Calendar Event Research Articles

“My Children, Read This Passage Every Year”: Composition and Meaning in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana by Arnon Atzmon

Reviewed by: “My Children, Read This Passage Every Year”: Composition and Meaning in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana by Arnon Atzmon Amit Gvaryahu Arnon Atzmon. “My Children, Read This Passage Every Year”: Composition and Meaning in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana. Jerusalem: Magnes, 2021. 451 + pp. [in Hebrew] Arnon Atzmon’s book, billed as a study of “composition and meaning” is so much more than that. It is a new and important introduction to the curious work Pesikta de-Rav Kahana (PdRK), offering new answers to basic questions of provenance and dating regarding this work. Although PdRK was not printed during the Italian Renaissance, it became known to scholars when Leopold Zunz published his Die gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden (Leipzig, 1832). Zunz reconstructed its structure and posited its order, and also noted that its medieval readers knew it alternatively both by the name Pesikta and the longer Pesikta de-Rav Kahana. Zunz’s work paid off: in 1868 Solomon Buber had already found manuscripts of this work and published an edition of the full work (Lyck, 1868). A hundred years and two world wars [End Page 180] later, the European communities that produced this scholarship were no more. In New York, Bernard Mandelbaum published a new edition of PdRK (New York: JTS, 1969). Like Vayikra Rabbah, and unlike Bereshit Rabbah, PdRK is a homiletic midrash—that is, it expands and expounds selected verses of a lection read in a synagogue. It is conventionally grouped with those two works as a “classical midrash” as opposed to “late midrash,” like Tanḥuma or Pesikta Rabbati. Each of its sections, called pesikta in the manuscripts and in scholarship, begins its first few subunits with an exposition of the first verse of the lection. The final subunits of the pesikta often end with a homily on the last verse of the lection, with homiletic expansions on some of the middle verses in between. The lection is from the Torah in some pesikata (the plural form), from the Prophets or the haftarah in others. PdRK only contains homiletic material for special days: holidays and Sabbaths where the regular order of reading a lection from the Torah and a corresponding haftarah was stopped for a calendar event, like the weeks between 17 Tammuz and Sukkot, or the weeks between 1 Adar and Passover. It presents a lectionary similar in many ways to the one practiced in modern synagogues. However, this was not the lectionary that the earliest rabbis knew. The Mishnah (M. Megillah 3:4–6) prescribed completely different readings for many of the holidays. Some are mentioned as an alternative tradition found in the parallel Tosefta (T. Megillah 3:5–9), while others are not known in tannaitic literature at all. At some point, the lections in the Mishnah—all from the laconic list of holidays in Leviticus 24—were abandoned and the new lections adopted. These new readings are significantly more narrative oriented: the Exodus story is read on Passover; the story of the giving of the Law at Sinai on Shavuot; and the story of Sarah’s pregnancy (Gen 21) on the New Year. These readings are also reflected in the synagogue poetry of Eleazar ha-Kallir. Atzmon offers the novel theory that Pesikta and its lectionary grew in tandem, with homilists scrambling to assemble sermon material from across the rabbinic tradition for these new lections. He does this through detailed studies of “composition and meaning” concentrated in part B of the book—its central and longest part. The detailed readings of part B cover almost all of PdRK and carefully support the claim that there was a conscious redactor shaping the message of each pesikta by using older materials, many of which are known from elsewhere in the rabbinic canon (including, Atzmon claims in part A, chap. 6, Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah). For some lections—like those with parallels in Vayikra Rabbah—this was an easy process. But for others, the task was harder. Some pesikata are not smoothly read; their seams show and so does the redactor’s effort. Atzmon shows that the most infelicitous pesikata are the ones for lections not mentioned in the Mishnah. The fact that the sources of...

The annual conference of the Irish College of Ophthalmologists: examining over a decade of trends.

