Perpetual Presence Research Articles

Matthew 28:16-20 - Hermeneutical Key to the Gospel of Matthew

This study analyses Matthew 28:16-20 as the hermeneutical key to the Gospel of Matthew. The text contains a narrative part about the eleven disciples meeting the risen Jesus in Galilee (vv. 16-17) and Jesus' final words commissioning them to evangelize all nations (vv. 18-20). The location of Galilee symbolizes openness to the Gentiles, fulfilling Old Testament prophecy. The mountain setting represents an encounter with God, as in other key moments of Jesus' ministry. The disciples' worship yet doubt (v. 17) shows imperfect faith, inviting readers to mature belief. Jesus claims absolute, cosmic authority from God (v. 18) as the basis for commissioning the disciples to “make disciples of all nations” through baptism and teaching (vv. 19-20). This universal mission corrects earlier limitations only to Israel. Teaching them to obey Christ's commands grounds the mission in Jesus' ethical demands. His perpetual presence (v. 20) assures guidance despite uncertainty. Thus, the text presents a mission paradigm for readers: Christ – centred proclamation for God's kingdom, not power; fidelity to Jesus' original disciples; invitation to internalize divine daughterhood; and responsibility to embody values commanded by Jesus. This call for active discipleship awaiting the Parousia proposes to resolve doubt into faith. Keywords: hermeneutical key, Galilee, mission, disciples, nations, baptism, teaching, presence, discipleship

Unsettling Arts of Extinction in Henrietta Rose-Innes' Green Lion

Henrietta Rose-Innes' novel Green Lion illuminates how art participates in human-animal relationships and impacts the lives and deaths of animals. As it narrates the demise of the Cape lion, the novel reveals the continuing influence of settler-capitalist ideologies and practices of preservation on representations of and responses to lions. This essay explores Rose-Innes' turn to taxidermy as inspiration for both the form and content of her novel, arguing that she crafts a work that resonates with new taxidermy in visual arts as she deploys narrative strategies that expose the consequences of images that neglect nonhuman life worlds and conceal death to offer consoling illusions of perpetual presence. Rather than recovering stories of lost animal worlds, Green Lion repositions animal images within histories of multispecies entanglements, exemplifying how literary texts can reframe animal lives and deaths to confront feelings of grief and guilt and reckon with legacies of settler-capitalism that have been obscured by images of timeless nature.

The HDM allergen orchestra and its cysteine protease maestro: Stimulators of kaleidoscopic innate immune responses

House dust mite (HDM) encloses an explosive cocktail of allergenic proteins sensitizing hundreds of millions of people worldwide. To date, the innate cellular and molecular mechanism(s) orchestrating the HDM-induced allergic inflammation remains partially deciphered. Understanding the kaleidoscope of HDM-induced innate immune responses is hampered by (1) the large complexity of the HDM allergome with very diverse functional bioreactivities, (2) the perpetual presence of microbial compounds (at least LPS, β-glucan, chitin) promoting as well pro-Th2 innate signaling pathways and (3) multiple cross-talks involving structural, neuronal and immune cells. The present review provides an update on the innate immune properties, identified so far, of multiple HDM allergen groups. Experimental evidence highlights the importance of HDM allergens displaying protease or lipid-binding activities on the initiation of the allergic responses. Specifically, group 1 HDM cysteine proteases are considered as the key initiators of the allergic response through their capacities to impair the epithelial barrier integrity, to stimulate the release of pro-Th2 danger-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) in epithelial cells, to produce super-active forms of IL-33 alarmin and to mature thrombin leading to Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) activation. Remarkably, the recently evidenced primary sensing of cysteine protease allergens by nociceptive neurons confirms the critical role of this HDM allergen group in the early events leading to Th2 differentiation.

