Transgender-Affirming Spiritual Care

Resources in support of transgender-affirming spiritual care have grown in recent years as attention to transgender experience has gained more mainstream attention. This essay explores resources which provide foundations for transgender spiritual care, spiritual care across the transgender lifespan, health care chaplaincy with transgender patients, and considerations around transgender religiosity, spirituality, and resilience-building. Adjacent fields of study and gaps in the literature are noted, but the suggested resources provide a strong foundation and a representative sample of the patchwork state of the scholarly conversation around transgender-affirming spiritual care at this time. While this review is not exhaustive, it does provide a comprehensive introduction to an emergent field which is increasingly in demand from spiritual care providers in the field

Theological Librarians and the Cultivation of Belonging

Drawing together critique of theological education (Willie Jame Jennings) with care ethics (Joan Tronto), this essay unpacks the important role of care and belonging in theological education. Rather than basing belonging in shared identity, homogeneity, tolerance, or loyalty, this essay argues that practices of care are what allow belonging to emerge and be sustained. The essay then identifies theological librarians as exemplars of what Jennings calls “the art of cultivating belonging.” While not a full proposal for rejuvenation of theological education, this essay draws connections between critical pedagogy, Jennings’ pedagogy of belonging, library science, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in a way that sparks further dialogue about the essentials of theological formation in the 21st century

Learning Bijective Feature Maps for Linear ICA

Separating high-dimensional data like images into independent latent factors, i.e independent component analysis (ICA), remains an open research problem. As we show, existing probabilistic deep generative models (DGMs), which are tailor-made for image data, underperform on non-linear ICA tasks. To address this, we propose a DGM which combines bijective feature maps with a linear ICA model to learn interpretable latent structures for high-dimensional data. Given the complexities of jointly training such a hybrid model, we introduce novel theory that constrains linear ICA to lie close to the manifold of orthogonal rectangular matrices, the Stiefel manifold. By doing so we create models that converge quickly, are easy to train, and achieve better unsupervised latent factor discovery than flow-based models, linear ICA, and Variational Autoencoders on images.Comment: 8 page

Hua\u27s Matrix Equality and Schur Complements

The purpose of this paper is to revisit Hua\u27s matrix equality (and inequality) through the Schur complement. We present Hua\u27s original proof and two new proofs with some extensions of Hua\u27s matrix equality and inequalities. The new proofs use a result concerning Shur complements and a generalization of Sylvester\u27s law of inertia, each of which is useful in its own right

The Effects of Onlooker Gender and Restrictive Emotionality on Help-Seeking Behavior

Endorsing traits associated with masculinity, such as restrictive emotionality (RE), may have negative implications for the health and well-being of both male and female individuals, specifically in terms of help-seeking. The current work examines whether gender of an onlooker (i.e., a coworker) impacts participants’ self-reported likelihood to seek help for a physical ailment or injury in the workplace. We also investigate if RE moderated the relationship between onlooker gender and intent to seek help. We hypothesize that participants would be more likely to seek help from a female (vs. male) coworker and this anticipated effect would be exacerbated for those relatively high in endorsement of RE. Participants (n = 129) were recruited online to engage in a study where they self-reported likelihood to seek help from a male or female coworker when experiencing various injury symptoms at work and their RE. Our results provided support for only one of our primary hypotheses: as RE increased, intent to seek help decreased. Auxiliary analyses revealed female participants were significantly more likely to seek help from a female onlooker than a male onlooker, whereas male participants were equally likely to seek help from females and males. These results suggest RE may be associated with maladaptive help-seeking behavior and participant gender and onlooker gender may interact to inform help-seeking with practical implications for developing interventions to encourage help-seeking

Quantum Delocalized Interactions

Classical mechanics obeys the intuitive logic that a physical event happens at a definite spatial point. Entanglement, however, breaks this logic by enabling interactions without a specific location. In this work we study these delocalized interactions. These are quantum interactions that create less locational information than would be possible classically, as captured by the disturbance induced on some spatial superposition state. We introduce quantum games to capture the effect and demonstrate a direct operational use for quantum concurrence in that it bounds the nonclassical performance gain. We also find a connection with quantum teleportation, and demonstrate the games using an IBM quantum processor

A UML profile for knowledge-based systems modelling

The Knowledge engineering (KE) techniques are essentially based on the knowledge transfer approach, from domain experts directly to systems. However, this has been replaced by the modelling approach which emphasises using conceptual models to model the problem-solving skill of the domain expert.This paper discusses extending the Unified Modelling Language by means of a profile for modelling knowledge-based system in the context of Model Driven Architecture (MDA) framework.The profile is implemented using the eXecutable Modelling Framework (XMF) Mosaic tool.A case study from the health care domain demonstrates the practical use of this profile; with the prototype implemented in Java Expert System Shell (Jess). The paper also discusses the possible mapping of the profile elements to the platform specific model (PSM) of Jess and provides some discussion on the Production Rule Representation (PRR) standardisation work

Explaining holistic image regressors and classifiers in urban analytics with plausible counterfactuals

We propose a new form of plausible counterfactual explanation designed to explain the behaviour of computer vision systems used in urban analytics that make predictions based on properties across the entire image, rather than specific regions of it. We illustrate the merits of our approach by explaining computer vision models used to analyse street imagery, which are now widely used in GeoAI and urban analytics. Such explanations are important in urban analytics as researchers and practioners are increasingly reliant on it for decision making. Finally, we perform a user study that demonstrate our approach can be used by non-expert users, who might not be machine learning experts, to be more confident and to better understand the behaviour of image-based classifiers/regressors for street view analysis. Furthermore, the method can potentially be used as an engagement tool to visualise how public spaces can plausibly look like. The limited realism of the counterfactuals is a concern which we hope to improve in the future