A married couple from Sydney have told the Synod on the family that parishes should welcome same-sex couples, following the example of parents who invite their son and his male partner to their home for Christmas.

"The Church constantly faces the tension of upholding the truth while expressing compassion and mercy. Families face this tension all the time," Ron and Mavis Pirola said yesterday:"Take homosexuality as an example. Friends of ours were planning their Christmas family gathering when their gay son said he wanted to bring his partner home, too. They fully believed in the Church's teachings and they knew their grandchildren would see them welcome the son and his partner into the family. Their response could be summed up in three words: 'He is our son.' "

"What a model of evangelisation for parishes as they respond to similar situations in their neighbourhood," the Pirolas said.

While Catholic teaching says homosexual people should not be discriminated against, it holds that homosexual acts are always immoral and that marriage can only be a union between one man.

The full testimony ofRon and Mavis Pirola follows:

Fifty-seven years ago, I looked across a room and saw a beautiful young woman. We came to know each other over time and eventually took the huge step of committing ourselves to each other in marriage. We soon found that living our new life together was extraordinarily complex. Like all marriages, we have had wonderful times together and also times of anger, frustration and tears and the nagging fear of a failed marriage. Yet here we are, 55 years married and still in love. It certainly is a mystery.

That attraction that we first felt and the continued bonding force between us was basically sexual. The little things we did for each other, the telephone calls and love notes, the way we planned our day around each other and the things we shared were outward expressions of our longing to be intimate with each other.

As each of our four children arrived, it was an exhilarating joy for which we still thank the Lord daily. Of course, the complexities of parenting had great rewards and challenges. There were nights when we would lie awake wondering where we had gone wrong.

Our faith in Jesus was important to us. We went to Mass together and looked to the Church for guidance. Occasionally we looked at Church documents but they seemed to be from another planet with difficult language1 and not terribly relevant to our own experiences.

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Australian couple tells Synod: Parishes should welcome gay couples

Whether seeking to maintain compliance or to drive business value, emerging technologies can unleash tremendous potential.

Just as Buddhist monks endure frigid Himalayan conditions in the pursuit of enlightenment, the financial services industry has weathered multiple financial and regulatory storms, yet still awaits enlightenment. The emergence of recent disruptive technologies may help, however navigating the various complexities internal to banks global operations and regulatory nuancesis of critical importance on the path to enlightenment.

Certain disruptive technologies such as complex event processing (CEP) engines, machine learning, and predictive analytics using emerging big-data technologies such as Hadoop, in-memory, or NoSQL illustrate a trend in how firms are approaching technology selection to meet regulatory compliance requirements.

At the same time, regulatory pressure, widely felt by global financial institutions for US and foreign banking organizations, has created seismic shifts in financial markets, causing banks to reshape business models in terms of services they offer, clients they serve, and products they take to market.

Banks are looking for the panacea to achieve regulatory and profitability goals within their organizations. To be successful, banks must consider the reality of siloed operations and complex legacy technology infrastructures and overlay these emerging technologies to promote unprecedented visibility on operational and regulatory issues and tap into hidden profitability.

In their pursuit of regulatory enlightenment, banks are considering four key drivers, which are accelerating the adoption of advanced technology in the compliance function:

1. The changing role of the CCOUnder Dodd-Frank, the chief compliance officer (CCO) now carries ultimate responsibility to ensure compliance programs, operations, policies, procedures, and technology footprints are effectively meeting newly mandated requirements. Naturally, CCOs have become more involved in technology decisions, helping shape the overall compliance function with more integration points and influence on the business across trading, operations, and risk management. Further, as the CCOs role and area of responsibility expands into oversight of social media interactions of traders and associated persons, it becomes clear that existing surveillance technology is insufficient.

2. Multiple regulatory requirementsWhen one looks across Dodd-Frank, Volcker Rule, DFAST, CCAR, BASEL III, FATCA, and LEI compliance requirements, the sheer number of hours and diverse skillsets needed to ingest, interpret, and plan the regulatory response is daunting. As a result, banks and other financial institutions have had to build core capabilities to interpret, plan, and implement solutions using lawyers, consultants, and internal talent. The check-the-box compliance response, where existing or new point solution technology is deployed, has little positive impact on profitability. Furthermore, the initial investment to achieve compliance is quickly lost as rules inevitably change, as more asset classes are added, new geographies are entered, and business models evolve. In order for compliance technology to be sustainable into the foreseeable future, its ability to evolve with constantly changing business and regulatory paradigms should be viewed as an intrinsic requirement.

3. Multiple geographies and jurisdictions To further complicate matters, regulatory alignment across jurisdictions remains an issue. As a recent example, we dont need to look further than the requirements imposed by the CFTC, SEC, and Federal Reserve for how the differently nuanced rules caused banks delays in interpretation and implementation of a regulatory response --affecting banks globally across holding-company/legal-entity structuring and long-term capital plans. Looking across national boundaries, the problem is compounded with multinational rules and jurisdictions such as FSA, ESMA (e.g., MiFID, EMIR), and JFSA to which compliance is required in a similar but nuanced fashion. Banks also face the challenges of navigating substitute compliance, cross-border implications, and suitability of home-country regulations and whether or not the counterparty is a US person. Emerging regulatory compliance solutions need to accommodate this global need as the effect of nuances and region-specific complexities will continue to be compounded.