The annual conference of the Irish College of Ophthalmologists (ICO) is a key calendar event for ophthalmology research in Ireland. We investigated whether there were identifiable trends across various domains for the last twelve ICO meetings. Our objectives were to assess subspeciality and training centre representation, as well as the characteristics of the first author to include gender and stage of training. A retrospective analysis of paper and poster presentations from the ICO annual conference yearbooks was conducted. The representation of subspecialties, affiliated institutions, and gender distribution were noted for both categories. For paper presentations, the author's career stage, full-text publication rates, and impact factors were also determined. A total of 306 paper presentations and 306 poster presentations were analysed. The subspecialty of retina had the highest representation within both sections. The overall mean publication rate was 38% (range, 6-39%), with a mean journal impact factor of 2.02. No statistically significant differences in gender noted with regard to poster, paper, or publications (p < 0.9, p < 0.1, p < 0.7, respectively). This is the first review of all research contributions to the ICO conference. We found that there is a need to promote research in some underrepresented subspecialities and training centres. No significant gender bias was found. There is scope to improve the publication conversion rate; this would allow for greater dissemination of the research presented at the ICO meeting.

Google Meet's Ubiquitous and Pervasive Application with BigBlueButton

In this pandemic period, the education processes apply online distance learning. There are many educational learning media that can be used and one is by using Google Meet. A platform for video conferences is called Google Meet. With the ability to host video conferences and host presentations, it is an excellent platform for cooperation. so that you can attend meetings straight from an email or Calendar event. Google Meet is important to inspect teachers' perceptions and attitudes. When they have positive perceptions about online education, teachers also adopt positive attitudes toward educational technology. They would thus be open to change and resist the move to online virtual education. Google Meet is now experiencing a pandemic with various difficulties. This research paper aims to introduce Google Meet, how to utilize the application of Google Meet, how to generate Google meet links, and their benefits. This paper focuses on the effect of the Google Meet media-assisted lecture method on building student knowledge.

Online, asynchronous conferences are poised to disrupt the conference industry

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted business and life as usual and led to global shutdowns for travel. Conferences, which are a key part of professional development, were also stunted and many were forced to go online. Excessive online engagement has produced Zoom fatigue. This editorial explores the value of in-person versus online conferences and points out some factors that are key for success. We also introduce the concept of the Global Mini-Conference (GMC) as a regular calendar event tailored to the needs of a specific audience in an open forum.

Mood Prediction Based on Calendar Events Using Multitask Learning

Predicting future moods with machine learning can help plan appropriate strategies for mental health; this can be facilitated by collecting future event information from calendar applications. However, a model for mood prediction from calendar event information has not yet been developed. In addition, because the dataset of mood values is characterized by the tendency to collect values close to either the mean or the most recent value, a mood prediction model employing past moods as input is likely to overfit the distribution of the training dataset. This makes it difficult to capture changes in mood due to external factors such as events, especially on days when mood fluctuates greatly. In this study, we propose a mood prediction deep learning model with an event feature extractor. For introducing a multitask learning method, we add not only mood but also the effects of events on mood as objective variables, and we achieve higher prediction accuracy than existing machine learning models. Given the small initial weights in deep learning, the middle layer tends to output values near zero when learning is insufficient. With the introduction of multitask learning, the output values of the event feature extractor in the prediction model output non-zero values, and the prediction accuracy is improved on days featuring a large fluctuation in mood from the previous day. Our proposal is expected to be a more efficient learning method for deep learning models to predict human mental states from external factors.

Verifying replicated data types with typeclass refinements in Liquid Haskell

This paper presents an extension to Liquid Haskell that facilitates stating and semi-automatically proving properties of typeclasses. Liquid Haskell augments Haskell with refinement types —our work allows such types to be attached to typeclass method declarations, and ensures that instance implementations respect these types. The engineering of this extension is a modular interaction between GHC, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, and Liquid Haskell’s core proof infrastructure. The design sheds light on the interplay between modular proofs and typeclass resolution, which in Haskell is coherent by default (meaning that resolution always selects the same implementation for a particular instantiating type), but in other dependently typed languages is not. We demonstrate the utility of our extension by using Liquid Haskell to modularly verify that 34 instances satisfy the laws of five standard typeclasses. More substantially, we implement a framework for programming distributed applications based on replicated data types (RDTs). We define a typeclass whose Liquid Haskell type captures the mathematical properties RDTs should satisfy; prove in Liquid Haskell that these properties are sufficient to ensure that replicas’ states converge despite out-of-order update delivery; implement (and prove correct) several instances of our RDT typeclass; and use them to build two realistic applications, a multi-user calendar event planner and a collaborative text editor.

