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Species-habitat associations are correlative, can be quantified, and used for powerful inference. Nowadays, Species Distribution Models (SDMs) play a big role, e.g. using Machine Learning and AI algorithms, but their best-available technical opportunities remain still not used for their potential e.g. in the policy sector. Here we present Super SDMs that invoke ML, OA Big Data, and the Cloud with a workflow for the best-possible inference for the 300 + global squirrel species. Such global Big Data models are especially important for the many marginalized squirrel species and the high number of endangered and data-deficient species in the world, specifically in tropical regions. While our work shows common issues with SDMs and the maxent algorithm ('Shallow Learning'), here we present a multi-species Big Data SDM template for subsequent ensemble models and generic progress to tackle global species hotspot and coldspot assessments for a more inclusive and holistic inference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of a more extensive research work on the oracular system of the snail [Mones 2022]. The article, as a part of a previous work, it is expressly dedicated to the review of the postulates of some authors on certain categories used in the analysis of the religious system of the Regla de Ocha. In order to structurally analyze the ritual system, it is necessary to examine the link of its main categories with the oracle, as well as with the concept of person managed within the ritual system. This proposal is aimed exclusively at bibliographic analysis and dialogue with these authors. Which was revealed fundamental for the development of fieldwork, reflected in the original research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methods of data transfer from the Oracle environment to the PostgreSQL environment with stage-by-stage organization of actions and determination of the sequence of migration are considered. The main directions for the transformation of the structure of databases, data formats and executed objects are identified. Methods for converting stored procedures and triggers written in procedural languages (PL/SQL and PL/pgSQL) are specified. Software change on nodes directly connected (associated) with the database server and minimization of downtimes during migration are considered, which allows the transfer to be performed for geographically distributed and round-the-clock functioning objects. Examples of changing the speed of query execution before and after migration are given for systems of various types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land administration systems are being modernised to streamline the cadastral data lodgement. However, in many jurisdictions, cadastral data are still stored as a flat file. This method of data storage has significant limitations in terms of effective access, management, query, and analysis of cadastral data. Therefore, this study elicited the requirements and proposed an approach to automate the cadastral data storage. The proposed approach was successfully implemented within the land registry organisation in Victoria, Australia and the database management system was rigorously tested. The outcomes can potentially contribute to the implementation of a similar data storage infrastructure in other jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Te'omim Cave is a large karst cave located in the Jerusalem Hills. Since 2009, the cave has been explored by our team as a joint project of the Martin (Szusz) Department of Land of Israel Studies and Archaeology at Bar-Ilan University and the Cave Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Over 120 intact oil lamps were collected in the 2010–2016 survey seasons from all sections of the cave; most of them were dated to the second to fourth centuries CE. All of these lamps had been deliberately inserted in narrow, deep crevices in the main chamber walls or beneath the rubble. Some crevices contained groups of oil lamps mixed with weapons and pottery vessels from earlier periods or placed with human skulls. This article discusses the possibility that the oil lamps, weapons, human skulls, and other artifacts were used as part of necromancy ceremonies that took place in the cave during the Late Roman period, and that the cave may have served as a local oracle (nekyomanteion). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This article undertakes a rhetorical reading of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s “The Path of the Law” (1897), attending particularly to Holmes’s use of the trope of the “oracle” in his legal philosophy to show how Holmes utilizes this figure to interrogate the Anglo-American legal tradition and to articulate his own, new understanding of the task of the law. For Holmes, lawyers reading the “sibylline leaves” of the common law will inevitably make imperfect predictions about how judges will rule a case. In contrast, Holmes suggests that lawyers should be able to make predictions with the same degree of reliability as scientific hypotheses based on the laws of physics. Similarly, Holmes argues that laws should be considered in terms of desired ends, rather than precedent and tradition, and assessed using the new quantitative social science of statistics. Thus, by turning “prophecy” into a figure of rationality, Holmes calls