The contrasting structure of Acts 12:5−17: A spatial reading

The episode of Peter’s rescue from prison in Acts 12:5–17 occupies an intriguing position in the narrative of Acts as a whole. Scholars hold differing views on the episode’s function. These views range from seeing the episode as a hermeneutical key to the work as a whole to making no discernable difference to the narrative whatsoever. The present article seeks to contribute to the debate by reading Acts 12:5–17 spatially. In paying attention to the various spatial references in the text, the movement of characters, their locales and their own and the reader’s experience of them being present or not present, a contrasting structure may be perceived in the text. Furthermore, spatiality helps to point out the contrast between different character groups in the narrative. Some implications for reading the episode in this contrasting fashion will be indicated, and the enigmatic statement about Peter’s ‘going to another place’ (Ac 12:17) will be read against the text’s spatial background.

Fractal Metrology for biogeosystems analysis

The solid-pore distribution pattern plays an important role in soil functioning being related with the main physical, chemical and biological multiscale and multitemporal processes of this complex system. In the present research, we studied the aggregation process as self-organizing and operating near a critical point. The structural pattern is extracted from the digital images of three soils (Chernozem, Solonetz and "Chocolate" Clay) and compared in terms of roughness of the gray-intensity distribution quantified by several measurement techniques. Special attention was paid to the uncertainty of each of them measured in terms of standard deviation. Some of the applied methods are known as classical in the fractal context (box-counting, rescaling-range and wavelets analyses, etc.) while the others have been recently developed by our Group. The combination of these techniques, coming from Fractal Geometry, Metrology, Informatics, Probability Theory and Statistics is termed in this paper Fractal Metrology (FM). We show the usefulness of FM for complex systems analysis through a case study of the soil's physical and chemical degradation applying the selected toolbox to describe and compare the structural attributes of three porous media with contrasting structure but similar clay mineralogy dominated by montmorillonites.

Fractal metrology for biogeosystems analysis

The solid-pore distribution pattern plays an important role in soil functioning being related with the main physical, chemical and biological multiscale and multitemporal processes. In the present research, this pattern is extracted from the digital images of three soils (Chernozem, Solonetz and "Chocolate'' Clay) and compared in terms of roughness of the gray-intensity distribution (the measurand) quantified by several measurement techniques. Special attention was paid to the uncertainty of each of them and to the measurement function which best fits to the experimental results. Some of the applied techniques are known as classical in the fractal context (box-counting, rescaling-range and wavelets analyses, etc.) while the others have been recently developed by our Group. The combination of all these techniques, coming from Fractal Geometry, Metrology, Informatics, Probability Theory and Statistics is termed in this paper Fractal Metrology (FM). We show the usefulness of FM through a case study of soil physical and chemical degradation applying the selected toolbox to describe and compare the main structural attributes of three porous media with contrasting structure but similar clay mineralogy dominated by montmorillonites.