Identifying the practice components of youth councils: contributions of theory

Social workers are involved in numerous efforts to engage youth in programs, communities, and civic life. One potential strategy has focused on engagement and empowerment of youth through the form of youth councils. Multiple theoretical frames have characterized the scholarly literature. This has limited the conceptual coherence of the field. In this paper, we report empirical data on the operation of several youth councils. We analyze the data to identify the implicit frameworks in use and apply the data from our study to sort practice components within frameworks. This effort is designed to improve conceptualization of youth councils, to inform the development of councils, and eventually to improve outcomes of councils.Published versionAccepted manuscrip

Identifying the Core Components of Christian Humility

Research in the field of humility has grown exponentially within the last 20 years. From being an under-explored and under-researched virtue, humility has become a subject of significant interest. Philosophical and methodological issues have hampered the field of humility research in regard to defining and measuring humility. Despite these issues, the existing literature indicates that humility has important features as both an intrapersonal and interpersonal facet. The research has shown strong indications that humility is an essential factor for successful relationships – social, romantic, and spiritual. Despite the evidence regarding the significance of humility within relationships, very little research has been conducted to explore the relationship between humility and attachment theory, and, more specifically, between humility and attachment style. In developing an operationalized definition of humility, the Christian tradition, which has a rich source of insight and reflection on humility as a virtue, has been under-utilized. The current study reviews the extant literature regarding humility, specifically relating to relationships, religion and spirituality, and attachment style. It explores the Christian understanding of humility as exemplified in Philippians 2:3-8 and posits an identification of the component constructs of Christian humility on that basis. This study examines those core components in relation to an existing measure of humility. It further analyzes the core components of Christian humility in relation to attachment style, specifically exploring the potential moderating effects of God attachment style on the relationship between the core components and adult attachment style

Sub-surface damage location and identification using infra-red techniques

The paper presents a new methodology for identifying sub-surface damage in composite components using a combination of Pulse Phase Thermography (PPT) and Thermoelastic Stress Analysis (TSA)

Nonparametric Identification and Estimation of Multivariate Mixtures

We study nonparametric identifiability of finite mixture models of k-variate data with M subpopulations, in which the components of the data vector are independent conditional on belonging to a subpopulation. We provide a sufficient condition for nonparametrically identifying M subpopulations when k>=3. Our focus is on the relationship between the number of values the components of the data vector can take on, and the number of identifiable subpopulations. Intuition would suggest that if the data vector can take many different values, then combining information from these different values helps identification. Hall and Zhou (2003) show, however, when k=2, two-component finite mixture models are not nonparametrically identifiable regardless of the number of the values the data vector can take. When k>=3, there emerges a link between the variation in the data vector, and the number of identifiable subpopulations: the number of identifiable subpopulations increases as the data vector takes on additional (different) values. This points to the possibility of identifying many components even when k=3, if the data vector has a continuously distributed element. Our identification method is constructive, and leads to an estimation strategy. It is not as efficient as the MLE, but can be used as the initial value of the optimization algorithm in computing the MLE. We also provide a sufficient condition for identifying the number of nonparametrically identifiable components, and develop a method for statistically testing and consistently estimating the number of nonparametrically identifiable components. We extend these procedures to develop a test for the number of components in binomial mixtures.finite mixture, binomial mixture, model selection, number of components, rank estimation

3D Model Assisted Image Segmentation

The problem of segmenting a given image into coherent regions is important in Computer Vision and many industrial applications require segmenting a known object into its components. Examples include identifying individual parts of a component for proces

Revealing components of the galaxy population through nonparametric techniques

The distributions of galaxy properties vary with environment, and are often multimodal, suggesting that the galaxy population may be a combination of multiple components. The behaviour of these components versus environment holds details about the processes of galaxy development. To release this information we apply a novel, nonparametric statistical technique, identifying four components present in the distribution of galaxy H$\alpha$ emission-line equivalent-widths. We interpret these components as passive, star-forming, and two varieties of active galactic nuclei. Independent of this interpretation, the properties of each component are remarkably constant as a function of environment. Only their relative proportions display substantial variation. The galaxy population thus appears to comprise distinct components which are individually independent of environment, with galaxies rapidly transitioning between components as they move into denser environments.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Identifying the Components of a Knowledge Management Strategy

What should a good knowledge management strategy incorporate? This paper uses a study that compares a proposed set of knowledge management strategy components to the outcomes of knowledge management projects/initiatives. As expected it was found that highly successful knowledge management projects/initiatives are more likely to have the proposed set of knowledge management strategy components than less successful to unsuccessful knowledge management projects/initiatives. The conclusion of the paper is that the proposed set of knowledge management strategy components is an appropriate list that knowledge management practitioners and researchers can use to construct an organization’s knowledge management strategy