Since its beginning in the early 1960s, the ecumenical charismatic renewal has exerted a continuing influence upon mainline Christian bodies, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. Recent studies by George Gallup indicate approximately 18 percent of United Methodists identify with the movement.

Information retrieval (IR) has changed considerably in the last years with the expansion of the Web (World Wide Web) and the advent of modern and inexpensive graphical user interfaces and mass storage devices. As a result, traditional IR textbooks have become quite out-of-date which has led to the introduction of new IR books recently. Nevertheless, we believe that there is still great need of a book that approaches the field in a rigorous and complete way from a computer-science perspective (in opposition to a user-centered perspective). This book is an effort to partially fulfill this gap and should be useful for a first course on information retrieval as well as for a graduate course on the topic. The book

This paper was prepared for the conference on the U.S.- Mexico

Copyright 2013 by the Office of the General Assembly Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically, mechanically, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (brief quotations used in magazine or newspaper reviews excepted), without the prior permission of the publisher. The sessions, presbyteries, and synods of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) may use sections of this publication without receiving prior written permission from the publisher.

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The spectre of climate change that is unfolding now is undeniably a cumulative impact of anthropogenic interference in the climate system over the last two centuries. The science is clear and the policy community is being increasingly convinced and galvanised into action to address this emergent challenge in light of the associated economic and human dimensions. The impacts of climate change ranging from sea level rise, melting ice caps and glaciers, severe weather events, drought, flooding, warming, subtle changes in ecosystems – will impinge on every aspect of society and economic life. The costs of inaction will more than outweigh the costs of action. There is only a narrow window of opportunity to redress the situation. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Fourth Assessment Report has

The 1988 commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the event of Aldersgate may well be remembered more for the renewed vigor it brought to debate about the meaning of this event than for any of its celebrations. One of our aims in this essay is to show why such debate was inevitable. Another aim

A penetrating analysis of our technical civilization and of the effect of an increasingly standardized culture on the future of man

Nonlinear manifold learning from unorganized data points is a very challenging unsupervised learning and data visualization problem with a great variety of applications. In this paper we present a new algorithm for manifold learning and nonlinear dimension reduction. Based on a set of unorganized data points sampled with noise from the manifold, we represent the local geometry of the manifold using tangent spaces learned by fitting an affine subspace in a neighborhood of each data point. Those tangent spaces are aligned to give the internal global coordinates of the data points with respect to the underlying manifold by way of a partial eigendecomposition of the neighborhood connection matrix. We present a careful error analysis of our algorithm and show that the reconstruction errors are of second-order accuracy. We illustrate our algorithm using curves and surfaces both in 2D/3D and higher dimensional Euclidean spaces, and 64-by-64 pixel face images with various pose and lighting conditions. We also address several theoretical and algorithmic issues for further research and improvements.