods to be created while deleting old ones. A paradigmatic example of this type of problem can be found with the old Google Docs API. Google started in parallel the service of Google Drive and granted a year of margin for users to adapt to the new API. In this case that we set an example, the jump was radical, both for the drastic change in the entire API that had little to do with the Google Docs; as well as the authentication procedure.
With this we mean, simply that the manufacturer against which we are integrating our applications will offer us facilities for future maintenance; or we can have significant problems. Here what we must do is not lose sight that applications must be updated and as part of these update business processes management, these maintenance tasks are derived.
In OpenKM, the subject of maintenance in the future is considered as one of the pedestals of the application. In this sense, we have created the SDK, which is a set of libraries that we maintain continually and that allow the user to integrate with OpenKM transparently. This allows saving time spent in maintenance due to version changes in OpenKM integration, while decrease also the possible errors in these integrations.
In OpenKM we are the first users of the SDK since our satellite applications use this solution to integrate with OpenKM and therefore we are also the first interested in the SDK and maintenance processes derived from uploads of versions as efficient as possible. Since we began using the SDKs, we have ostensibly reduced the cost of the support time, while the number of errors in the integrations has been reduced to practically zero, given that the SDK is a library that is continuously tested with continuous integration.
When choosing a document management software, this is a fundamental issue in which we must pay particular attention. Not only see the facilities that it provides us when making integrations, but also future maintenance.
The OpenKM suite of programs already offers a series of integrations that in general terms are of interest to a wide range of organizations, regardless of the type of (public entity, company, foundation, NGO) size or sector in which it operates.
There are several ways to integrate with an application, the most common is through the API, but neither do you have to discard integrations at the database level or the level of exchange files in the operating system.
Ease of maintenance over time.
Storage of documents with metadata.
Recovery of documents from metadata (for example the id number of an invoice).
This type of integration can be done directly by the OpenKM API in real time or, for example, with batch tasks where OpenKM collects daily information (documents + CSV files with metadata) and incorporates them into the document control system.
Microsoft Office Add-ins allows Office suite applications to interact with OpenKM quickly and efficiently.
Microsoft Outlook Add-in: enables users to select multiple emails and import the content of the email and documents attached to OpenKM. Moreover, if the user wishes to attach a large file, OpenKM can replace it with a download link, to ensure the correct reception of the e-mail by the recipient.
Microsoft Word Add-in: allows users to upload new files as well as edit those that already exist in OpenKM, from the application.
Microsoft Excel Add-in: users can edit the contents of the document management software or from the Office application and upload the files or their new versions to OpenKM.
Microsoft PowerPoint Add-in: allows you to edit the files and upload them to OpenKM, both from the document management system and from the application.
Also, from all the Add-ins it is possible to add valuable information to the documents. You can add notes to files, keywords, categories or metadata groups.
The OpenKM electronic signature client supports any digital certificate of electronic signature, which allows users to sign any document created or managed from OpenKM. The signing of documentation is usually an essential step to obtain approval or demonstrate the agreement between the parties involved in business processes.
The OpenKM scanner client allows the integration of the document management system with any device that follows the TWAIN protocol. In processes of digitization of information – digitized documents -, it is essential to have a scanner client that facilitates the process of scanning documents to enter data into the company's document management system.
OpenKM offers ad-hoc integrations with other systems. With Vtiger CRM for example, OpenKM can be used as a back-end of the customer relationship management system. With Google Drive, OpenKM has developed an integration to allow the simultaneous edition of documents by multiple users. WordPress or Joomla, CMS that enable you to create or maintain blogs or web pages; so that OpenKM builds or prepares content that feeds the updates of these platforms. AutoCAD, for managing and previewing .dwg files from the document management system. The BonitaSoft connector that allows the integration of workflows in the OpenKM enterprise content manager. And the integration with OCR zone engines like Kofax, ChronoScan or Abby Flexicapture that allows the amortization of these optical character recognition solutions about the OpenKM enterprise content manager.
Rapid processing of large volumes of information: document integration in the information management system in companies allows users to enjoy the ability to manage the information contained in large document repositories conveniently.
Integration of archive and recovery tasks: when information or a document becomes part of the company's document management system, the data will be integrated into the centralized repository accessible to users based on defined security and the privileges they have.
Advanced capture and storage capabilities: OpenKM's content management system, apart from offering commercial OCR connectors, provides an optical character recognition engine. This engine allows the extraction of high-value data, contained in scanned documents, in such a way that favours the digitalization of the file cabinets of the organization, while increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the processes of introducing information to the system. This will make it possible for other users in other places to access these data, necessary to take suitable decisions.
Risk reduction: the integration of document management in the company helps the design and application of coherent and robust security policies, that protect the company's documentation and information from information losses and unwanted access.
Reduction of management costs: thanks to integrated systems, companies can work in a coordinated manner as a single entity. This ideal should always happen, but experience shows that it does not happen as much as it should. Synchronization is a milestone that can be achieved thanks to enterprise content managers. Because, through its set of functionalities and automated business processes, minimizes the impact of human errors. Thanks to workflow engines, create workflows, or with OCR solutions digitize and capture information in formats that allow the archiving and access to documents in the long-term.


text:
\section{Introduction}

John Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton (CA, plural: cellular automata) and archetypical example of a complex and computationally universal system arising from simple rules \citep{gardner1970, berlekamp2004}. Life is a ``zero-player" (or simulation) game invented by Conway during coffee breaks with help from colleagues; its invention laid the foundations for a vibrant community of hobbyists and professional researchers to study Life and related CA, with some of the most interesting and beautiful work in CA the work of non-academic artists, engineers, and tinkerers. Life consists of binary cells on a grid, with each cell's dynamics defined by the sum of neighbors and the cell's own state. The dynamics of Life depend entirely on cell states and neighborhood values and follow a simple set of rules.

Life is one of 262,144 possible rules in the framework of Life-like CA. Rules can be written as Bx/Sy, where x and y are any, none, or all integers from 0 through 8. Life is written as B3/S23: empty cells with 3 neighbors are {\bfseries B}orn, or become 1, and active cells with 2 or 3 neighbors {\bfseries S}urvive, and retain a state of 1. Life-like CA update synchronously and discretely. Because B rules and S rules are 9-bits each, and can be implemented in any combination, there are $2^9 \cdot 2^9 = 2^{18}$ possible rule combinations of Life-like CA.

In Life cells can have a state of 0 or 1, and each cell has a neighborhood consisting of the cells orthogonally and diagonally adjacent to it. With exactly 3 neighbors cell state becomes 1. With 2 neighbors, cell state remains unchanged, regardless of whether the current state is 0 or 1.
All other cells take on a state of 0. Note that it is possible to write a description of Life rules without referring to the particular value of the cell state. This distinction enables facile implementation of Life in the Lenia framework, but is not a general characteristic for every Life-like CA.

Inspired by Life, CA frameworks have subsequently been expanded to larger neighborhoods \citep{Evans2001, pivato2007}, higher dimensions \citep{bays1987, chan2020}, multiple channels \citep{chan2020}\footnote{See also \url{https://softologyblog.wordpress.com/2018/03/09} and \url{https://github.com/slackermanz/vulkanautomata} }, and continuous-value states and updates \citep{rucker2003, chan2019}\footnote{See also \url{https://github.com/rudyrucker/capow},
\url{https://www.rudyrucker.com/capow}, and \url{https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1567}} to give just a few examples of the many Life-inspired CA projects.

An early framework for continuous CA, developed by Rudy Rucker in the 1990s, was CAPOW \citep{rucker2003}. Later, Stephan Rafler described the SmoothLife CA based on sharply defined inner and outer neighborhoods, with birth and survival rules defined by a pair of intervals comprised of smooth step functions\footnote{Rafler, S. (2011). Generalization of Conway's ``Game of Life" to a continuous domain - SmoothLife. pre-print on ArXiv \url{https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1567}}. Bert Chan developed the continuous Lenia CA framework with a different formulation: neighborhoods are defined by smooth convolution kernels and a single update function (called the growth function) \citep{chan2019}

Neither SmoothLife nor Lenia explicitly considered Life-like CA in general: SmoothLife was developed with a single continuous interval each for birth and survival ({\it i.e.} SmoothLife used ``Bays space" rules \citep{bays1987}), and Lenia updates do not depend on cell state. This potentially leaves a vast volume of continuous CA with interesting dynamics that are not readily implementable in Lenia or SmoothLife.

A Life-like CA of particular interest is called Move or Morley, with rules B368/S245 (Figure \ref{fig:morley_in_lenia}). Morley supports a commonly occurring puffer, a mobile pattern that continuously generates persistent patterns along its trajectory. The Morley puffer is a simple example of an infinite growth pattern, of particular interest as an indicator of complexity in CA. Morley has multiple B and S conditions, none of which overlap and most of which are not contiguous, making it an ideal Life-like CA for exploring the limitations of previous continuous CA frameworks.

In the next section we demonstrate Lenia does not have a simple implementation of Life-like CA Morley. This limitation is exemplified in Figures \ref{fig:morley_in_lenia} and \ref{fig:timelapse}. Choosing to view this as a problem, we  incorporate conditional updates based on cell state, and name the resulting CA framework {\it Glaberish}, a nod to the Latin etymology of Lenia and a reference to the role of Life-like CA beyond Conway's Life in studying complex systems. Glaberish takes its root from another Latin word for smooth\footnote{Lenia and Glaberish are based on the Latin root words {\it lenis} and {\it glaber}, respectively.}, and Glaberish is to Lenia as Life-like CA are to Conway's Life.

