the fundamental belief in sikhism is that god exists not merely as an idea or concept, but as a real entity. god is indescribable, yet knowable and perceivable to anyone who is prepared to dedicate the time and energy to become perceptive to his persona. the gurus never spoke about proofs of the existence of god. for them, he is too real, and something obvious does not require any logical proof...

A. Cosmological proof of the Existence of God In the 3rd Meditation, Descartes attempts to prove that God (i) exists, (ii) is the cause of the essence of the meditator (i.e. the author of his nature as a thinking thing), and (iii) the cause of the meditator’s existence (both as creator and conserver, i.e. the cause that keeps him in existence from one moment to the next). The proof that God exi...

Identifying influential nodes in complex networks has received increasing attention for its great theoretical and practical applications in many fields. Some classical methods, such as degree centrality, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, and coreness centrality, were reported to have some limitations in detecting influential nodes. Recently, the famous h-index was introduced to the ...

We consider variations of two well-known centrality measures, betweenness and closeness, with a different model of information spread. Rather than along shortest paths only, it is assumed that information spreads efficiently like an electrical current. We prove that the current-flow variant of closeness centrality is identical with another known measure, information centrality, and give improve...

Identifying the node spreading influence in networks is an important task to optimally use the network structure and ensure the more efficient spreading in information. In this paper, by taking into account the shortest distance between a target node and the node set with the highest k-core value, we present an improved method to generate the ranking list to evaluate the node spreading influenc...

We present findings from an 18-month evaluative study in which we gathered survey and telephone interview data on 51 rural pastors who participated in an intervention designed to help them overcome some of the biggest hurdles in their professional lives (including loneliness, isolation, burnout, an imbalance between personal and professional life, and an absence of self-care activities) and to ...

This research proposes a vigorous methodology based on the fuzzy set theory to improve the facility layout process. Using natural language, the fuzzy set theory is an appropriate tool for controlling complex systems such as facility planning. The closeness rating between departments in a plant depends on qualitative and quantitative factors. Some of these factors may have a greater effect on th...

A novel algorithm for the fast detection of hubs in chemical networks is presented. The algorithm identifies a set of nodes in the network as most significant, aimed to be the most effective points of distribution for fast, widespread coverage throughout the system. We show that our hubs have in general greater closeness centrality and betweenness centrality than vertices with maximal degree, w...

Using data collected across 19 years, the chief goal of this study was to discover predictors of continued relational closeness between best friends. Participants were same-sex and cross-sex best friend pairs recruited from a small Midwestern college. In 1983, participants completed several tests and activities designed to assess facets of intimacy, with follow-up studies in 1987 and 2002 measu...

k-Anonymity and ε-differential privacy are two mainstream privacy models, the former introduced to anonymize data sets and the latter to limit the knowledge gain that results from the inclusion of one individual in the data set. Whereas basic k-anonymity only protects against identity disclosure, t-closeness was presented as an extension of k-anonymity that also protects against attribute discl...