for a radical reinvention of the law as scientifically based and oriented towards the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Polaire Brotherhood (La Fraternité polaire) was an occult society active in interwar Paris. Some of the important names of the French occult scene of the period were among its members. According to the reports in the bulletin of the society, there was also a branch operating in Belgrade in the 1930s. However, this has not previously been confirmed. Archive materials used for this paper attest to the existence of the Belgrade group for the first time. Its most important figure was Ksenija Atanasijević (1894–1981), a prominent philosopher. Therefore, attention is also paid to her involvement with Theosophy and co-masonry and the place of esotericism in her work. The activity of the group reminded of the Theosophical—it included meetings, lectures and meditations. They were also familiar with The Oracle of Astral Force (the Fraternité's key method). The existence of a branch of the French brotherhood in this period can be understood in the context of the French-Serbian cultural relations. This interest in the "alternative" helps us get a better understanding of the history of Serbian intellectuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decentralized finance (DeFi) is by far the most popular application of blockchain technology. Despite the wide acceptance of new financial instruments and services, there are still many unexplored areas in the field. We dedicate this research to the understanding of one of the most crucial limitations of decentralized finance—oracles. DeFi protocols, as well as other blockchain applications, function in a closed environment and regularly need to fetch real-world information (e.g., assets' prices)—the tool used for this purpose is called an oracle. We review the existing oracle types in DeFi applications and focus our research on the least explored one: when another protocol, typically a decentralized exchange, serves as a price oracle. After explaining the mechanisms behind the decentralized exchanges, we introduce an algorithmic model that allows one to safely design a decentralized oracle and adjust crucial parameters. We believe that understanding and implementing the logic presented in the model can help to reduce the chances of price manipulations attacks, which are the most frequent incident types in DeFi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, a number of traditional Chinese stories, from the 8th to the 18th century, are considered both for their use of coincidences and for the strong sense of fate or destiny that is very much evident in their plots. The elaborate use of coincidences to support an unfolding destiny is particularly well demonstrated in the 'The Oil Peddler and the Queen of Flowers'. Also included here is the detective novel, Dee Goong An, in which divination is used as a means for the Tang Dynasty detective, Judge Dee, to track down important criminals. The book was translated into English by the Dutch sinologist Robert van Gulik, who later became famous for writing his own Judge Dee detective stories. Some of the differences between the 18th century original and van Gulik's own murder mysteries are introduced here--hence the reference in the title of this essay to 'Chinese-influenced fiction'. One other example of Chinese-influenced fiction is included: Hermann Hesse's last great novel, The Glass Bead Game, in which the I Ching makes a small but significant contribution to the unfolding narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum search is one kind of the most important quantum algorithms, which is the only threat to postquantum cryptography till now. In this paper, we consider the problem of partial searching, where we are interested in part of the information of the item being searched. Then, we present the quantum partial search algorithm with smaller oracles, which reduces the difficulty of designing oracles without errors. The time complexity of this algorithm is smaller than that of the Grover search algorithm in practical instances. Furthermore, we present a punctuated version of the quantum partial search algorithm with smaller oracles to make the algorithm more practical by decreasing the number of iterations further. The punctuated algorithm could be running on several quantum computers in parallel. Taking these factors into consideration, the quantum partial search algorithm with smaller oracles for multiple target items is practical for running on a quantum computer and solving many real problems, such as the Hamiltonian circuit problem and solving systems of nonlinear equations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on observations in the Old Babylonian Mari letters, the Balaam inscription, Neo-Assyrian and ancient Greek oracles, the suspected long-term process of the emergence of Israelite prophetic writings is questioned despite the textual variants which are testified to especially in Qumran. Israelite prophets stuck with their lives to the reliability of the divine message, so they were anxious for their trustworthy messages to be written down. For actualizations and new contextualizations there was no need for any changes. As examples of how prophecies were written down I used Haggai, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jeremiah 49:38, the penultimate verse in the Bible's only