In Results several techniques from the literature are used to assess CA implemented in the Lenia framework and in Glaberish. A spatial entropy metric, similar to that in \citep{wuensche1999}, is shown applied to CA grid states in Lenia and Glaberish in Figure \ref{fig:teaser}, with an emergent glider pattern in the Glaberish CA (s613). This metric is further considered in the context of previous work in the Discussion section. Speculation about the potential value of increasingly complicated systems, {\it i.e.} continuous CA, forms the basis for possible future research directions discussed in our Conclusions.

\section{Glaberish is Lenia with conditional updates } \label{sec:workup}

\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
  \includegraphics{./assets/lenia_orbium.png}

  \caption{Lenia neighborhood kernel and growth function for Orbium CA. A neighborhood kernel and a growth function gives rise to complex behavior in Lenia. The Gaussian kernel defined by $(\mu=0.5, \sigma=0.15)$ and Gaussian growth function defined by $(\mu=0.15, \sigma=0.015)$, shown here, supports the exemplary {\it Orbium} glider pattern.}
  \label{fig:orbium_rules}
  \label{fig:standard_lenia}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

Like Life, Lenia defines CA dynamics with a neighborhood and an update function. Neighborhood values are the result of 2D convolution with kernel $K$, which become input to growth function $G$. CA dynamics in the Lenia system are defined as

\begin{equation}
    A^{t+dt} = \psi ( A^{t)}+ dt \cdot G(K \ast A^t) )
    \label{eqn:standard_lenia}
\end{equation}

where $\psi$ is a squashing or clipping function that limits values to between 0.0 and 1.0, and $A^{t}$ is the CA grid at time $t$.

The kernel $K$ and growth function $G$ can take various forms, but a typical Lenia CA uses Gaussian functions of the form

\begin{equation}
    f(x) =  exp\left( - \left(\frac{(x-\mu)}{2\sigma}\right)^2 \right)
    \label{eqn:gaussian}
\end{equation}

Figure \ref{fig:standard_lenia} visualizes $K$ and the growth function for a Lenia CA, Orbium. The neighborhood kernel is a $(\mu=0.5, \sigma=0.15)$ Gaussian with a 2D grid of radial distance from center as input $x$. $K$ is normalized to have a sum of 1.0, and the output of convolution with $K$ is input for the growth function. In the same CA, the growth function $G(\cdot)$ is a Gaussian  with $(\mu=0.15, \sigma=0.015)$. Note that for use as a growth function, $f(x)$ is stretched to yield values from -1 to 1, {\it i.e.} $G(x) = 2 \cdot f(x) - 1$. The Orbium CA supports an iconic glider pattern of the same name, described in \citep{chan2019}.

\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
  \includegraphics{./assets/conway_life.png}
  \caption{Conway's Game of Life implemented in the Lenia framework. Kernel $K$ is a Moore neighborhood, and a step-wise growth function corresponds to B3/S23.}

  \label{fig:life_in_lenia}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[t]
\begin{center}
  \includegraphics{./assets/morley_in_lenia.png}
  \includegraphics{./assets/morley_genesis.png}
  \includegraphics{./assets/morley_persistence.png}
  \caption{Continuous implementations of the Life-like Morley/Move CA (B368/S245). a) Implemented in Lenia with updates defined by a single growth function. b) and c) Implemented in Glaberish with separate genesis and persistence functions.}
  \label{fig:morley_in_lenia}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

Figure \ref{fig:life_in_lenia}a shows how Conway's Life can be implemented in the Lenia framework. The B and S rules overlap, so if we sum the corresponding continuous intervals we get a two-step staircase function; the default value is -1, cells go to 0, values in the survival interval yield a value of 0, no change, and values in the birth interval yield an update of +1. Growth occurs only where B and S rules overlap.

Lenia can only readily implement Life-like CA where values in the B interval are a subset of those in the S interval, to enable growth and avoid survival outside of survival intervals. B368/S245, aka Morley (Figure \ref{fig:morley_in_lenia}), is an example of a CA with no overlap between B and S rules and is not readily implementable in the Lenia framework. Combining the B/S rules as in Figure \ref{fig:life_in_lenia} results in a growth function that never returns values greater than 0 (Figure \ref{fig:morley_in_lenia}a), yielding a CA that is not capable of growth.

To extend Lenia to a full generalization of Life-like CA, we add conditional updates, splitting the growth function into genesis and persistence functions that depend on the cell state. Equation \ref{eqn:glaberish} defines the Glaberish update.

\begin{equation}
    A^{t + dt} = \psi \left( \\
    A^t +  dt [ (1 - A^t)G_{gen}(N) + A^t  P(N) ]
    \\ \right)
    \label{eqn:glaberish}
\end{equation}

\begin{figure}[ht]
\begin{center}
  \includegraphics{./assets/morley_timelapse.png}
  \caption{A common puffer in Life-like CA Morley/Move (B368/S245). a) The puffer pattern is static in Lenia, under the growth function in Figure \ref{fig:morley_in_lenia}a. b) Implemented in Glaberish, the pattern exhibits expected behavior: moving across the grid while leaving a trail of oscillating patterns.}
  \label{fig:timelapse}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

In Equation \ref{eqn:glaberish} we use $N$ to denote the result of neighborhood convolution $K \ast A^t$. The growth function $G(\cdot)$ is replaced in Equation \ref{eqn:glaberish} by genesis function $G_{gen}(\cdot)$ and persistence function $P(\cdot)$.
Conditional update dynamics rescue the ability to implement B368/S245, and a timelapse of the common Morley puffer pattern is shown in Figure \ref{fig:timelapse}.

\section{Results}

\label{sec:results}

\begin{figure}[ht]
\begin{center}
  \includegraphics{assets/lenia_geminium.png}
  \includegraphics{assets/glaberish_s613.png}
  \caption{Rule visualization in Lenia and Glaberish. a) Hydrogeminium, a CA based on the Lenia framework. b) s613, a Glaberish CA. These use the same neighborhood kernel but differ in their update functions. Most notably s613 splits updates into genesis and persistence dependent on current cell state. Despite minor differences in the update functions and marked differences in CA dynamics, both systems readily support mobile patterns. }
  \label{fig:gem_s613_updates}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

We compare the Hydrogeminium CA from Lenia  \citep{chan2019} to an evolved CA rule set under the Glaberish framework. We refer to the Glaberish CA as ``s613" for the random seed used to evolve it, selecting for poor performance of neural networks trained to predict whether all cell states fall to 0 after a set number of time steps, described in \citep{davis2022}. These CA share a neighborhood kernel, and the persistence function from s613 resembles a slightly shifted version of the growth function from Hydrogeminium natans (Figure \ref{fig:morley_in_lenia}). The most notable difference between the two sets of rules, the s613 genesis function (a Gaussian with $\mu = 0.063$ and $\sigma = 0.0088$) makes for markedly different dynamics between the two CA.

Hydrogeminium is defined by a (shared with s613) neighborhood kernel with three rings, the weighted sum of three Gaussians acting on the radial distance from center in a 2D grid, with parameters $(\mu, \sigma)$ = $[(0.0938, 0.033), (0.2814, 0.0330), (0.469, 0.033)]$ and weights $[0.5, 1.0, 0.667]$. The growth function has parameters $(\mu, \sigma)$ = $(0.26, 0.036)$. s613 shares the neighborhood function (as well as the same step size $dt=0.1$), but has genesis and persistence functions with parameters $(\mu, \sigma) = (0.0621, 0.0088)$ and $(0.2151, 0.0369)$, respectively.

\begin{figure}[ht]
\begin{center}
  \includegraphics{assets/gem_s613.png}
  \caption{Grid state progression from random uniform initial states. a) Hydrogeminium at step 0. c) Hydrogeminium at step 512. c) Hydrogeminium at step 1024. b) s613 at step 0 (same as in \ref{fig:gem_s613_compare}a). d) s613 at step 512. f) s613 at step 1024.}
  \label{fig:gem_s613_compare}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[ht]
\begin{center}
  \includegraphics{assets/average_values.png}
  \caption{Mean-normalized mean cell value over time. b) After 256 time steps, the normalized average cell value for s613 varies from its overall mean value by a standard deviation of 0.0947, while Hydrogeminium (a) has a standard deviation of 0.00204. As discussed in \citep{wolfram1984}, class III CA are characterized by chaos but tend to an equilibrium cell density, which we don't see in the case of s613.}
  \label{fig:average}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

\cite{wolfram1984} suggested a subjective classification scheme for complexity in 1D CA, later applied to 2D CA in \citep{packard1984}, and often referenced to as a general rubric for CA. Under the Wolfram classes, briefly, Class I CA cells quickly reach a uniform state (usually all 0), Class II CA typically produce an equilibrium grid of static and/or oscillating patterns, Class III CA produce chaotic dynamics with aperiodic patterns, and Class IV CA exhibit long-lived, complex, and localized patterns. These categories remain subjective, but the sedentary patterns produced by Hydrogeminium might fall under Class II, while the open-ended dynamics of s613 could be categorized as Class III or class IV. Class III CA are suggested in \cite{wolfram1984} to tend toward a consistent density value, but in Figure \ref{fig:average} we see substantial variation in average cell value (normalized to the mean) in s613 over 8 runs, much more than for Hydrogeminium.