4. Business model changesAs banks react to the swath of new regulations, jockey for a position in an unforgiving global economic climate, and seek to shift their business models, they must have access to deeper data and analytics outputs upon which to base their decisions. Historically, banks have used traditional data warehouse and decision support systems, with substantial manual intervention yielding temporally sparse outputs -- and in many cases the decisions are informed by stale or incomplete data. With a banks business model typically spanning 24/7 global operations across multiple legal entities, the banks technology solutions must offer visibility across a complex global and rapidly changing operating model, while accommodating global, regional, and national regulatory requirements.

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4 Factors Driving Enlightenment & Big-Data Adoption in Regulatory Compliance

With more apps moving to the cloud, Cisco Systems Inc.s Raghunath Nambiar, Distinguished Engineer with the companys Data Center Business Group, thinks that Oracle Corp.s commitment to cloud makes sense. So while Oraclehas been touting it benchmark leadership, Cisco has been a key part of Oracles move towards the cloud, and its Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) also compares well when benchmarked. Nambiar stopped by theCUBE at Oracles Open World conference to talk with Jeff Frick and John Furrier about UCS benchmarks and his predictions for the future of the data center.

People care about benchmarks, said Nambiar, because they enable comparison based on performance, price, and efficiency in a vendor-neutral way. The numbers are important for customers, vendors, and the organization itself. In terms of setting benchmarks, Nambiar said, Cisco has been doing extremely well. In fact, in the past five years, the company has achieved more than 95 industry benchmark reports.

Many members of the benchmarking community, Nambiar said, are employed by major vendors. Its their task, he explained, to remain neutral so consumers can accurately assess their options. When companies compare against each other, it creates an exciting, competitive environment, Nambiar said, and one from which customers benefit because prices go down while performance goes up.

Nambiar went on to discuss Ciscos relationship with Oracle, touching on Cisco customer use cases for Oracle and detailing that the modern enterprise applications fit into three buckets. These include:

1. Traditional, like transaction processing and enterprise data warehousing, for which Nambiar says Ciscos UCS is a great fit.

2. Emerging, like big data management, in which tools like Hadoop play an important role. Nambiar says that UCS is a good fit for this type of application, and is especially ideal if customers want to combine traditional and emerging applications.

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Enlightenment through benchmarking, the Cisco way|#oow14

To understand whats going on with MNsure, we can appeal to dogs for enlightenment.

Consider a world in which there are only four dog breeds: Border Collies, Huskies, Malamutes, and Utonagans (yes, there is such a thing). All Border Collies live for 17.2 years, all Huskies for 8.1 years, all Malamutes for 1.8 years (poor things), and Utonagans for negative 9.1 years (dying 9 years before they are born; best to overlook the metaphysical implications).

If we then compute the average lifespan, wed find that the average dog lives to be 4.5 years. But does that 4.5-year average lifespan give you any meaningful information about how long your dog will live?

Not really. And what if there were altogether 22,000 dogs, but only 770 of them were Utonagans? Would that change things? Shouldnt the life expectancy be adjusted according to the number of dogs in each breed?

Welcome to statistics.

If we switch from dogs to MNsure providers, the above scenario is part of whats at issue in the debate over the recently announced increase in MNsure rates. Last week, MNsure providers Blue Cross Blue Shield, HealthPartners, Medica, and UCare and the Minnesota Department of Commerce reported the percentage changes in rates for 2015 as, respectively, increases of 17.2 percent, 8.1 percent, 1.8 percent; and a decrease of 9.1 percent.

The strict mathematical average of these four numbers is indeed 4.5 percent. But does that 4.5 percent number give any meaningful information about individual rate increase? It doesn't, for the same reason the average lifespan didnt tell us about how long your dog would live. Unless you are bundling coverage in equal amounts from these four providers, the increase in a persons premium will not come close to a 4.5 percent increase.

The 4.5 percent number gets even more confusing when we consider that the provider with the lowest rates and the most private health plans in MNsure (with 60 percent of them), Preferred One, is leaving the program. The exclusion of Preferred One further skews the statistics, because any Preferred One consumer who either switches to one of the other providers or stays with Preferred One will have a much, er, healthier increase. (We wont even mention that a HealthPartners spokesman said that he wasnt sure how the Commerce Department arrived at the 8.1 percent figure.)

A better measure of the increase is a weighted calculation. That is, the providers with more subscribers would have their increases given proportionally greater significance in computing the overall change. Of the four providers, Blue Cross Blue Shield has 55 percent of the remaining MNsure subscribers (or about 12,300 people); HealthPartners has 30 percent (6,800 people); Medica, an 11 percent share (2,500); and UCare a 3 percent share (770).

Using a weighted measure, the aggregate increase in revenue for these four providers assuming no changes in the subscriber base would be approximately 11.8 percent, which more accurately reflects the increase in premiums. But that 11.8 percent still doesnt take into account the wild card of the 60 percent of MNsure subscribers orphaned after Preferred One jumped ship.

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Why MNsure's 4.5% 'average' rate increase tells us almost nothing about MNsure rates