A Case for Basic Belief in the Christian Scriptures: An Augmented Aquinas/Calvin Model in Favor of Including Scripture Beliefs among the Great Things of the Gospel

By what means does the Christian come to believe and know the Christian Scriptures are the word of God? The more popular opinion relies on a discursive scientific evaluation of historical artifacts (i.e. manuscripts). While this methodology can be extremely helpful in several respects it is highly improbable that it can serve as the ground and fountain of the belief and knowledge that the Christian Scriptures are/probably are the word of God. With this improbability in mind, I offer an alternative by way of Alvin Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology and his treatment of the great things of the Gospel [i.e. GTG]. Through the employment of Plantinga’s work I maintain that belief in the Scripture as the word of God is worthy to be counted among the GTG. So, just as basic beliefs in the GTG are enjoyed by Christians, beliefs and even knowledge of the Christians Scriptures as the word of God can be enjoyed in the same or similar way. After acknowledging and sufficiently overcoming a series of potential defeaters I conclude that if a Christian believes her Bible is the word of God down to the very words, she is rational and warranted in holding that belief

The effects of urban geometry on point source scalar plume statistics: a large eddy simulation study

Urban population currently forms the largest percentage of total human population in recorded history. The United Nations reported that 54% of people lived in urban environments in 2015, which is slated to increase to 68% by 2050. Preparing for this massive shift requires anticipating possible health hazards to a metropolitan population, and urban meteorology forms a distinct part of this anticipation. Understanding the impact of large urban cores and central business districts (CBDs) on air quality and urban dispersion will help city planners work towards neighborhoods with effective and safe removal of potentially harmful pollutants, like PM2.5. This requires a framework to understand how pollutants are dispersed in an urban canopy. Advances in Large Eddy Simulations (LES) in recent years facilitate studying this dispersion in more detail. Entire CBDs can be resolved within the domain of the LES, making it very attractive for urban meteorology. This study aims to utilize LES to quantify scalar plumes in an idealized urban canopy at atmospheric Reynolds numbers. A suite of LES was run over idealized urban geometry (cuboids), featuring both staggered and aligned geometry and identical plan and frontal area fractions. Non-Gaussian plume behavior was found in the near source region (x/H<12), although the urban geometry was found to lose its influence on the plume as distance downstream from the source increased. Evidence of street channeling on the plume moments was also found, namely in the form of excess positive kurtosis (K) values (leptokurtic) with an in-street scalar source. In addition to the plume statistics, the behavior of instantaneous scalar concentration at a point (relevant for an individual’s exposure to pollutants) is of great interest. Probability distribution functions (PDFs) of scalar concentration, joint PDFs of concentration and velocity fluctuations, and PDFs of time periods that concentration exceeds a set threshold were created to characterize the local behavior of scalar concentration and how it differs from average plume behavior. Non-Gaussian, exponential PDFs were found away from the plume mean centerline, yielding evidence of intermittent instantaneous scalar behavior on the edges of the plume. These findings emphasize the importance of exercising caution in the near source region when using operational Gaussian dispersion models

Retinotopic Mapping of Categorical and Coordinate Spatial Relation Processing in Early Visual Cortex

Spatial relations are commonly divided in two global classes. Categorical relations concern abstract relations which define areas of spatial equivalence, whereas coordinate relations are metric and concern exact distances. Categorical and coordinate relation processing are thought to rely on at least partially separate neurocognitive mechanisms, as reflected by differential lateralization patterns, in particular in the parietal cortex. In this study we address this textbook principle from a new angle. We studied retinotopic activation in early visual cortex, as a reflection of attentional distribution, in a spatial working memory task with either a categorical or a coordinate instruction. Participants were asked to memorize a dot position, with regard to a central cross, and to indicate whether a subsequent dot position matched the first dot position, either categorically (opposite quadrant of the cross) or coordinately (same distance to the centre of the cross). BOLD responses across the retinotopic maps of V1, V2, and V3 indicate that the spatial distribution of cortical activity was different for categorical and coordinate instructions throughout the retention interval; a more local focus was found during categorical processing, whereas focus was more global for coordinate processing. This effect was strongest for V3, approached significance in V2 and was absent in V1. Furthermore, during stimulus presentation the two instructions led to different levels of activation in V3 during stimulus encoding; a stronger increase in activity was found for categorical processing. Together this is the first demonstration that instructions for specific types of spatial relations may yield distinct attentional patterns which are already reflected in activity early in the visual cortex

