‘Seven whole days’: The Obligation of the Clergy of the Church of England to ‘say daily the Morning and Evening Prayer’

All Christians are called to pray. The daily offering of Morning and Evening Prayer is a particular obligation of the clergy of the Church of England, as part of the ‘manner of life of clerks’ laid down in Canon C 26. However, despite the significant time devoted to these prayers by the clergy on a daily basis, there has been little detailed examination of this canonical obligation. This article explores the historical background to the obligation and its effect today.

Look at the Audience? A Randomized Controlled Study of Shifting Attention From Self-Focus to Nonsocial vs. Social External Stimuli During Virtual Reality Exposure to Public Speaking in Social Anxiety

Background: Enhanced self-focused attention plays a central role in the maintenance and treatment of Social Anxiety and is targeted in contemporary cognitive behavioral therapy. Actual developments use Virtual Reality (VR) for behavioral training. However, no VR attention training combining exposure to public speaking with shifting attention from self-focus to external focus has been investigated, and no experimental evidence exists on different kinds of external cues as targets of attention. Therefore, we investigated the effects of an attention training during public speaking in VR and examined differential effects of an external focus on nonsocial vs. social stimuli.Methods: In this randomized controlled study, highly socially anxious participants were instructed to focus on either objects or the audience within a virtual speech task. We assessed the pre-post effects on affective reactions, self-perception, and attentional processes during public speaking as well as general Social Anxiety using subjective, physiological, and eye-tracking measures. Repeated-measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were calculated to detect changes from pretest to posttest over both groups, and time × group interaction effects.Results: Within the analysis sample (n = 41), anxiety during public speaking and fear of negative evaluation significantly decreased, with no significant differences between groups. No significant time effect, but a significant time × group effect, was found for the looking time proportion on the audience members' heads. Follow-up tests confirmed a significant increase in the social-focus group and a significant decrease in the nonsocial-focus group. For all other variables, except external focus and fear of public speaking, significant improvements were found over both groups. Further significant time x group effects were found for positive affect during public speaking, with a significant increase in the social focus, and no significant change in the nonsocial-focus group.Conclusion: Our findings suggest that attention training to reduce self-focus can be successfully conducted in VR. Both training versions showed positive short-term effects in the highly socially anxious, with particular advantages of an external social focus concerning eye contact to the audience and positive affect. Further research should investigate whether social focus is even more advantageous long term and if reinterpretations of dysfunctional beliefs could be achieved by not avoiding social cues.

The Evolution of Subsea Wells Plug and Abandon by the Use of Intervention Vessel

During the last years, the total number of subsea wells considerably increased thanks to growing investments in the development of deep and ultra-deep water fields. At the end of their producing life, all these wells will need to be decommissioned and permanently plugged and abandoned, so the demand for technologies that will allow to fulfil this task in the respect of the regulations and at the minimum cost gained a lot of momentum. This paper describes a permanent P&A strategy of subsea wells to be carried out with Well Intervention vessel. The study first goes through the operation sequence and available technologies, defining an abandonment approach which is in line with international standards. Identified strategy results into a significant time and cost reduction comparing with traditional subsea wells decommissioning works performed by a floater rig, even maintaining the same level of safety and effectiveness. The study shows that the overall time reduction estimated by using an intervention vessel ranges from 40 to 55%, compared to a conventional rig-based approach, leading the wells abandonment expenditure savings up to 70%. For all those wells where the implementation of an intervention vessel is not guaranteed, there is still room to get time and cost savings of about 5-15% by combining the same riserless technologies with a conventional floater rig.

Mind Your Outcomes: Quality-Centric Systems Development

This paper directly addresses a critical issue that affects the development of many complex distributed software systems: how to establish quickly, cheaply and reliably whether they will deliver their intended performance before expending significant time, effort and money on detailed design and implementation. We describe ΔQSD, a novel metrics-based and quality-centric paradigm that uses formalised outcome diagrams to explore the performance consequences of design decisions, as a performance blueprint of the system. The ΔQSD paradigm is both effective and generic: it allows values from various sources to be combined in a rigorous way, so that approximate results can be obtained quickly and subsequently refined. ΔQSD has been successfully used by Predictable Network Solutions for consultancy on large-scale applications in a number of industries, including telecommunications, avionics, and space and defence, resulting in cumulative savings of $Bs. The paper outlines the ΔQSD paradigm, describes its formal underpinnings, and illustrates its use via a topical real-world example taken from the blockchain/cryptocurrency domain, where application of this approach enabled an advanced distributed proof-of-stake system to meet challenging throughput targets.