prophecy against Elam, reads: "Then I shall set my throne in Elam and exterminate king and princes from there—declares YHWH." It is argued here that the verse has two plausible and quite different meanings, that it was designed to convey both, and that as such it is a deliberately ambiguous oracle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we design and analyse the Circuit for Grover's Quantum Search Algorithm on 2, 3 and 4-qubit systems, in terms of number of gates, representation of state vectors and measurement probability for the state vectors. We designed, examined and simulated the quantum circuit on IBM Q platform using Quantum Programming Studio. We present the theoretical implementation of the search algorithm on different qubit systems. We observe that our circuit design for 2 and 4-qubit systems are precise and do not introduce any error while experiencing a small error to our design of 3-qubit quantum system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the phenomenon of knowledge overload becomes more and more obvious, the automatic summarization technology still needs to break through the bottleneck in order to improve the application value and expand the scope of the application. Traditional training paradigms for extractive summarization systems suffer from the inconsistency in training and evaluation. In this paper, we propose an innovative and interpretable contrastive learning based framework for extractive summarization called DCDSum , which comprises a D iverse Oracle evaluator, a C ontrastive learning extractor, and a D ynamic Top-k selector. Different from previous models that consider the extractive summarization task as a sequence labeling problem, our contrastive learning extractor treats it as a sentence reranking problem and introduces contrastive loss to achieve it, which can bridge the gap between objective function and evaluation metrics. The experimental results demonstrate the outstanding performance of our approach on the CNN/DailyMail, XSum, and PubMed datasets, achieving highly competitive results. In particular, our method achieves ROUGE-1 of 44.65, ROUGE-2 of 21.32, and ROUGE-L of 40.87 on the CNN/DailyMail dataset. The outcomes across various evaluation metrics substantiate that the Diverse Oracle extraction algorithm adeptly captures a broader array of sentences with reduced redundancy, consequently enhancing the interpretability of the DCDSum framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the advancing world of blockchain technology, the paramount need for trustworthy oracles, the entities responsible for providing external data to blockchain’s smart contracts, is becoming more apparent. This paper introduces a novel protocol, the Persona Preserving Reputation Protocol (P2RP), which leverages Decentralized Identity (DID)-based reputation systems to maintain security and user privacy while ensuring the trustworthiness of blockchain oracles. Leveraging the innovative application of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs), we introduce a technique for forecasting and calculating the reputation scores of users, a crucial component within the P2RP protocol. The design of P2RP features four distinct account types with varying degrees of privacy and reputation characteristics. The simulation results suggest that the P2RP protocol can lead towards a secure, privacy-preserving, and reliable oracle service in the Web3 ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our main goal here is not to peruse the development of the sanctuary or its relation to the political setting as this would be a topic for further analyses. We intend to present in this article some preliminary observations on the mantic techniques, their use, evolution and the credibility of some sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantum algorithm, as compared to classical algorithm, plays a notable role in solving linear systems of equations with an exponential speedup. Here, we demonstrate a method for solving a particular system of equations by using the concept of well-known Grover's quantum search algorithm. The algorithm finds the solution by rotating the initial state vector in the Hilbert space to get the target solution state. It mainly involves finding particular matrices that solve the set of equations and constructing corresponding quantum circuits using the basic quantum gates. We explicitly illustrate the whole process by taking 48 different set of equations and solving them by using the concept of Grover's algorithm. We propose new quantum circuits for each set of equations and design those on the IBM quantum simulator. We run the quantum circuit for one set of equations and obtain the desired results, and hence verify the working of the algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conserning the Hurrian and Mitanni period, Muslumantepe appears to had been an ımportant center in the Upper Tigris region. What is particularly remarkable here is a palace structure from the Early Bronze Age surrounded by city walls. The temple from the Middle Bronze Age and the in-situ cult objects provide important insights into the temple architecture and religious rituals of the Hurrian-Mitanni Period. The comparisons show that the Palace and Temple in Müslümantepe could be the earliest of the Middle Bronze Age Palaces and Temples related to the Hurrians in Northern Syria, especially in the Amuq Plain. The cult objects provide a better insight into Hurrian-Mitanni religious festivals and rituals conducted both inside and outside the temples. The excavations in Müslümantepe provided archaeological evidence supporting the written documents on the Hurrian origins of AN.TAH.