A história da prostituta Raab é contada no Antigo Testamento em Js 2,1-21; 6,22-25. Depois de acolher os espiões hebreus e escondê-los em sua casa, ela os envia em segurança de volta ao acampamento de Israel recebendo deles a promessa de que ela e sua família escapariam da matança quando Jericó fosse invadida. Essa narrativa serviu de inspiração para que autores do Novo Testamento, bem como mestres judeus, destacassem suas virtudes, apresentando-a como modelo, não obstante sua condição de prostituta. Inúmeros testemunhos antigos chamam a atenção sobretudo porque, enquanto as mulheres em geral, e de modo especial as meretrizes eram vistas como gente abjeta e lhes era negado qualquer tipo de direitos civis e religiosos, desde a Escritura Raab foi retratada como uma das principais protagonistas da tomada de Jericó e suas virtudes celebradas através dos tempos. O presente artigo dividir-se-á em três momentos: depois de um breve comentário ao texto de Josué, a segunda etapa consiste na exposição e análise das passagens neotestamentárias nas quais Raab comparece. Por fim, a partir da tradição judaica –Flávio Josefo, Talmud e diversos midrašim –será evidenciado como os judeus apresentaram a personagem em questão que ainda hoje pode inspirar comportamentos de acordo com sua fé no Deus verdadeiro.

Measuring the semantic similarity of texts has a vital role in various tasks from the field of natural language processing. In this paper, we describe a set of experiments we carried out to evaluate and compare the performance of different approaches for measuring the semantic similarity of short texts. We perform a comparison of four models based on word embeddings: two variants of Word2Vec (one based on Word2Vec trained on a specific dataset and the second extending it with embeddings of word senses), FastText, and TF-IDF. Since these models provide word vectors, we experiment with various methods that calculate the semantic similarity of short texts based on word vectors. More precisely, for each of these models, we test five methods for aggregating word embeddings into text embedding. We introduced three methods by making variations of two commonly used similarity measures. One method is an extension of the cosine similarity based on centroids, and the other two methods are vari...

Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) has been characterized as a receptor that recognizes unmethylated CpG motif and triggers a pro-inflammatory cytokine response that influences both innate and adaptive immunity. Buffalo is an economically important livestock species in many Asian and Mediterranean countries, but there is little information available on its TLR9 structure and response to stimulation with its agonist CpG-ODNs. Hence in this study, we report the analysis of newly sequenced buffalo TLR9 gene fragment. In this study, buffalo TLR9 amino acid sequence revealed close association of TLR9 proteins within other bovines and small ruminants; but high divergence from other species. Multiple alignment of deduced amino acid sequence of Bubalus bubalis TLR9 with other species showed that 156/201 (74.28%) amino acids were conserved in all species. Leucine rich repeat (LRR) motifs in the ectodomain of TLR9 are responsible for molecular recognition of its agonist. The LRR pattern of Bubalus bubalis TLR9 protein was predicted towards N-terminal sequence and was found to be conserved among all species except Rattus norvegicus and Equus caballus. Blast analysis of buffalo TLR9 sequence with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) database revealed 13 SNPs out of which 7 were cds-synonymous and 6 were of the functional significance. Furthermore, kinetics of TLR9 and proinflammatory IL-1 and TNF-cytokine expression by buffalo PBMCs influenced by CpG-ODN is also discussed.