Concept and types of terms in procedures for resolving election disputes

In the article, the author established the nature and types of terms for resolving electoral disputes. It is concluded that it is advisable to establish the essence of the term as a legal category; it is used in the consideration and resolution of administrative disputes, including election disputes. It is substantiated that the term must be understood as a certain time period, determined by the calendar date or event, with the onset of which the person arises or terminates the right to act in a certain way. The terms in consideration and resolution of electoral cases are classified according to a number of criteria - the method of protecting violated suffrage; time of application of the right to appeal a management decision; stages of the election process; time criterion for their calculation; conditions of their occurrence; their substantive nature; opportunities for their recovery. Given the nature of the time limit for applying to the court as a variety of terms in the consideration and resolution of electoral disputes, it was concluded that it would be appropriate to classify them as defined by the substantive rules of administrative law. Attention is drawn to the fact that maintaining the norm on defining the terms of appeal to the administrative court as a guarantee of the protection of electoral rights in the structure of the Code of Administrative Procedure of Ukraine is a compulsory measure of legal regulation, they should be eliminated as part of law-making activities to develop and adopt the Electoral Code of Ukraine. It is emphasized that classifying the term of appeal to the administrative court as a guarantee of ensuring the implementation of suffrage to the category of material terms allows us to conclude that it should be understood as a limitation period. It is noted that it becomes especially relevant to solve the problem of legislatively determining the length of time for appeal to an administrative court as a category of material terms, and accordingly to solve the question of whether it is reasonable to apply the category of “reasonableness” to the determination of their duration, used in the Code of Administrative Procedure of Ukraine to determine the period during which a court must consider the matter or carry out other procedural actions

Wearable Stress Sensors for Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder With In Situ Alerts to Caregivers via a Mobile Phone

Background: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often exhibit unexpected and difficult to manage self-injurious, aggressive, and/or disruptive and challenging behaviors. These behaviors can lead to restrictive care settings including hospitalizations and lifelong residential care placement. Because children with ASD have significant impairments in social communication skills including lack of facial expression, an inability to clearly articulate feelings, and atypical body language, caregivers could benefit tremendously by knowing when a child is becoming stressed. Objective: To develop a set of customized features in a wearable sensor and mobile app that monitors stress reactivity of children with autism in real time and automatically triggers in situ alerts to a caregiver via a mobile handheld device. Methods: The Center for Discovery (CFD) is a not-for-profit internationally recognized service provider for people with complex developmental disabilities, including a large population of children and adults with autism. Neumitra Inc., is a start-up technology vendor specializing in wearable stress monitoring. Neumitra’s wearable sensor called neuma featured an embedded system with automated scoring of electrodermal activity, a well-established method for recording physiological stress responses. The sensor was accompanied by a mobile app for users to self-monitor their own stress levels. The app provided a 10-point color gradient scale as an interpretation of real-time stress and arousal levels. CFD collaborated with Neumitra’s development team to develop a set of customized features amenable to the use case presented by caring for children with autism. The research team at CFD trialed the neuma system extensively, developed use case scenarios, and identified the features necessary to successfully implement in situ alerts to caregivers and track stress events to review for patterns of stress. Results: The resulting system is neuma-CFD, a coordinated technological system for in situ monitoring of stress levels to identify correlations in the user’s stress increases and contextual events. The system delivers in situ alerts to caregivers via a smartphone or similar handheld devices. A new interface for the mobile app was customized to minimize user burden. The home screen now allows users to create high-frequency calendar events in only two taps. These events include common challenging behaviors and common intervention techniques. Thus, upon review, stress responses can be viewed relevant to both challenging behavioral episodes and intervention techniques. To enhance clinical review, the app now logs the detection of stress events into the calendar. Users can also access an increased granular review of electrodermal activity within a calendar event, such as behavior episodes or classroom routines. Conclusions: In field testing, in situ alerts were reported by caregivers to be beneficial. Furthermore, the integration of color-coding calendar events and routines in an intuitive interface allows multiple users to review the contextual events correlated to stress responses with minimal training. Wear tolerance, a challenging human factor common in ASD, can be addressed through behavioral shaping protocols. The hardware form factor was not amenable to this population due impulsive behaviors including pulling on the device to remove it, causing hardware damage. Exposure to water during handwashing was another challenge in hardware. These concerns are being revised in future versions of hardware. This system can also benefit other healthcare populations, such as patients with anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder or any other condition for which understanding patterns of stress offers improved health outcomes.