ŠUM, the spring festival celebrated by the Hittites. Interestingly, the temple artifacts have added a new dimension to the relationship between the Hurri-Greek Pantheon, to which Gütterbock had previously drawn attention in the context of the Illuyanka myth. The Zeus Omphalos pedestal related to the oracle well unearthed in the Temple of Apollo in Athens, as well as a similar variant of the wheel of fortune shaft made from cylindrical stone were discovered at the Hurrian-Mitanni Temple in Müslümantepe. In this way, many known direct or indirect relations between the ancient Asia Minor and the ancient Greek world were acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pudlák [14] lists several major complexity theoretic conjectures relevant to proof complexity and asks for oracles that separate pairs of corresponding relativized conjectures. Among these conjectures are: • CON and SAT : coNP (resp., NP) does not contain many-one complete sets that have P-optimal proof systems. • NP ∩ coNP : NP ∩ coNP does not have many-one complete problems. • P ≠ NP. We construct two of the oracles that Pudlak asks for: • Relative to the first oracle, NP ∩ coNP holds and CON does not hold. • Relative the second oracle, P ≠ NP holds and both CON and SAT do not hold. This separates P ≠ NP from another conjecture by Pudlák, namely the conjecture CON ∨ SAT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poetry of Hosea employs and engages the religious imagery from the Baʿlu cult in its construal of Israel's deity, YHWH, as a storm god. The present article focuses on the varied uses of storm god imagery in Hos 6:1–6 and offers a new explanation for the abstruse imagery of verse 5 and for the polemical dynamics at play within 6:1–6. In particular, it treats the final colon of Hos 6:5, which has defied explanation by interpreters: wmšpṭy kʾwr yṣʾ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pudlák [19] lists several major complexity theoretic conjectures relevant to proof complexity and asks for oracles that separate pairs of corresponding relativized conjectures. Among these conjectures are: • DisjNP : The class of all disjoint NP-pairs does not have many-one complete problems. • SAT : NP does not contain many-one complete sets that have P-optimal proof systems. • UP : UP does not have many-one complete problems. • NP ∩ coNP : NP ∩ coNP does not have many-one complete problems. As one answer to this question, we construct an oracle relative to which (among others) DisjNP , ¬ SAT , UP , and NP ∩ coNP hold. Hence, there is no relativizable proof for the implication DisjNP ∧ UP ∧ NP ∩ coNP ⇒ SAT. In particular, regarding the conjectures by Pudlák this extends a result by Khaniki [11]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private query allows a client, Alice, to retrieve an item of a database hold by the server, Bob, without revealing which item he or she retrieved, while limiting his ability to access other items. In this paper, an efficient quantum private query (QPQ) protocol is proposed, where two oracle operations Ok, Od are utilized to encode the encryption keys and the encrypted data items into their corresponding quantum superposition states ϕ ′ , ψ ′ , and the Grover iteration is also introduced to extract the target state d i ′ (i.e., the state of the encrypted data item Alice retrieved) from the superposition state. In order to guarantee the client's privacy, the server Bob transmits all the encrypted data items of the database to the client Alice with oblivious transfer strategy. Compared with the previous qRAM-based or QKD-based QPQ protocols, our communication complexity (i.e., the number of transmitted qubits) is reduced from O(NlogN) or O(N) to O(logN), and the exchanged classical message is reduced from O(N) bits to O(logN) bits too. The security analysis shows our protocol can not only guarantee the server's privacy but also the client's privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider a class of chance-constrained combinatorial optimization problems, which we refer to as probabilistic partial set-covering (PPSC) problems. Given a prespecified risk level ϵ ∊ [0; 1], the PPSC problem aims to find the minimum cost selection of subsets of items such that a target number of items is covered with probability at least 1 - ϵ. We show that PPSC admits an efficient probability oracle that computes the coverage probability exactly, under certain distributions of the random variables representing the coverage relation. Using this oracle, we give a compact mixed-integer program that solves the PPSC problem for a special case. For large-scale instances for which an exact oracle-based method exhibits slow convergence, we propose a samplingbased approach that exploits the special structure of PPSC. The oracle can be used as a tool for checking and fixing the feasibility of the solution given by this approach. In particular, we introduce a new class of facet-defining inequalities for a submodular substructure of PPSC, and show that a sampling-based algorithm coupled with the probability oracle effectively provides high-quality feasible solutions to the