Hyperparameter Optimization of Ensemble Models for Spam Email Detection

Unsolicited emails, popularly referred to as spam, have remained one of the biggest threats to cybersecurity globally. More than half of the emails sent in 2021 were spam, resulting in huge financial losses. The tenacity and perpetual presence of the adversary, the spammer, has necessitated the need for improved efforts at filtering spam. This study, therefore, developed baseline models of random forest and extreme gradient boost (XGBoost) ensemble algorithms for the detection and classification of spam emails using the Enron1 dataset. The developed ensemble models were then optimized using the grid-search cross-validation technique to search the hyperparameter space for optimal hyperparameter values. The performance of the baseline (un-tuned) and the tuned models of both algorithms were evaluated and compared. The impact of hyperparameter tuning on both models was also examined. The findings of the experimental study revealed that the hyperparameter tuning improved the performance of both models when compared with the baseline models. The tuned RF and XGBoost models achieved an accuracy of 97.78% and 98.09%, a sensitivity of 98.44% and 98.84%, and an F1 score of 97.85% and 98.16%, respectively. The XGBoost model outperformed the random forest model. The developed XGBoost model is effective and efficient for spam email detection.

JURIDICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ISRAEL AND GIBEONITES’ TREATY IN JOSHUA 9:3-27: HONOURING ONE’S PROMISE

Concluding a treaty should lead to the realization of the existence of God as the absolute Being to whom all vows and promises are made. It should also promote human values, especially faithfulness, and trust. However, this goal is farfetched. Nowadays, it remains difficult to know which principles and values humanity still holds on to because of the constant breaking of vows and promises. The Gibeonites’ ruse shows human deception to honor its promises, and this endangers human society and its values. The failure to honor the promises threatens human society, for it brings about a lack of confidence and trust. Joshua’s faithfulness to the treaty calls for human faithfulness to its life commitment that promotes human and divine values. Faithfulness to treaties leads to the finding and confirmation of God’s perpetual presence and actions in human life. The paper calls on humanity to honor its promises and vows as a way of building a better human society grounded in faithfulness and confidence.

Rents, Experiments, and the Perpetual Presence of Concessionary Weather Insurance

Geographers have interpreted the rise of weather insurance for small agricultural producers as emblematic of financialization’s inexorable march to capitalize the countryside. Yet this market has proved far less successful than advocates hoped or critics feared. Rather than a speculative tool for surplus extraction from smallholders or a mechanism for their financial subjectification, this article reinterprets weather insurance as an infrastructure of concessionary transfers from the development sector to make market-mediated mechanisms work. These transfers are emblematic of the new distributional terms struck between donors, states, and insurance capital as financial risk transfer is articulated with the extension of fragmentary safety nets. Economic field experiments with insurance have proliferated as venues in which the value of insurance is tested by both economists and experimenting subjects. Just as data from these trials have suggested some positive welfare impacts, they have also indicated target clients are unwilling or unable to pay full market price, thus performing a new justification for the perpetual presence of subsidies. Such transfers present opportunities for reinsurers to command rents through their control of large pools of capital and their interpretive authority over techniques for pricing risk under uncertainty. In a changing climate, reinsurers are poised to collect larger rents from donors’ and governments’ premium subsidies meant to decrease insurance costs for the vulnerable. These dynamics of rent cycling underscore the urgency of building more equitable, systematic risk-sharing infrastructures to replace the current fragmentary archipelagos of weather insurance.

Understanding the spatiotemporal pollution dynamics of highly fragile montane watersheds of Kashmir Himalaya, India

Pollution of riverine ecosystems through the multidimensional impact of human footprints around the world poses a serious challenge. Research studies that communicate potential repercussions of landscape structure metrics on snowmelt riverine water quality particularly, in climatically fragile Himalayan watersheds are very scarce. Though, worldwide, grasping the influence of land-use practices on water quality (WQ) has received renewed attention yet, the relevance of spatial scale linked to landscape pattern is still elusive due to its heterogenic nature across diverse geomorphic regions. In this work, therefore, we tried to capture the insights on landscape-aquascape interface by juxtapositioning the impacts of landscape structure pattern on snowmelt stream WQ of the whole Jhelum River Basin (JRB) under three varying spatial scales viz., watershed scale, riparian corridor (1000 m wide) and reach buffer (500 m wide). The percentage of landscape pattern composition and configuration metrics in the JRB were computed in GIS utilizing Landsat-8 OLI/TIRS satellite image having 30 m resolution. To better explicate the influence of land-use metrics on riverine WQ with space and time, we used Redundancy analysis (RDA) and multilinear regression (MLR) modeling. MLR selected land-use structure metrics revealed the varied response of WQ parameters to multi-scale factors except for total faecal coliform bacteria (TC) which showed perpetual presence. The reach-scale explained slightly better (76%) variations in WQ than riparian (75%) and watershed (70%) scales. Likewise, across seasonal scale, autumn (75%), winter (83%), and summer (77%) captured the most WQ variation at catchment, riparian, and reach scales respectively. We observed impairing WQ linkages with agriculture, built-up and barren rocky areas across watersheds, besides, pastures in riparian buffer areas, and fragmentation of landscape patches at the reach scale. Due to little appearance of spatial scale differences, a multi scale perspective landscape planning is emphasized to ensure future sustainability of Kashmir Himalayan water resources.

