Counseling Hispanics: Cross Cultural and Christian Perspectives

Cross-cultural and Christian factors are examined in working with Hispanics in therapy. Cross-cultural concerns involve language difficulties, acculturation assessment, family dynamics, gender issues, attitudes toward authority figures: and expectations in therapy. Christian mental health professionals are in a unique position to increase adequate mental health care to this underserved population. Sensitive treatment can reduce the resistance many Hispanic evangelicals have to psychotherapy. In addition, the training of paraprofessional counselors in Hispanic churches would enable many Hispanics to obtain therapy who could not otherwise afford it

Koinonia

Spotlight on SpeakersHeeding the Call of the Ministry of the Towel, Siang-Yang Tan Being Honest About Why We Can\u27t All Just Get Along, William H. Willimon Perspectives on PracticesA Christian Philosophy of Student Development: The Ongoing Discussion and Debate, Carolyn Arthur A Life Worth Living, Damon Seacott The State of Our Seniors Address, Melanie Sunukjian ACSD MattersExecutive Committee Elections New Professionals Retreat ACSD 2002 at Lee University Regular FeaturesPresident\u27s Corner Editor\u27s Diskhttps://pillars.taylor.edu/acsd_koinonia/1019/thumbnail.jp

Lay Christian Counseling and Client Expectations for Integration in Therapy

As lay approaches to Christian counseling have multiplied and become increasingly sophisticated, we hypothesize that these might affect expectations of conservative Christian clients for professional integrative psychotherapy. Accordingly, we review several models of lay counseling, broadly categorizing them into active listening, cognitive & solution-focused approaches, inner healing, and mixed models. We consider how client expectations for psychotherapy may be altered through their experiences with these approaches. Subsequently, we make recommendations for clinicians who deal with lay-counseling-experienced clients. These include doing a more detailed assessment of client lay counseling experiences and considering ethical aspects of treatment (informed consent and competency to treat)

Dynamic acceleration coefficient of particle swarm optimization in robotics motion coordination

This paper focuses on improving an optimization process for swarm robots using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by altering the acceleration coefficient from static to dynamic. In swarm robotic, motion coordination addresses the issue of avoiding a group of robots interfere with each other in a limited workspace, while achieving the global motion objective. PSO is commonly suggested in the literature to optimize path trajectory in robotic field. However, the typical PSO tends to be trapped in local optima. Therefore, a dynamic acceleration coefficient is proposed to optimize the cognitive and social coefficients of PSO in order to improve its exploration ability in seeking the global optimum solution. With this novel feature, PSO becomes less dependent on the chain of its past experience that it had explored in a certain region within the solution space. The effectiveness of the proposed method is tested on a simulated swarm robotic platform. Results show the proposed PSO with Dynamic Coefficient (DCPSO) is 1.09 seconds and 3.58 seconds faster than the typical PSO under dynamic and extreme conditions respectively

Optimization of photovoltaic energy harvesting using artificial neural network

This paper proposes artificial neural network (ANN) based maximum power point tracking (MPPT) controller to maximize the energy harvested by a grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) system under various environmental conditions. Due to the non-linear characteristics, PV system will exhibit multiple peaks when the PV array receives non-uniform irradiance. As such, the conventional perturb and observe (P&O) MPPT controller will be trapped at local maximum power point (MPP). Therefore, this paper aims to integrate ANN into MPPT controller to improve the effectiveness of the MPPT controller in tracking the global MPP. The effectiveness of the proposed method is tested under uniform and non-uniform irradiance conditions, and the performances are compared with the conventional P&O. The simulation results show the proposed method able to track the global MPP even the PV system exhibits multiple peaks under non-uniform condition, whereas the conventional P&O is trapped at local MPP. Thus, the proposed algorithm is able to harvest much energy as compared to the conventional method

Enhanced multi-hop mechanism in vehicular communication system using swarm algorithm

As on-road vehicles are increasing every year, safety on the road has become one of the major concerns. Therefore, Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) becomes as an important role on the road. In VANET, communication occurs between vehicles and the infrastructures. During broadcasting, an emergency message is transferred to the surrounding vehicles to alert other vehicles in the area. However, blind flooding in wireless network might result in redundant rebroadcast, contentions and collision with the neighbouring nodes. This situation is named as broadcast storm. Broadcast storm might lead to the losses of the information or lead to the wrong information being transmitted to the neighbouring nodes. The paper aims to design a broadcast control system which is able to optimize the broadcast process in VANET. Vehicular network is modelled in Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) and the algorithm is formulated in MATLAB. Data is extracted from SUMO through Traffic Control Interface for MATLAB (TraCI4Matlab). The broadcast protocol and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm are formulated in this paper. At the same time PSO is modified for the broadcast enhancement. Results showed that after parameters tuning the modified PSO is able to broadcast into a larger coverage area at a faster rate