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Changing of the Guard

Bobby Maddex interviews Dr. James Taylor and Adam Lockridge of St. Raphael Orthodox Online Homeschool. Dr. Taylor is stepping down as director of the school after founding it and running it the past two years. Adam Lockridge will be taking his place and explains his vision for the school.




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Holy Cross Monastery in Wayne, West Virginia

Bobby Maddex, the Director of Digital Media for Ancient Faith Ministries speaks with Hieromonk Fr. Basil and Hieromonk Archdeacon Sergius of Holy Cross Monastery in Wayne, West Virginia USA. They are here today to tell us about the new church the monastery is building and how you might be able to help. If you would like to help please go to; Church donation page: https://www.holycross.org/pages/new-church Video #1, “Let the Walls of Jerusalem Be Builded”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjDsuvUIPec




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The Consecration of the Virgin Mary

Fr. Pat uses Aristotle's four causes to explore the consecrated life of the Mother of God.




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Hanging on to Others

Fr. Pat looks at the story from Mark 2 of the paralytic being lowered through the roof.




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Beginning Lent (Romans 13:11-14:4)




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The Virgin Mary




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The Imagination and the Moral Order

Preaching from Luke 6:31-26, Fr. Pat discusses the Golden Rule.




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The End is Just the Beginning

What the St. Nicholas Ground Blessing can teach us about God's triumph over death.




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Sexuality, Virginity, and Marriage

In this two-hour special, Kevin's guest is the V. Rev. Fr. Josiah Trenham, pastor of Saint Andrew Orthodox Church, Riverside, California, and the author of the recently published Virginity and Marriage According to Saint John Chrysostom (St Herman Press). They discussed and took calls on the views of the church fathers and the contemporary Orthodox Church on sex, marriage, and celibacy (monasticism) in the context of a sex-obsessed contemporary Western culture.




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Orthodoxy in Colonial Virginia

Matthew interviews Nicholas Chapman, the Managing Director of Orthodox Christian Books, about an 18th-century Orthodox convert from Virginia named Philip Ludwell III. Ludwell gave George Washington his commission in the army and was a cousin of George's wife Martha. Learn more HERE and HERE.




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Update: Google adds tagging support

Tagging has been all over the place recently and apparently Google couldn't resist. Now you can tag sites in your search history for later retrieval.




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What Happens in Batman Begins




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How to Make Boring Content More Engaging

So, I ran a mastermind group. One of the members was struggling with content creation. She said: Our blog posts are informative. But how do we make them more engaging for our readers? What did I tell her? I shared my “3 sentence rule” for making boring content more engaging. Here it is… First of […]




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Norrie's title wait continues as 'challenging' year ends in final loss

Britain's Cameron Norrie is unable to finish a frustrating season on a high as he loses to France's Benjamin Bonzi in the Moselle Open final.




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Woods and McIlroy's TGL to begin in early January

The inaugural schedule for TGL, the tech-infused golf competition spearheaded by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, has been revealed.




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Mark Davis: 'Journeyman' can be disparaging but it's true about me

Shabnam Younus-Jewell chats to Mark Davis about his 30 plus years as a professional.




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Angry Higgins beaten in quarter-finals by Wakelin

John Higgins loses his quarter-final tie with Chris Wakelin in frustrating fashion at the International Championship in Nanjing, China.




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Wales managing Fishlock's fitness with Seattle Reign

Head coach Rhian Wilkinson says Wales are monitoring Jess Fishlock's fitness in conjunction with her club side Seattle Reign.




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Watch: 'Time to reflect' for Higgins after cup final defeat

Derry City manager Ruaidhri Higgins reacts to his side's disappointing 2-0 defeat by Drogheda in the FAI Cup.




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Selby begins squash title defence

Defending champion Daryl Selby will play qualifier Nathan Lake in the first round of the British National Squash Championships on Tuesday.




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'Emotionally it is tough right now' - Derry boss Higgins

Derry City manager Ruaidhri Higgins and midfielder Michael Duffy give their thoughts on the Candystripes' 2-0 defeat by Drogheda United in the FAI Cup final.




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Health overspend 'challenging' - chief minister

Alfred Cannan says reducing Manx Care's overspend for the current financial year will be difficult.




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Work to begin on temporary fix of damaged pier

Work on a temporary fix to Worthing Pier after it was damaged in a storm will take about a week.




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'Bringing history to life' through 3D laser scanning

Buildings that are normally inaccessible can now be explored virtually using smartphones.




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Canal repair works begin as charity seeks support

Leeds and Liverpool Canal bosses appeal for help funding the maintenance of the network.




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Ex-RAF pilot encouraging others to begin fostering

Nigel, from Somerset, decided to become a foster parent aged in his 80s after his wife died.




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Learning the art of apple wanging in Alton

BBC Radio Stoke’s Matt Weigold went to try his hand at apple wanging for Alton Apple Day.




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Rapid-charging battery train trials under way

The trains are converted from old Underground trains and will be rolled out in the Thames Valley.




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Southend to begin fly-tipping cameras trial

The pilot scheme begins in December to help identify and charge fly-tippers.




