Situational-Context: A Unified View of Everything Involved at a Particular Situation

As the interest in the Web of Things increases, specially for the general population, the barriers to entry for the use of these technologies should decrease. Current applications can be developed to adapt their behaviour to predefined conditions and users preferences, facilitating their use. In the future,Web of Things software should be able to automatically adjust its behaviour to non-predefined preferences or context of its users. In this vision paper we define the Situational-Context as the combination of the virtual profiles of the entities (things or people) that concur at a particular place and time. The computation of the Situational-Context allow us to predict the expected system behaviour and the required interaction between devices to meet the entities’ goals, achieving a better adjustment of the system to variable contexts.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

A Collaborative Visualization Framework Using JINI™ Technology

It is difficult to achieve mutual understanding of complex information between individuals that are separated geographically. Two well-known techniques commonly used to deal with this difficultly are collaboration and information visualization. This thesis develops a generic flexible framework that supports both collaboration and information visualization. It introduces the Collaborative Visualization Environment (COVE) framework, which simplifies the development of real-time synchronous multi-user applications by decoupling the elements of collaboration from the application. This allows developers to focus on building applications and leave the difficulties of collaboration (i.e., concurrency controls, user awareness, session management, etc.) to the framework. The framework uses an object sharing approach to share information and views between participants in a collaborative session. This approach takes advantage of several Java technologies (i.e., JavaBeans™, Jini™, and JavaSpaces™). JavaBeans™ establish a well-known standard for applications to operate within the framework. Jini™ services provide framework stability and enable code sharing across the network. Objects are shared between remote clients through the JavaSpaces™ service

All Excellence is God\u27s Excellence: Examining the Fractal Nature of Biblical Wisdom for Decision-making in Complex Environments

This study analyzed decision-making techniques in complex environments to discover and examine fractal patterns within biblical wisdom. Employing a constructivist grounded theory approach, interviews of organizational leaders from various occupational verticals such as business leaders, pastors, missionaries, politicians, coaches, teachers, military, and law enforcement were conducted to discern their decision-making principles and methods. The significance of this research is its immense application potential. From the broader context of one’s worldview, the search for meaning, purpose, and success in one’s life journey is fundamental to the human psyche. Within motivated leaders, there is consistently a desire to do well—ultimately, to be excellent in one’s personal journey. However, a person’s destination is not determined by their desire but by their path and that path is greatly determined by the choices they make. The greatest influence one can have in impacting their destiny and achieving future success is through sound decision-making. The term and act that describes sound perspective, assessment, and decision-making is wisdom. God is the Source of wisdom. Wisdom executed consistently over time is excellence. Therefore, it could be declared that all excellence must be God’s excellence. This study explored the components of wisdom and how they correlate and attain superlative results in the decision-making process within challenging environments. The desired fruit of the study ascertained that these components can be constructed and extrapolated through the grounded theory process to produce concepts and principles for executing wise judgment in one’s life journey all to the glory of God

Flexibly Instructable Agents

This paper presents an approach to learning from situated, interactive tutorial instruction within an ongoing agent. Tutorial instruction is a flexible (and thus powerful) paradigm for teaching tasks because it allows an instructor to communicate whatever types of knowledge an agent might need in whatever situations might arise. To support this flexibility, however, the agent must be able to learn multiple kinds of knowledge from a broad range of instructional interactions. Our approach, called situated explanation, achieves such learning through a combination of analytic and inductive techniques. It combines a form of explanation-based learning that is situated for each instruction with a full suite of contextually guided responses to incomplete explanations. The approach is implemented in an agent called Instructo-Soar that learns hierarchies of new tasks and other domain knowledge from interactive natural language instructions. Instructo-Soar meets three key requirements of flexible instructability that distinguish it from previous systems: (1) it can take known or unknown commands at any instruction point; (2) it can handle instructions that apply to either its current situation or to a hypothetical situation specified in language (as in, for instance, conditional instructions); and (3) it can learn, from instructions, each class of knowledge it uses to perform tasks.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

Evaluating Discipleship Program Effectiveness of Liberian Churches in Worcester, Massachusetts

This project is evaluating discipleship program effectiveness of Liberian churches in Worcester, Massachusetts. The goal of this thesis is to develop a strategy and effective program for the Liberian churches in Worcester, Massachusetts as a tool to train and educate the Liberian churches for effective and adequate discipleship programs. This project will survey Liberian Christians residing in Worcester, Massachusetts who are members of churches that are dominantly Liberians. This research will help others to understand their religious background, social lifestyles and commitment to discipleship. Implementation of the 12-step training proposed in this project will enable the Liberian churches to be successful in the United States of America and globally

Toward a Criminology of International Criminal Law: An Integrated Theory of International Criminal Violations

Violations of international criminal law (i.e., genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes) are a common occurrence around the globe. One need only to read international news, visit intra‐governmental (e.g., United Nations or the International Committee Red Cross), or nongovernmental organizations (e.g., Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International) to be exposed to the vast numbers of crimes of states, paramilitaries, and/or militias. Nonetheless, there has been relatively little attention paid to these types of offenses by criminologists. While there have been developments in creating typologies (Smeulers, 2008) and predictive models for genocide (Harf, 2005), due to the complexities and various forms of these types of crimes, there has been little to no development of a criminological theoretical model that can aid in the analysis of such crimes. Our goal is to firmly place international crimes on the criminological agenda by creating additional awareness of and interest in the most massive, systematic, and gruesome types of crime‐genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression‐and to introduce an integrated theory that can provide a frame for a systematic analysis and understanding of the etiological factors at play

A case study of systems engineering implementation in designing electronic blast systems

Abstract: It is not known if a lack of formal system engineering processes being used in the design and development of new and existing systems, lead to high risk of failure in the implementation of electronic blast systems. In mining, more specifically electronic blast systems, minimal research exists on the application of system engineering principles and practices to deliver better systems faster, and more cost-effectively compared to that of ad-hoc, non-systemic approaches. The main objective of the research was to determine how well system engineering processes are applied in electronic blast systems implementation. The investigations showed results of the measurement through the SECM model’s and revealed that the company is on maturity level of 2 with aspects of level 3 in all three focus-area categories, namely technical, management and environment. The activities performed indicate that SECM outputs are managed to a plan, and there are some defined organisation processes used to plan and execute activities. System engineering processes do exist but are informal, and most are not measured, and this prevents process improvement, and hence an increase SECM maturity level

Theological Education and Spiritual Formation in the Lives of Engaged, Emerging Adults

This thesis seeks to answer the following question: What is an effective discipleship method for emerging adults who are already engaged in IChurch? The method chosen was multi-layered and utilized corporate discipleship which involved a classroom setting geared toward theological and doctrinal education based on Bloom-Anderson’s taxonomy of educational objectives, communal discipleship which was concerned with small group activities and peer-to-peer accountability, and personal discipleship geared toward individual spiritual formation given an edited list of Whitney’s personal spiritual disciplines. Participants were asked to take an introductory Theological examination which plotted them from analyze level to the create level of Bloom’s taxonomy, indicating that they could think Biblically at a critical level and were on their way to being able to share their knowledge with others (create). Upon passing at least to an analyze point, they then underwent a spiritual formation assessment given six of Whitney’s disciplines, and then were asked to journal their experience for four weeks. On the fifth week, they turned in their journals and took the theology exam again alongside the spiritual formation assessment. Results then were analyzed to see if this method created leaders who could disciple others