Praised for its revolutionary technique and studied for its perplexing imagery, Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait has remained a riddle since the 19th century. Completed in 1434 in Bruges, the work showcases a skilled use of oil paints and impressively realistic details. More famous and perhaps more important, however, than van Eyck’s technique are the two figures and the objects which decorate...

practices, then in medicine and textile industry, and over the last few decades they have become the world’s most popular and widespread drug drug. The history of cannabis consumption goes back several thousand years when it originated in Asia. The first references to cannabis can be found in Chinese and Indian writings such as Vedian hymns and Indian religious songs, dated back to the first mi...

old son was a persistent bed-wetter. The trouble started when he was around three, though he had been completely trained at 18 months. It began with the odd wet bed, gaining momentum fast until he was never dry. We did everything the experts advised?never scolded, loved him more, praised his prowess in other spheres. We surreptitiously docked off evening drinks and began again the business of t...

At a recent Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on the Boston bombings, a Massachusetts state official praised the decisiveness of the response. As citizens of a U.S. ally that was the target of more than 100 terror attacks between 2000 and 2005, we viewed the event somewhat differently. While your actions affirmed that the U.S. will go to extraordinary lengths to protect the security of...

The article analyzes how the most important medieval Jewish exegetes interpreted book of Qohelet. It is focused on some controversial ideas text, namely, meaning pleasures life and kind wisdom praised in book. question authorship, although not controversial, also analyzed. interpretations these topics were basis for their understanding purpose as a whole. Different explanations given by whether...

Background: While praised for its benefits in treating symptoms related to menopausal changes, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has been associated with an increased risk hormone-dependent cancer development, particularly endometrial and breast. Few studies have elucidated the relationship between HRT cessation receptor-positive breast proliferation. We report herein, best of our knowledge, fi...

An effective low-cost solution to determine characteristic features of objects from a simple infrared diode array, working on the reflection light scanner principle and using the fusion of amplitude information to detect and characterize objects, has been designed. Essentially, two arrays of several emitter-receiver pairs are mounted on opposite sides of the area of observation (e.g. a conveyer...

A simple yet remarkably powerful tool of selfish and malicious participants in a distributed system is “equivocation”: making conflicting statements to others. We present TrInc, a small, trusted component that combats equivocation in large, distributed systems. Consisting fundamentally of only a non-decreasing counter and a key, TrInc provides a new primitive: unique, once-in-alifetime attestat...

Individual conversion and personal salvation are stressed in some church circles, however, in the history of the Church there has always been a strong interest in the well-being and “conversion” of the community. Consider, for example, Paul’s approach to the Corinthians, and the analogy of the community as one “body” in chapter 12 of his letter to the Corinthians. We see this viewpoint emerging...

In this paper, we aim to monitor the flow of people in large public infrastructures. We propose an unsupervised methodology to cluster people flow patterns into the most typical and meaningful configurations. By processing 3D images from a network of depth cameras, we built a descriptor for the flow pattern. We define a data-irregularity measure that assesses how well each descriptor fits a dat...