A Seminar On The Dynamics, Prevention, And Legal Implications Of Clergy Sexual Misconduct

Problem Clergy sexual misconduct has become a major problem among Christian denominations. It involves violation of expectations and the breaking of public trust. There is also a growing awareness in our society of the legal implications of clergy sexual misconduct. This present study was to prepare, present, and evaluate a seminar for pastors on the dynamics, prevention, and legal implications of clergy sexual misconduct. Method Research was done to help ministers understand the dynamics, prevention, and legal implications of clergy sexual misconduct. Then, a seminar was conducted in four areas of the Oregon Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. This seminar was attended by fifty-seven pastors. Results Pastors believed that all colleges and/or the seminary should include in their ministerial training program a core course on sexual ethics in the ministry. Also, seminars and/or programs should be created to help ministers who are already serving in their respective responsibilities. They also indicated that new and transferring pastors should be screened before hiring them and be asked to attend an orientation process. Finally, the pastors expressed the hope that some fallen ministers may be given the opportunity for restoration providing that certain requirements are met. Conclusions Church leaders should study the development and implementation of an instrument to screen new and transferring pastors which includes an orientation process. Colleges and/or the seminary should consider creating and incorporating a class on sexual ethics in the ministry. Seminars/workshops should also be made available to help ministers, especially those coming from outside of North America, deal with this problem in a Christian, professional, and responsible way. Finally, more study should be done to create a system of restoration for fallen pastors and a recovery program for victims of clergy sexual misconduct, their relatives, and congregations

Sampling motif-constrained ensembles of networks

The statistical significance of network properties is conditioned on null models which satisfy spec- ified properties but that are otherwise random. Exponential random graph models are a principled theoretical framework to generate such constrained ensembles, but which often fail in practice, either due to model inconsistency, or due to the impossibility to sample networks from them. These problems affect the important case of networks with prescribed clustering coefficient or number of small connected subgraphs (motifs). In this paper we use the Wang-Landau method to obtain a multicanonical sampling that overcomes both these problems. We sample, in polynomial time, net- works with arbitrary degree sequences from ensembles with imposed motifs counts. Applying this method to social networks, we investigate the relation between transitivity and homophily, and we quantify the correlation between different types of motifs, finding that single motifs can explain up to 60% of the variation of motif profiles.Comment: Updated version, as published in the journal. 7 pages, 5 figures, one Supplemental Materia

Personal income and its distribution in Spanish municipalities

This resource describes a data source for local personal income and its distribution in Spanish municipalities

Els dos telescopis refractors més grans de Catalunya

Entre 1886 i 1904 varen aparèixer a Catalunya dos telescopis refractors dobles (amb dos tubs, un visual i un altre fotogràfic) de grans dimensions. El primer fou un telescopi de la firma francesa Mailhat amb una obertura de 22 cm en ambdós tubs, que finalment va ser donat a la Facultat de Ciències de la Universitat de Barcelona. L’altre telescopi refractor fou també doble, de la mateixa firma, però amb 38 cm d’obertura, i va anar a l’Observatori Fabra. Aquesta comunicació, fa un estudi històric i tècnic d’aquestos telescopis

Improving classification using a Confidence Matrix based on weak classifiers applied to OCR

This paper proposes a new feature representation method based on the construction of a Confidence Matrix (CM). This representation consists of posterior probability values provided by several weak classifiers, each one trained and used in different sets of features from the original sample. The CM allows the final classifier to abstract itself from discovering underlying groups of features. In this work the CM is applied to isolated character image recognition, for which several set of features can be extracted from each sample. Experimentation has shown that the use of CM permits a significant improvement in accuracy in most cases, while the others remain the same. The results were obtained after experimenting with four well-known corpora, using evolved meta-classifiers with the k-Nearest Neighbor rule as a weak classifier and by applying statistical significance tests.This work was partially supported by the Spanish CICyT through the project TIN2013-48152-C2-1-R, the Consejería de Educación de la Comunidad Valenciana through Project PROMETEO/2012/017 and a FPU fellowship (AP2012-0939) from the Spanish Ministerio de Educación Cultura y Deporte

Estimating the Personal Income Distribution in Spanish Municipalities Using Tax Micro-Data

Local income data is an important economic indicator, widely used in a broad range of studies related to regional convergence, urban economics, fiscal federalism, housing and spatial analysis. Despite its importance, there is a lack of official data on local incomes and, most importantly, on local income distributions. In this paper we use official data on personal income tax returns and a reweighting procedure to derive a representative income sample at the local level. Unlike previous attempts in the literature to acquire local income estimates, the results obtained allow us to derive not only an average value for income but also its local distribution, a valuable and informative tool for analysing distributional and income inequality. We apply this methodology to Spanish Personal Income Tax micro-data and illustrate its potential use in analysing income inequality by means of computed Gini, Atkinson indexes and top 0.01%, 0.5% and 0.01% income share measures for the most populated Spanish municipalities (those with over 160,000 inhabitants)