Shared Oversight: Equipping Elders to Shepherd the Flock

Leadership structures vary greatly across various faith traditions, but how much flexibility is biblically warranted? Far from being silent, the Bible is descriptive and prescriptive with regard to a plurality of leadership within a congregation. These elders, also called overseers, are to shepherd the flock (Acts 20:17, 28). The problem is that there is often lack training to that end. This study constructed a process for training elders and/or potential elders within a congregation to better understand the nature of plurality and parity of those tasked with caring for God’s people. The four training sessions covered the following: (1) The role and prominence of elders throughout the Mosaic and New Covenants and in the early church, (2) the understanding of elders and overseers being the same group who are tasked with shepherding, or pastoring, the church, (3) the parity of elders, regardless of status of employment, and (4) the primacy of teaching in shepherding, including that which is commonly called preaching. The elders of Providence Church of Texas served as participants in the study, the goal of which was to better equip those tasked with equipping the saints for the work of the ministry. The effectiveness of the training process was evaluated by both a questionnaire given before and after the sessions and via the information gathered by the researcher through discussions in the sessions. The handouts and teacher’s notes from each session are included to aid in adaptability to other ecclesiastical contexts

Constraints on Higher Spin CFT2_2

We derive constraints on two-dimensional conformal field theories with higher spin symmetry due to unitarity, modular invariance, and causality. We focus on CFTs with $\mathcal{W}_N$ symmetry in the "irrational" regime, where $c>N-1$ and the theories have an infinite number of higher-spin primaries. The most powerful constraints come from positivity of the Kac matrix, which (unlike the Virasoro case) is non-trivial even when $c>N-1$. This places a lower bound on the dimension of any non-vacuum higher-spin primary state, which is linear in the central charge. At large $c$, this implies that the dual holographic theories of gravity in AdS$_3$, if they exist, have no local, perturbative degrees of freedom in the semi-classical limit.Comment: 31 pages+refs, 4 figure

Changing Horses: Shifting Agricultural Experiment Station Publications from Paper to Electronic Format

CD-ROMs are an emerging alternative to paper publication and should be considered as a format for some Ag Experiment Station and Extension publications. Marketing the change to CDs to authors can be difficult. We emphasized the advantages of CDs, such as keyword searching, ability to hold several publications on one disk, and reduced printing costs. We also shared with authors a rough assessment of the audience’s computer capability and willingness to accept a short, summary-type publication at events with the full publication available electronically. We projected savings of more than $20,000 in one year by converting six Agricultural Experiment Station publications to CDs; to date the projections have been within$300 of actual savings. A “print friendly” design was chosen for the CDs because printed copies will be available to the public on demand. Because audience use of information has to be considered, CDs may not be best for publications designed as an in-the-field reference. Adopting CDs over paper publications was necessary to meet budget goals and also was beneficial for much of the public, who will get a searchable, comprehensive package of information rather than a single publication

Educating for Global Citizenship through Service-Learning: A Theoretical Account and Curricular Evaluation

The last decade has witnessed substantial increases in US university study abroad programming. Related, there has been a demonstrable spike in university administrators and faculty members suggesting that their institutions prepare students for global citizenship. Yet few institutions have offered a clear conceptualization of what global citizenship is, how they educate for it, or how they measure their progress in that effort. This dissertation addresses the relative dearth of applicable theoretical constructs by offering one such construct, suggesting the specific educative process by which it may be encouraged, and discussing initial efforts evaluating its success. Its three primary contributions are: (1) a particular articulation of global citizenship that draws on existing theoretical approaches while insisting on integration with or development of strong mechanisms for application, (2) clarification of the educative process by which that articulation and practice of global citizenship may be encouraged, and (3) the development and testing of a quantitative instrument for better understanding and evaluating global citizenship and civic engagement. A pre- and post- survey is employed to develop an index of global civic engagement and awareness measures among students (1) not participating in global service-learning, (2) participating in global service-learning without a deliberate global citizenship education component, and (3) participating in global service-learning with clear attention to the integration of a global citizenship curriculum. The findings, buttressed by analysis of related qualitative data, suggest that integration of a carefully developed and articulated theoretical and practical approach to global citizenship education is essential if universities are to be successful in their efforts to create global citizens. Perhaps less intuitive and more alarming, the findings indicate that exposure to study abroad programming absent deliberate global citizenship education efforts may serve to merely reinforce stereotypes, create situations where severe cultural shock and withdrawal are likely experiences, and otherwise serve to cause young US citizens to shrink from rather than engage with the world. Taken as a whole, the analysis suggests the outcomes of many efforts to globalize campuses and create global citizens are unclear at best and that clearer conceptualizations, educative processes, and evaluation efforts are needed

Calcium Sparks and Homeostasis in a Minimal Model of Local and Global Calcium Responses in Quiescent Ventricular Myocytes

We present a minimal whole cell model that accounts for both local and global aspects of Ca signaling in quiescent ventricular myocytes..

Elastic shape analysis of surfaces with second-order Sobolev metrics: a comprehensive numerical framework

This paper introduces a set of numerical methods for Riemannian shape analysis of 3D surfaces within the setting of invariant (elastic) second-order Sobolev metrics. More specifically, we address the computation of geodesics and geodesic distances between parametrized or unparametrized immersed surfaces represented as 3D meshes. Building on this, we develop tools for the statistical shape analysis of sets of surfaces, including methods for estimating Karcher means and performing tangent PCA on shape populations, and for computing parallel transport along paths of surfaces. Our proposed approach fundamentally relies on a relaxed variational formulation for the geodesic matching problem via the use of varifold fidelity terms, which enable us to enforce reparametrization independence when computing geodesics between unparametrized surfaces, while also yielding versatile algorithms that allow us to compare surfaces with varying sampling or mesh structures. Importantly, we demonstrate how our relaxed variational framework can be extended to tackle partially observed data. The different benefits of our numerical pipeline are illustrated over various examples, synthetic and real.Comment: 25 pages, 16 figures, 1 tabl

Principal-Agent eller Principal-Steward?

Syfte: Syftet med studien är att utifrån ett agent- och stewardshipteoretiskt perspektiv belysa och analysera styrelsers relation till verkställande direktörer i företag där VD:n inte erhåller rörlig ersättning. Metod: Vid genomförandet av studien har en kvalitativ datainsamlingsmetod används. Tre fall har studerats för att belysa och analysera forskningsområdet samt leda fram till en slutsats. Semistrukturerade intervjuer har använts som primär informationskälla. Teoretisk referensram: För att besvara forskningsfrågan har en referensram utvecklats utifrån steward- och agentteorin. Empiri: Studiens empiri består av information erhållen från studiens tre fall, där styrelsens relation till VD:n undersöktes utifrån sex variabler. De tre fallen som studerades fanns inom företagen LKAB, Green Cargo och Folksam Sak. Slutsats: Studiens resultat visade att inte i något av de tre fall som studien undersökte kan relationen enbart beskrivas som en principal-stewardrelation eller som en principal-agentrelation. Vidare kan styrelsers relation till verkställande direktörer i företag som inte använder sig av rörlig ersättning bäst beskrivas som en kombination av de båda relationstyperna