A study of conflict in the Filipino Christian family and the place of pastoral counseling

The family perpetuates society. Healthy family depends on healthy marriages. Family life is always accompanied by stresses and strains which may give rise to marital conflict. This may result in breakdown of the marriage, leading to problems for any children and also for church and society. During my fifteen years serving as a missionary in Mindanao Island, the Philippines, I have observed that many Christian marriages are under stress, so I decided to study the subject of marriage conflict in the Philippines with the purpose of understanding it better so that I can work out ways in which the church can help couples to have stable marriages. I am also interested in determining the place of pastoral counseling in helping Christian couples to overcome their marital problems. This study begins with the presentation of what motivates me to conduct the research, my purpose and objectives. This is followed by a study of the Filipino family in its historical, cultural, religious and social context. In the next chapter practical theology and pastoral theology are described in order to lay a basis for the study of conflict in Christian families and the place of pastoral counseling. The method of the research is then briefly described. The centre of the thesis is a questionnaire-based survey in which 214 randomly selected married Christians answered a series of questions. Many of these questionnaires were completed by only one spouse of a couple, either husband or wife, but some were completed by both husband and wife independently. They answered a series of questions about their marriage and the frequency and causes of marital conflict and how they deal with it. The results of the survey are analyzed in detail. I go on to study the resolution of marital conflict and the nature and place of pastoral counseling before drawing up a suggested plan of action for local churches in the Philippines to help couples facing conflict in their marriages. I believe that this research shows the need for such programs, including pastoral counseling, to be available in the churches to help prevent serious marital conflict resulting in breakdown of marriages. It is my hope and prayer that, with God's blessing, this will result in stronger marriages and stronger churches in the Philippines

The benefit of management policy of Seoul on airborne particulate matter: An application of contingent valuation

There is an increasing concern on particulate matter (PM) management in Seoul. The annual mean PM concentration of Seoul is far higher than the World Health Organization guideline and its decreasing rate has been slowed since 2012. Seoul Metropolitan Government has made various efforts to solve the problem. In particular, after an open forum held in June 2017, the Ten Measures for Fine Particles were established. Since the management of fine particles would enforce a huge budget (annual mean of 146 million US dollar) it requires a legitimate validation by the benefit analysis. This paper aims to estimate the benefit of the management policy of Seoul on airborne particulate matter. The benefit is estimated by the contingent valuation method. The estimation by the Spike model shows that the annual willingness to pay (WTP) per household for the management of airborne particulate matter is 126 US dollar (or 138,107 Korean won) (95% confidence interval of 114 to 137 US dollar). The applications of the other statistical models are also analyzed. Considering the total number of households, annual benefit of the management policy of Seoul on airborne particulate matter is 492 million US dollar annually (95% confidence interval of 446 to 537 million US dollar). A simple comparison shows that the benefit of the management of airborne particulate matter in Seoul is 3~4 times higher than the incurred expense

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF HYBRID SOLAR AIRWATER HEATER WITH VARIOUS INLET AIR TEMPERATURE DURING HEATING PROCESS

Research about hybrid solar air-water heater that can heating both air and liquid has been conducted for enhancing the usage of solar thermal energy. In the previous study, thermal efficiency of this collector was investigated with many operating and external conditions, but all of previous experiment conducted using outdoor air as inlet air of collector. Thus, in this study, the performance change of hybrid solar air-water heater was investigated with change of inlet air temperature during air and liquid were heated simultaneously. As a result, thermal efficiency for liquid heating was increased with increment of the inlet air temperature. On the contrary to this, thermal efficiency for air heating of collector was decreased with increment of inlet air temperature. In case of total thermal efficiency of collector considered air and liquid heat gain, it was also decreased with increment of inlet air temperature. From these results, it was confirmed that using outdoor air directly as inlet air of collector is better for the use of solar energy. However it is hard to conclude that which is better between using outdoor air and heated air on the perspective of energy saving of building because heat storage performance was increased if the return air or any heated air is used as inlet air of hybrid solar air-water heater when air and liquid was heated simultaneously even air and total thermal efficiency is decreased. Thus, the necessity of more profound study and consideration about this as a further study was also confirmed

HaRiM+^+: Evaluating Summary Quality with Hallucination Risk

One of the challenges of developing a summarization model arises from the difficulty in measuring the factual inconsistency of the generated text. In this study, we reinterpret the decoder overconfidence-regularizing objective suggested in (Miao et al., 2021) as a hallucination risk measurement to better estimate the quality of generated summaries. We propose a reference-free metric, HaRiM+, which only requires an off-the-shelf summarization model to compute the hallucination risk based on token likelihoods. Deploying it requires no additional training of models or ad-hoc modules, which usually need alignment to human judgments. For summary-quality estimation, HaRiM+ records state-of-the-art correlation to human judgment on three summary-quality annotation sets: FRANK, QAGS, and SummEval. We hope that our work, which merits the use of summarization models, facilitates the progress of both automated evaluation and generation of summary.Comment: 9 pages (+ 21 pages of Appendix), AACL 202

Forecasting Root-Zone Electrical Conductivity of Nutrient Solutions in Closed-Loop Soilless Cultures via a Recurrent Neural Network Using Environmental and Cultivation Information

In existing closed-loop soilless cultures, nutrient solutions are controlled by the electrical conductivity (EC) of the solution. However, the EC of nutrient solutions is affected by both growth environments and crop growth, so it is hard to predict the EC of nutrient solution. The objective of this study was to predict the EC of root-zone nutrient solutions in closed-loop soilless cultures using recurrent neural network (RNN). In a test greenhouse with sweet peppers (Capsicum annuum L.), data were measured every 10 s from October 15 to December 31, 2014. Mean values for every hour were analyzed. Validation accuracy (R2) of a single-layer long short-term memory (LSTM) was 0.92 and root-mean-square error (RMSE) was 0.07, which were the best results among the different RNNs. The trained LSTM predicted the substrate EC accurately at all ranges. Test accuracy (R2) was 0.72 and RMSE was 0.08, which were lower than values for the validation. Deep learning algorithms were more accurate when more data were added for training. The addition of other environmental factors or plant growth data would improve model robustness. A trained LSTM can control the nutrient solutions in closed-loop soilless cultures based on predicted future EC. Therefore, the algorithm can make a planned management of nutrient solutions possible, reducing resource waste