Ephesians 2

19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, ²⁰ built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. ²¹ In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. ²² And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

Reflection:

Always looking in from the outside? Supposedly part of a team, but not really belonging? In Ephesians 2, Paul affirms that though we were once regarded as strangers and foreigners to the people of God, today we belong as fellow citizens and family members. This truth removes any doubt that together we are members of God’s household. Though not related by physical blood or birth, we have the same Spirit living inside of us. Consequently, for some of us we no longer need to feel like the outsider, and for others of us we no longer need to view fellow brothers and sisters as strangers. Together, with Christ as the cornerstone, we become God’s temple. And as God’s temple we are the place where God’s presence is made real in this world.

Response:

No longer regarded as strangers by God, we are also no longer strangers to one another. And because we are fellow citizens let us not attempt to live out our calling as individuals. Today let’s pray for an increase of real community in our ministries. May our relationships with one another be based not on personal likes and dislikes, but based on the Spirit who lives inside of us.  Let’s also pray for fellow brothers and sisters who have been living on the “outside.” As the Spirit attests in their hearts that they belong to the Lord, may they fully enter into God’s household.

Thanks to CNN.com!

Just this once? House refuses to pass debt ceiling increase.

Wish they would have told us sooner! Cell phones may cause brain cancer!

Big spender: Obama nominates new Secretary of Commerce.

If you hadn’t heard, PBS was hacked!

And, Balloon Boy’s dad is selling his balloon?!

Image from Sarah PAC

Over the Memorial Day weekend, Sarah Palin kicked off her (somewhat surprising) “One Nation” bus tour of the Northeast. The former vice-presidential candidate and current TV-personality has already set off a storm of questions.

Is she laying the groundwork for a 2012 Presidential bid? Some see her road-trip as an over-the-top publicity stunt. But members of the press are asking another question altogether…where is she?

Sarah Palin and her advisers are refusing to tell members of the media where she is going on her current bus tour – and the former Alaska governor seems to be enjoying the cat and mouse game that’s resulted.”

Palin’s game of “keep the press guessing” has created an unusual (and potentially dangerous) situation on some of America’s highways.

Since Palin and her team won’t share where the potential candidate is headed, reporters and producers have little choice but to simply stay close to Palin’s bus. This has resulted in scenes of the Palin bus tooling down the highway followed by a caravan of 10 or 15 vehicles – including a massive CNN bus – all trying to make sure they don’t lose sight of the Palin bus.”

On Monday the bus headed through Pennsylvania, making stops in both Gettysburg and Philadelphia. By the evening, Palin had made it all the way to New York where she shared a dinner with fellow reality-TV star Donald Trump.

Where will it stop tomorrow? Well, only Sarah knows.

Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal

Finding Story Chains in Newswire Articles

Xianshu Zhu

1:30pm Thursday 2 June 2011, ITE 325B

Huge amounts of information are shared on the Internet every day, such as online newspapers, digital libraries, blogs, and social network messages. While there are some excellent search engines, such as Google, to assist in retrieving information by simply providing keywords, large volumes of unstructured search results returned by search engines make it hard to keep a clear picture of the evolution of an event. Moreover, in addition to events themselves, people may be more interested in finding out the hidden relationships among different events or causes and effects of an event. However, traditional search engines provide limited support for dealing with these sophisticated search tasks. In this dissertation, we try to enrich search options of existing search engines and organize search results in a more structured and meaningful way.

More specifically, we propose to develop a News Story Reader, with functionality similar to Google maps, that contains the following characteristics: (1) Search results are organized into groups of causes and impacts of events, thus helping web users navigate through the search results in a more directional and efficient way; (2) Enriched search options will allow users to search for correlations between two stories by selecting two articles as start and end points respectively producing a coherent story chain as output; (3) An interactive user interface will provide the functionality to zoom in and zoom out, and add via points to the search result.