large-scale test instances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding primitive roots in a finite field of $p^{n}$ elements of characteristic $p$ remains to be a hard computational problem with the bottlenecks coming from both locating a small set of possible candidates and also factoring $p^{n}-1$ in order to test these candidates. Kopparty et al. (2016) have introduced a question of designing a fast algorithm to find primitive roots with a short advice from an oracle. Trivially, for an $m$ -bit prime $p$ , such a primitive root can be fully described by about $mn$ bits of information received from an all-powerful oracle. Here, we have shown that one can achieve this in polynomial time and with about $(1/2+o(1))m + O(\log n)$ bits of advice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding primitive roots in a finite field of $p^{n}$ elements of characteristic $p$ remains to be a hard computational problem with the bottlenecks coming from both locating a small set of possible candidates and also factoring $p^{n}-1$ in order to test these candidates. Kopparty et al. (2016) have introduced a question of designing a fast algorithm to find primitive roots with a short advice from an oracle. Trivially, for an $m$ -bit prime $p$ , such a primitive root can be fully described by about $mn$ bits of information received from an all-powerful oracle. Here, we have shown that one can achieve this in polynomial time and with about $(1/2+o(1))m + O(\log n)$ bits of advice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an oracle factorisation algorithm, which in polynomial deterministic time, finds a nontrivial factor of almost all positive integers n based on the knowledge of the number of points on certain elliptic curves in residue rings modulo n. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective To upgrade No.1 Military Medical Project database from Oracle 8.17 to Oracle 11g so as to solve the problems of server overloading and client terminal failing to connect to the server due to excessive concurrent databases. Methods Exp/Imp and Toad tools of the database were used to generate and modify the upgrade statements as well as to import and export database data, so that the inter-platform and-version database upgrade could be carried out. Results The database was upgraded and the system's operation speed was enhanced greatly. Conclusion The upgrade scheme has easy operation, short time consumed, zero data loss and high reliability, and thus is worthy promoting in medium- and small-scale hospitals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Croatian historiography, two passages by Diodorus have always garnered particular attention. These are the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of book XV in which this Greek historian from the 1st century BC, originally from Sicily, described the arrival of the Parians on the island of Pharos (today’s Hvar) in 385/384 BC. According to Diodorus (XV, 13, 4) the Parians sent out colonists to the Adriatic following the advice of an oracle (κατά τινα χρησμ/ν). The origin of this oracle is elaborated in detail in this paper with the help of a comparative analysis of selected passages from The Library of History and the archaeological and historical context. Particular scrutiny is accorded to the question of whether the oracle originated in Dodona or Delphi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the history and design of the special versions of the bombe key-finding machines used by Britain’s Government Code & Cypher School (GC&CS) during World War II to attack the Enigma traffic of theAbwehr(the German military intelligence service). These special bombes were based on the design of their more numerous counterparts used against the traffic of the German armed services, but differed from them in important ways that highlight the adaptability of the British bombe design, and the power and flexibility of the diagonal board. Also discussed are the changes in theAbwehrindicating system that drove the development of these machines, the ingenious ways in which they were used, and some related developments involving the bombes used by the U.S. Navy’s cryptanalytic unit (OP-20-G). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the paper we consider minimisation ofU-statistics with the weighted Lasso penalty and investigate their asymptotic properties in model selection and estimation. We prove that the use of appropriate weights in the penalty leads to the procedure that behaves like the oracle that knows the true model in advance, i.e. it is model selection consistent and estimates nonzero parameters with the standard rate. For the unweighted Lasso penalty, we obtain sufficient and necessary conditions for model selection consistency of estimators. The obtained results strongly based on the convexity of the loss function that is the main assumption of the paper. Our theorems can be applied to the ranking problem as well as generalised regression models. Thus, usingU-statistics we can study more complex models (better describing real problems) than usually investigated linear or generalised linear models. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

