Bücher von Paul Thomas

This booklet explores the mystery of biblical marriage as a type of the relationship between Christ and His bride, the Church. The uniqueness of this relationship is witnessed in the creation of the woman, from the rib of the man. This corresponds to the bride of Christ, the Church, which was similarly purchased with blood and water issuing from the side of her husband, the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul's command for husbands to love their wives and wives to respect their husbands are twin pillars central to the success of a marriage.

This book can perhaps be usefully perceived as an invitation to reflect on aspects of the principles of the government of God through the ages. In this present time, when authority has been compromised - partly because of the misuse of power and partly because of rebellion - there is an urgent need to reclaim sound biblical principles of authority and leadership. As the idiom says, we cannot throw out the baby with the bathwater. God has always had principles of governance for the people of His covenant. Each epoch or dispensation had a specific set of divine edicts drawn up between God and His people. The content varied but the principles always reflected the holy and moral nature of God. We can ascertain from the pages of the Bible that there has never been a time when God operated without principles of governance.

Simulated test collections may find application in situations where real datasets cannot easily be accessed due to confidentiality concerns or practical inconvenience. They can potentially support Information Retrieval (IR) experimentation, tuning, validation, performance prediction, and hardware sizing. Naturally, the accuracy and usefulness of results obtained from a simulation depend upon the fidelity and generality of the models which underpin it. The fidelity of emulation of a real corpus is likely to be limited by the requirement that confidential information in the real corpus should not be able to be extracted from the emulated version. We present a range of methods exploring trade-offs between emulation fidelity and degree of preservation of privacy.We present three different simple types of text generator which work at a micro level: Markov models, neural net models, and substitution ciphers. We also describe macro level methods where we can engineer macro properties of a corpus, giving a range of models for each of the salient properties: document length distribution, word frequency distribution (for independent and non-independent cases), word length and textual representation, and corpus growth.We present results of emulating existing corpora and for scaling up corpora by two orders of magnitude. We show that simulated collections generated with relatively simple methods are suitable for some purposes and can be generated very quickly. Indeed it may sometimes be feasible to embed a simple lightweight corpus generator into an indexer for the purpose of efficiency studies.Naturally, a corpus of artificial text cannot support IR experimentation in the absence of a set of compatible queries. We discuss and experiment with published methods for query generation and query log emulation.We present a proof-of-the-pudding study in which we observe the predictive accuracy of efficiency and effectiveness results obtained on emulated versions of TREC corpora. The study includes three open-source retrieval systems and several TREC datasets. There is a trade-off between confidentiality and prediction accuracy and there are interesting interactions between retrieval systems and datasets. Our tentative conclusion is that there are emulation methods which achieve useful prediction accuracy while providing a level of confidentiality adequate for many applications.Many of the methods described here have been implemented in the open source project SynthaCorpus, accessible at: https://bitbucket.org/davidhawking/synthacorpus/

Evaluation research findings should be a key element of the policy-making process, yet in reality they are often disregarded. This valuable book examines the development of evaluation and its impact on public policy by analysing evaluation frameworks and criteria which are available when evaluating public policies and services. It further examines the nature of evidence and its use and non-use by decision-makers and assesses the work of influential academics in the USA and UK in the context of evaluation and policy making. The book emphasises the 'real world' of decision-makers in the public sector and recognises how political demands and economic pressures can affect the decisions of those who commission evaluation research while providing recommendations for policymakers on adopting a different approach to evaluation. This is essential reading for under-graduate and post-graduate students of policy analysis and public sector management, and those who are involved in the planning and evaluation of public policies and services.

A practical guide to using the Book of Common Prayer, without using technical language or assuming prior knowledge. It includes a history and theology of the BCP with practical advice on using its principal services.

An engaging range of period texts and theme books for AS and A Level history.