Animal Voices: Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective and the Crimes of Animality

While previous readings of Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ series The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective (1894) have focused on Brooke’s status as New Woman detective, this article considers the series in the context of Pirkis’ own engagement with animal rights and anti-vivisection campaigns in the late nineteenth century. The discussion focuses on one Loveday Brooke story in particular, “The Murder at Troyte’s Hill,” arguing that Pirkis dramatises contemporary anti-vivisectionist rhetoric (that animal experimentation was not only scientifically flawed, but morally damaging, leading to human experimentation). Pirkis’ fiction instead presents a number of contact zones in which human and animal identities are renegotiated, most significantly in the figure of Loveday Brooke herself. The article considers the representation of comparative philology in the story, as an emerging linguistic science which raised anxieties of cultural dissolution and which was often associated with the image of the vivisector. It concludes that the Pirkis stories demonstrate, anticipating Derrida, that to write of the animal in the nineteenth century is inevitably to write about crime, and vice versa; the animal is a perpetual presence in Victorian detective fiction.

Changelings: alterity beyond difference

Drawing on historical and ethnographic data from Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, as well as data from contemporary Chile, this talk explores the phenomenon of changelings. Changelings are cuckoo-like imposters, left in the place of humans abducted by fairy captors, and identical in almost all aspects to the humans they have displaced. Yet small indices of difference – voracious appetite, rapid ageing, and fear of fire and iron – lead kin to suspect that the people in their midst might not be whom they seem. What intrigues me, however, is that not just difference, but similarity too, comes to index alterity in surprising ways. The question then becomes not just an epistemological one of how we can know others, but an ontological one of what kinds of others do we think we know. This shifting configuration of similarity and difference within the changeling encounter reveal a micropolitics of alterity that I suggest resonates beyond the historical and folkloric record to find parallels in contemporary debates about kinship. In particular, the perpetual presence of alterity within the kinship relation might lead to a reconsideration of Marshall Sahlins’ recent insistence upon ‘mutuality of being’ as the essence of ‘what kinship is.’

The Duce on the Screen: The image of Mussolini in the newsreels of the Istituto Luce

Abstract The article begins with an introduction that highlights the uniqueness of the newsreels produced by the Istituto Luce, and underlines their peculiarity of being a fundamental tool of propaganda in advertising the image and aura of the Duce. It also shows that they anticipated some of the most crucial propaganda strategies that emerged from the study of Sigfried Kracauer on the aesthetics of the Nazi Newsreels produced after 1933. The article is an analysis of a selection of images of the Duce extracted from the Istituto Luce newsreels filmed during the period 1928–1932, and will be particularly focused on productions filmed during the reclamation of the marshes in Tuscany and the construction of Littoria in Lazio. The argument made in the article is that the Luce skilfully used the newsreels to build the myth of the Duce as the founder of the new Italy and the embodiment of the new Fascist man, placing the body of Mussolini, his words and his perpetual presence at the centre of the newsreels narrative in order to dominate the Italian cinema screens.

