The theme of power in the theology of Adolf Von harnack

Harnack Is best known as a church historian of the first rank, but a case can also be made for his significance as a constructive theologian. This thesis sets out to examine his theology using an interpretive framework not employed before, namely, the theme of power which runs throughout his work. Use is made of the sociological typology of power developed by Dennis Wrong on the basis of Weber, of Michael Mann's work on the origins of social power, and of Peter Berger's classification of various theological approaches to secularisation and religious pluralism. The investigation broadens the base of Harnack research by making fuller use than has generally the case of publications other than Das Wesen and Dogmengeschichte. and pays attention to Harnack's devotional as well as his scholarly writing. The theory of power which emerges is strongly dualistic, distinguishing interior, ideological power from external, social power. Divine power empowers individuals from within, via their acceptance of the charismatic and competent authority of Jesus as legitimate authority, and the concomitant attribution of benign, nutrient power to the character of God. This acceptance produces markedly beneficial effects upon the individual’s emotional and moral state, which gives rise to constructive activity in the external world. Inherent in this theory is a high estimate of the empowering possibilities of ideas and personalities. Harnack argues that the early church underwent a regrettable process Ctranspotentiation'), involving the growth of external, coercive authority and a diminution in the availability of interior, divine/spiritual power. Harnack's work contains serious tensions related to its untenable dualism and its ambivalence about the possibility of legitimate external authority in the church. But his explanation of divine/spiritual empowering provided a plausible, attractive theodicy and apologetic in its time. With modifications it could do so again, and is of especial value in developing an existential theology of the inner life

Eliminating Writer’s Block: Flipped Classroom Meets ThinkSpace

This video interview elaborates the methodology that was presented at a Poster session at the Food & Nutrition Conference and Expo at Chicago, Oct 21 - 24, 2017. Background: Students find writing the personal statement to be a challenging and anxiety-producing aspect of the internship application. We previously implemented Flipped Classroom and small group learning approaches into the Foundations of Dietetics course. While these strategies facilitated peer feedback on personal statements, students lacked a structured system for providing comments and were limited with in-class time to provide feedback. Methods: Using ThinkSpace, a web-based active learning tool, students completed guided reflections in class. Students were not aware that the reflections were components of the first draft of the personal statement, helping create a low-risk writing environment. The peer review feature of ThinkSpace allows students to upload a draft and receive comments from peers. Students then participated in an in-class team Writer’s Workshop to discuss peer critiques. Results: Since the introduction of groups in 2014 and ThinkSpace in 2016, course evaluations have shown improvement. The mean score for “Overall, this course has been effective in advancing my learning” increased significantly from 2014-2015. Additionally, across student evaluation scores in 2015 and 2016, there was statistically more agreement that learning had been improved. Conclusion: ThinkSpace can advance teaching how to write a personal statement by allowing practice and feedback to occur outside the classroom. Improved course evaluations from 2014 to 2015 coincide with the use of small groups, indicating implementation was effective in enhancing student learning. Finally, ThinkSpace, in conjunction with groups, allows faculty to maximize student engagement by increasing the value of peer feedback and facilitate an active learning environment.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/thinkspace_presentations/1005/thumbnail.jp

Linking fish growth and climate across modern space and through evolutionary time : otolith chronologies of the Australian freshwater fish, golden perch (Macquaria, ambigua, Percichthyidae)