Calendaring and alarms can improve naturalistic time-based prospective memory for youth infected with HIV

ABSTRACTIndividuals with HIV disease often evidence deficits in prospective memory (PM), which interfere with daily functioning and increase the risk of suboptimal health behaviours. This study examined the benefits of simple encoding and cueing supports on naturalistic time-based PM in 47 HIV-positive young adults. All participants completed a naturalistic time-based PM task in which they were instructed to text the examiner once per day for seven days at a specified time. Participants were randomised into (1) a Calendaring condition in which they created a calendar event in their mobile telephone for the specified texting time; (2) an Alarm condition in which they programmed an alarm into their mobile telephone for the specified texting time; (3) a Combined calendaring and alarm condition; and (4) a Control condition. Participants in the Combined condition demonstrated significantly better naturalistic PM performance than participants in the Control and Calendaring conditions. Findings indicate that HIV-positive young people may benefit from a combined calendaring and alarm supportive strategy for successful execution of future intentions in daily life.

Preterm Birth as a Calendar Event or Immunologic Anomaly.

Preterm Birth as a Calendar Event or Immunologic Anomaly.

Towards New Ambient Light Systems: a Close Look at Existing Encodings of Ambient Light Systems

Ambient systems provide information in the periphery of a user’s attention. Their aim is to present information as unobtrusively as possible to avoid interrupting primary tasks (e.g. writing or reading). In recent years, light has been used to create ambient systems to display information. Examples of ambient light systems range from simple notification systems such as displaying messages or calendar event reminders, to more complex systems such as focusing on conveying information regarding health activity tracking. However, for ambient light systems, there is a broad design space that lacks guidelines on when to make use of light displays and how to design them. In this paper we provide a systematic overview of existing ambient light systems over four identified information classes derived from 72 existing ambient light systems. The most prominent encoding parameters among the surveyed ambient light systems are color, brightness, and their combination. By analyzing existing ambient light systems, we provide a first step towards developing guidelines for designing future ambient light systems

The advantages of using quarterly returns for long-term event studies

The main purpose of this paper is to explore the low power and methodological problems as they continue to plague long-term event study research. We investigate long-term tests (up to 2 years) performed on non-overlapping quarterly time frames as a solution. Components of commonly employed characteristic-based matching processes are examined as the source of low power. Single “best” matching firms don’t statistically match their event firms at the time of the event and are vastly inferior to matching with portfolios. A modified market mean method which uses the securities continuously traded during the calendar event period, is shown to be well specified, have comparable power and avoid the costs of more complex matching methodologies. Contrary to popular perception, increased power derives from the decreased variance in comparison returns; not from an increased covariance between comparison firm returns and event firm returns. The tests are easy to implement, well-specified and have higher power when based on quarterly versus monthly data.

Narrating the Past??New Year of the Trees? Celebrations in Modern Israel

At the beginning of the 20th century, the secularly oriented Zionist movement adopted a marginal calendar event from the traditional Jewish cycle year ('Tu B'Shvat, the New Year of the Trees'), and turned it into the secular Festival of Trees. Its celebration was marked by a new nation-wide ritual: planting young trees on barren lands. This ritual accurately fitted the Zionist Narrative of returning the degraded Land of Israel to its former flourishing glory as the Biblical 'Land of Milk and Honey', and was presented as such. In the 1970s, another ritual was introduced in addition to and often substituting for tree planting. The Seder Tu B'Shvat, a festive repast of fruits and wine accompanied by songs and readings, was a secular adaptation of a controversial mystical treatise from the 18th century based on Kabbalistic symbolism. This paper examines the nature and functions of the new narratives formulated in the past twenty-five years which accompany the expansion of this ritual amongst secular Jews.

Narrating the Past-- &amp;quot;New Year of the Trees&amp;quot; Celebrations in Modern Israel

At the beginning of the 20th century, the secularly oriented Zionist movement adopted a marginal calendar event from the traditional Jewish cycle year ('Tu B'Shvat, the New Year of the Trees'), and turned it into the secular "Festival of Trees". Its celebration was marked by a new nation-wide ritual: planting young trees on barren lands. This ritual accurately fitted the Zionist Narrative of returning the degraded Land of Israel to its former flourishing glory as the Biblical 'Land of Milk and Honey', and was presented as such. In the 1970s, another ritual was introduced in addition to and often substituting for tree planting. The Seder Tu B'Shvat, a festive repast of fruits and wine accompanied by songs and readings, was a secular adaptation of a controversial mystical treatise from the 18th century based on Kabbalistic symbolism. This paper examines the nature and functions of the new narratives formulated in the past twenty-five years which accompany the expansion of this ritual amongst secular Jews.