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How curry is bringing people together in Luton

The Sikh temple on Cardigan Street welcomes anyone from any background.




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Campbell's Bluebird to have engines refurbished

A team of engineers are checking the engines so the hydroplane can return to the water.




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Safety improvements at accident 'hot spot' begin

New road markings are being installed on the slip road following a fatal crash in September.




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Trial begins of man accused of woman's murder

Paul Irwin, 50, denies murdering 34-year-old Tiffany Render in March.




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Vic's Vintage Adventure Begins!

CWR presenter Vic Minett joins the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run 2024





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Alpine confirm switch to Mercedes power when Renault ends F1 engine project | Formula 1

Alpine have officially announced they will use Mercedes power units when Formula 1 introduces its new engine regulations in 2026.




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Bringing Store ratings on Search to more countries

Google's Store Ratings have been helping US merchants highlight the high quality experiences other shoppers have had right from Search, and we're now bringing store ratings to English-language shopping searches in Australia, Canada, India and the United Kingdom.




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Understanding Logging in the Cloud

I recently read an interesting pair of articles about Application Logging in OpenShift. While these are great articles on how to use log4j and Apache Commons Logging, they don't address the cloud logging issue at all.

What is the cloud logging issue?

Suppose I have an application I want to deploy in the cloud. I also want to automatically elastically scale this app. In fact I'm hoping that this app will succeed - and then I'm going to want to deploy it in different geos. I'm using EC2 for starters, but I might need to move it later. Ok, so that sounds a bit YAGNI. Let's cut back the requirements. I'm running my app in the cloud, on a single server in a single geo.

I do not want to log to the local filesystem.

Why not? Well firstly if this is say EC2, then the server might get terminated and I'm going to lose my logs. If it doesn't get restarted then they are going to grow and kill my local filesystem. Either way, I'm in a mess.

I need to log my logs somewhere that is:
1) designed to support getting logs from multiple places - e.g. whichever EC2 or other instance my server happens to be hosted today
2) separate from my worker instance so when that gets stopped and started it lives
3) supports proper log rotation, etc

If I have this then it supports my initial problem, but it actually also supports my bigger requirements around autoscaling and geos.

Stratos is an open source Platform-as-a-Service foundation that we've created at WSO2. In Stratos we had to deal with this early on because we support elastic auto-scaling by default.

In Stratos 1.x we built a model based on syslog-ng. Basically we used log4j for applications to log. So just as any normal log4j logging you would do something like:


Logger  logger = Logger.getLogger("org.fremantle.myApp");
logger.warn("This is a warning");


We automatically setup the log appenders in the Stratos services to use the log4j syslog appender. When we start an instance we automatically set it up under the covers to pipe the syslog output to syslog-ng. Then we automatically collate these logs and make them available.

In Stratos 2.x we have improved this.
The syslog-ng model is not as efficient as we needed, and also we needed a better way of slicing and dicing the resulting log files.

In the Stratos PaaS we also have another key requirement - multi-tenancy. We have lots of instances of servers, some of which are one instance per tenant/domain, and some which are shared between tenants. In both cases we need to split out the logs so that each tenant only sees their own logs.

So in Stratos 2.x (due in the next couple of months) we have a simple Apache Thrift interface (and a JSON/REST one too). We already have a log4j target that pushes to this. So exactly the same code as above works in Stratos 2.x with no changes. 



We are also going to add models for non-Java (e.g. syslog, log4php, etc).

Now what happens next? The local agent on the cloud instance is setup automatically to publish to the local central log server. This takes the logs and publishes them to an Apache Cassandra database. We then run Apache Hive scripts that slice the logs per tenant and per application. These are then available to the user via our web interface and also via simple network calls. Why this model? This is really scalable. I mean really, really scalable. Cassandra can scale to hundreds of nodes, if necessary. Also its really fast. Our benchmarks show that we can write >10k entries/second on a normal server.

Summary

Logging in the cloud isn't just about logging to your local disk. That is not a robust or scalable answer. Logging to the cloud needs a proper cloud logging model. In Stratos we have built one. You can use it from Java today and from Stratos 2.0 we are adding support to publish log entries just with a simple REST interface, or a super-fast highly scalable approach with Apache Thrift.




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Meeting New Challenges in Document Engineering




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Managing Mechanisms for Collaborative New-Product Development in the Ceramic Tile Design Chain

This paper focuses on improving the management of New-Product Development (NPD) processes within the particular context of a cluster of enterprises that cooperate through a network of intra- and inter-firm relations. Ceramic tile design chains have certain singularities that condition the NPD process, such as the lack of a strong hierarchy, fashion pressure or the existence of different origins for NPD projects. We have studied these particular circumstances in order to tailor Product Life-cycle Management (PLM) tools and some other management mechanisms to fit suitable sectoral reference models. Special emphasis will be placed on PLM templates for structuring and standardizing projects, and also on the roles involved in the process.