Digital literacies and children’s personalized books: Locating the 'self'

This conceptual article discusses the role of digital literacies in personalized books, in relation to children’s developing sense of self, and in terms of assessing the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI). Personalized books contain children’s data, such as their name, gender or image, and they can be created by readers or automatically by the publisher. Some personalized books are e-books enhanced with artificial intelligence, and some can be ordered as paperbacks. We discuss this use of children’s personal data in terms of the social location of the self with regard to subjective and objective dimensions. We draw on a map metaphor, in which objective space requires readers to locate themselves in an unknown ‘A-to-B’ space and subjective space provides an individually oriented world of ‘me-to-B’. By drawing on examples of personalized books and their use by parents and young children, we discuss how personalization troubles the borders between readers’ me-to-B and A-to-B space experiences, leading to possible confusion in the sense of self. We conclude by noting that AI-enhanced personalized texts can reduce personal agency with respect to formulating a sense of identity as a child

The effectiveness of classroom vocabulary intervention for adolescents with language disorder

Purpose Phonological-semantic intervention has been shown to be effective in enhancing the vocabulary skills of children with language disorder in small-group or individual settings. Less is known about vocabulary interventions for adolescents with language disorder in whole-class models of delivery. The current study investigated the effectiveness of phonological-semantic vocabulary intervention for adolescents with language disorder, delivered by secondary school teachers within science lessons. Methods Seventy-eight adolescents with language disorder, aged 11 – 13 years, were taught science curriculum words by teachers in class, under two conditions: 1) 10 words taught through usual teaching practice; and 2) 10 matched words taught using an experimental intervention known as Word Discovery, which embedded phonological-semantic activities into the teaching of the syllabus. Ten similar control words received no intervention. Word knowledge was assessed pre-intervention, post-intervention, and follow-up. Results At pre-intervention, measures of depth of word knowledge and expressive word use did not differ between usual teaching practice and experimental words. At post-intervention, depth of knowledge of experimental words was significantly greater than that of usual teaching practice words. This significant advantage was not maintained at follow-up, although depth of knowledge for experimental words remained significantly higher at follow-up than at preintervention. At post-intervention, expressive use of experimental words was significantly greater than that of usual teaching practice words, and this significant difference was maintained at follow-up. There was no change in students’ depth of knowledge or expressive use of no-intervention words over time, confirming that the findings were not due to maturity or practice effects. Conclusion The experimental intervention was more effective than usual teaching practice in increasing the word knowledge of participants. Clinical and teaching implications include the importance of intervening during the adolescent years, with classroom vocabulary intervention being a viable option for collaborative teacher and speech and language therapy/pathology practice

It Takes Two–Skilled Recognition of Objects Engages Lateral Areas in Both Hemispheres

Our object recognition abilities, a direct product of our experience with objects, are fine-tuned to perfection. Left temporal and lateral areas along the dorsal, action related stream, as well as left infero-temporal areas along the ventral, object related stream are engaged in object recognition. Here we show that expertise modulates the activity of dorsal areas in the recognition of man-made objects with clearly specified functions. Expert chess players were faster than chess novices in identifying chess objects and their functional relations. Experts' advantage was domain-specific as there were no differences between groups in a control task featuring geometrical shapes. The pattern of eye movements supported the notion that experts' extensive knowledge about domain objects and their functions enabled superior recognition even when experts were not directly fixating the objects of interest. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) related exclusively the areas along the dorsal stream to chess specific object recognition. Besides the commonly involved left temporal and parietal lateral brain areas, we found that only in experts homologous areas on the right hemisphere were also engaged in chess specific object recognition. Based on these results, we discuss whether skilled object recognition does not only involve a more efficient version of the processes found in non-skilled recognition, but also qualitatively different cognitive processes which engage additional brain areas