Telling the Nation: A Postmodernist Reading of Tanure Ojaide’s God’s Medicine-Men and Other Stories

Postmodernist reasoning signifies a move from traditional viewpoint to an accelerated technological terrain, the implication of this diversion is noticeable in the eclectic nature of life in contemporary society; all things become a continual flickering without any recognizable or perpetual presence. As a literary concept, postmodernism fashions the problematic landscape for the appreciation of the disordered nature of the world as it focuses on the dismantling of traditional values and affirmation of a fragmented society. Postmodernism, with its subtle emphasis on capitalism, has greatly exacerbated the post-colonial tendencies in Tanure Ojaide’s God’s Medicine-Men and Other Stories as money becomes a recurrent motif and a chief signifier. The stories underpin the overarching effect of cultural materialism, individuals and the society as everyone is caught in its web; these stories could also be read as the author’s depiction of a society that is going through a cultural flux.

The Comings and Goings of the Son of Man

Matthew’s eschatological schema presents difficult narrative puzzles, not least of which is the paradox between a ‘coming Son of Man’ who is assumed to be absent from earth in the present, and a risen Jesus who promises perpetual presence ‘until the end of the age’ (28.20). A suggestion of G.B. Caird will be explored using a narrative-critical approach that focuses especially on Matthew’s interests in divine presence, mountains and the significance of the Jerusalem Temple. It will be argued that the Matthean παρουσία may be read not so much as a ‘second coming’ but as a more continuous statement of presence from the cross and resurrection onwards. This places the ‘Son of Man’ as a narrative symbol of mediation between heaven and earth, in the clouds, on the final mountain-top, ‘until the end of the age’. It is suggested that this can be seen as part of Matthew’s theodicy for the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce.

Enhancing the Perceived Value of Mobile Marketing. a Romanian Case Study

ABSTRACT. The increasingly presence of mobile marketing and mobile advertising is attracting both customers and marketers to a new dimension of business communication. Even though the adoption rates are high, the value of mobile marketing from a customers' perspective is hard to specify, as it is dependent on the features of the mobile instrument, the predominant traits of the customer and their attitudes towards the advertised product or service. The purpose of this article is to establish how the value of mobile marketing services is perceived by users with different demographic characteristics. For this purpose, an online study was conducted with more than 500 participants.JEL Classification: M31, M37, A13, O33Keywords: mobile marketing, consumer behaviour perceived valueIntroduction to mobile marketing and its perceived valueMobile marketing is the newest marketing form that enables business entities to use mobile phones as an ultimate marketing vehicle, thus establishing a perpetual presence in the life of their customers, anytime, anywhere (Varnali, Toker, 2010). Although mobile marketing and mobile advertising are still in their infancy stage (Soroa-Koury, Yang, 2010), they are becoming a feasible marketing channel for interested marketers and advertisers (Mobile Marketing Association, 2007), providing the fact that mobile campaigns are successful only when they are not intrusive (Andrews, 2006). More than having unprecedented opportunities in building and fostering customer relationships (Varnali, Toker, 2010), the personal nature of the mobile instruments suggest that there is a strong compatibility between a customer's own values and a lifestyle involving mobile marketing services (Roach, 2009).The mobile media can offer added value that is based on the distinctive features of mobile devices, such as always with the user, always on and always connected (Varnali, Toker, 2010). By underlining the personal use of mobile devices, companies can consequently credit the gained information to a single user (Cleff, 2008). Through shifting individualized marketing communication in the focus of the strategic considerations of the company (Tripathi, Mittal, 2008), these can provide individual customized products, services and communication messages to every unique (potential) client (Tripathi, Mittal, 2008). A bidirectional, one-on-one communication with every single consumer tends to build a strong level of trust and commitment between companies and its individual clients, allowing for a rise in perceived utility and value of a company. Since consumer perceived value is the ultimately goal of business entities, there is a deep need to understand what elements and features of the mobile medium can provide value from a consumer's point of view (Varnali, Toker, 2010).Is has been suggested (Pura, 2005) that commitment and perceived value can be leveraged by offering emotional and fun experience in the right context and although a consumer may not intentionally seek emotional benefits during a consumption experience (Yang, Jolly, 2009), positive emotions play an important role on a subliminal level when thinking of further acquisition making processes. Trust in the marketer has been found to have a positive influence on the attitude towards mobile marketing and advertising (Karjaluoto, Lehto, et al., 2008), but adoption of mobile marketing depends both on the perceived utilitarian value and hedonic value (Bauer et al., 2007; Kleijnen, Ruyter, & Wetzels, 2007) of its provided services. Although it was supported that hedonic value has a stronger influence than utilitarian value when building attitudes towards mobile marketing (Bruner & Kumar, 2005), additional results (Kim & Hwang, 2006) show that higher level of maturity consumers have a tendency to more utilitarian values, while lower maturity level consumers tend to exhibit more hedonic value seeking.Despite the fact that value dimensions vary in number and type, most of them including utilitarian, hedonic, social and monetary value (Gummerus, Pihlstrom, 2011), the importance and co-existence of emotional and functional values were demonstrated on many mobile marketing instruments, such as mobile internet (Kim et al. …

