Book Review: Dewey’s Social Philosophy: Democracy as Education

Book review of John Shook\u27s Dewey\u27s Social Philosophy: Democracy as Education

Maximizing Discipleship Via An Adult Small Group Ministry

Since its inception in 1996, First Redeemer Church has been firmly committed to Jesus’ commission to make disciples. While all of the church’s ministries aim to do this, First Redeemer Church relies heavily on its adult small group ministry to facilitate discipleship. One indication of this ministry’s strategic importance is the considerable financial investment the church has made, and plans to make, to provide on-campus spaces for adult education. Such investments have been considered worthy in light of the expected spiritual growth of the ministry’s participants and their involvement in and financial support of the church. This study will evaluate the efforts of First Redeemer’s adult small group ministry to produce disciples and explore opportunities for improvement. Toward this end, it will validate generosity and volunteerism as compelling and legitimate indicators of spiritual growth by examining relevant biblical texts. Quantitative data will be collected via empirical sources to compare the generosity and involvement of the ministry’s participants to non-participants. Qualitative data will be collected via surveys to compare generosity and involvement levels among participants in different small groups; variations will be examined to identify opportunities to hone ministry-wide discipleship strategies. Relevant literature will be examined understand how exemplary small group practices elsewhere might be applied to First Redeemer’s current milieu. The end goal of this study is to discover ways to maximize the disciple-making proficiency of First Redeemer Church’s adult small group ministry

A hypertext-based Internet-assessable database for the MSFC Technology Transfer Office

There exists a continuing need to disseminate technical information and facilities capabilities from NASA field centers in an effort to promote the successful transfer of technologies developed with public funds to the private sector. As technology transfer is a stated NASA mission, there exists a critical need for NASA centers to document technology capabilities and disseminate this information on as wide a basis as possible. Certainly local and regional dissemination is critical, but global dissemination of scientific and engineering facilities and capabilities gives NASA centers the ability to contribute to technology transfer on a much broader scale. Additionally, information should be disseminated in a complete and rapidly available form. To accomplish this information dissemination, the unique capabilities of the Internet are being exploited. The Internet allows widescale information distribution in a rapid fashion to aid in the accomplishment of technology transfer goals established by the NASA/MSFC Technology Transfer Office. Rapid information retrieval coupled with appropriate electronic feedback, allows the scientific and technical capabilities of Marshall Space Flight Center, often unique in the world, to be explored by a large number of potential benefactors of NASA (or NASA-derived) technologies. Electronic feedback, coupled with personal contact with the MSFC Technology Transfer Office personnel, allows rapid responses to technical requests from industry and academic personnel as well as private citizens. The remainder of this report gives a brief overview of the Mosaic software and a discussion of technology transfer office and laboratory facilities data that have been made available on the Internet to promote technology transfer

A compilation of technology spinoffs from the US Space Shuttle Program

As the successful transfer of NASA-developed technology is a stated mission of NASA, the documentation of such transfer is vital in support of the program. The purpose of this report is to document technology transfer, i.e. 'spinoffs', from the U.S. Space Shuttle Program to the commercial sector. These spinoffs have their origin in the many scientific and engineering fields associated with the shuttle program and, as such, span many diverse commercial applications. These applications include, but are not limited to, consumer products, medicine, industrial productivity, manufacturing technology, public safety, resources management, materials processing, transportation, energy, computer technology, construction, and environmental applications. To aide to the generation of this technology spinoff list, significant effort was made to establish numerous and complementary sources of information. The primary sources of information used in compiling this list include: the NASA 'Spinoff' publication, NASA Tech Briefs, the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Technology Utilization (TU) Office, the NASA Center for Aerospace Information (CASI), the NASA COSMIC Software Center, and MSFC laboratory and contractor personnel. A complete listing of resources may be found in the bibliography of this report. Additionally, effort was made to insure that the obtained information was placed in electronic database form to insure that the subsequent updating would be feasible with minimal effort

Spike: Artificial intelligence scheduling for Hubble space telescope

Efficient utilization of spacecraft resources is essential, but the accompanying scheduling problems are often computationally intractable and are difficult to approximate because of the presence of numerous interacting constraints. Artificial intelligence techniques were applied to the scheduling of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This presents a particularly challenging problem since a yearlong observing program can contain some tens of thousands of exposures which are subject to a large number of scientific, operational, spacecraft, and environmental constraints. New techniques were developed for machine reasoning about scheduling constraints and goals, especially in cases where uncertainty is an important scheduling consideration and where resolving conflicts among conflicting preferences is essential. These technique were utilized in a set of workstation based scheduling tools (Spike) for HST. Graphical displays of activities, constraints, and schedules are an important feature of the system. High level scheduling strategies using both rule based and neural network approaches were developed. While the specific constraints implemented are those most relevant to HST, the framework developed is far more general and could easily handle other kinds of scheduling problems. The concept and implementation of the Spike system are described along with some experiments in adapting Spike to other spacecraft scheduling domains

Renewing Health Governance: A Case-Study of Newfoundland and Labrador

There were several new policy reforms and discourses that intersected with the Canadian health public agenda during the 1990s. Despite new circumstances and widespread Pan-Canadian pressure and leadership calling for common health reforms, these transformations across jurisdictions or policy fields were not “inevitable” as often forecast by boosters. Our objective is to better understand the role of local contextual factors (culture, institutions, and interests) and how these have influenced provincial experiences with policy reforms. These contextual factors do not exercise similar degrees of influence upon policy change. Our goal is to explore and evaluate how health care reform evolved in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL)

Outdoor Education Fatalities in Canada: A Comparative Case Study

The recent criminal negligence case against an Ontario teacher in the death of a student identified pertinent outdoor education administration and policy issues. This comparative case study examined this case and two additional high profile Canadian outdoor education fatalities, identifying common factors and issues. Using Accimaps to illustrate the multiple contributing factors for each event, the case studies all exhibited contributory administrative factors of undefined risk tolerance, risk creep, lack of oversight, and issues regarding parental consent. Conclusions were drawn as preventative lessons that can inform school or board-level outdoor education policy and practice

Gender and Criminal Justice Responses to Terrorism in the United States

This brief summarizes findings from a recent study published in Crime & Delinquency titled Gender and Criminal Justice Responses to Terrorism in the United States (available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/00111287211047535 ). Using data from the American Terrorism Study (ATS), this study examine show gender varies across federal terrorism cases, how gender shapes federal terrorism case outcomes, and how combinations of relevant case attributes uniquely impact court outcomes for males and females. Data include a sample of 2,147 defendants in terrorism-related cases across several types of legal measures: charge type, number of charges, whether or not the prosecutor references terrorism (e.g., relying on terrorism statutes or referring to a defendant\u27s association with a terrorist movement during adjudication), joint or single prosecution, bail, conviction outcome, and sentence length. While several types of analyses were conducted, only descriptive statistics are presented in this brief

Gender Differences in Seeking Help

Gender differences in willingness to seek help were examined in this study. Males often appear to not seek help from others, especially from a professional, like a psychologist. The current study will look at several factors that may prevent males from seeking help. First, males may be unaware of their problems as whole, specifically emotional and relational problems. Next, males often are afraid or unable to open up because they do not think in emotions. Lastly, males are afraid to appear weak in order to keep their masculine appearance. In this study, participants read several scenarios and determined whether they felt the person in the scenario should seek help. Results were examined to determine when participants felt it was necessary to seek help. Results showed that males were more likely when to suggest working things out on their own. Females were more likely to suggest seeking help from a psychologist. Future research should examine why this difference between males and females exist