序成六虚上下,数生太极乾坤--今本《周易》卦序排列数学规律三探

今本<周易>序卦是一件完美的数学作品.序卦的分布规律体现于一系列的数列之中,但是,假如这些排列规律彼此间缺乏关联性,显得孤立、分散,便难以真正体现序卦排列的数学规律性.经过更深入的研究,笔者发现这些排列规律并非彼此分散、互不相干的,而是互有关联,整合成一个完美的统一体.序卦排列数学规律其鲜明的特点有四:其一是连续性,其二是周期性,其三是对称性,其四是关联性.连续性、周期性体现其简易性,对称性、关联性体现其统一性.简易性、统一性体现其完美性.     

THERE'S MORE TO TIME THAN TICKING AWAY

Time is an element that each of us experiences in the core of our being. Yet it also is one of the great mysteries in our conceptual grasp of reality. The notion of time has therefore been reflected upon and explored by thinkers and scientists since ancient times. In this essay I relate the multiple ways in which Antje's Jackelén's scholarly and stimulating work Time and Eternity analyzes the historical, philosophical, theological, and scientific perspectives on the notion of time lived and its relation to the conceptual endless time that we call eternity, and offer some of my own contextual reflections on the topic.     

Infants’ auditory enumeration: Evidence for analog magnitudes in the small number range

Vigorous debate surrounds the issue of whether infants use different representational mechanisms to discriminate small and large numbers. We report evidence for ratio-dependent performance in infants’ discrimination of small numbers of auditory events, suggesting that infants can use analog magnitudes to represent small values, at least in the auditory domain. Seven-month-old infants in the present study reliably discriminated two from four tones (a 1:2 ratio) in Experiment 1, when melodic and continuous temporal properties of the sequences were controlled, but failed to discriminate two from three tones (a 2:3 ratio) under the same conditions in Experiment 2. A third experiment ruled out the possibility that infants in Experiment 1 were responding to greater melodic variety in the four-tone sequences. The discrimination function obtained here is the same as that found for infants’ discrimination of large numbers of visual and auditory items at a similar age, as well as for that obtained for similar-aged infants’ duration discriminations, and thus adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that human infants may share with adults and nonhuman animals a mechanism for representing quantities as “noisy” mental magnitudes.     

Collective motivation beliefs of early adolescents working in small groups

This study examined collective efficacy, group cohesion, and group performance in 125 randomly assigned groups of older (mean age 13.45 years) and younger (mean age 11.41 years) early adolescents working on three cooperative tasks. Collective motivation significantly predicted performance, even after controlling for past performance and self-efficacy for the older but not the younger participants. For the older (but not the younger) participants, groups with high collective efficacy and group cohesion scored higher on performance tasks than groups with low collective efficacy and group cohesion. The results point to the emergence of collective motivation beliefs in early adolescence, consistent with theories of social and cognitive development. Implications for theory and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Confirmation Ministry in the Crossfire of Tolerance and Fascism

This article discuses the vitality of confirmation ministry in India in the present social, economic, and political contexts. The article analyses how confirmation ministry in the Andhra Evangelical Lutheran Church contributes to Lutheran identity and leadership, dealing briefly with the theological impetus from Luther's Small Catechism and Luther's theology of sola fide and sola gratsia     

Chaos breeds autonomy: connectionist design between bias and baby-sitting

In connectionism and its offshoots, models acquire functionality through externally controlled learning schedules. This undermines the claim of these models to autonomy. Providing these models with intrinsic biases is not a solution, as it makes their function dependent on design assumptions. Between these two alternatives, there is room for approaches based on spontaneous self-organization. Structural reorganization in adaptation to spontaneous activity is a well-known phenomenon in neural development. It is proposed here as a way to prepare connectionist models for learning and enhance the autonomy of these models.     

Interrogatory Theology

Abstract : Theological engagement with young people—and indeed with people of all ages—benefits when it attends to the practice of asking questions. The understanding of theological statements requires an appreciation of the questions behind them. In addition, questions are not merely instruments for getting to the answers. Good questions themselves generate insight. Questioning works best in an atmosphere of trust and freedom. This article develops these points by narrating experiences of theological engagement with young people.     

Organizational network perceptions versus reality: A small world after all?

Given the complexity of organizing and keeping track of even a small organizational network, boundedly rational people may have learned to use small world principles in perceiving friendship networks: arrange people in dense clusters, and connect the clusters with short paths. Analysis of 116 perceived friendship networks from four different organizations showed that these perceived networks exhibited greater small world properties than the actual friendship networks. Further, people perceived more friendship clustering than actually existed, and attributed more popularity and brokerage to the perceivedly-popular than to the actually-popular.     

Response patterns of young children from two contrasting SES contexts to different numerical tasks with numbers 1–5

This study contributes to a multifaceted picture of young children’s emergent number knowledge by focusing on the variety of ways in which children express and use quantitative information. The authors’ aims are to (a) explore the extent to which quantifying collections 1–5 and using that information pose different levels of difficulty to children from 33 to 47?months old, (b) identify intra- and intertask response patterns, and (c) analyze the influence of socioeconomic status and age on these response patterns. Sixty-six children from two contrasting socioeconomic status groups (very low and middle) were asked to solve tasks with 1–5 elements in the context of a game. Using quantitative information turned out to be more complex than quantification. Intra- and intertask response patterns showed that children gradually come to understand the first five numerical values according to the numerical sequence in a much less strict way than that proposed by the cardinal-knowers model that posits that children progress in an orderly way in their number knowledge. Children in different ages and socioeconomic status groups were found to be more similar to each other when the whole arc of responses provided was considered than when solely correct performance was measured.