Review essay: Imagining our selves: another step for sf film-philosophy

Imagining our selves: another step for sf film-philosophy Greg Singh Steven M. Sanders, ed., The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2008. 232 pp. us$35.00 (hbk).Questions about space, place, time and that thing we tend to refer to as 'me' stir the imagination in myriad ways. Sf film is a powerfully expressive framework for the imagination, and philosophising can be understood as the exercise of imagination through method. Sf film is often concerned with the nature of humanity, what it is to be a human and what it means to be a particular human - themes fundamental to the genre and to philosophy, both of which also pose generative and enabling 'what if?' questions. The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film contributes towards an understanding of how sf provides materials for philosophical thinking. In this sense, the book is a useful, original and focused intervention in film studies that partakes of the more general academic movement towards the development of an interdisciplinary film-philosophy.Steven M. Sanders' introduction indicates that there is a general consensus among his contributors as to what constitutes sf (and, by extension, sf film and television), and the essays take a rather canonical approach to the genre. There is not much in the way of thinking through a philosophy of genre: as a classificatory or taxonomic system; as a phenomenon of expectation and recognition for various stakeholder groups (producers, consumers, critics, publishers and so on); or genre's relationship to time and personal identity (as found in, for example, fan cultures). For example, while Sanders' contribution indicates the noirish conventions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Siegel US 1956) and Deborah Knight and George McKnight's essay acknowledges the noirishness of Blade Runner (Scott US/Hong Kong 1982) and Dark City (Proyas Australia/ US 1998), they go no further than that. Sanders's introduction, itself surprisingly critical in its evaluation of the rest of the contents, implies an all-too-easy delimitation of Hollywood history, its periods and tropes, particularly in relation to the idea of an sf genre. An essay on the philosophical implications (and paradoxes) of intertextuality, for example, would have provided the opportun- ity to unpack the periodisation tendencies in film history and historiography, allowing a more organic relationship to emerge between genre, time and the political economics of industrial sf filmmaking.Knight and McKnight focus on the connections between memories, emotions and desires in Dark City and Blade Runner as fundamental to the understanding of character motivation through sense of self. The question that popular criticism most consistently asks of the latter film is: is Deckard an android? If so, his memories are implanted and are not his own. Yet this does not stop him from being a reasoning, wilful subject, nor a desiring one. The logic here is sound, even as several of the premises ostensibly offered by popular commentary on the film come unstuck: Deckard might as well be an android, stuck as he seems to be, in a perpetual present. After all, Deckard's alienation is an archetypical form of alienation, directly following Jean-Jacques Rousseau and G.W.F. Hegel as a discrepancy between his own sense of being (he suspects that he may actually be a replicant) and his existence as a replicant exterminator. As Sanders points out, however, such a state of perpetual presence would make relationships impossible to sustain over time: the psychoid nature of perpetual presence is matched by what Giuliana Bruno describes as the 'schizoid' nature of Blade Runner's Los Angeles, a 'ramble city' or postmodern patchwork of memories from different pasts that could not possibly have co-existed (and yet here they are in modern LA).Shai Biderman's discussion of personhood and identity over time in Total Recall (Verhoeven US 1990) is an example of how to philosophise concisely and economically, without cheapening the line of enquiry or talking down to the non-specialist reader. …