In our preliminary work, we start with a relatively simple problem: given a start and an end article we want to find a chain of articles that coherently connect them together. We developed a random walk based algorithm that can find story chains that are coherent and relevant, and with low redundancy. We applied two intelligent pruning methods to reduce the size of the graph so that the algorithm is efficient. Moreover, our next goal is to find hierarchical story chains that can show evolution of stories at different levels of granularity. Thus, we further extended our current algorithm by using random walks on the word-document co-clustering graph with weights biased on name entities to find hierarchical story chains.

The contributions of this dissertation include (1) a News Story Reader system that can help alleviate the information overload problem; (2) design and development of two story chain finding algorithms; (3) exploration of methods that can find story chains on which news articles are connected via causes and impacts; (4) exploration of methods on story chain visualization.

Committee:

• Dr. Tim Oates (chair)
• Dr. Charles Nicholas
• Dr. Tim Finin
• Dr. Sergei Nirenburg

I recently ventured out to Corolla, North Carolina for a relaxing break at the beach. If you know anything about the Outer Banks, you know that this time is still technically pre-season. Many stores are closed and very few people are around. This is perfect for relaxing purposes, but when it’s time to eat…It’s time to eat! So my first night there, I made my own make shift version of an Indian meal.

To make this meal, you need:

• Chicken (leg quarters, thighs, drumsticks, breasts…whatever you prefer)
• Patak’s Indian Cooking Sauce (http://pataksusa.elsstore.com/view/category/1428-sauce—in—glass/) There are a large variety of flavors. I chose Jalfrezi Sauce and Butter Chicken Sauce.
• Black pepper
• One red onion (sliced)
• Onion powder
• Adobo
• Salt
• Garlic powder
• Garlic and herb seasonings
• Potatoes (sliced like potato chips) If you don’t want potatoes, you can also use basmati rice or naan. Either way, it will be delicious.
• Vegetable of choice (I chose cabbage)

1. First preheat your oven to 375 degrees
2. Place potatoes in a deep oven-safe dish. Add some of your sliced onions, adobo, salt, black pepper, onion powder, and garlic and herb seasonings. With your hands (because it’s fun), mix all the ingredients so that the potatoes have an even coating of seasonings. Cover dish with foil and place in the oven. When the potatoes are almost ready, remove the foil so they can get a little bit crisp.
3. Use a fork to punch little holes in your chicken pieces. These holes should not be large noticeable holes because then your chicken will lose its tenderness.
4. Place all the chicken in a large mixing bowl. Add onions, salt, adobo, onion powder, garlic powder, black pepper, and garlic and herb seasonings. Pour a little bit of olive oil or canola oil on top. Once again, use your hands to rub in the seasonings and evenly coat each chicken piece. *Though seen as unhealthy, leaving the skin on chicken whilst it’s cooking helps it retain its moisture and tenderness. If you can, leave some on there and take it off when consuming.*
5. Evenly place all chicken pieces in large oven safe tray. Make sure there is space between all pieces so that none of the parts will be left uncooked. The pan may need to be sprayed if it is an aluminum pan but glass trays (preferred) do not need to be.
6. Your preferred vegetable can be placed in the oven to steam. Just place them in an oven safe dish and sprinkle some salt and black pepper. Add a little bit of water and cover tightly with foil. Place in the oven when chicken is halfway finished and they will be steamy delicious by the time the chicken is done.
7. Lastly, for the Patak sauces, follow the instructions on the jar on how to heat them. I heated my sauces in a skillet with a little bit of the “juice” from the chicken. The drippings from the chicken adds a little bit more flavor to your sauces and connects the two flavors. Generally, you heat them up for about 15 minutes on medium heat in the skillet.

Now you can set up your table and enjoy this delicious meal with family and friends!

*Note-

Notice I didn’t put exact measurements for seasonings. That is because the seasonings listed are really fail proof seasonings. The only ones that you could put too much of are salt, adobo, and black pepper.

Also it is important to use your own judgment when determining the doneness of the chicken. Because the chicken parts used can vary, times may also vary. Boneless chicken breasts take a lot less time to cook than whole leg quarters.