Pastors with Mission and Purpose Perceptions of Strategic Leadership for the Church--A Multi-Case Study

This qualitative multiple-case study aimed to explore pastors’ perceptions of strategic leadership at churches in Virginia. This researcher sought to understand the strategic leadership of pastors with mission and purpose ways of growing thriving churches. This research defined strategic leadership as “the capacity to learn, change, and have managerial wisdom” (Boal & Hooijberg, 2001, p. 515) based on the Strategic Leadership Theory (Finkelstein & Hambrick, 1996). Declining church membership, attendance at services, or even closures is alarming (Felicetti, 2021), and this research may help churches facing such problems. A rationale for this study was to explore pastors’ viable avenues that may help improve church membership or attendance at services for others growing God’s Kingdom. Christian universities train individuals who are: Champions for Christ (Liberty University); Strengthened for lives of purpose, services, and leadership (Pepperdine University). Some individuals plant and grow various membership-size churches in the United States. Why do some churches grow extremely large numerically, and others do not? What are pastors’ perceptions of strategic leadership for the church regarding membership growth and attendance at church services? This researcher conducted a study at 11 purposively selected churches to try to answer these questions and others. Within the population, 19 participants through face-to-face interviewing provided essential data. The analyzed data revealed five themes as beneficial for how pastors may improve church strategies to grow thriving churches. This study’s strategic leadership data analysis allowed for advancement to the leadership study field of churches and Strategic Leadership Theory

The Portrayal of Teachers in Children\u27s Popular Fiction

This study explores cultural messages about teachers and teaching, as delivered by current children\u27s literature. Our findings confirmed that teachers are still portrayed, in text and picture, as White, kind, conservative, women who teach for the love of children. More surprisingly, we also found that: 1) the stories conveyed strong themes of students acting as agents of teachers’ identity work, 2) that students often position teachers as sex objects, and 3) that teachers’ social class is characterized as working class. The results imply ambivalence about teachers’ identities and suggest that the teaching profession keeps women in a powerless and objectified job

Trusting Telework in the Federal Government

Despite an Executive Office mandate to permit federal workers to telework, federal managers still deny employees this benefit. Several factors have been attributed to their aversion, including lack of trust. Findings from a hermeneutic phenomenological study exploring the lived experiences and perceptions of 12 federal government managers who prohibit their employees from teleworking (Brown, 2013) was analyzed to identify themes related to trust. Of the eight themes Brown identified, five focused on lack of trust. This paper discusses those five trust-related themes and recommends success factors for enabling leaders’ trust of telework are discussed

County Agent Views About Facilitating Public Education and Discussion of Genetic Engineering Use in Agriculture

We conducted seven focus groups with Extension agents from three northeast states in Spring 2000 to learn what agents knew about genetic engineering (GE) applications in agriculture, their view of Extension\u27s role in public discussion and education, and the training needed to assume such a role. While participating agents together knew a fair amount about their target audiences\u27 perceptions of GE, they felt unprepared to deal with the challenges of public issues education in light of the current public debate, the publics\u27 low science literacy, and their own science background. Their expressed training needs reflected these challenges

Generic 3D Representation via Pose Estimation and Matching

Though a large body of computer vision research has investigated developing generic semantic representations, efforts towards developing a similar representation for 3D has been limited. In this paper, we learn a generic 3D representation through solving a set of foundational proxy 3D tasks: object-centric camera pose estimation and wide baseline feature matching. Our method is based upon the premise that by providing supervision over a set of carefully selected foundational tasks, generalization to novel tasks and abstraction capabilities can be achieved. We empirically show that the internal representation of a multi-task ConvNet trained to solve the above core problems generalizes to novel 3D tasks (e.g., scene layout estimation, object pose estimation, surface normal estimation) without the need for fine-tuning and shows traits of abstraction abilities (e.g., cross-modality pose estimation). In the context of the core supervised tasks, we demonstrate our representation achieves state-of-the-art wide baseline feature matching results without requiring apriori rectification (unlike SIFT and the majority of learned features). We also show 6DOF camera pose estimation given a pair local image patches. The accuracy of both supervised tasks come comparable to humans. Finally, we contribute a large-scale dataset composed of object-centric street view scenes along with point correspondences and camera pose information, and conclude with a discussion on the learned representation and open research questions.Comment: Published in ECCV16. See the project website http://3drepresentation.stanford.edu/ and dataset website https://github.com/amir32002/3D_Street_Vie