InOn Law and Economy in Society, Weber presents trial by ordeal as being the archetype of formal irrationality. Drawing on illustrations of ordeal from the ancient Near East to the present day, this article critiques Weber and argues that a more nuanced understanding of the operation of ordeal reveals flaws and inconsistencies in Weber’s understanding of the ordeal, and consequently his classification of the phenomenon as being formally irrational. Ordeal is also a phenomenon of duality; the first aspect of human and magico-religious judges works with power dramas and sleight of hand to conceal the bias of a law-finding judge in a multiplex society. The second duality of nature bridges what participants in the ordeal believe is happening and its operation in practice. This means that ordeal cannot readily be categorised as being formally irrational as Weber claims and instead bridges both formal irrationality and substantive irrationality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Big Data, as a Decision Support Tools in numerous firms, has offered the capacity to assemble, store, access and investigate massive measures of information (data) so that better choice of decisions can be made with respect to clients, providers, employees, logistics, and framework. Contrasts in the utilization of Information Technology (IT) have been found in various countries, thus it is important to lead a far reaching investigation of the encouraging and repressing components (factors) in the adoption and diffusion of BDDSA in Nigeria. The point of this review was accordingly to fill the hole by exploring factors influencing the effective selection of BDDSA in Nigeria MIS (Management Information System) user organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the great technological developments encompassing several business, commercial and industrial sectors, there was the constant development of different applications in various platforms, creating the need to interconnect these systems. The use of the Web Service technology concept makes it possible to streamline these processes efficiently and safely, where it significantly reduces manual working time. This work is based on the integration of two different platform systems through a real case study. The goal is to reduce the time to launch product orders and register new customers with the development of Web Service. This will consume the data from a Magento e-commerce platform and will later include the same in an Oracle database of an ERP, proving the goals of minimizing the resources [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of urban networks reveals that the accessibility of important city objects for the vehicle traffic and pedestrians is significantly correlated to the popularity, micro-criminality, micro-economic vitality, and social liveability of the city, and is always the chief factor in regulating the growth and expansion of the city. The accessibility between different components of an urban structure are frequently measured along the streets and routes considered as edges of a planar graph, while the traffic ultimate destination points and street junctions are treated as vertices. For estimation of the accessibility of destination vertex j from vertex i through urban networks, in particular, the random walks are used to calculate the expected distance a random walker starting from i makes before j is visited (known as access time). The state-of-the-art of access time computation is costly in large planar graphs since it involves matrix operation over entire graph. The time complexity is O(n2.376) where n is the number of vertices in the planar graph. To enable efficient access time query answering in large planar graphs, this work proposes the first access time oracle which is based on the proposed access time decomposition and reconstruction scheme. The oracle is a hierarchical data structure with deliberate design on the relationships between different hierarchical levels. The storage requirement of the proposed oracle is O(n4/3loglogn) and the access time query response time is O(n2/3). The extensive tests on a number of large real-world road networks (with up to about 2 million vertices) have verified the superiority of the proposed oracle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rational metabolic engineering methods are increasingly employed in designing the commercially viable processes for the production of chemicals relevant to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and food and beverage industries. With the growing availability of omics data and of methodologies capable to integrate the available data into models, mathematical modeling and computational analysis are becoming important in designing recombinant cellular organisms and optimizing cell performance with respect to desired criteria. In this contribution, we used the computational framework ORACLE (Optimization and Risk Analysis of Complex Living Entities) to analyze the physiology of recombinant Escherichia coli producing 1,4-butanediol (BDO) and to identify potential strategies for improved production of BDO. The framework allowed us to integrate data across multiple levels and to construct a population of large-scale kinetic models despite the lack of available information about kinetic properties of every enzyme in the metabolic pathways. We analyzed these models and we found that the enzymes that primarily control the fluxes leading to BDO production are part of central glycolysis, the lower branch of tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle and the novel BDO production