Ad maiorem Dei gloriam: The Jesuits in Albania

When Pope Francis addressed students, teachers, and parents of the Jesuit schools of Italy and Albania in 2013, he discussed the core and the value of a Jesuit-Catholic education, which in essence follows St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits in all multifarious activities and apostolates put Jesus in the center, thereby making him the prototype. It was Jesus who had trodden a novel way for the Society of Jesus to follow and that meant to live a meaningful life, live well, and live joyfully among the people they were serving. It was Jesus that invited the path was gratuitously provided. Thus, Jesus became the core of the core of a Jesuit education. Education for the Society of Jesus is the formation that brings about and allows room for growth “developing intelligence, but also an integral formation of all the aspects of your personality.” Jesuit education inspires students to seek for more and live enthusiastically. Moreover, St. Ignatius of Loyola left a distinctive gem in Jesuit education: teaching and learning the virtue of magnanimity, which means educating to “have greatness of mind; … great ideals, the wish to do great things to respond to what God asks of us.” The magnanimity of Jesuit education entails a big heart open to Christ and to the human ideals that correspond to the Gospel. Francis concluded his 2013 speech by blessing the audience saying: “The Lord is always close to you, he picks you up when you fall and impels you to develop and to make ever loftier decisions, ‘con grande ánimo y liberalidad,’ with magnanimity. Ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

Multiple Scattering Casimir Force Calculations: Layered and Corrugated Materials, Wedges, and Casimir-Polder Forces

Various applications of the multiple scattering technique to calculating Casimir energy are described. These include the interaction between dilute bodies of various sizes and shapes, temperature dependence, interactions with multilayered and corrugated bodies, and new examples of exactly solvable separable bodies.Comment: 22 pages, 23 figures, submitted to the proceedings for the Casimir 2009 workshop in Yale, August 200

Vibrational properties of inclusion complexes: the case of indomethacin-cyclodextrin

Vibrational properties of inclusion complexes with cyclodextrins are studied by means of Raman spectroscopy and numerical simulation. In particular, Raman spectra of the non-steroidal, anti-inflammatory drug indomethacin undergo notable changes in the energy range between 1600 and 1700 cm$^{-1}$ when inclusion complexes with cyclodextrins are formed. By using both \emph{ab initio} quantum chemical calculations and molecular dynamics, we studied how to relate such changes to the geometry of the inclusion process, disentangling single-molecule effects, from changes in the solid state structure or dimerization processes.Comment: 14 file figure

Inverse modelling in estimating soil hydraulic functions: a Genetic Algorithm approach

The practical application of simulation models in the field is sometimes hindered by the difficulty of deriving the soil hydraulic properties of the study area. The procedure so-called inverse modelling has been investigated in many studies to address the problem where most of the studies were limited to hypothetical soil profile and soil core samples in the laboratory. Often, the numerical approach called forward-backward simulation is employed to generate synthetic data then added with random errors to mimic the real-world condition. Inverse modelling is used to backtrack the expected values of the parameters. This study explored the potential of a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to estimate inversely the soil hydraulic functions in the unsaturated zone. Lysimeter data from a wheat experiment in India were used in the analysis. Two cases were considered: (1) a numerical case where the forward-backward approach was employed and (2) the experimental case where the real data from the lysimeter experiment were used. Concurrently, the use of soil water, evapotranspiration (ET) and the combination of both were investigated as criteria in the inverse modelling. Results showed that using soil water as a criterion provides more accurate parameter estimates than using ET. However, from a practical point of view, ET is more attractive as it can be obtained with reasonable accuracy on a regional scale from remote sensing observations. The experimental study proved that the forward-backward approach does not take into account the effects of model errors. The formulation of the problem is found to be critical for a successful parameter estimation. The sensitivity of parameters to the objective function and their zone of influence in the soil column are major determinants in the solution. Generally, their effects sometimes lead to non-uniqueness in the solution but to some extent are partly handled by GA. Overall, it was concluded that the GA approach is promising to the inverse problem in the unsaturated zone.</p> <p style='line-height: 20px;'><b>Keywords. </b>Genetic Algorithm, inverse modelling, Mualem-Van Genuchten parameters, unsaturated zone, evapotranspiration, soil wate