Semiotics of art, life, and thought: Three scenarios for (post)modernity

It is difficult to make sense of the notion of postmodernity, because “modernity” is clearly a shifter, in the sense of Jespersen and Jakobson: a term dependent for its meaning on its moment of enunciation. It is true that, from the Middle Ages onwards, several meanings of modernity have received an objectified reference. But in the arts, particularly in the visual arts, this is not true. Modernity has been defined as the ever-new transgression of norms established by the period coming immediately before. In another sense, modernity is connected to urbanity, as it first took place (or at least was observed) in the coffeehouses of the seventeenth century and the boulevards of the nineteenth century. This meant a close connection of individuals having nothing to do with each other from the point of view of family relationships. At the same time as this concept of modernity is overhauled by the perpetual presence of the mobile phones, it is confirmed and extended by the Internet. A third kind of modernity, perhaps closely connected to the second one ( but essentially opposed to the first kind) is that of thinking, as initiated during the Enlightenment, striving to go beyond the divergent doxa of different cultures to some kind of rational understanding. Taking into account the standing of rationality in the history of humanity, postmodern philosophy really amounts to some kind of mobbing of the poorest and most feeble members of the crowd.

The Vengeful Logic of Modern Criminal Restitution

Restitution, a perpetual presence in the life of the law, dwells on the margins of our modern legal landscape, and invokes a pre-legal moment in which injured parties bore the responsibility-or the privilege of themselves remedying the harms committed against them. This article explores the criminal sanction of restitution, and particularly restitution's surprising relationship with revenge. Rather than regarding bloodlust and the desire to cause suffering in those who first made us suffer as revenge's sine qua non, I argue that just as essential to revenge is a nostalgia for a prehistorical and prelegal time in which being wronged was an occasion not for recourse to the law, but for action. The article examines two distinct but related sites of restitutive justice within the contemporary criminal justice system where this fantasy of agency plays out. First turning to the victims'rights movement, observing that the movement has become ossified in a punitive logic that belies its pretensions toward a victim centered paradigm, the article then looks at the kinder, gentler restorative justice movement, which values rehabilitation and reintegration but is motivated as well by a vengeful impulse. The place of restitution in these movements emerges as the instantiation of a doubled fantasy of return to a state of equilibrium: on a leveled playing field occupied by wrongdoer and wronged, liberated from law's domination, a struggle between equals can result in the natural justice of a wrong repaid. This fantasy is born of nostalgia for an economy of revenge that exists only as an illusory ideal of agency vis-a`-vis those who wrong us, forever (or at least for now) kept at arm's distance by virtue of its institutionalization within a state that seeks to preserve its monopoly on force.

A narrative study of nursing art in critical care.

The purpose of this study was to describe nursing art from the perspective of patients who had been nursed in a critical care unit. The study pursued two objectives: (a) to generate stories of occasions in which nursing was considered art in a critical care setting and (b) to describe the meanings made manifest in those stories. Using a narrative inquiry, 10 persons were interviewed twice for the purpose of answering the research question. Stories were generated in open-ended interviews, tape recorded, and analyzed by the primary researcher using Van Manen's hermeneutic phenomenological framework. Five themes were found to represent critically ill persons' experience of nursing art: (a) perpetual presence, (b) knowing the other, (c) intimacy and agony, (d) deep detail, and (e) honoring the body. The stories cultivated a human face and contextual detail for the abstract holistic concept of nursing art.

Words Written and Words Inspired: More and Sola Scriptura

The main features of More’s position on Luther’s doctrine of evident scripture and Tyndale’s deployment of it are familiar to students of More’s controversial works: adherence to scripture alone defies the gospel promise of Christ’s perpetual presence in the Church; it defies the Church’s authority, and it renounces the prophecy in Jeremiah 31:33 of a new covenant to be written not in books but in men’s hearts. These assertions appear repeatedly in the Responsio ad Lutherum, A Dialogue concerning Heresies, and The Apology. However, in The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer More appealed to one further dimension of orthodoxy’s position with regard to scriptural authority: asserting the authority of the specfically unwritten character of the new covenant, he argued that it displaced the written character of the law. Tyndale, in his adherence to sola scripture, More found, could thus be represented as defying the gospel covenant.

Christ's Confidence in His Perpetual Presence

Christ's Confidence in His Perpetual Presence