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Enterprise Microblogging for Advanced Knowledge Sharing: The References@BT Case Study

Siemens is well known for ambitious efforts in knowledge management, providing a series of innovative tools and applications within the intranet. References@BT is such a web-based application with currently more than 7,300 registered users from more than 70 countries. Its goal is to support the sharing of knowledge, experiences and best-practices globally within the Building Technologies division. Launched in 2005, References@BT features structured knowledge references, discussion forums, and a basic social networking service. In response to use demand, a new microblogging service, tightly integrated into References@BT, was implemented in March 2009. More than 500 authors have created around 2,600 microblog postings since then. Following a brief introduction into the community platform References@BT, we comprehensively describe the motivation, experiences and advantages for an organization in providing internal microblogging services. We provide detailed microblog usage statistics, analyzing the top ten users regarding postings and followers as well as the top ten topics. In doing so, we aim to shed light on microblogging usage and adoption within a globally distributed organization.




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Leveraging Web 2.0 in New Product Development: Lessons Learned from a Cross-company Study

The paper explores the application of Web 2.0 technologies to support product development efforts in a global, virtual and cross-functional setting. It analyses the dichotomy between the prevailing hierarchical structure of CAD/PLM/PDM systems and the principles of the Social Web under the light of the emerging product development trends. Further it introduces the concept of Engineering 2.0, intended as a more bottom up and lightweight knowledge sharing approach to support early stage design decisions within virtual and cross-functional product development teams. The lessons learned collected from a cross-company study highlight how to further developblogs, wikis, forums and tags for the benefit of new product development teams, highlighting opportunities, challenges and no-go areas.




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Towards Classification of Web Ontologies for the Emerging Semantic Web

The massive growth in ontology development has opened new research challenges such as ontology management, search and retrieval for the entire semantic web community. These results in many recent developments, like OntoKhoj, Swoogle, OntoSearch2, that facilitate tasks user have to perform. These semantic web portals mainly treat ontologies as plain texts and use the traditional text classification algorithms for classifying ontologies in directories and assigning predefined labels rather than using the semantic knowledge hidden within the ontologies. These approaches suffer from many types of classification problems and lack of accuracy, especially in the case of overlapping ontologies that share common vocabularies. In this paper, we define an ontology classification problem and categorize it into many sub-problems. We present a new ontological methodology for the classification of web ontologies, which has been guided by the requirements of the emerging Semantic Web applications and by the lessons learnt from previous systems. The proposed framework, OntClassifire, is tested on 34 ontologies with a certain degree of overlapping domain, and effectiveness of the ontological mechanism is verified. It benefits the construction, maintenance or expansion of ontology directories on the semantic web that help to focus on the crawling and improving the quality of search for the software agents and people. We conclude that the use of a context specific knowledge hidden in the structure of ontologies gives more accurate results for the ontology classification.




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Paris : Imaginons les Places de demain. Et si on s’occupait des rues d’aujourd’hui ?

A gauche, Barbès. A droite, la nouvelle Place du Panthéon. Aux mêmes heures !
C’est une vaste opération lancée depuis 2015 par la Mairie de Paris. «Donner plus de place à celles et ceux qui ont envie de vivre dans une ville plus pacifiée, avec moins de voitures et moins de stress» selon les mots d'Anne Hidalgo. Sept grandes places parisiennes vont être « réinventées » : ...




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E-bidding adoption among SMEs: evidence from an African emerging market

While digitalisation reforms aiming to enhance the quality of public services were put in place, most stakeholders in developing countries still use paper-based-tendering processes, which are associated with increased costs. To overcome these problems, calls to adopt e-bidding have recently emerged. This study aims to explore the readiness of Moroccan SMEs to adopt e-bidding. To achieve this goal, we proposed an integrated framework combining the TAM and UTAUT models to examine the predictors of SMEs' intention to adopt e-bidding. We empirically tested the conceptual model using a partial least squares (PLS) estimation based on data from 210 SMEs. Our results suggest that effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, and social influence as the key factors influencing SMEs intention to adopt e-bidding. We also suggest firm size as a significant moderator. This will help in improving SMEs' user experience and will also allow a better implementation of e-bidding in Morocco and similar contexts.




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Researching together in academic engagement in engineering: a study of dual affiliated graduate students in Sweden

This article explores dual affiliated graduate students that conduct research involving both universities and firms, which we conceptualise as a form of academic engagement, e.g., knowledge networks. We explore what they do during their studies, and their perceptions about their contributions to the firm's capacities for technology and innovation. So far, university-industry interactions in engineering are less researched than other fields, and this qualitative study focuses upon one department of Electrical Engineering in Sweden. First, we define and describe how the partner firms and universities organise this research collaboration as a form of academic engagement. Secondly, we propose a conceptual framework specifying how graduate students act as boundary-spanners between universities and firms. This framework is used for the empirical analysis, when exploring their perceptions of impact. Our results reveal that they primarily engage in problem-solving activities in technology, which augment particularly the early stages of absorptive capacities in firms.




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Concurrent Software Engineering Project




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Encouraging Girls to Consider a Career in ICT: A Review of Strategies




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Enhancing Classroom Learning Experience by Providing Structures to Microblogging-based Activities




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Student Perceptions of Microblogging: Integrating Twitter with Blogging to Support Learning and Interaction