Open Calendar Sharing and Scheduling with CalDAV

Building on a decade of work on calendar standards, the CalDAV protocol promises to unlock the potential of widespread calendar interoperability. It permits calendar sharing over the Web and reduces the coordination cost of scheduling meetings across and within organizational boundaries. The protocol extends the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) protocol-itself, a simple extension of HTTP- to provide services for calendar maintenance, queries, event scheduling, and security.

A note on shuffled financial surrogates

We revise the method of shuffled surrogate data for financial time series. We take into account calendar effects such as the day-of-the-week and the holiday effect. More precisely, we shuffle the data that belong to a particular calendar event separately from the other data. Our modification keeps these calendar effects unchanged for the shuffled surrogate time series. As a consequence, the shuffled surrogate data preserve not only the distribution of the original data. but also the distribution of the calendar effects. Empirical results are presented based on the returns of the Nasdaq Composite index, and the General Index of the Athens Stock Exchange. Significant differences are observed between the ordinary and the proposed method.

Extensions and Applications of Event Charts

Event charts, which are used to track and plot timed events at the individual level, are highly effective for presenting multiple time-to-event data, can serve as valuable data-monitoring tools, and can be used to supplement conventional survival plots. Depending on the information chosen and the format to be plotted, commonly used event charts are classified as calendar, interval, or Goldman event charts. A very flexible S-Plus routine was developed for drawing standard event charts and for providing many extensions, such as sorting, subsetting, alignment, and multiple point and line formats, to facilitate the graphical data presentation. If used appropriately, these extensions are useful for revealing the correlation between covariates and multiple events. For example, they can be set up so that a continuous time-invariant covariate such as age of diagnosis is plotted on the y axis, and multiple timed events are plotted on the x axis. They can also be set up so that discrete time-invariant covariates such as the treatment arm are sorted and characterized using different line formats (line type, width, and color). In addition, discrete time-varying covariates can be shown by changing the line formats between line segments. The strengths and weaknesses of various event charts and their applications are shown using examples ranging from historical cohort studies to randomized clinical trials.

The Future of Applied Sedimentary Geology

The turn of the millenium is for many of us an occasion to pause and consult the crystal ball. Sedimentary geologists have added incentive to do so because the calendar event coincides with a profound change in what one may call our professional hinterland, the part of society that requires our expertise and offers jobs. Sedimentary geology and its sister, paleontology, originated as historical sciences, dedicated to the study of the sediment record as a history book of the evolution of life and the changing environments at the Earth's surface. To this day, deciphering earth history remains a principal task of sedimentary geology and a source of major scientific contributions. However, increased quantitative understanding of geologic systems and societal demand have established prediction besides description as an increasingly important part of the natural sciences. Earth scientists are expected to deliver predictions of two sorts—prediction in the space domain, notably the inaccessible subsurface, and prediction in the time domain, the future behavior of the solid earth and its fluid envelopes. Sedimentary geologists are involved in both types of prediction. Exploring for resources such as petroleum, metallic ores, or drinking water as well as determining the spread of underground pollution requires mainly prediction in space. Predicting oceanic and atmospheric climate constitutes the principal task in the time domain. Prediction in time also includes catastrophic changes related to energy bursts of the solid Earth, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or landslides. As is typical for the natural sciences, work in sedimentary geology spans the full range from pure, curiosity-driven research to applied research driven by the demand of economies. Both pure and applied research may be relevant for society and may make fundamental contributions to knowledge. I will first discuss major challenges in pure research and then make a tour of the horizon …

First Memories Seem Quite Complete but When the Event Happened is Recalled Least Frequently

A first memory of 88 students appeared quite complete, containing information about what happened and where, with reference to self and others. Least frequently mentioned was when the recalled event happened, either in terms of calendar time or context-setting event, whereas the latter was least frequently added upon request for further information, including about when the event happened. Conceivably, when something was learned may not be relevant for its use in interpreting later situations.