Who is Jesus? Reflections on S. Endo\u27s A Life of Jesus

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. Shusaku Endo was a Japanese author born in Tokyo in 1923. He was raised by his single mother who became a fervent believer in Christianity. With her influence, Endo himself was baptized by the age of twelve. Having grown up in Japan, Endo was obviously very knowledgeable about Japanese religion and customs and most especially Japanese ideals. He claimed that “the Japanese have a traditional saying to the effect that the four most dreadful things on the earth are fire, earthquakes, thunderbolts, and fathers” (4). Obviously, as this quote illustrates, the image of a strict father is not very appealing to the Japanese; instead, according to Endo, the Japanese prefer the image of a maternal figure. This is precisely why, Endo argues, that the Christian religion is such a minority in Japan. Because God has always been depicted as a stern father in western cultures, Christianity has never caught on in Japan. So to help his Japanese audience better understand his beloved religion, Shusaku Endo wrote the novel called A Life of Jesus. To accomplish this purpose, Endo depicted God and Jesus in a very different way from which western readers are used to seeing. Because the Japanese identify more with the maternal side of things and are more “responsive to one who „suffers with [them]‟”, Endo decided to depict God as a caring maternal figure and Jesus as a man who had such great love that he was willing to die even for those who did not yet believe (1). In this way Endo is able to greatly bring out the humanity of Jesus. When A Life of Jesus is read with this perspective in mind, it makes a lot more sense in terms of the arguments made, the type of soft language used, and the tear jerking metaphors presented. Overall, this book serves its purpose, which is to present and in a way to “sell” Christianity to a Japanese based audience who know very little, if anything, about Jesus

Gender Discrimination and Job Satisfaction

This article defines the relationship between two factors and its impact by examining the effect of Gender discrimination in the work place which influences the job performance and job satisfaction in individuals(i.e.; hiring, promotion, salary, control/ autonomy/ influence, challenge, performance measures, feed back, in strumentality, stability/security). The data is collected through quantitative method. The sample of thestudy consisted of 500 employees working in different bank in Islamabad and Wahcantt (Pakistan) through the questionnaire, of which 300 were returned and processed. R was used to analysis the data, using independent T-Test, and excel, Correlation and Multi-regression analysis. There is a significant prove, gender discrimination has an influence on Job satisfaction and job performance and stability of individuals. From findings of the study, it is also depicted that male and female have significantly different level of job satisfaction

Disclinations, e-cones, and their interactions in extensible sheets

We investigate the nucleation, growth, and spatial organization of topological defects with a ribbon shaped elastic sheet which is stretched and twisted. Singularities are found to spontaneously arrange in a triangular lattice in the form of vertices connected by stretched ridges that result in a self-rigidified structure. The vertices are shown to be negative disclinations or e-cones which occur in sheets with negative Gaussian curvature, in contrast with d-cones in sheets with zero-Gaussian curvature. We find the growth of the wrinkled width of the ribbon to be consistent with a far-from-threshold approach assuming a compression-free base state. The system is found to show a transition from a regime where the wavelength is given by the ribbon geometry, to where it is given by its elasticity as a function of the ratio of the applied tension to the elastic modulus and cross-sectional area of the ribbon

Maximum and Minimum Stable Random Packings of Platonic Solids

Motivated by the relation between particle shape and packing, we measure the volume fraction $\phi$ occupied by the Platonic solids which are a class of polyhedron with congruent sides, vertices and dihedral angles. Tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron shaped plastic dice were fluidized or mechanically vibrated to find stable random loose packing $\phi_{rlp} = 0.51, 0.54, 0.52, 0.51, 0.50$ and densest packing $\phi_{rcp} = 0.64, 0.67, 0.64, 0.63, 0.59$, respectively with standard deviation $\simeq \pm 0.01$. We find that $\phi$ obtained by all protocols peak at the cube, which is the only Platonic solid that can tessellate space, and then monotonically decrease with number of sides. This overall trend is similar but systematically lower than the maximum $\phi$ reported for frictionless Platonic solids, and below $\phi_{rlp}$ of spheres for the loose packings. Experiments with ceramic tetrahedron were also conducted, and higher friction was observed to lead to lower $\phi$

The Economics of Stateless Nations: Sovereign Debt and Popular Well-being in Pakistan

The Government of Pakistan believes that “high and growing” indebtedness of the government is reflected in falling investment and growth rates of the economy, leading to growing poverty of the people. This paper examines how this came to be, and whether the connections implicit in this assessment do in fact exist? On this basis, the paper also comments on the efficacy of some current policy proposals. The conventional wisdom is that “persistent fiscal and balance of payments deficits are a fundamental source of Pakistan’s high debt burden” [Pakistan (2001), p. xv)].1 The State Bank of Pakistan (2001, p. 117) goes further: “This…public debt is the result of structural weaknesses in the domestic economy and the external account. Excessive government expenditures, stagnant tax revenues, high returns on government securities and inappropriate sequencing of financial reforms, led to a bludgeoning (sic.) domestic debt profile. On the external front, large current account deficits, stagnant export revenues and declining worker (sic.) remittances, effectively forced Pakistan into an unsustainable situation”. All this is true, but hardly exhaustive.

Beyond the golden run : evaluating the use of reference run models in fault injection analysis

Fault injection (FI) has been shown to be an effective approach to assess- ing the dependability of software systems. To determine the impact of faults injected during FI, a given oracle is needed. This oracle can take a variety of forms, however prominent oracles include (i) specifications, (ii) error detection mechanisms and (iii) golden runs. Focusing on golden runs, in this paper we show that there are classes of software which a golden run based approach can not be used to analyse. Specifically we demonstrate that a golden run based approach can not be used when analysing systems which employ a main control loop with an irregular period. Further, we show how a simple model, which has been refined using FI, can be employed as an oracle in the analysis of such a system

An automated wrapper-based approach to the design of dependable software

The design of dependable software systems invariably comprises two main activities: (i) the design of dependability mechanisms, and (ii) the location of dependability mechanisms. It has been shown that these activities are intrinsically difficult. In this paper we propose an automated wrapper-based methodology to circumvent the problems associated with the design and location of dependability mechanisms. To achieve this we replicate important variables so that they can be used as part of standard, efficient dependability mechanisms. These well-understood mechanisms are then deployed in all relevant locations. To validate the proposed methodology we apply it to three complex software systems, evaluating the dependability enhancement and execution overhead in each case. The results generated demonstrate that the system failure rate of a wrapped software system can be several orders of magnitude lower than that of an unwrapped equivalent