Australian freshwater systems have highly variable flow regimes influenced by El Nino dry- and La Nina wet- phases of the Southern Oscillation climate phenomenon (SOI). A system characterised by strong climate forcing offers opportunities to disentangle the links between fish growth and climate in order to determine how fish populations could respond to changes in flow arising from climate change or anthropogenic activities (water extraction, river regulation, etc). Life histories (an organism's schedules of growth, maturity and longevity) form the very essence of population dynamics and thus are likely to comprise a sensitive suite of characteristics for reflecting differences in the environment and climates that populations have experienced. An ideal way to investigate life-history variation is through the use of otoliths to extract age information and reconstruct growth chronologies. This thesis is novel in that otolith growth chronologies extracted from an extant fish species were firstly validated as environmental recorders of climate over a range of spatial scales (from single reservoir to river system), and then modem life-histories were compared with Pleistocene remains of the same species over truly evolutionary timescales. This PhD studied the otoliths of the Australian freshwater fish golden perch, Macquaria ambigua (Percichthyidae). Golden perch are common and widespread across fifteen degrees of latitude and occur in four major drainage basins across southeastern and central Australia. Given their broad distribution, extant populations currently experience a wide range of climatic regimes and large differences in age and growth were expected. This study firstly established that golden perch otoliths were suitable for reconstructing growth chronologies by validating the three central assumptions that otoliths could be aged accurately, measured precisely and that otolith growth sensitively reflected relative somatic growth. During this validation, a Biochronology macro was developed to improve the precision of otolith annual-growth measurements by ensuring their orthogonality to the direction of otolith growth even with changing annual opaque zone orientations across the otolith section. This Biochronology macro was then applied to golden perch collected from Googong reservoir, New South Wales, which is at the upper altitudinal and lower thermal limit of the biogeographical range for golden perch. Otoliths proved to be excellent archives of the local environmental conditions experienced over 1982 to 1999 as synchronous interannual growth fluctuations were recorded in the somatic and otolith increment width records for fish of all ages. 73 .4% of the inter-annual variation in the population growth chronology was explained by three environmental parameters: fluctuations in Googong reservoir's water level, minimum dissolved oxygen saturations, and the length of the growing season (number of degree days exceeding 20°C). Low water levels, low oxygen saturations and short growing seasons all combined to result in poor fish growth. These linkages between fish growth and local environmental conditions from a single reservoir were then scaled up to determine if there were synchronous fluctuations between widely separated populations in years of strong climate forcing. 1,240 golden perch otoliths were measured from seven populations that were isolated from one another by barriers to dispersal (dams and weirs). Five populations were clustered around the Australian Capital Territory and two populations were located hundreds of river kilometres downstream in New South Wales. The twenty-nine year growth chronology from 1972 to 2000 was highly correlated with the average annual values of the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) over 1972-1992 but not over the final eight years 1993-2000 (correlations of 0.59 and -0.62 respectively). This highlights that rather than there being a predictable relationship between fish growth and the SOI through time, populations can drift in and out of synchrony dependent upon the relative combination, strength and autocorrelation of sub-components of high frequency climate disturbances. Growth chronologies were then constructed at the opposite climate extreme to the southern Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), focusing on golden perch inhabiting the intermittent rivers of the Lake Eyre Basin (LEB) that run through the deserts of Central Australia. However, similar to the results for golden perch growth in the cooler and less arid MDB, otolith chronologies in the LEB were highly synchronous among individuals and were significantly correlated with annual discharge. Annual discharge explained 74% and 18% of the inter-annual growth variation for fish from the Diamantina River and Cooper Creek respectively. Finally, the age and growth of golden perch at the two extremes of their extant range (MDB and LEB) were compared with Pleistocene remains of the same species 20- 17,000 years ago (calendar years). This was in order to estimate life-history divergence across modem populations as well as investigate the extent of change over thousands of years. The Pleistocene otoliths were from the dry Willandra Lakes in the MDB, dated back to an oscillatory lake phase shortly after the last glacial maximum (6-9°C cooler than modem). Although there have been no changes to external otolith dimensions, substantial age differences were described for fossil and modem samples. In particular, older age classes were far more common for Pleistocene golden perch (up to 43 years) when compared to their modem counterparts (up to 26 years). Otolith increment widths at age were also narrower, interpreted as representing slower somatic growth during the glacial climate phase. The slower growing and greater longevity Pleistocene golden perch could well have reached larger asymptotic sizes than historical records (23kg and 76cm) given the well known demographic trade-offs among these traits. For comparisons among modem populations, age distributions were similar for LEB and MDB populations, even though the lower mortality MDB environments were expected to have a greater frequency of older age classes. It is suggested that a lack of older age classes in the MDB may represent a legacy of commercial over-exploitation during the 19th and 20th Centuries as well as a disruption of ecological processes through river regulation. Comparisons of otolith growth patterns revealed that the LEB population had wider increment widths-at-age when compared to the MDB, most likely as a function of longer growing seasons, warmer temperatures and faster growth. Spatial divergence of modem life-histories were identified, but the magnitude of differences across modem climate extremes were nowhere near as substantial as the growth and longevity changes over the last 20,000 years of climate change. In conclusion, otoliths offer considerable potential as growth archives to retrieve the environmental histories of both individuals and populations over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales

Adaptive immunity to rhinoviruses: sex and age matter

Background: Rhinoviruses (RV) are key triggers in acute asthma exacerbations. Previous studies suggest that men suffer from infectious diseases more frequently and with greater severity than women. Additionally, the immune response to most infections and vaccinations decreases with age. Most immune function studies do not account for such differences, therefore the aim of this study was to determine if the immune response to rhinovirus varies with sex or age