\cite{eppstein2010} introduced a set of heuristic requirements for predicting complexity and universality in CA: mortality and fertility. CA are {\it mortal} if a pattern can be found that disappears after several time steps, and {\it fertile} if a pattern exists that displays the capacity for infinite growth (estimated by finding patterns that escape an initial bounding box). Unlike Wolfram's CA classes and their application to 2D CA \citep{wolfram1984, packard1984} these metrics are not subjective and capture more of the Life-like CA that support universal computation.

Although fertility and mortality were not developed with continuous CA in mind, Hydrogeminium and s613 meet both criteria.
Random uniform conditions typically escape an initial bounding box, as demonstrated in Figure \ref{fig:gem_s613_compare} (bounding box, in gray, is twice the width and height of the initialization area). A vanishing pattern for either CA is trivial: a single active pixel with a value smaller than any update function zero-crossing must vanish. Starting from a random uniform initial state (range 0.0 to 1.0), Hydrogeminium typically settles into a mostly static state resembling a Turing pattern \citep{turing1952}. CA s613 remains dynamic, continuously remodeling local structures.

An important motivation for studying artificial life is to explore how to recognize living systems vastly different than found in Earth ecosystems.
One approach is to take an abstract, information theoretic approach to defining the activities of life. In broad strokes, we can look for systems that generate local departure from thermal equilibrium \citep{popescu2011} and generate statistically unlikely structures. Entropy-based measures find common application in analyzing life and computation alike. Indeed many of the key activities of biological life including replication, transcription, and translation have been analyzed as computation with respect to their thermodynamic efficiency \citep{kempes2017}. Cellular automata, important models of both computation and artificial life, have been been subject to several entropy-based metrics including input entropy \citep{wuensche1999}, local entropy \citep{helvik2004}, conditional entropy \citep{pena2021}, and transfer entropy \citep{lizier2008}.

We consider spatial entropy of CA grids, calculating the image entropy under a sliding window with the same dimensions as the convolution kernel used to compute neighborhood values. Given the neighborhood kernel window size, our spatial entropy measure is conceptually similar to the input entropy in \citep{wuensche1999}, which considers the discrete states of cells defining 1D CA rules of varying input size. The 2D spatial entropy used here considers the cell values (discretized to 8 bits for computational tractability) in the neighborhood kernel window. In the window around each cell in the CA grid we compute entropy as for a 2D 8-bit image

\begin{equation}
H = -\sum_{s=0}^{S}{ P(s) \log_2(P(s))}
\label{eqn:entropy}
\end{equation}

where $H$ is the entropy of the sub-grid and $P(s)$ is the empirical proportion of cells in the sub-grid in state $s$.
Computed at each cell location (or pixel), Equation \ref{eqn:entropy} yields a spatial entropy map. In Figure \ref{fig:spatial_entropy} spatial entropy is visualized for a random uniform initial state (confined to a starting box), and after several hundred time steps of change under Hydrogeminium and s613 rules, starting from the same random uniform initialization. After 1024 steps, Hydrogeminium has very little spatial entropy variance while s613 has higher average entropy and much higher variance. Over 8 runs with bounded random uniform initial cell states, Hydrogeminium had final average spatial entropy of 1.18 bits $\pm$ 0.065 (standard deviation), while s613 had final average spatial entropy of 3.95 bits $\pm$ 1.25.

In addition to variation across the CA grid at a given time step, s613 spatial entropy varies substantially over time, especially as compared to Hydrogeminium in Figure \ref{fig:spatial_entropy_plot}. The upper and lower bounds in Figure \ref{fig:spatial_entropy_plot}, representing standard deviation from the mean, remain consistent and wide over time in s613. Hydrogeminium approaches a static mean value and vanishingly small standard deviation of spatial entropy after about 200 time steps.

\begin{figure}[ht]
\begin{center}
  \includegraphics{assets/spatial_entropy.png}
  \caption{Spatial entropy maps of step 512 of CA simulation, starting from a bounded random uniform initial grid. a) Random uniform initial grid state. b) Spatial entropy for a. c) Hydrogeminium grid state after 1024 steps and d) spatial entropy of c. e) Grid state of s613 after 1024 steps and f) corresponding spatial entropy map.}
  \label{fig:spatial_entropy}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[ht]
\begin{center}
  \includegraphics{assets/spatial_entropy_plot.png}
  \caption{Spatial entropy over time. Values represent 11 snapshots taken every 25 time steps in Hydrogeminium and s613 CA simulations. Starting grid states were identical and sample from a random uniform distribution. Error fill is $\pm$ standard deviation. }
  \label{fig:spatial_entropy_plot}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[ht]
\begin{center}
  \includegraphics{assets/gem_s613_patterns.png}
  \caption{Self-organizing, traveling patterns in Hydrogeminium and s613. a) Large, slow-moving, and eponymous pattern in Hydrogeminum natans. b) Fast-moving glider in s613. This pattern begins to wobble afer some time steps and eventually becomes unstable. It has a similar pattern in c) glider in Hydrogeminium natans. This pattern starts to wobble after a few hundred time steps, and sometime becomes unstable over long time periods. d) "Frog" pattern in s613. This pattern moves in a straight, hopping motion. Trajectories correspond to 64 time steps for all patterns, except a) which shows 128 time steps.}
  \label{fig:gem_s613_patterns}
\end{center}
\end{figure}

Mortality and fertility heuristics, subjective categorization, and entropy-based metrics are all attempts to measure and/or predict complexity and universality in CA. They do not fully substitute for finding coherent, self-organizing, traveling patterns known as gliders (or, often, particles in 1D CA). They may serve as effective tools for finding gliders, however, especially when information theoretic metrics are used as filters to highlight the presence of gliders/particles \citep{lizier2008, shalizi2006, wuensche1999, helvik2004}. In 2D CA gliders often are readily apparent from observation, as in the discovery of the classic reflex glider in Life \citep{berlekamp2004}. In this work we present a few examples of gliders in Hydrogeminium and s613, found by evolving synthesis patterns encoded as compositional pattern producing networks \citep{stanley2007} in \citep{davis2022}. These patterns were selected for a combination of center-of-mass displacement and consistent average cell value (a proxy for homeostasis).

Traveling glider patterns from each CA are shown along with trajectories in Figure \ref{fig:gem_s613_patterns}, and include a slow-moving ``wrinkled cucumber" in Hydrogeminium and a hopping ``frog" pattern in s613. Both CA support similar broad gliders that initially have a straight traveling behavior, but begin to wobble after several hundred time steps and often eventually become unstable.

Figure \ref{fig:teaser} shows the Figure \ref{fig:gem_s613_patterns}d pattern emerging from s613 dynamics, and corresponding spatial entropy, with the same grid state simulated for an equal number of steps in Hydrogeminium for comparison. This pattern emerges comparatively often from random uniform initial states in s613, frequently created and destroyed in collisions with other active cells.

\section{Discussion}

\label{sec:discussion}

By extending Conway's Life to continuous values and time steps, Lenia introduced a combinatorial increase in possible configurations. By focusing on Life, Lenia also introduced a significant simplification over Life-like CA, opting for a single growth function instead of mirroring the cell value-dependent birth and survival rules of Life-like CA. We showed that this simplification limits Lenia's ability to implement arbitrary Life-like CA: there is no straightforward implementation of Life-like CA with birth rules that are not a subset of its survival rules\footnote{But note that Lenia can readily implement Life, which in turn can simulate any other Life-like CA. See for example Brice Due's OTCA metapixel \url{https://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/}}.

Aside from the lack of straightforward implementations of many of the 262,144 possible Life-like CA in Lenia, any significant limitation as a model for artificial life as a result of the growth function simplification in Lenia is not readily apparent: work with the framework has generated a large taxonomy of bioreminiscent patterns \citep{chan2019} and Lenia has continued to be the substrate for increasingly automated exploration of bioreminiscent patterns \citep{reinke2020, davis2022} and modifications to the framework itself \citep{chan2020, kawaguchi2021}. Nonetheless, there is a vast number of Life-like CA with non-overlapping and/or non-contiguous B/S rules, including the Morley/Move CA we focused on in this article and the B356/S23 CA found in \cite{pena2021} to score the highest on a complexity metric based on conditional entropy\footnote{Like Morley, B356/S23 has a frequently-occurring puffer pattern, a reflex puffer with period 72}, and the increased rule-space enabled with Glaberish likely contains many interesting CA.

In comparing related CA in Lenia and Glaberish, we observed that Hydrogeminium tends to eventually produce mostly sedentary Turing patterns, an equilibrium characteristic of class II CA in Wolfram's classification scheme. The Glaberish CA s613 continuously remodels local structures and remains difficult to predict, characteristic of Class III or IV (chaotic or complex) CA under Wolfram's classification \citep{wolfram1984}. The markedly different dynamics of the two related CA make predicting future states in Hydrogeminum significantly easier than in s613. It is not clear how much the framework influences the CA dynamics in comparison to the way each rule set was developed: s613 was evolved to be difficult for convolutional neural networks to predict whether a given pattern would disappear after a number of time steps \citep{davis2022}, whereas Hydrogeminium was developed with a combination of manual and semi-automated evolution \citep{chan2019}. Also, not all Lenia CA share the characteristic end-point of a static Turing pattern\footnote{Examples of more dynamic Lenia CA include {\it Astrium scintillans} and two variants of {\it Pentafolium incarceratus}.}.

