This great prayerful tradition : American presidents preaching public theology at the National Prayer Breakfast

This study presents a comprehensive analysis of the speeches delivered by American presidents at the National Prayer Breakfast (NPB) from its inception in 1953 until 2016, as well as the rhetorical context of the NPB. Taking a dual-disciplinary approach that combines public theology and presidential studies, this study delineates a generic pattern in the presidential prayer breakfast address built around five narratives. In their speeches at the NPB, presidents construct narratives of faith, connecting divine and human stories in ways that move beyond personal piety, civil religion, or a politicized use of religious language. Presidents serve as public theologians through their prayer breakfast speeches, engaging in transformative rhetoric to communicate their messages. The annual NPB creates a unique liminal space for the president to experiment with speaking theologically.Includes bibliographical reference

Web pages: What can you see in a single fixation?

Research in human vision suggests that in a single fixation, humans can extract a significant amount of information from a natural scene, e.g. the semantic category, spatial layout, and object identities. This ability is useful, for example, for quickly determining location, navigating around obstacles, detecting threats, and guiding eye movements to gather more information. In this paper, we ask a new question: What can we see at a glance at a web page – an artificial yet complex “real world” stimulus? Is it possible to notice the type of website, or where the relevant elements are, with only a glimpse? We find that observers, fixating at the center of a web page shown for only 120 milliseconds, are well above chance at classifying the page into one of ten categories. Furthermore, this ability is supported in part by text that they can read at a glance. Users can also understand the spatial layout well enough to reliably localize the menu bar and to detect ads, even though the latter are often camouflaged among other graphical elements. We discuss the parallels between web page gist and scene gist, and the implications of our findings for both vision science and human-computer interaction.Google Awar

Bridging text spotting and SLAM with junction features

Navigating in a previously unknown environment and recognizing naturally occurring text in a scene are two important autonomous capabilities that are typically treated as distinct. However, these two tasks are potentially complementary, (i) scene and pose priors can benefit text spotting, and (ii) the ability to identify and associate text features can benefit navigation accuracy through loop closures. Previous approaches to autonomous text spotting typically require significant training data and are too slow for real-time implementation. In this work, we propose a novel high-level feature descriptor, the “junction”, which is particularly well-suited to text representation and is also fast to compute. We show that we are able to improve SLAM through text spotting on datasets collected with a Google Tango, illustrating how location priors enable improved loop closure with text features.Andrea Bocelli FoundationEast Japan Railway CompanyUnited States. Office of Naval Research (N00014-10-1-0936, N00014-11-1-0688, N00014-13-1-0588)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (IIS-1318392

Status Organizing Processes

The authors review theoretical and empirical work related to the theory of status characteristics and expectation states to this date,1980

An intuitive model of perceptual grouping for HCI design

ABSTRACT Understanding and exploiting the abilities of the human visual system is an important part of the design of usable user interfaces and information visualizations. Good design enables quick, easy and veridical perception of key components of that design. An important facet of human vision is its ability to seemingly effortlessly perform "perceptual organization"; it transforms individual feature estimates into perception of coherent regions, structures, and objects. We perceive regions grouped by proximity and feature similarity, grouping of curves by good continuation, and grouping of regions of coherent texture. In this paper, we discuss a simple model for a broad range of perceptual grouping phenomena. It takes as input an arbitrary image, and returns a structure describing the predicted visual organization of the image. We demonstrate that this model can capture aspects of traditional design rules, and predicts visual percepts in classic perceptual grouping displays

School violence, school differences and school discourses

This article highlights one strand of a study which investigated the concept of the violenceresilient school. In six inner-city secondary schools, data on violent incidents in school and violent crime in the neighbourhood were gathered, and compared with school practices to minimise violence, accessed through interviews. Some degree of association between the patterns of behaviour and school practices was found: schools with a wider range of wellconnected practices seemed to have less difficult behaviour. Interviews also showed that the different schools had different organisational discourses for construing school violence, its possible causes and the possible solutions. Differences in practices are best understood in connection with differences in these discourses. Some of the features of school discourses are outlined, including their range, their core metaphor and their silences. We suggest that organisational discourse is an important concept in explaining school effects and school differences, and that improvement attempts could have clearer regard to this concept