The relationship between baptismal status and spiritual practices among committed Baptist youth

The empirical correlates of baptismal status raise intriguing questions for empirical theologians (does baptism make a measurable difference) and for social scientists (how does baptismal status function as an indictor of religiosity). The present study investigates these problems among a sample of 674 highly committed Christian adolescents participating in a weeklong youth mission and service event sponsored by the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches in Eastern Canada. In this sample, 72% had been baptised as an older child or adolescent, 13% had been baptised only as a baby before they were old enough to make a decision for themselves, and 15% had never been baptised. Multivariate analyses, controlling for sex and age differences and for maternal and paternal church attendance, found significant associations between baptismal status and spiritual practices. The status of never having been baptised is significantly associated with lower levels of church attendance, personal Bible reading, and personal prayer. The status of having been baptised only as a baby is significantly associated with lower levels of church attendance

Psychological type profile of religiously committed male and female Canadian Baptist youth: a study among participants at tidal impact

A sample of 479 female and 274 male religiously committed Canadian youth over the age of 11 years completed the Adolescent Form of the Francis Psychological Type Scales (FPTSA) within the context of a weeklong mission and service event sponsored by the Convention of Atlantic Baptist Churches. The data demonstrated strong preferences for intuition among both males (75%) and females (66%), and strong preferences for feeling among both males (86%) and females (92%). Females demonstrated stronger preferences for judging (61%) compared with males (39%). Both sexes demonstrated similar preferences for extraversion (52% among females and 49% among males). The most frequently occurring type among both males (22%) and females (20%) was ENFP. The implications of these findings are discussed for youth ministry and for potential recruitment into ordained ministry

Profiling user activities with minimal traffic traces

Understanding user behavior is essential to personalize and enrich a user's online experience. While there are significant benefits to be accrued from the pursuit of personalized services based on a fine-grained behavioral analysis, care must be taken to address user privacy concerns. In this paper, we consider the use of web traces with truncated URLs - each URL is trimmed to only contain the web domain - for this purpose. While such truncation removes the fine-grained sensitive information, it also strips the data of many features that are crucial to the profiling of user activity. We show how to overcome the severe handicap of lack of crucial features for the purpose of filtering out the URLs representing a user activity from the noisy network traffic trace (including advertisement, spam, analytics, webscripts) with high accuracy. This activity profiling with truncated URLs enables the network operators to provide personalized services while mitigating privacy concerns by storing and sharing only truncated traffic traces. In order to offset the accuracy loss due to truncation, our statistical methodology leverages specialized features extracted from a group of consecutive URLs that represent a micro user action like web click, chat reply, etc., which we call bursts. These bursts, in turn, are detected by a novel algorithm which is based on our observed characteristics of the inter-arrival time of HTTP records. We present an extensive experimental evaluation on a real dataset of mobile web traces, consisting of more than 130 million records, representing the browsing activities of 10,000 users over a period of 30 days. Our results show that the proposed methodology achieves around 90% accuracy in segregating URLs representing user activities from non-representative URLs

Improving the reading skills of young people with Duchenne muscular dystrophy in preparation for adulthood

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a progressive genetic condition that affects both muscle and brain. Children with DMD are at risk of psycho-social difficulties such as poor academic achievement and behavioural and socio-emotional problems. This article by Janet Hoskin and Angela Fawcett, both from the University of Swansea, describes how 34 participants with DMD took part in a 36-week online literacy intervention which was delivered in partnership between home and school. The key objective was to improve reading skill. Participants were re-tested at 36 weeks for single word and text level reading, comprehension, fluency, processing and timed single word reading. Pre and post results indicated that children who followed the intervention for 36 weeks made significant improvement in their single word reading (p = <0.0001), timed single word reading (p = <0.0001) and text level reading (p = <0.004). They also made significant improvement in their fluency and comprehension scores. The results showed that children with DMD and related literacy difficulties benefit from a regular, structured and systematic synthetic phonics programme. With young people with DMD increasingly living into adulthood, early literacy intervention is particularly important to ensure optimum career and training opportunities

SPATIAL ECOLOGY AND HABITAT USE OF THE WESTERN MASSASAUGA (SISTRURUS TERGEMINUS) IN NEBRASKA

We used radiotelemetry during 2004 and 2005 to investigate seasonal movements and habitat use and to improve our understanding of how land management practices were affecting Western Massasauga (Sistrurus tergeminus) populations in Nebraska. We found Western Massasaugas to brumate in crayfish burrows 100% of the time, and spring emergence occurred during March - April. The longest movements occurred during May when snakes were moving away from brumation sites to summer habitat, after which movements decreased until a second peak in August. We did not find significant differences between male and female activity area, range length, total distance moved, daily movement, or distance from spring and fall brumation sites. However the core activity range of females was significantly less than that of males. During the active season, grassland habitat was used 75.6% of the time compared to habitats of grassland-shrubs (10.7%), hydrophilic vegetation (9.1%), woodlands (3.1%), and shrublands (1.5%). Identifying variations in a species spatial ecology is important for achieving long-term conservation goals because life history events, resource availability, and land management practices may have an effect on seasonal movements and habitat use. The results of our study demonstrate the need for, and some of the necessary data for, improved land management planning in order to meet conservation needs of the Western Massasauga in Nebraska

Religiosity and music copyright theft among Canadian Baptist youth

This study examines the views of 706 Canadian Baptist youth (between the ages of 14 and 18 years) on the moral issue of music copyright theft, and explores the influence on these views of age, sex, Sunday church attendance, personal prayer, personal Bible reading, and conservative Bible believing. The participants were attending Springforth 2005 (a major Canadian Baptist Youth Conference). The data demonstrate a high level of acceptance of music copyright theft, with only 26% of the participants agreeing that downloading copyright music from the Internet without paying is always wrong. Employing multiple regression modelling, the data demonstrated that, as Canadian Baptist youth mature (grew older), as they became more familiar with Bible teaching (through frequent reading of the scriptures), and as they became more integrated within the community of faith (through frequent Sunday church attendance), so they take a tougher line against music copyright theft

A surprising steric effect on a tandem cycloaddition/ring-opening reaction : rapid syntheses of difluorinated analogues of (hydroxymethyl)conduritols

Difluorinated analogues of (hydroxymethyl)conduritols can be synthesised from selected furans and a difluorinated dienophile in two reaction steps

The Reasons We Choose Science Careers: Motivational Factors in Choosing a Science Career

This purpose of this study is to explore some of the motivating factors that influence adults, specifically, to choose a Science career. The research will identify the motivators or influences that encouraged several well-known Scientists to choose a Science related career; and then to identify themes or commonality among the motivators. This information is important and useful because it may lead to enhanced understanding of why today’s students have such low participation in science, and what society can do to influence change. A second thread in this research is examining the linkages between Science career motivators and science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) programs, policy and economics