We also considered variance in spatial entropy as a life-like characteristic for assessing CA. One hallmark of life seems to be unusual or improbable structure, {\it e.g.} living eukaryotic cells maintain an improbable distinction between the external environment and their internal milieu, as well as distinct environments within organelles that quickly return to equilibrium when life stops.
In terms of spatial entropy, s613 is more varied over both space and time than Hydrogeminium (Figures \ref{fig:spatial_entropy} and \ref{fig:spatial_entropy_plot}). Spatial entropy considered here is a nearly analogous metric to the input entropy described in \citep{wuensche1999}. Wuensche described a characteristic signature of complex CA in entropy variance, which we also see in s613, across space as well as time. Other information theoretic measures of complexity have been applied to CA, including local entropy \citep{helvik2004}, conditional entropy \citep{pena2021}, transfer entropy \citep{lizier2008}, and local sensitivity and statistical complexity \citep{shalizi2006}. While not considered here, the project repository includes tools for computing conditional entropy on continuous CA.

We also demonstrated that both Hydrogeminium and s613 support gliders. Gliders form a foundational basis of computation in CA, readily performing the essential functions of information transfer by their ability to travel, and information modification in the consequences of their collisions \citep{berlekamp2004, lizier2008, lizier2010}. Gliders are essential components of engineered computing devices in CA, such as Turing machines \citep{rendell2011} or Life metacells capable of simulating arbitrary Life-like CA\footnote{See, for example, Brice Due's OTCA metacell \url{https://otcametapixel.blogspot.com/}}.

Information theoretic filters have been shown to be effective for identifying gliders and other coherent structures in CA \citep{wuensche1999, shalizi2006, helvik2004, lizier2008}. Our gliders, in contrast, were obtained from synthesis pattern evolution, selected for center-of-mass displacement and mean cell value homeostasis \citep{davis2022}.

\section{Conclusions}

\label{sec:conclusions}

In this paper we discussed a potentially important limitation of the Lenia framework: updates are applied without regard to current cell values, which limits facile implementation of Life-like CA to those with birth rules wholly contained as a subset of the survival rules. Life, with its B3/S23 rule set, can be readily implemented in Lenia, but not Morley or other CA with non-overlapping B/S rules. We demonstrated that by splitting the update function into conditional genesis and persistence functions (analogous to B and S rules),  the ability to implement Life-like CA with distinct B/S rules can be recovered, as shown for the Morley puffer pattern.

In a direct comparison between related CA implemented in the Lenia and Glaberish frameworks, the Glaberish CA is more active and unpredictable. Both CA meet the mortality and fertility criteria predicting universality from \citep{eppstein2010}, but s613 exhibits greater variance in entropy across space and time.

More importantly, both CA support gliders. Gliders are important components of computational ability, and drivers of life-like characteristics, in CA because they transmit information and can perform computation in the results of their collisions. Substantial efforts have been made to develop formal classification or heuristics that are predictive of CA that are computationally universal and compelling, but there seems to be no comprehensive substitute for finding gliders.

As noted in \citep{packard1984}, increasing degrees of freedom in CA can increase the tendency to chaos, and as noted in \citep{chan2020} expanding CA to greater numbers of channels and dimensions makes persistent self-organizing patterns rare, but potentially more interesting. Continuously-valued CA implementations certainly fall under ``additional degrees of freedom'' as compared to their discrete counterparts.
In addition, Glaberish at least doubles the number of functions used to calculate updates, but if applied to the Lenia's expanded universe extension \citep{chan2020}, where multiple channels may interact in different ways, Glaberish may lead to an exponential increase in rule functions. Determining whether the trade-off of a more complicated implementation is worth the greater expressiveness of the Glaberish formulation, specifically whether the framework is meaningfully more capable for a given task, remains the subject of future work. While continuous dynamics and strong localization of structure that we demonstrated for the Glaberish automaton s613 are promising, our comparisons were limited to one pair of exemplary (and related) CA from the Lenia and Glaberish frameworks and do not claim superiority of one CA framework over the other.

Similar arguments for parsimony could be made against Lenia and other extended CA frameworks with additional degrees of freedom, compared to simple CA like Life. Even Life may seem too complicated if we also have simpler systems available, like the Turing-complete rule 110 elementary CA \citep{cook2004}.

A strong argument in favor of more complicated CA is the potential for agents to exist fully embodied in simulated environments that follow the same physics as the agents themselves. Continuous CA, complicated as they may be in comparison to their simple antecessors, may fill the gap between real-world robots and simulated agents. In typical simulated learning environments, {\it e.g.} in reinforcement learning research, there is a sharp distinction between the mechanics of control policies and that of the simulated environment. Recent work, described online\footnote{https://developmentalsystems.org/sensorimotor-lenia/} demonstrated a hint of the potential for embodied agents under consistent physics in continuous CA. In a special version of Lenia's expanded universe, the authors used gradient descent methods to optimize glider-supporting CA to improve the gliders' ability to survive interaction with obstacles in an immutable channel. Several CA in that work each give rise to a particular glider pattern that by all appearances skirts obstacles contained in the immutable layer.

Spatial entropy maps with window size 23 are visualized in Figure \ref{fig:teaser} for a comparison of Hydrogeminium and s613, with s613 exhibiting a glider pattern emerging from CA dynamics.
An aim of future work is to discover more complex patterns with compartmentalization of internal structures and a clear distinction in internal/external entropy values (or another information theoretic complexity measure), making for an intriguing analog to biological cells.

Glaberish expands the search space of possible CA in Lenia in the same way as Life-like CA expanded the possible CA rules beyond Life itself, providing a more expansive substrate for developing agency and autopoiesis in continuous CA.
While aesthetics and human pareidolia play a role in the attractiveness of continuous CA patterns, they have the potential to offer increasingly life-like systems for studying life-like computation.

\subsection{Funding} This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under the Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) program (EFMA-1830870).

\footnotesize

\bibliographystyle{apalike}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaArXiv


text:
Q: JAVA, giving an instance that is still null attributes I am implementing an AvlTree. In the Avl tree i want to compare heights of Vertices for adjusting the Avl if there are violations (RR,LR,RL,LL).
So i have AvlNode class which has a AvlNode.getHeight() method.
But e.g when i have this:
AvlNode.getRightNode().getHeight() is an error since it has no right node at that moment. Obviously this could be fixed with some null checks. But i want my AvlNode class to give null instances the height of 0 without performing these checks.
I thought about using a FACADE to wrap the AvlNode class, and whenever a getHeight method is called for a null instance it returns 0.
Is there a better way to achieve this goal?

A: I think you could wrapper it with
AvlNode.getRightNodeHeight()

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Can you image that having a five-star skiller on your squad in FIFA 15? That must be frustrate your opposition I bet. Thankfully, EA Sports is here to help. This time EA Sports released a new FIFA 15 tutorial of the best beginner skill moves. This also can help you to win more fifa 15 coins. And it is worth mentioning that the gameplay tutorial covers the best basic to advanced moves that are not so tricky to pull off.
Enjoy the video below. Soure from utfifa15coins.com.
Of course there are plenty more skill moves in FIFA 15. You can check them out under the skill moves in the settings menu and try them out!


