Can I Get a Yee-Haw and an Amen: Collecting and Interpreting Oral Histories of Texas Cowboy Churches

With more than 850 Christian cowboy ministries worldwide and approximately 160 individual cowboy churches in Texas, the cowboy church movement is an immensely important religious movement that speaks volumes about contemporary culture. Cowboy churches\u27 Low Barriers Model Christianity attracts many disenchanted with traditional evangelicalism\u27s assumed sterilized and feminized religion. Despite the cowboy church movement\u27s exponential growth since the late-1980s, few outside the movement understand the complexity cowboy churches envelop. Using Cowboy Christians\u27 oral histories, Jake McAdams argues that the cowboy church movement is a suburban seeker church movement centered around the mythic cowboy identity in which participants have a sincere religious experience. Gaining invaluable primary sources and understanding the cowboy church movement in its historical contexts provides a voice to Conboy Christians and allows interested individuals to better understand the complexities of contemporary Texas and American society

Embedding oriented graphs in books

A book consists of a line L in [special characters omitted]3, called the spine, and a collection of half planes, called pages, whose common boundary is L. A k-book is book with k pages. A k-page book embedding is a continuous one-to-one mapping of a graph G into a book such that the vertices are mapped into L and the edges are each mapped to either the spine or a particular page, such that no two edges cross in any page. Each page contains a planar subgraph of G. The book thickness, denoted bt(G), is the minimum number of pages for a graph to have a k-page book embedding. We focus on oriented graphs, and propose a new way to embed oriented graphs into books, called an oriented book embedding, and define oriented book thickness . We investigate oriented graphs having oriented book thickness k using k-page critical oriented graphs, oriented graphs with oriented book thickness equal to k, but, for each arc, the deletion of that arc yields an oriented graph with oriented book thickness equal to k –1. We discuss several classes of two-page critical oriented graphs, and use them to characterize oriented graphs with oriented book thickness equal to one that are strictly uni-dicyclic graphs, oriented graphs having exactly one cycle, which is a directed cycle. We give a similar result for strictly bi-dicyclic graphs, oriented graphs having exactly two cycles, which are directed cycles

A Non-Hypothetical and Incentive Compatible Method for Estimating Consumer Willingness-to-Pay for a Novel Functional Food: The Case of Pomegranates

A preference and valuation mechanism that compared results of an experimental auction and nonhypothetical preference rankings was developed and used to elicit preferences for pomegranate products from a representative sample of shoppers in Texas. Familiarity with pomegranate products increased willingness-to-pay (WTP) for pomegranates, as did tasting and providing additional information on the health benefits of the products. Ready-to-eat and juice products were preferred to whole fruit products. Subjects did not indicate an increased WTP for Texas varieties over California Wonderful pomegranate based on auction bids but indicated a preference for one Texas variety in the nonhypothetical ranking procedure; thus, the auction results and nonhypothetical preference ranking procedures were divergent. Further, there were interaction effects of the information treatments with the product characteristics.willingness-to-pay, pomegranate, experimental auction, ranking, health, novel product, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Marketing, D12, Q13,

Automated Retrieval of Non-Engineering Domain Solutions to Engineering Problems

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityBiological inspiration for engineering design has occurred through a variety of techniques such as creation and use of databases, keyword searches of biological information in natural-language format, prior knowledge of biology, and chance observations of nature. This research focuses on utilizing the reconciled Functional Basis function and flow terms to identify suitable biological inspiration for function based design. The organized search provides two levels of results: (1) associated with verb function only and (2) narrowed results associated with verb-noun (function-flow). A set of heuristics has been complied to promote efficient searching using this technique. An example for creating smart flooring is also presented and discussed.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

Second Chances in The Wire: Perspectives from Psychology and the Judiciary

Playing off a scene in The Wire wherein prison inmates discuss whether American lives have “second acts,” this essay considers psychological and legal issues at play in people’s efforts to turn their lives around, from bad to good. In the first half of the essay, a professor of psychology discusses empirical research into redemptive life stories in which people find positive meaning in suffering and/or transform their lives from failure to relative success. While examples of redemptive life stories may be found in The Wire, making good on second chances seems to be a relatively rare occurrence. In the second half, a federal judge considers the issue of second chances in the American legal system, focusing on the issue of sentencing. Like many of the drug offenders in The Wire, young men sentenced for crimes today have often suffered from a litany of setbacks and deprivations in life. The effort to rehabilitate these offenders must be balanced against competing sentencing goals that involve, for example, deterrence and payback. As in the television series, the possibilities of making good on second chances may be vanishingly rare in the real lives of offenders today

Development and Validation of the Optimal Supervision Environment Test (OSET)

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate the Optimal Supervision Environment Test (OSET), an instrument designed to assess the supervisor’s ability to create an optimal supervision environment. Using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the initial validation of the OSET has yielded a three-factor model that identifies the following three environmental domains of supervision: the Emotional Environment, the Learning Environment, and the Power Environment. The total scale and each OSET subscale have strong internal consistency (.84 to .90). These results provide initial support for using OSET as a valid and reliable multidimensional supervision instrument

Using Service-Learning to Promote Social Justice Advocacy and Cognitive Development During Internship

Little empirical research has examined how to effectively prepare counseling students as social justice advocates. In a quasi-experimental design, a service-learning intervention was used in community counseling internship to promote students’ social justice advocacy competency as well as cognitive development, including moral and intellectual development. Findings demonstrated a significant increase in social justice advocacy competency in both the experimental and control groups at the end of one quarter of community counseling internship. In addition, the experimental group had significantly higher scores on the Public Information advocacy domain sub-scale of the Advocacy Competency Self-Assessment Survey. Teaching strategies such as service-learning may prepare counselor trainees for community engagement when they are in practice