route. Interestingly, among the enzymes between the glucose uptake and the BDO pathway, the enzymes belonging to the lower branch of TCA cycle have been identified as the most important for improving BDO production and yield. We also quantified the effects of changes of the target enzymes on other intracellular states like energy charge, cofactor levels, redox state, cellular growth, and byproduct formation. Independent earlier experiments on this strain confirmed that the computationally obtained conclusions are consistent with the experimentally tested designs, and the findings of the present studies can provide guidance for future work on strain improvement. Overall, these studies demonstrate the potential and effectiveness of ORACLE for the accelerated design of microbial cell factories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the episode of Augustine's conversion to chastity as described in his Confessions, we here try to show how the planned, the incidental, and the succeeding interpretative reading combine in the structure of a multiple oracle, proving God not only the creator of order, but also the lord over coincidence and the author of history. The event in the Milan garden offers us a more complex and dialectical understanding of the relation between divine providence and human freedom in Augustine than the deterministic predestination formulated during the Pelagian controversies. Reading a text becomes the model for understanding the world and acting out God's eternal plan under the conditions of temporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to show that the unspeakable nature of truth is in force since the early texts of Jacques Lacan and tracks the concepts of allusion, quote and enigma to trace their relationship with half-telling. To do this, the work first investigates the rhetorical characteristics of halftelling and secondly, investigates how Freud, in his book Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and Lacan use allusion. Finally, the work discusses the two formalizations of interpretative half-telling developed by Lacan in Seminar 17, the quote and the enigma, to show their allusive functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to highlight the mythical figure of Amphiaraus as the first naval doctor and as mythical deity of early Ancient Greek Medicine. Historical archives and reports were researched as well as extensive research in available literature was also conducted. Apollodorus referring to the Argonauts mentions Amphiaraus as part of the crew; in that way Amphiaraus becomes the first physician to participate in a naval expedition. Among others, Amphiaraus was considered a brave hero having participated in the hunting of Calydonian boar and the expedition of Seven against Thebes. He was also considered to be a seer and prophet, due to his ascends from Melampus and Apollo. After his death, the myth says that Amphiaraus became immortal and, therefore, he was deified. A temple was erected to honor him at Oropos Attiki, the Amphiaraeion, which functioned as an oracle and a sanatorium, whereas games were organized every five years to honor the memory of Amphiaraus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to put forth how wrong it is to interpret the metaphysic aspect of the religion with the effect of rationalism and positivism with level-headed comments and aims to prove these that religion is a reality which won't be separated from metaphysics. Religion in itself comes from a metaphysical aspect and transportation of prophet miracles and of mahatma oracles is a proof of this. To this end, this paper deals with Magic and Witchcraft which seem like a supernatural event even though it's not, along with Miracle and Oracle which are real supernatural events; thus within this context, anecdotes and events are analyzed especially by the ones who are active around Sufism in the Islamic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conception of time of the pre-Hispanic Maya is studied through epigraphic and philological analysis of hieroglyphic texts under the theoretical approaches of the Italian school of the history of religions. The data indicate that time is animated and consists of tangible discrete units that are represented by a calendar of 365 days. The properties of each day are provided by an oracle of lots of 260 units that is projected over time. Both time and the oracle are thought as gods that alternate in a fixed and cyclic order and not as an abstract physical quantity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well-known that the "Unsorted Database" quantum algorithm by Grover gives quadratic speedup to several practically important combinatorial and enumerative problems, such as: SAT, Graph Coloring, Maximum Cliques, Traveling Salesman and many others. Recently, quantum programming languages such as QISKIT, QSHARP or Quipper start to be used to design, verify and simulate practical quantum algorithms for important problems in Quantum Machine Learning or optimization. So far, however, no methodologies have been created to program Grover's Oracles for particular classes of problems. In contrast, such methodologies have been already created for classical Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSP). Invertible Logic was recently introduced by Supriyo Datta and his team. The goal of this paper is to present results of our research towards creating