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 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)

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

Turbine Integrated Pitching System

The Cal Poly Wind Power Club (CPWP) tasked this senior project to design, manufacture, test, and deliver a mechanism to pitch the blades for their small-scale horizontal axis wind turbine. CPWP competes in the Collegiate Wind Competition (CWC) against schools across the country, and as such it was critical to comply with the provided competition rules in addition to the design requirement from CPWP. The purpose of the pitching mechanism is to improve the performance and efficiency of the wind turbine by allowing the blades to adjust angles with different wind speeds. Specifically, this project aimed to minimize hub size, minimize power draw, minimize axial depth, increase blade strength, decrease blade switch time, in addition to being a durable and lightweight mechanism. The mechanism was designed with safety and reliability in mind and has been integrated into the CPWP wind turbine. The system utilizes two actuators to push and pull a swashplate connected to a 4-bar linkage to create the rotational motion in order to effectively pitch the blades. The team used a combination of CAD software and physical prototypes to evaluate the effectiveness of the mechanism. All of the manufacturing was completed by the team in the Cal Poly machine shops using a combination of manual machines and CNC. In addition, the team conducted various component and mechanism testing, including full turbine wind tunnel tests to validate the design. The final product was delivered to CPWP in time for the CWC competition, where it was put to the test against other universities\u27 wind turbine designs