Ethnic Identity Maintenance within the Latino-American Church: a Structuration Perspective

The Latino ethnic/immigrant church plays a significant role in maintaining the ethnic identity of its congregants. Through the perspective of structuration theory, this qualitative analysis investigates how the activities of the church impact its members and how an individual might contribute to the cultural structure of the Latino church (i.e., duality of structure). Interviews of 25 pastors from Spanish-speaking congregations in both urban and rural settings in Oregon resulted in several themes including the initial planting of the church, the denominational structure, the emergence of a new multiethnic cultural identity, generational differences, and the influence of Spanish

Time-derivative preconditioning for viscous flows

A time-derivative preconditioning algorithm that is effective over a wide range of flow conditions from inviscid to very diffusive flows and from low speed to supersonic flows was developed. This algorithm uses a viscous set of primary dependent variables to introduce well-conditioned eigenvalues and to avoid having a nonphysical time reversal for viscous flow. The resulting algorithm also provides a mechanism for controlling the inviscid and viscous time step parameters to be of order one for very diffusive flows, thereby ensuring rapid convergence at very viscous flows as well as for inviscid flows. Convergence capabilities are demonstrated through computation of a wide variety of problems

Inverse kinematics problem in robotics using neural networks

In this paper, Multilayer Feedforward Networks are applied to the robot inverse kinematic problem. The networks are trained with endeffector position and joint angles. After training, performance is measured by having the network generate joint angles for arbitrary endeffector trajectories. A 3-degree-of-freedom (DOF) spatial manipulator is used for the study. It is found that neural networks provide a simple and effective way to both model the manipulator inverse kinematics and circumvent the problems associated with algorithmic solution methods

A List of Household Objects for Robotic Retrieval Prioritized by People with ALS (Version 092008)

This technical report is designed to serve as a citable reference for the original prioritized object list that the Healthcare Robotics Lab at Georgia Tech released on its website in September of 2008. It is also expected to serve as the primary citable reference for the research associated with this list until the publication of a detailed, peer-reviewed paper. The original prioritized list of object classes resulted from a needs assessment involving 8 motor-impaired patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and targeted, in-person interviews of 15 motor-impaired ALS patients. All of these participants were drawn from the Emory ALS Center. The prioritized object list consists of 43 object classes ranked by how important the participants considered each class to be for retrieval by an assistive robot. We intend for this list to be used by researchers to inform the design and benchmarking of robotic systems, especially research related to autonomous mobile manipulation

The influence of imagined interactions on verbal fluency

Imagined interactions (IIs) are a type of social cognition and mental imagery whereby actors imagine an interaction with others for the purposes of planning. Within actual encounters, verbal fluency is a characteristic that contributes to the speaker\u27s credibility. The planning that takes place through imagined dialogues can help a speaker overcome disfluency found in speech. This study shows that improvements in speaking style are also dependent upon the trait of communication apprehension that an individual experiences. Visualization can decrease apprehension levels, thus producing higher verbal fluency. Results from this study indicate planning\u27s influence in the reduction of silent pauses but not vocalized pauses. Finally, the complexity of one\u27s imagined dialogue has been found to play a role in an increase of verbal fluency

Enzyme Inhibitor May Offer Dual Protection against Brain Disease

Genetic analysis in budding yeast and in cultured human astrocytes reveals that specific histone deacetylase complexes accelerate expansion mutations in DNA triplet repeats

Convergence of a linearly transformed particle method for aggregation equations

We study a linearly transformed particle method for the aggregation equation with smooth or singular interaction forces. For the smooth interaction forces, we provide convergence estimates in $L^1$ and $L^\infty$ norms depending on the regularity of the initial data. Moreover, we give convergence estimates in bounded Lipschitz distance for measure valued solutions. For singular interaction forces, we establish the convergence of the error between the approximated and exact flows up to the existence time of the solutions in $L^1 \cap L^p$ norm

Preferential Refugee Policies in Postwar Canada

Canada is widely known today to accept migrants seeking refuge, however, some groups received preferential treatment when entering Canada after the Second World War. The purpose of this study is to examine the political, economic, and social reasons behind why the Canadian government wrote preferential refugee policies for specific groups seeking refuge. Utilizing government correspondence written between 1948 and 1957 and literature that reviews the implementation of public policy and its effects, this study analyzes the motivations and factors that led to the government’s policy decisions on American draft dodgers fleeing the draft, Baltic refugees fleeing Soviet repatriation and rule, and Hungarian refugees who fled communism. This reveals that the Government of Canada established preferential policies for refugees based on race, religion, and assimilationist principles. It proves that although Canada embraces multiculturalism and humanitarian refugee policies today, in its past, it chose to selectively accept refugees and provide preferential avenues for refugees seeking safety in Canada