text:
Home » News » Discover the show's speakers
Discover the show's speakers
Antoine HEUTY Annabelle Villot-Malka Chris Morrison Cyndi Rhoades Gaël Seguillon Hana Kajimura Leo Bonanni Lucie Jeannot Megan Meiklejohn Natasha Franck Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel Ryan Teng Tara St James
Check out the program
Antoine Heuty
Antoine Heuty founder and CEO of Ulula
(www.ulula.com)- a software and analytics platform to create more transparent and responsible supply chains. Ulula uses simple mobile phones to reach workers anonymously and directly in over 130 countries to enable honest feedback and provide alerts and key information to improve labor conditions. He previously held senior positions at the international Natural Resource Governance Institute and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). He is the co-author of various publications on transparency, mobile technology, natural resource governance and supply chains.
Annabelle Villot-Malka
Sustainable development project manager at Première Vision
Annabelle Villot-Malka, sustainability project manager, has joined Premiere Vision and the Smart Creation team to support the company's ambitions to promote a contemporary fashion industry that is creative, innovative and sustainable.
After graduating from Ecole HEC in Business Management, she took on fashion design at Studio Berçot, where she specialized in knitwear. Her careers spans 10 years in fashion and luxury, from the perspective of the design studio to production and commercials, eventually building her expertise on sustainability within the Kering group's sustainability department. Her focus is mainly on materials & sourcing standards and stakeholder engagement.
Chris Morrison
Chief Executive Offer of Transparency-One.
Transparency-One's mission is to partner with the network of companies supporting the world's consumer product supply chain to create a healthier, safer, and more sustainable world for consumers. Chris has an extensive background in transformative technologies for the retail and consumer products industry across the areas of big data analytics, supply chain management, and product lifecycle management. He has held executive roles at Oracle, Trace One, and Bamboo Rose. He holds an MBA and Masters of Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelors of Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
He lives in Boston with his wife and two boys
Cyndi Rhoades
Founder of Worn Again Technologies
Cyndi founded Worn Again Technologies in 2005 with a determination to make a difference and create a business out of solving the challenge of textiles becoming waste and ending up in landfill or incineration.
Cyndi began her career as a film maker in music videos and documentaries which over time evolved into a deep interest in the impacts of commerce and global economics on society and the environment. These interests led to the formation of Worn Again Technologies which she has been driving forward ever since, from its early beginnings in upcycling to its current transformational polymer recycling technology.
Paving the way in this uncharted territory, Cyndi is now a recognised thought (and 'do') leader and an advocate for polymer recycling technology as an enabler for a circular textiles industry. She is a regular speaker on circularity and innovation including the Economist Sustainability Summit and Stylus Decoded Future 2019 conferences.
Cyndi is an early pioneer of the sustainable fashion movement and a co-founder of the RE:Fashion Awards, the world's first Sustainable Fashion Awards in London. She is also an award-winning entrepreneur; in 2019 she was awarded the PCIAW Outstanding Contribution to the Textile Industry and was a finalist for The Circular Economy Awards, Leadership award.
Also in 2019, Worn Again Technologies was awarded the ANDAM Innovation Prize and 'One to Watch' at Global Good Awards.
Gaël Seguillon
Première Vision Marketplace Director
Gaël Séguillon and E-commerce are like Obelix's magic potion, he felt in when he was "little".
He spent 20 years in the field, developing e-commerce platform for Fnac, Rakuten-PriceMinister and Rue du Commerce.
Always interested in taking on new challenging ecommerce project, it was obvious for him to join Premiere Vision 2 years ago to settle, launch and develop our Marketplace, a BtoB ecommerce site, a new additional PV service for the fashion industry.
Beside E-commerce, Gael is passionate with music, he is also a confirmed record collector, DJ, Radio producer and announcer.
Hana Kajimura
Head of sustainability at Allbirds
Leonardo Bonanni
Founder and CEO of Sourcemap
Leo is the founder and CEO of Sourcemap, the supply chain mapping company. Sourcemap helps companies trace their products down to the raw materials to ensure that practices meet their standards at every step of the supply chain. Over 10,000 factories and 250,000 farms below to the Sourcemap network, which ensures brands like Hershey and Timberland can keep tabs on issues like deforestation and social compliance across their supplier base.
You can see their supply chains mapped on open.sourcemap.com, the world's largest repository of transparent supply chains.
Leo obtained his PhD working on Sourcemap at the MIT Media Lab and is a frequent lecturer on supply chain transparency and sustainability.
For more information visit www.sourcemap.com
Lucie Jeannot
International fashion product manager at Première Vision
Megan Meiklejohn
Sustainable materials and transparency lead at Eileen Fisher
Natasha Franck
Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Eon
Natasha Franck is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Eon. Eon is the leading digital identity platform across fashion, apparel and retail – connecting products to the Internet of Things to power enterprise intelligence, customer engagement and new business models.
Leading end-to-end digital transformation across industry, Eon developed the CircularID™ Protocol — the global protocol for digital identification of products in circular economy. By digitizing products in alignment with the protocol, Eon introduces CircularID™ Connected Products. CircularID™ Connected Products are able to communicate to stakeholders across the value chain, bringing the intelligence and visibility to the product lifecycle that is essential for our global transition to a circular economy.
Before founding Eon, Natasha worked in smart cities and sustainable urbanism at Delos and Jonathan Rose Companies. Natasha holds a Bachelor's Degree from Georgetown University.
Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel
CEO & Co-Founder Arianee & Curator Foundashion
Pierre-Nicolas Hurstel is CEO and Co Founder of Arianee: the Digital Identity standard consortium for all valuable goods based on blockchain. He is Founder and Curator of the Instagram community Foundashion_ uniting fashion and luxury professionals convinced that innovation is the solution for a sustainable growth of the industry. After 10 years as strategy, change and management consultant working with Luxury, Fashion and Trade show corporations he became CEO of Eurovet Americas the leading lingerie and swimwear professional events in North America. In 2018 he founded ReMode in Los Angeles. Passionate with innovation, art, food and rugby, he lives in Brooklyn with his wife and 2 daughters.
Ryan Teng
VP of Business development at CLO Virtual Fashion
For the past decade, Ryan Teng has experienced multiple facets of the apparel industry. From starting as a menswear buyer to then working in wholesale, and eventually managing all brands under the Billabong umbrella for all of Asia, his background culminates into a macro-view of how the apparel industry can succeed if done correctly.
Happening to stumble upon CLO three years ago, he never would have imagined to work in technology, but hasn't looked back since. With a passion to push the industry forward one human at a time, he is always happy to chat about the current and future state of fashion. He also has two cats.
Tara St James
Tara St James founder of Re:Source Library
Tara St James launched Study NY in 2009 after designing high street fashion for over 15 years in Canada and the US. Study produces in NYC's garment district using ethical fabrics and production methods.
Shortly after starting Study NY, Tara focused on educating the next generation of designers on the importance of sustainability in design. She has extensive lecturing and teaching experience in NYC including currently teaching a class on sustainable textiles at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Study NY has been awarded the Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation prize as well as runner up in the CFDA / Lexus Sustainable Fashion Challenge.
Most recently Tara worked as Production Coordinator and Research Fellow in the Sustainable Strategies Lab for Pratt's Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator. She has built a sustainable textile library and sourcing service and will be launching the new Re:Source Library consultancy in July 2019 .

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Financial Close
Management Reporting and Analytics
EPM Advisory
Application Implementation
EPM Infrastructure
EPM Integration
Hosting / Cloud
CCH Tagetik
OneStream
Keyteach
CXO Software
EPMware
Life at inlumi
Intelligent Performance Management
You are here: Home / Resources / Customer Stories / Sapa
Sapa: Aluminium giant with Oracle HFM
Hydro Extruded Solutions, formerly known as Sapa Group, benefited enormously when they introduced Oracle HFM for group consolidation, with inlumi as the supplier and project partner. The advantages were seen immediately in the form of working time reduction at the head office and subsidiary companies, expeditious access to reports and higher quality data.
Download this customer story in PDF format:
Group consolidation for more than 40 companies
In 2013, when Norsk Hydro and Orkla combined their international aluminium extrusion companies under the name of Sapa, the need emerged for an efficient group consolidation system for the new organisation. Indeed, Sapa suddenly had to account for its 23,000 employees in more than 40 countries. Oracle HFM (Hyperion Financial Management) was selected for Sapa's financial consolidation, business segment operation reports and internal reports for the group management team.
With inlumi selected as the supplier and project partner, the HFM solution was effectively developed and adapted to Sapa's business segments, reporting requirements and various undertakings. After just over a year of operation, key individuals at Sapa's head office experienced noticeable benefits on many levels in the form of higher quality data, reports, and working time reduction at both the head office and subsidiary companies.
"HFM has demonstrated that it is a modern and future-oriented system for group consolidation, and inlumi has been a solid partner who thoroughly understands our needs," says Kirsti Botheim, Group Accounting Director and Knut Ravnås, Group Business Controller.
Local management, global execution
With consultants from inlumi working closely with Sapa's project group, the development project spanned over a period of 15 months. The system was built with Sapa's group account plan, which supports consolidation of the accounts in line with IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) with integrated management reports for different management levels. The system also facilitates data capture from the ERP systems of the various companies.
With approximately 400 users globally, this is the most comprehensive HFM installation in Norway. Both Kirsti Botheim and Knut Ravnås emphasise project collaboration and user training as the most important criteria for helping the project to reach its goal. "Excellent training on the premises of the numerous companies of the Group is a prerequisite for establishing local ownership where the data is registered each month. This is why we selected a combination of on-site training for users and a web-based class-room solution for Smartview. inlumi's consultants were solution-oriented and played a central role in this work," they said.
"Excellent training on the premises of the numerous companies of the Group is a prerequisite for establishing local ownership where the data is registered each month. This is why we selected a combination of on-site training for users and a web-based class-room solution for Smartview. inlumi's consultants were solution-oriented and played a central role in this work."
Kirsti Botheim, Group Accounting Director at Sapa
Sustainable metal and unique qualities
Aluminium has unique qualities in that it is lightweight, extremely robust and it offers sustainable recycling. It is also widely used in construction from vehicles and vessels to industrial machines, buildings and large offshore installations. As a young group, Sapa is perhaps the least known of our international key players. This will probably change quickly, as the Orkla/Hydro-owned group is one of the world's major suppliers of aluminium pro-file-based solutions.
"It was an ambitious move to commit to the implementation of a new group consolidation system so soon after the merger, during a period of multiple projects and new systems plus routines during establishment. However, we can only conclude that the project was satisfactorily executed. The system has worked in the way we wanted from the first month of reports (June 2015), and it has also met all the accounting and reporting requirements," says Knut Ravnås.
Higher quality, reduction of working time
After using Oracle HFM for just over 12 months, key individuals at the Sapa Group would sum it up as: "Better quality data and quicker access to reports and information for managers. Regarding management reports, we are talking about freeing up one week's work each month. In retrospect, there is no doubt that the decision to select Oracle HFM as a consolidation system and inlumi as a project partner was a good one, and it has contributed positively to our competitiveness."
Arrange a call-back
Does this story resonate with you? Get in touch with us for an initial exploratory discussion.
Whether you are considering on-premise, cloud or hybrid solutions making use of Oracle, Tagetik and OneStream technologies, inlumi can help. We deliver all elements of the project life-cycle to implement EPM technologies that are tailored to the needs of your organisation: application design, development and configuration testing, training and roll-out.
https://www.inlumi.com/wp-content/uploads/application-implementation.jpg 627 1200 Kaitlin https://inlumi.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/logo-inlumi-site.png Kaitlin2017-09-13 00:10:502020-07-23 13:28:13Application Implementation
Netherlands: +31 882 380 800
Sweden: +46 102 098 900
Norway: +47 951 663 05
Denmark: +45 20 87 97 99
Finland: +31 882 380 800
Spain: +34 672 317 800
Subscribe to instant updates from inlumi
© inlumi 2020
Valmet Ikano Bank