The Influence of Funders and Resources

Generally, goal-directed networks are a more, not less, expensive way to coordinate organizational activity. This chapter describes the different types of resources typically required to achieve social impact, including financial resources, human resources, technology, and time. It describes the unique challenges in managing network resources, including when networks compete with their partners for resources and the significant time that networks require to achieve social impact. It includes recommendations for networks that lack the resources they need to make a social impact and funders that wish to forge a path for social impact. Throughout the chapter, case illustrations are used to describe both the types of resources networks require and the varied ways that they secure and manage those resources. It also includes recommendations for fiscal sponsorship and explains how to conduct a community asset inventory.

Probing the gluon plasma with charm balance functions

Recent theoretical explanations for how hydrodynamic-like flow can build up quickly in small collision systems (hydrodynamization) has led to a microscopic picture of flow building up in a gluon-dominated phase before chemical equilibrium between quarks and gluons has been attained. The goal of this contribution to Offshell-2021 is to explore consequence of assuming a long-lived gluon-dominated phase, which we shall denote a gluon plasma (GP). As these consequences are naturally enhanced in a large systems, we assume and explore the extreme scenario in which a GP would be created in AA collisions and exist for significant time before the formation of a chemically-equilibrated quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The GP and its formation would be impossible to probe with light-quark hadrons, which are first produced later in this scenario. As charm quarks are produced early in the collision, they can circumvent the limitations of light quarks and we propose charm balance functions as an effective tool to test this idea and constrain the dynamics of the GP.

Automation and digitalization of healthy fruit and berry plants reproduction

High-quality planting material is a condition for increasing productivity and labor productivity in the cultivation of agricultural products. High-quality planting material is material that is free from harmful pathogens. The process of plant healing requires significant time and material costs. However, with the proper organization, plant healing can be significantly accelerated and cheapened. The main condition for accelerating this process is maximum automation and digitalization of all stages of clonal micropropagation. The article shows the results of many years of work on the cultivation of healthy planting material. Variants of possible improvement of planting stock recovery are proposed with the introduction of the necessary hardware and software at specific stages of recovery and reproduction.

A type system for extracting functional specifications from memory-safe imperative programs

Verifying imperative programs is hard. A key difficulty is that the specification of what an imperative program does is often intertwined with details about pointers and imperative state. Although there are a number of powerful separation logics that allow the details of imperative state to be captured and managed, these details are complicated and reasoning about them requires significant time and expertise. In this paper, we take a different approach: a memory-safe type system that, as part of type-checking, extracts functional specifications from imperative programs. This disentangles imperative state, which is handled by the type system, from functional specifications, which can be verified without reference to pointers. A key difficulty is that sometimes memory safety depends crucially on the functional specification of a program; e.g., an array index is only memory-safe if the index is in bounds. To handle this case, our specification extraction inserts dynamic checks into the specification. Verification then requires the additional proof that none of these checks fail. However, these checks are in a purely functional language, and so this proof also requires no reasoning about pointers.

Capturing Emerging Trends to Bridge Relevancy Gap Between Academic Delivery of Course on Business Research and Talent Expectation of Re-search Industry

What is changing in business research in terms of practices and methods? Are the emerging trends in business research valuable enough to be included as essential contents for the course on business research? This research paper aims to troupe a light on the drifts that are likely to sojourn for a significant time and hence are academically must to deliver in classroom session while coaching progression on business research. This paper explores business correlated emergent research practices and tools with an objective to find their suitability from academic standpoint. This paper will uncover the trends that may help students in becoming potentially more suitable and job ready for research industry that offer keys and solutions to businesses and also aids in the advancement the subject substance of course on business research approaches. The global content in this paper creates valuable insight on the basis of exploration of emerging research trends hence this paper shall contribute as a reference material for the imminent forthcoming research interrelated to this topic.