Catholic Social Thought in Catholic Business Schools in the U.S. Today: A Survey and Conclusions

When it comes to religion and business ethics, Catholic Schools have a uniquely important position in that they are institutions generally founded in support of religious values which in turn supposedly impact the content and method of teaching of business (and business ethics). Catholic business schools claim to have a distinctiveness which gives them an advantage over non-Catholic business schools (Spitzer, 2010; Lowney, 2012). It is clear that Catholic schools are better than their peers at providing business ethics education in their curriculum. But it also appears that many Catholic business schools and departments consider their business ethics education one of the most important Catholic distinctives. However, merely having a business ethics class is not enough to distinguish one from a secular business school. This paper is primarily a presentation of the findings of our research survey on Catholic Social Teaching in Catholic business schools completed in the Fall of 2014. We proposed to collect data from 50 Catholic colleges and Universities using a series of 30 questions. Our study shows that there are some distinctive programs and methods by which Catholic Business Schools are integrating faith with business, but for many of these schools, the following traits seemed to be characteristic: Business Ethics classes were considered to be the key location of any Catholic Social Teaching in the business school Many Catholic business schools assume that the Catholic identity is taught through core non-business classes. At most of the schools, a very small minority of faculty were considered capable of speaking about Catholic Social Thought. In terms of self-perception of how their institution was improving their distinctive Catholic identity, nearly 2/3 of the schools thought they were improving, and about 2/3 thought they were doing better than other Catholic Business Schools. Generally, uniquely Catholic mission goals for education like “Change Unity of Heart, Mind and Soul” or “Care for the individual person” scored more poorly than “Producing employable graduates” or “Cultivating innovative problem-solvers” While Catholic Business Schools do much better than their peers at requiring business ethics classes, by and large it seems that the Catholic identity of many of these business schools is in many cases maintained and promoted primarily by requiring business ethics classes

Robust incremental SLAM with consistency-checking

Incorrect landmark and loop closure measurements can cause standard SLAM algorithms to fail catastrophically. Recently, several SLAM algorithms have been proposed that are robust to loop closure errors, but it is shown in this paper that they cannot provide robust solutions when landmark measurement errors occur. The root cause of this problem is that the robust SLAM algorithms only focus on generating solutions that are locally consistent (i.e. each measurement agrees with its corresponding estimates) rather than globally consistent (i.e. all of the measurements in the solution agree with each other). Moreover, these algorithms do not attempt to maximize the number of correct measurements included in the solution, meaning that often correct measurements are ignored and the solution quality suffers as a result. This paper proposes a new formulation of the robust SLAM problem that seeks a globally consistent map that also maximizes the number of measurements included in the solution. In addition, a novel incremental SLAM algorithm, called incremental SLAM with consistency-checking, is developed to solve the new robust SLAM problem. Finally, simulated and experimental results show that the new algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art robust SLAM methods for datasets with incorrect landmark measurements and can match their performance for datasets with incorrect loop closures.Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. Internal Research and Development Progra

Concepts in Animal Parasitology, Chapter 04: Hosts, Reservoirs, and Vectors

Chapter 4 in Concepts in Animal Parasitology on hosts, reservoirs, and vectors by Matthew G. Bolek, Kyle D. Gustafson, and Gabriel J. Langford. 2024. S. L. Gardner and S. A. Gardner, editors. Zea Books, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States. doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.ciap00

Concepts in Animal Parasitology, Chapter 05: Life Cycles

Chapter 5 in Concepts in Animal Parasitology on life cycles by Matthew G. Bolek, Kyle D. Gustafson, and Gabriel J. Langford. 2024. S. L. Gardner and S. A. Gardner, editors. Zea Books, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States. doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.ciap00

Kikuchi-Fujimoto Disease in a 30-Year-Old Caucasian Female

Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease is a rare, self-limited, histiocytic, necrotizing lymphadenitis first described in Japan in 1972. Necrosis of lymph node tissue is caused by apoptosis and may be virally induced. It commonly presents with cervical lymphadenitis and fever. Despite its low incidence, Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease should be considered in patients with persistent lymphadenopathy. Originally thought to occur only in young Asian women, it is now recognized in other geographic regions. We report a 30-year-old white woman with Kikuchi-Fujimoto disease. We discuss the clinical features, differential diagnosis, radiography, pathology, and outcome