The NC Fire Fighters' Burned Children Fund annually provides grant funds for NC Fire Departments to create and enhance current fire and life safety education programs in their community. Grant applications are reviewed by a FFBCF committee and awarded based on creativity and need. Awards are presented at the NC Fire & Life Safety Conference.
Matthews Fire-Rescue Department - $750.00 - Citizens Fire Academy.
Chapel Hill FD - $1000.00 - " Big Blue's Book of Safety Fun"
Thomasville Fire Department - "Taking A Walk in My Boots" – Helping Family Members Understand the Job of a Firefighter Program, to increase family and public awareness of a firefighter's duties.
Asheville Fire & Rescue - "Fire Safety For Seniors," a Remember When follow-up program for foster grandparents and/or senior companions.
Charlotte Fire Department - Juvenile "Matches and Lighters are Tools Not Toys," a Blaze mascot education program.
Boger City Fire Department - "Sparky" costume supplies and educational materials.
South Fork Volunteer FD - a "Fire Safety" Program to establish a fire & life safety in the VFD, to increase fire safety awareness.
Gaston County Fire Marshal's Office - "Fire Truck Kiosk" Program to educate Gaston County library users on fire and life safety.
South Mills Volunteer FD - a "Neighborhood Safety Festival" directed toward military families.
Erwin Fire & Rescue Squad - "Stove Top Fire Stop" Program to reduce cooking fires in residential program.


text:
Executive Park at 2001 State Hill
Address: 2001 St. Hill Road Wyomissing PA 19611
Two story, 50,644 SF commercial office building for lease
Situated on a 6.63 Acre Site
Parking for approximately 231 cars, all in open lots, with six of these spaces designated for handicap access.
Ground floor fitness center which can be accessed by tenants during business hours
The elevator, corridors, and stairways are accessed directly from the ground and second floor lobbies
2,000 amps, 277/480 volt, three phase, four wire, alternating current (AC). Step down transformers are located in electrical rooms on each floor.
The building is fully sprinkled, Fire Alarms consisting of hard-wired smoke detectors are located throughout the common areas
Site Highlights:
Excellent highway access
Rte. 422 Bypass is approximately 1/2 mile to the east providing high speed accessibility between Lancaster, Allentown and Philadelphia
Zoned C-1
Card access system for tenant access to the building and common areas
All common areas of the building have handicap accessibility


text:
Aaron Gemmill Samuel Payne
Curated by Rachel Valinsky
March 3 - March 8, 2015
SPRING/BREAK Art Show
Skylight at Moynihan Station
Room 4021, 4th Floor East Hallway
Roven, Glen. "Eating Art." Huffington Post. March 6, 2015.
Hamer, Katy Diamond. "Where Did You Go for SPRING/BREAK, 2015." Eyes towards the dove. March 24, 2015.
The exhibition investigates daily spatial exchange as a strategy for marking, mapping, and charting forms of displacement and directional movement. The show presents certain tactics linked to intuitive and adaptive experiences of space that undercut or problematize rational understanding of a landscape's continuous qualities and imbue everyday practices with new critical perspectives. To this effect, it postulates that the affective and spatial labor implicitly performed at the individual level, describes a negotiation of space, a constant exchange which also points to a form of resistance to the rationalization and commodification of memory, images, transportation, and communication.
In Aaron Gemmill's to live where others pass (nest) series, road data from MTA bus maps was processed through nesting software to produce a laser-cut acrylic panels, which were then used as printing plates. The plates were installed as the floor of an art fair booth where the weight of visitors' footsteps created cracks in the surface. Abstracting the transit map onto a floor relief, which in turn took on multiple forms into these unique, idiosyncratic prints, Gemmill repurposes modes of spatial organization into intelligible new propositions for routing movement and tracking the history of the printing plate's activity, use, and packaging. In his photographs, Gemmill has positioned himself at the intersection of a sidewalk at the coordinates 40.701, -73.987 (near the underpass crossing of the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway). Through a conflation of the angles and the photographic frame's aspect ratio, the photographs collapse two-point perspective of the image into the frontal image object that contains it. Gemmill uses the expansion joints as rules to create folds in the photographs.
Samuel Payne's work explores displacement as a function of ludic play, materials, and physical labor. Payne's work takes cues from Archimedes' principle, which indicates that the force of an object moving upwards as it is submerged partially or fully in fluid, is equal to the weight of the fluid that the object displaces. Mapping this displacement, which emerges from the relationship between an object and its fluid, shifting context, Payne tracks the objects' relation to the center and to the periphery. In his most recent work, 1,820 lb Gambit, Payne elaborates on the difference between destruction and storage, disappearance and displacement. Using tiles he was once hired to remove himself from the floor of a gallery, Payne doubles their removal, by installing and extracting them from the exhibition space's floor. In pulling the centerpiece out and placing it in a bin on the periphery of the room, Payne also puts the outside on display and conflates the temporality of the tiles' exhibition. He asks what the residue of memory of labor can be when the work wants to point to an absence.
Aaron Gemmill (b. Birmingham, AL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He holds an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. His work has been exhibited at P!, Cleopatra's Greenpoint, Socrates Sculpture Park, Carriage Trade in New York, among others.
Samuel Payne (b. 1982, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn. He earned his MFA in painting at the University of Washington in Seattle, and his BA at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. His work has been exhibited at Torrence Shipman, New York and Peninsula Art Space, New York.


Graphic 45 Papers including Vintage Hollywood, Midnight Masquerade, Portrait of a Lady and more.
Graphic 45 Imagine Collection - Castles in the Air 12x12 sheet is a 12x12 sheet of images ready to cut out to embellish your papercraft projects. Gorgeous steampunk themed imagery with a feminine touc..
Graphic 45 Steampunk Debutante 12x12 Deluxe Collector's Edition contains gorgeous papers, a sticker sheet & sheet of chipboards with feminine steampunk designs. Contains: 1 12x12 Paper ..
Graphic 45 Sun Kissed 6x12 Chipboards gives you a great selection of die-cut chipboard tags and other embellishments in gorgeous designs which compliment the rest of the Sun Kissed collection. Themed ..
Graphic 45 Sun Kissed 6x12 Die-Cuts Banners gives you 2 sheets of banners, tags, tickets and other embellishments in gorgeous designs which compliment the rest of the Sun Kissed collection. Themed aro..
Graphic 45 The 12 Days of Christmas Deluxe Collector's Edition Pack contains co-ordinating papers, stickers and chipboards to create beautiful projects along the theme of the Twelve Days of Christ..
The 12x12 patterns and solids paper pad from the Vintage Hollywood collection from Graphic 45 contains 24 sheets, 2 each of 12 designs, perfect to use as backgrounds on cards, for home decor projects,..


text:
Q: How to use custom loss function for keras I have recently came across the Focal loss function and heard it's mainly used in imbalanced dataset. So i just gave it a try on Cifar10 dataset by using this simple Focal loss function i found online(For Keras).
I am continuously facing an error which i have mentioned at the end. I have tried several methods to resolve it but no luck. Please see to it, i really appreciate your help. Thank you!

Focal Loss
import keras.backend as K

ALPHA = 0.8
GAMMA = 2

def FocalLoss(targets, inputs, alpha=ALPHA, gamma=GAMMA):

    inputs = K.flatten(inputs)
    targets = K.flatten(targets)

    BCE = K.binary_crossentropy(targets, inputs)
    BCE_EXP = K.exp(-BCE)
    focal_loss = K.mean(alpha * K.pow((1-BCE_EXP), gamma) * BCE)

    return focal_loss

Input Data
from keras.datasets import cifar10

(xtrain,ytrain),(xtest,ytest) = cifar10.load_data()

Neural Net
from keras.layers import Dense, Conv2D, Flatten, MaxPool2D
from keras.models import Sequential
from keras.optimizers import Adam

model = Sequential([
      Conv2D(filters=64, kernel_size=(27,27), strides=(1,1), input_shape=(32,32,3),padding='same', activation='sigmoid'),
      MaxPool2D(pool_size=(13,13), strides=(1,1), padding='valid'),
      Conv2D(filters=32,  kernel_size=(11,11), strides=(1,1), padding='valid', activation='sigmoid'),
      Flatten(),
      Dense(units=600, activation='sigmoid'),
      Dense(units=128, activation='sigmoid'),
      Dense(units=10, activation='softmax')

])

Comipiling and Fitting
model.compile(loss=FocalLoss, optimizer=Adam(learning_rate=0.0001), metrics=['accuracy'])
model.fit(xtrain, ytrain, epochs=10, batch_size=120, validation_data=(xtest,ytest), verbose=2)

Error while fitting
Epoch 1/10
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-52-52246069690d> in <module>()
----> 1 model.fit(xtrain, ytrain, epochs=10, batch_size=120, validation_data=(xtest,ytest), verbose=2)

10 frames
/usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/framework/func_graph.py in wrapper(*args, **kwargs)
    971           except Exception as e:  # pylint:disable=broad-except
    972             if hasattr(e, "ag_error_metadata"):
--> 973               raise e.ag_error_metadata.to_exception(e)
    974             else:
    975               raise

TypeError: in user code:

    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/keras/engine/training.py:806 train_function  *
        return step_function(self, iterator)
    <ipython-input-50-e8cbeb45fe58>:12 FocalLoss  *
        BCE = K.binary_crossentropy(targets, inputs)
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/util/dispatch.py:201 wrapper  **
        return target(*args, **kwargs)
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/keras/backend.py:4829 binary_crossentropy
        bce = target * math_ops.log(output + epsilon())
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/ops/math_ops.py:1141 binary_op_wrapper
        raise e
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/ops/math_ops.py:1125 binary_op_wrapper
        return func(x, y, name=name)
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/ops/math_ops.py:1457 _mul_dispatch
        return multiply(x, y, name=name)
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/util/dispatch.py:201 wrapper
        return target(*args, **kwargs)
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/ops/math_ops.py:509 multiply
        return gen_math_ops.mul(x, y, name)
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/ops/gen_math_ops.py:6176 mul
        "Mul", x=x, y=y, name=name)
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/framework/op_def_library.py:506 _apply_op_helper
        inferred_from[input_arg.type_attr]))

    TypeError: Input 'y' of 'Mul' Op has type float32 that does not match type uint8 of argument 'x'.

