Christliche Rundfunkarbeit in Afrika

Die Entdeckung der elektromagnetischen Wellen für die Nutzung in Hörfunk undFernsehen ist in ihrer Bedeutung für die Menschheit vergleichbar mit der Erfindungder beweglichen Lettern. Fast 500 Jahre liegen zwischen der Erfindung dieser beidenKommunikationsmittel, die zusammen einen ungewöhnlich starken Einfluß auf dasLeben des heutigen Menschen ausüben. Schon die großen religiösen Reformer des 16. Jahrhunderts haben sich auf geradezu dramatische Weise der Druckpresse bedient, auch heute ziehen die Männer der Kirche vielfach noch immer das geschriebene Wort vor. (...)EnglishRadio broadcasting is the most important medium of mass communication in Africa.Because all the radio Stations are looking for good programs there is a great chancefor Christian evangelization. Catholics and Protestants (even Moslems) use mainly stateowned broadcasting facilities for their programs. There are only a very few radiostations owned by Christian churches. TV stations (there are 21 TV stations south ofthe Sahara) are airing more religious programs produced outside the African countries than do the sound broadcasting stations. Current religious news is distributed through the general news-services (sound or even film). The main task of Christian broadcasting in Africa should be to train qualified people for the work. A first training center for Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox has been working successfully in Nairobi since 1966 (cf. CS 1 : 1968, 124-126)

Using the DELPHI Method to Collect Feedback on Student\u27s Perceptions of Teaching Quality

In educational institutions, teaching effectiveness is a highly valued asset among administrators, professors, and students alike. Information gathered from students is often used as a basis for promotion and tenure decisions (Abrami & d’Apollonia, 1999; Waters, Kemp, & Pucci, 1988), and, ideally, formative purposes. However, students do not always believe that their evaluations carry much weight (Chen & Hoshower, 2003; Spencer & Schmelkin, 2002). This is likely due to the fact that summarized results from student evaluations often do not get in the hands of professors until after that particular course has concluded and, therefore, the feedback does not directly benefit the students who provided it. The goal of the current paper is to introduce a method that can be used by instructors to evaluate the effectiveness of their teaching in a particular course in such a way as to implement change in the course if necessary for those very same students. First, we will discuss teaching effectiveness in general; second we will introduce the DELPHI method and its usefulness in evaluating effective teaching; and third we will report on the results of using this method in our courses with the goal of improving the learning experience for the students providing the feedback

Ensemble of a subset of kNN classifiers

Combining multiple classifiers, known as ensemble methods, can give substantial improvement in prediction performance of learning algorithms especially in the presence of non-informative features in the data sets. We propose an ensemble of subset of kNN classifiers, ESkNN, for classification task in two steps. Firstly, we choose classifiers based upon their individual performance using the out-of-sample accuracy. The selected classifiers are then combined sequentially starting from the best model and assessed for collective performance on a validation data set. We use bench mark data sets with their original and some added non-informative features for the evaluation of our method. The results are compared with usual kNN, bagged kNN, random kNN, multiple feature subset method, random forest and support vector machines. Our experimental comparisons on benchmark classification problems and simulated data sets reveal that the proposed ensemble gives better classification performance than the usual kNN and its ensembles, and performs comparable to random forest and support vector machines

Adaptation-Based Programming in Haskell

We present an embedded DSL to support adaptation-based programming (ABP) in Haskell. ABP is an abstract model for defining adaptive values, called adaptives, which adapt in response to some associated feedback. We show how our design choices in Haskell motivate higher-level combinators and constructs and help us derive more complicated compositional adaptives. We also show an important specialization of ABP is in support of reinforcement learning constructs, which optimize adaptive values based on a programmer-specified objective function. This permits ABP users to easily define adaptive values that express uncertainty anywhere in their programs. Over repeated executions, these adaptive values adjust to more efficient ones and enable the user's programs to self optimize. The design of our DSL depends significantly on the use of type classes. We will illustrate, along with presenting our DSL, how the use of type classes can support the gradual evolution of DSLs.Comment: In Proceedings DSL 2011, arXiv:1109.032

On the Perception of Religious Group Membership from Faces

BACKGROUND: The study of social categorization has largely been confined to examining groups distinguished by perceptually obvious cues. Yet many ecologically important group distinctions are less clear, permitting insights into the general processes involved in person perception. Although religious group membership is thought to be perceptually ambiguous, folk beliefs suggest that Mormons and non-Mormons can be categorized from their appearance. We tested whether Mormons could be distinguished from non-Mormons and investigated the basis for this effect to gain insight to how subtle perceptual cues can support complex social categorizations. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants categorized Mormons' and non-Mormons' faces or facial features according to their group membership. Individuals could distinguish between the two groups significantly better than chance guessing from their full faces and faces without hair, with eyes and mouth covered, without outer face shape, and inverted 180°; but not from isolated features (i.e., eyes, nose, or mouth). Perceivers' estimations of their accuracy did not match their actual accuracy. Exploration of the remaining features showed that Mormons and non-Mormons significantly differed in perceived health and that these perceptions were related to perceptions of skin quality, as demonstrated in a structural equation model representing the contributions of skin color and skin texture. Other judgments related to health (facial attractiveness, facial symmetry, and structural aspects related to body weight) did not differ between the two groups. Perceptions of health were also responsible for differences in perceived spirituality, explaining folk hypotheses that Mormons are distinct because they appear more spiritual than non-Mormons. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Subtle markers of group membership can influence how others are perceived and categorized. Perceptions of health from non-obvious and minimal cues distinguished individuals according to their religious group membership. These data illustrate how the non-conscious detection of very subtle differences in others' appearances supports cognitively complex judgments such as social categorization

Physiological basis and image processing in functional magnetic resonance imaging: Neuronal and motor activity in brain

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is recently developing as imaging modality used for mapping hemodynamics of neuronal and motor event related tissue blood oxygen level dependence (BOLD) in terms of brain activation. Image processing is performed by segmentation and registration methods. Segmentation algorithms provide brain surface-based analysis, automated anatomical labeling of cortical fields in magnetic resonance data sets based on oxygen metabolic state. Registration algorithms provide geometric features using two or more imaging modalities to assure clinically useful neuronal and motor information of brain activation. This review article summarizes the physiological basis of fMRI signal, its origin, contrast enhancement, physical factors, anatomical labeling by segmentation, registration approaches with examples of visual and motor activity in brain. Latest developments are reviewed for clinical applications of fMRI along with other different neurophysiological and imaging modalities

I become all things to all men, in order that I may save some of them

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/atsconferences/2825/thumbnail.jp