a systematic methodology to solve search problems in Artificial Intelligence, Logic Design and Machine Learning by repeated applications of modified hardware oracles. These oracles can use: (1) classical Boolean logic, (2) quantum logic, or (3) invertible logic. Our methodology to design and exercise all types of general oracles is based on bottom-up synthesis and technology transformations. For CSP problems we apply unified blocks which use various data representations and encodings. • Introduces a methodology of solving Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization Problem based on general oracles. • This methodology applies to classical binary hardware, quantum computing and invertible logic. • Illustrates how to solve optimization problems in quantum as repeated calls of Grover Algorithm with modified oracles. • Discusses the bottom-up design of oracles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We aim to consider the notion of a computable numbering as a uniform enumeration of sets of a family relative to an arbitrary oracle. The questions under investigation concern primarily universal computable numberings. A study of this kind of numberings is mostly motivated by their nature since any universal numbering of a family contains information on all its computable numberings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider variable selection problem for general transformation models with ranking data by penalized maximum log-marginal likelihood approach. We incorporate smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD), lasso and hard thresholding penalties into penalty term. With some conditions and proper penalties, we show that the corresponding penalized estimates are √n-consistent and enjoy oracle properties. We also propose a three-step Monte Carlo Markov chain stochastic approximation algorithm for our proposed procedures. With the proposed procedure, we not only can select important variables but also are able to estimate corresponding effects. Through some simulation examples and a Hong Kong horse racing data analysis, we illustrate that our proposed procedure uniformly works very well for moderate sample size. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature of the Śaiva Mantramārga evidences differing strategies of incorporating prasenā divination into its theoretical frameworks. The early Niśvāsaguhya confines prasenās a prognosticatory role in support of a more common method of dream divination used to determine reasons for failed initiation. Questions of intertextuality and doctrinal dependence are raised when the Trika’s Tantrasadbhāva envisages prasenās as fulfilling exactly the same function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional analysis using quantile regression typically focuses on fitting the regression model at different quantiles separately. However, in situations where the quantile coefficients share some common feature, joint modeling of multiple quantiles to accommodate the commonality often leads to more efficient estimation. One example of common features is that a predictor may have a constant effect over one region of quantile levels but varying effects in other regions. To automatically perform estimation and detection of the interquantile commonality, we develop two penalization methods. When the quantile slope coefficients indeed do not change across quantile levels, the proposed methods will shrink the slopes toward constant and thus improve the estimation efficiency. We establish the oracle properties of the two proposed penalization methods. Through numerical investigations, we demonstrate that the proposed methods lead to estimations with competitive or higher efficiency than the standard quantile regression estimation in finite samples. Supplementary materials for the article are available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a simple scheme to implement the two-qubit Grover quantum search algorithm with trapped ions in thermal motion. In the scheme two states of the Λ-type three-level ions are used as quantum bits (qubits). The scheme puts no limitations on the intensity of the laser field and the speed of the hot ions, and all the operations can be achieved in a reasonable amount of time before decoherence sets in. The scheme might be experimentally realizable with presently available techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits Terence Ranger's call for scholars of the occult in Africa to better historicize, contextualize, and disaggregate the subject. I argue that Ranger's imperative fails to define what type of object of study the occult is and take seriously the 'aggregation' of the occult as an empirical ethnographic fact. I suggest that 'the occult' is often experienced as both a proliferating series of oracular institutions for contending with feelings of affliction, and as invisible forces whose origin and nature are compound. I turn to James Siegel's work on witchcraft to bring attention to the experiential dimension of the occult, and provide an extended ethnographic account of a moment in which the source, nature, and means of redress of an individual's occult affliction cannot be determined. I argue, in line with Siegel, that historicization and contextualization, while important, risk denaturing the occult and impairing our understanding of its persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]