Sketchnoting A Methodology: Fostering Team Based Learning Conversations

Sketchnoting is a methodology that uses simple shapes, frames, and connectors to visualize complex information, concepts, and physical objects, thus it has a low barrier entry for skilled and non-skilled drawers, as well as for designers or non-designers alike. It is situated at the lower end of the visualization fidelity spectrum, which ranges from napkin style sketches to photo-realistic renderings or high fidelity info-graphics

Planned Vaginal Birth or Elective Repeat Caesarean: Patient Preference Restricted Cohort with Nested Randomised Trial

A study conducted in Australia provides new data on the outcomes for mother and baby associated with either planned vaginal birth, or elective repeat caesarean section following a previous caesarean section

Genomic signatures of population decline in the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae

Population genomic features such as nucleotide diversity and linkage disequilibrium are expected to be strongly shaped by changes in population size, and might therefore be useful for monitoring the success of a control campaign. In the Kilifi district of Kenya, there has been a marked decline in the abundance of the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae subsequent to the rollout of insecticide-treated bed nets. To investigate whether this decline left a detectable population genomic signature, simulations were performed to compare the effect of population crashes on nucleotide diversity, Tajima's D, and linkage disequilibrium (as measured by the population recombination parameter ρ). Linkage disequilibrium and ρ were estimated for An. gambiae from Kilifi, and compared them to values for Anopheles arabiensis and Anopheles merus at the same location, and for An. gambiae in a location 200 km from Kilifi. In the first simulations ρ changed more rapidly after a population crash than the other statistics, and therefore is a more sensitive indicator of recent population decline. In the empirical data, linkage disequilibrium extends 100-1000 times further, and ρ is 100-1000 times smaller, for the Kilifi population of An. gambiae than for any of the other populations. There were also significant runs of homozygosity in many of the individual An. gambiae mosquitoes from Kilifi. These results support the hypothesis that the recent decline in An. gambiae was driven by the rollout of bed nets. Measuring population genomic parameters in a small sample of individuals before, during and after vector or pest control may be a valuable method of tracking the effectiveness of interventions

Devils Tower National Monument: Historic Resource Study

This study presents historical contexts associated with Devils Tower National Monument (DETO). First, we describe the Tower itself. The following five chapters elucidate themes, better known as historical contexts. The first theme describes how Native Americans occupied the region since about 13,000 years before present. Evidence is clear of their continuous presence in the area. Eras of exploration and settlement follow. The establishment of Devils Tower as the nation’s first national monument, created by Theodore Roosevelt’s executive order under the Antiquities Act, occurred in 1906. During the 1930s, development of the park continued with some twists unique to Devils Tower. The CCC era is of particular interest for National Park Service sites across the nation, and Devils Tower is no exception. MISSION 66 improvements transformed the monument and laid out a modernized, standardized park landscape in Devils Tower. The history of climbing also has a significant and unique place in the history of Devils Tower. Buildings and structures dating from 1973 are now of sufficient age to be considered for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. We discuss the 1970s in several places in these narratives and offer a theme and historical context for the 1970s to the present. What is particularly significant for Devils Tower National Monument is how nature and culture come together in every age with the result that people perceive the Tower differently, draw various inspirations from it, and experience Bear Lodge/Devils Tower in unique ways.This is published as Devils Tower National Monument: Historic Resource Study. National Park Service, Intermountain Office, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2023. Document is available online at the National Park Service History Electronic Library & Archive: http://npshistory.com/index.htm. Posted with permission

The challenge of enterprise/innovation: a case study of a modern university

In the prevailing economic and political climate for Higher Education a greater emphasis has been placed on diversifying the funding base. The present study was undertaken between 2012 and 2014 and addressed the implementation of an approach to the transformation of one academic school in a medium-sized modern university in Wales to a more engaged enterprise culture. A multimethod investigation included a bi-lingual (English and Welsh) online survey of academic staff and yielded a 71% response rate (n = 45). The findings informed a series of in-depth interviews (n = 24) with a representative sample of those involved in enterprise work (support staff, managers, senior managers), and those who were not. The results provided the platform for the ‘S4E model’ for effective engagement with enterprise: (1) Strategic significance for Enterprise, (2) Support for Enterprise, (3) Synergy for Enterprise, and (4) Success for Enterprise. The outcomes of the research and the recommendations from it have potential to inform practice in other academic schools within the university and, in a wider context, within other Schools of Education regionally, nationally and internationally. Its original empirical exploration of enterprise within education studies is a significant contribution to that body of knowledge