NOTE
Both xtrain and ytrain are in same dtype. (i.e)'uint8'

A: the problem is related to your target type, they are int8 but you need to cast the to float32. I do it inside the loss, where I removed also the flatten part which is a mistake
def FocalLoss(targets, inputs, alpha=ALPHA, gamma=GAMMA):

    targets = K.cast(targets, 'float32')

    BCE = K.binary_crossentropy(targets, inputs)
    BCE_EXP = K.exp(-BCE)
    focal_loss = K.mean(alpha * K.pow((1-BCE_EXP), gamma) * BCE)

    return focal_loss

here the running notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1E89tggfCvifuoJRdGuXTHuBQPvXFCYN4?usp=sharing


This is a day for anyone who wants to promote vocations to priesthood and religious life. Come learn how.
Join religious sisters from around the Archdiocese for dinner, conversation, prayer, and fun. Come learn how to discern if God is calling you to be a Sister.
This free overnight retreat provides a quiet place to contemplate the call to priesthood. Share this time in prayer and fellowship with priests, seminarians, and other young men in discernment.
Gather with other guys in high school and spend a day of prayer, fun, and conversation. Come learn more about priesthood and life in the seminary at this free day of discernment. Youth group guys welcome along with their youth leaders.
Join high school ladies from around the Archdiocese and gather with religious sisters to spend a day in prayer, conversation, and activities. Walk with the sisters to learn about religious life and consecration for service in the Church. Youth group ladies are welcome along with their youth leaders.
"Among the virtues that priests must possess for their sacred ministry none is so important as a frame of mind and soul whereby they are always ready to know and do the will of him who sent them and not their own will. The divine task that they are called by the Holy Spirit to fulfill surpasses all human wisdom and human ability. 'God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the strong' (1 Cor 1:27). Aware of his own weakness, the true minister of Christ works in humility trying to do what is pleasing to God." (Presbyterorum Ordinis, 15).
These words from the Second Vatican Council are just as important today as on the day they were written. It is no secret that there are big questions before the leaders of our Church at this time. So much worry and doubt have been caused by clergy not only behaving contrary to human decency, but even more painfully violating the promises of their ordination and consecration to the Lord. As a priest and a vocation minister, I must say that I am saddened and disheartened by these actions. I can also say however, that I am not discouraged in my ministry.
I am a vocation director. My job is to help people discover their call from God. I have the honor of helping people discern why the Almighty God has created them. We may have doubts because of the weaknesses of our brothers in ministry, but I cannot doubt the wisdom and power of God. God is raising up new priests right now. Priests who will boldly follow God's holy will – just like the majority of priests who have been ordained are doing now. These young men are out there in your parishes, in your schools, in your workplaces, and in your own families. They are there because God made them to find their vocations in this time and in this context.
I hope you all can join me in praying for and encouraging holy vocations, without fear and without doubt. May we each do what is pleasing to God. Each of us has been made for a reason. Each of us is weak and has our struggles. But may each of us renew our faith in our God. He calls the weak to do his holy will. Pray for those he has called, that they may answer. May they may have the support and care of all of us in the Church who, in our weakness, seek to follow the will of the God who loves us.
As the Catholic Church prepares to celebrate the World Day for Consecrated Life, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' (USCCB) Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations (CCLV) is releasing the results of a survey taken of the most recent Profession Class of 2017 conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA).The survey results have been released to coincide with the annual celebration of World Day for Consecrated Life, which will be celebrated in the Church on Friday, Feb. 2, and in parishes on the weekend of Feb. 3-4.
On Monday the Vatican announced Pope Francis' appointment of Oratorian Father Mario Alberto Aviles as auxiliary bishop of the Diocese of Brownsville.
In June, the National Religious Retirement Office (NRRO) distributed $25 million to 390 religious communities across the United States. The funding is provided by donations to the Retirement Fund for Religious collection. The annual, parish-based appeal is held in most U.S. Catholic parishes each December and benefits more than 32,000 elderly Catholic sisters, brothers and religious order priests. The most recent collection raised nearly $30.7 million and marked the second year in a row that contributions exceeded $30 million.
Mass for conferral of holy orders for Praveen Kumar Lakkisetti, Danny Darius Nyakundi Nyang'au, Abel Ruiz, and Daniel Eduardo Villarreal to the priesthood and George Mbugua Ndung'u Wanjiru to the diaconate is available on Facebook live on at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 20, from St. Mark the Evangelist Church in San Antonio on the Archdiocese of San Antonio Facebook page and the Today's Catholic Facebook page.
Nearly all of the religious men and women who professed perpetual vows in 2016 had a strong prayer life prior to entering their religious institute, according to a survey on men and women religious conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University. The survey results were released February 2, to coincide with the annual celebration of World Day for Consecrated Life.
In the eyes of many, Sister Joni Luna had it all.
Sister Stephanie Marie Martinez performs several different roles in her job at Blessed Sacrament Academy (BSA). She returned to BSA from other assignments in 1992 to serve as administrative assistant. She has since added grant writer, alumni relationship builder, donation record keeper and inveterate prayer warrior. She teaches Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) at Mission San José, loves to cook, has a joyous laugh and a welcoming heart.
Former Oblate School of Theology and Assumption Seminary faculty member Father John Kemper, PSS, 57, has been named provincial superior of the Society of St. Sulpice, also known as the Sulpician Fathers, for the United States Province. He will take office July 1. The Sulpicians were founded solely for formation of future priests. The U.S. Province runs four seminaries, and helps with formation at certain seminaries around the nation, presently including OST's sister institution, Assumption Seminary.
World Day of Consecrated Life was observed by women and men religious of the archdiocese on Feb. 8 with a gathering at the St. Paul Community Center. Attendees heard bilingual presentations on "Evangelii Gaudium" and a message from the teachings of Pope Francis.
Amidst the presence of parents, family members and friends of seminarians and alumni priests, Assumption Seminary celebrated Family Day on March 15. It was a day of memory, acknowledgement and gratitude to the parents and friends of seminarians and priests as the seminary celebrates the centennial of its mission.
Father David Garcia, whose boundless passion and enthusiasm for a variety of priestly assignments over the years has aptly earned him the "Energizer Bunny" moniker, celebrated 40 years in the priesthood on March 20 at St. Luke Church. Concelebrating the Mass were Bishop Gerald Barnes of the Diocese of San Bernardino, Father Virgil Elizondo and Msgr. Michael Boulette, in the presence Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller, MSpS, Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Amarillo John W. Yanta, Auxiliary Bishop Emeritus Thomas J. Flanagan and many fellow priests, family members and friends.
More than 5,000 years of service to the church by women and men religious, priests, and deacons observing significant anniversaries in 2015 were honored by Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller, MSpS, at the archdiocesan jubilee Mass held at Our Lady of Grace Church on April 21.
Three Missionhurst-CICM students renewed their temporary vows in the community in late April. Brother Leo Sanggaria, CICM, from Indonesia, signed his vows before Father Charles Phukuta, CICM, U.S. provincial superior.
The Del Rio Pray for Vocations (Traveling Crucifix) Program began in the summer of 2013 at Sacred Heart Church.
Pope Francis presided over the ordination of nearly twenty men to the priesthood on April 26, where he warned them against being vain priests who live first for their own pleasure rather than for God's.
The numbers are in: almost 600 Catholic men will be ordained priests for the U.S. in 2015, an increase of more than 100 from last year.
Knights of Columbus Council 4183 held its annual Knights with the Seminarians' Dinner recently at the KC Hall in New Braunfels, with all monies received from ticket sales allocated for seminarian financial support.
Brother Rubén Garza of the Brothers of the Beloved Disciples professed his first vows at chastity, poverty, obedience and Marian consecration at a Mass at St. Mary Magdalen Church on March 19. Father George Montague, SM, was the presider at the liturgy, which included three concelebrants: Father Joseph Mary Marshall, SM; Father Will Combs, BBD; and Father Robert Hogan, BBD. Altar servers were Brother Sean Stilson, BBD, and archdiocesan seminarian Michael Langford.
When the announcement came that Pope Francis declared 2015 as the Year of Consecrated Religious Life, jubilation was heard across the archdiocese from members of the religious communities.
Sister Agnesine Heinsch is one of seven Sisters of the Incarnate Word Blessed Sacrament who live in the convent on the campus of Blessed Sacrament Academy. For 58 years, she has served God as a member of the congregation -- first as a teacher at various schools in South Texas and later as treasurer for the BSA school office and the convent in San Antonio. As an individual, Sister Agnesine is full of life, encouraging and musical. The large garden she cultivated for many years behind the convent is now a playground enjoyed by children attending the Child Development Center, but she still has her green thumb. Sister Agnesine will also go fishing whenever possible.
Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller, MSpS, met recently with the newly elected provincial of the Heralds of Good News community. Father Saji Sebastian, HGN, was in the archdiocese visiting Father Tomy Thomas and Father Mathew Binesh, who staff Resurrection of the Lord Parish in San Antonio.
In a wide-ranging, off-the-cuff speech to priests and religious in Naples, Pope Francis addressed various challenges of consecrated life, emphasizing above all the importance of poverty and resisting gossip.
The Assumption Seminary community rejoiced March 14 as eight of its men received Candidacy for Holy Orders during the Holy Eucharist presided by Bishop Daniel E. Flores of the Diocese of Brownsville, representing all the bishops of the candidates.
Daughters of Charity Services hosts Catholic Daughters Court of Our Lady of Holy Trinity for Dr.
Daughters of Charity Services of San Antonio hosted Catholic Daughters of America Court of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity on Feb. 23 to celebrate "Read Across America" with reading of books with three and four year olds.
The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate sponsored a "Come and See" vocation discernment experience at the Pat Guidon Center of Oblate School of Theology the weekend of Jan. 16-18.
The spring semester at Assumption Seminary in San Antonio began with the visit of Archbishop Jorge C. Patron Wong, Vatican Secretary of Seminaries and Congregation for Clergy, on Jan. 10.
In his opening message for the 51st World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Pope Francis invited those discerning a vocation to the priesthood or religious life to listen for what Jesus is calling them to. "I invite you to listen to and follow Jesus, to allow yourselves to be transformed interiorly by his words. It will help you to participate in a communal journey that is able to release the best energies in you and around you. No vocation is born of itself or lives for itself.A vocation flows from the heart of God and blossoms in the good soil of faithful people, in the experience of fraternal love," the pontiff stated.
Dr. Carolyn Woo, CEO and president of Catholic Relief Services, addressed the Assumption Seminary Centennial Civic Luncheon, a gathering of generous sponsors of the seminary from all walks of life. The Nov. 19 event gathering began with words of welcome by Michael Belz, president of Catholic Life Insurance. He invited the guests to join and celebrate the joy of Assumption Seminary in its centennial year. He thanked the guests for being present to witness and thank God for the hundred years of Assumption Seminary's journey in forming men for the priesthood.
Our congregation, the Missionaries of the Holy Infant Jesus of Good Health, was founded in Morelia, Michoacán, México, on Sept. 9, 1966. We are a diocesan religious institute of apostolic life, composed of sisters who profess public perpetual vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, who live our lives in community, and who dedicate ourselves to the works of our apostolate (Canon N. 607, 2).
In a chapter held over 25 years ago the Sisters of the Holy Spirit made a decision to answer the Holy Father's call to send missionaries to the Third World.
The Year of Consecrated Life was inaugurated in the archdiocese Nov. 30 with a special televised liturgy celebrated by Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller, MSpS, at San Fernando Catehdral, with more than three-quarters of the pews in the sanctuary filled with consecrated religious.