A face for all seasons:searching for context-specific leadership traits and discovering a general preference for perceived health

Previous research indicates that followers tend to contingently match particular leader qualities to evolutionarily consistent situations requiring collective action (i.e., context-specific cognitive leadership prototypes) and information processing undergoes categorization which ranks certain qualities as first-order context-general and others as second-order context-specific. To further investigate this contingent categorization phenomenon we examined the “attractiveness halo”—a first-order facial cue which significantly biases leadership preferences. While controlling for facial attractiveness, we independently manipulated the underlying facial cues of health and intelligence and then primed participants with four distinct organizational dynamics requiring leadership (i.e., competition vs. cooperation between groups and exploratory change vs. stable exploitation). It was expected that the differing requirements of the four dynamics would contingently select for relatively healthier- or intelligent-looking leaders. We found perceived facial intelligence to be a second-order context-specific trait—for instance, in times requiring a leader to address between-group cooperation—whereas perceived health is significantly preferred across all contexts (i.e., a first-order trait). The results also indicate that facial health positively affects perceived masculinity while facial intelligence negatively affects perceived masculinity, which may partially explain leader choice in some of the environmental contexts. The limitations and a number of implications regarding leadership biases are discussed

Exile Vol. XIII No. 2

FICTION The Garden by Joyce Horvath 5-8 Early Morning Man by Harvey Spurlock 12-24 28 Nisan 1960 by Cem Kozlu 29-35 Letters to the Editor by Rick Brown 39-55 POETRY World II by Jeffrey R. Smith 1-4 It is not for no reason by Bonnie Bishop 9 I have often wondered by Mike Engle 10 Without opera glasses by Trudi Spaeth 10 Differentiations in August by Alan Pavlik 11 Gold by Nancy Scott 25 With images by Trudi Spaeth 25 Grandpa by Karen Cozart 26-27 Meditation on a Line by Sylvia Plath by Lauren Shakely 28 Bantling by Francie King 36 Haiku by Suzanne Husting 36 I saw you yesterday by Rick Tucker 37 My Eyes Would Escape 38 ART untitled by Nancy Eastlake 8 The Diary of a Madman by Clare Conrad 24 Trumpeter by Bill Henderson 38 Untitled by Nancy Eastlake Cover design: Kee McFarland With special thanks to Mrs. Louis Brakeman for her services

An investigation of intensity-modulated radiation therapy versus conventional two-dimensional and 3D-conformal radiation therapy for early stage larynx cancer

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) has been incorporated at several institutions for early stage laryngeal cancer (T1/T2N0M0), but its utility is controversial.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>In three representative patients, multiple plans were generated: 1) Conventional 2D planning, with the posterior border placed at either the anterior aspect ("tight" plan) or the mid-vertebral body ("loose" plan), 2) 3D planning, utilizing both 1.0 and 0.5 cm margins for the planning target volume (PTV), and 3) IMRT planning, utilizing the same margins as the 3D plans. A dosimetric comparison was performed for the target volume, spinal cord, arytenoids, and carotid arteries. The prescription dose was 6300 cGy (225 cGy fractions), and the 3D and IMRT plans were normalized to this dose.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>For PTV margins of 1.0 cm and 0.5 cm, the D95 of the 2D tight/loose plans were 3781/5437 cGy and 5372/5869 cGy, respectively (IMRT/3D plans both 6300 cGy). With a PTV margin of 1.0 cm, the mean carotid artery dose was 2483/5671/5777/4049 cGy in the 2D tight, 2D loose, 3D, and IMRT plans, respectively. When the PTV was reduced to 0.5 cm, the the mean carotid artery dose was 2483/5671/6466/2577 cGy to the above four plans, respectively. The arytenoid doses were similar between the four plans, and spinal cord doses were well below tolerance.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>IMRT provides a more ideal dose distribution compared to 2D treatment and 3D planning in regards to mean carotid dose. We therefore recommend IMRT in select cases when the treating physician is confident with the GTV.</p