text:
Look! It Is Jesus
by John Schwenkler 8 . 20 . 19
What do Catholics believe happens to the bread and wine that are consecrated during the Liturgy of the Eucharist?
As the philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe put it in a classic essay from 1974, the easiest way to explain what we are supposed to believe is by thinking about how to introduce the concept of transubstantiation to a young child:
Not of course using the word "transubstantiation," because it is not a little child's word. But the thing can be taught, and it is best taught at mass at the consecration, the one part where a small child should be got to fix its attention on what is going on. . . . Such a child can be taught then by whispering to it such things as: "Look! Look what the priest is doing. . . . He is saying Jesus' words that change the bread into Jesus' body. Now he's lifting it up. Look! Now bow your head and say 'My Lord and my God,'" and then "Look, now he's taken hold of the cup. He's saying the words that change the wine into Jesus' blood. Look up at the cup. Now bow your head and say 'We believe, we adore your precious blood, O Christ of God.'"
Anscombe was making two points. First, that a child's instruction in the faith should be primarily "as part of an action; as concerning something going on before it; as actually unifying and connecting beliefs, which is clearer and more vivifying than being taught only later, in a classroom perhaps, that we have all these beliefs." Catechetical instruction in precise formulae and official doctrine is relevant to religious formation. But such explicit teaching is dependent on a foundation of prior formation in religious praxis.
Anscombe's other point was that the words used in the formulation of official Church teaching are often not the words we should use to explain what Catholics believe. "Transubstantiation" is her example of such a word, but there are more: "divine nature," "human nature," "hypostatic union," "consubstantial," and in some contexts even "presence" and "sign." These words are not unsuitable because the concepts they express are too difficult for most people to grasp, but because they belong to a specialized vocabulary and most people do not have a prior understanding of what they mean. Use of these words can do the opposite of what teaching about doctrine is supposed to do: muddy, rather than clarify, the matters we are trying to speak about.
Consider the word "substance." In ordinary speech, we talk of "substance" in connection with drugs and alcohol ("substance abuse"), as well as in scientific, medical, and environmental contexts. But the concept of substance that philosophers and theologians are trying to capture through the word has a much wider application.
Put simply, we talk about substances whenever we talk about stuff and about things. To say that the "substance" of the sacred Host and Chalice is different after the priest prays the words of consecration is just to say that what they are is now different: Before they were bread and wine, and now they are the Body and Blood of Jesus. This is how Anscombe's simple catechism teaches this to a child. It's also, in most cases, the clearest and most direct way that an adult can say what she herself believes.
Anscombe's teacher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, wrote in his Philosophical Investigations about the strangeness of saying something like "I believe that he is suffering" or "I believe that he is not an automaton" of a human being in one's presence. Correcting these unnatural forms of expression, Wittgenstein tries saying: "My attitude toward him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul."
The important distinction to notice here is the one between an attitude and an opinion. Wittgenstein is showing us that when we relate to another human being, our way of relating to him or her is different from the way we would relate to a machine or a brute animal. We do not merely think, "this is a person," but are oriented toward him or her in a way defined by the attitude these words express—just as in reaching for a hot cup of tea one's hand is prepared, without needing to think about it, to touch the cup carefully.
When considering the attitude of Catholics toward the Eucharist, our concern should be less with their opinions regarding this great mystery than with the attitudes that define their orientation to it. That fewer than one-third of U.S. Catholics say they believe that during Mass the bread and wine "actually become the body and blood of Jesus," while close to 7 in 10 believe the Eucharistic sacrifice is merely symbolic, is less disturbing in itself than the breakdown of practices of genuflection, Eucharistic adoration, and the restriction of Holy Communion to those initiated in the faith and spiritually prepared to receive it. The two things are related, of course, but the latter is more fundamental and more important on its own.
The widespread disbelief among Catholics in the reality of the Eucharistic sacrifice is not a situation that will be corrected by formal catechesis—especially since about a third of those who believe it is merely symbolic also know that the Church teaches the opposite, and many of the uninstructed likely would not care. For it matters less what Catholics are told about the Eucharist than what they are brought to do in relation to it. The most important thing is to take the same attitude toward this sacrament that we would take if Jesus's dying body were laid out on the altar.
And where explicit instruction is undertaken, the words to do the job are not "substance," "substantial," "transubstantiation," or even "Real Presence." Our attitude toward the Eucharistic sacrament is an attitude toward what is there. The words of John the Baptist will do for instruction: "Look! Behold! Pay attention to what you see. It is Jesus, the Lamb of God."
John Schwenkler is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University.
Become a fan of First Things on Facebook, subscribe to First Things via RSS, and follow First Things on Twitter.
More on: Religion, Eucharist
Articles by John Schwenkler
Filter Web Exclusive Articles
Month Any January February March April May June July August September October November December Year Any 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005


text:
La autoconsciencia o autoconciencia es la experiencia de la individualidad y personalidad de uno mismo. Este término es empleado en numerosos textos de psicología, sobre todo en la psicología evolutiva. Es la capacidad de introspección y la habilidad de reconocerse como un individuo, diferenciándose de su medio y otros individuos.

Enfoque biológico

Existen dudas acerca de qué partes de nuestro cerebro nos permiten poseer una autoconsciencia y cómo es que estamos programados de forma biológica para esto. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran especuló que las neuronas especulares podrían proveer las bases para la autoconsciencia del ser humano. Según una declaración realizada en un ensayo escrito para la Fundación Edge.

Animales

Se han realizado estudios, principalmente en primates, para determinar si los animales poseen una autoconsciencia. Se puede reconocer de manera más simple mediante la llamada prueba del espejo en la cual los animales deberían atravesar cuatro etapas:
Respuesta social: el animal intenta interactuar con su reflejo.
Inspección física: inicia reconocimiento de rasgos.
Comportamiento repetitivo frente al espejo: similar a la forma en que niños pequeños hacen muecas.
Prueba de la marca: momento en que el animal toca de forma espontánea una zona de su cuerpo que no hubiera sido visible sin el espejo.

Referencias

Véase también
Autoconocimiento
Autoconcepto
Sí-mismo

Conciencia
Términos de psicología

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia