Regele\u27s Science, scripture, and same-sex love (Book Review)

A review of Regele, M. B. (2014). Science, scripture, and same-sex love. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. 278 pp. $22.00. ISBN 978142679829

Bavinck\u27s The riddle of life (Book Review)

A review of Bavinck, J. H. (2016). The riddle of life (B. Hielma, Trans.). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 102 pp. $20.00. ISBN 978080287333

Root and Neal\u27s The surprising imagination of C. S. Lewis (Book Review)

A review of Root, J. & Neal, M. (2015). The surprising imagination of C. S. Lewis. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press. 270 pp. $34.99. ISBN 978142679510

Training methods for facial image comparison: a literature review

This literature review was commissioned to explore the psychological literature relating to facial image comparison with a particular emphasis on whether individuals can be trained to improve performance on this task. Surprisingly few studies have addressed this question directly. As a consequence, this review has been extended to cover training of face recognition and training of different kinds of perceptual comparisons where we are of the opinion that the methodologies or findings of such studies are informative. The majority of studies of face processing have examined face recognition, which relies heavily on memory. This may be memory for a face that was learned recently (e.g. minutes or hours previously) or for a face learned longer ago, perhaps after many exposures (e.g. friends, family members, celebrities). Successful face recognition, irrespective of the type of face, relies on the ability to retrieve the to-berecognised face from long-term memory. This memory is then compared to the physically present image to reach a recognition decision. In contrast, in face matching task two physical representations of a face (live, photographs, movies) are compared and so long-term memory is not involved. Because the comparison is between two present stimuli rather than between a present stimulus and a memory, one might expect that face matching, even if not an easy task, would be easier to do and easier to learn than face recognition. In support of this, there is evidence that judgment tasks where a presented stimulus must be judged by a remembered standard are generally more cognitively demanding than judgments that require comparing two presented stimuli Davies & Parasuraman, 1982; Parasuraman & Davies, 1977; Warm and Dember, 1998). Is there enough overlap between face recognition and matching that it is useful to look at the literature recognition? No study has directly compared face recognition and face matching, so we turn to research in which people decided whether two non-face stimuli were the same or different. In these studies, accuracy of comparison is not always better when the comparator is present than when it is remembered. Further, all perceptual factors that were found to affect comparisons of simultaneously presented objects also affected comparisons of successively presented objects in qualitatively the same way. Those studies involved judgments about colour (Newhall, Burnham & Clark, 1957; Romero, Hita & Del Barco, 1986), and shape (Larsen, McIlhagga & Bundesen, 1999; Lawson, Bülthoff & Dumbell, 2003; Quinlan, 1995). Although one must be cautious in generalising from studies of object processing to studies of face processing (see, e.g., section comparing face processing to object processing), from these kinds of studies there is no evidence to suggest that there are qualitative differences in the perceptual aspects of how recognition and matching are done. As a result, this review will include studies of face recognition skill as well as face matching skill. The distinction between face recognition involving memory and face matching not involving memory is clouded in many recognition studies which require observers to decide which of many presented faces matches a remembered face (e.g., eyewitness studies). And of course there are other forensic face-matching tasks that will require comparison to both presented and remembered comparators (e.g., deciding whether any person in a video showing a crowd is the target person). For this reason, too, we choose to include studies of face recognition as well as face matching in our revie

Pirate stealth or inattentional blindness?:the effects of target relevance and sustained attention on security monitoring for experienced and naïve operators

Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) operators are responsible for maintaining security in various applied settings. However, research has largely ignored human factors that may contribute to CCTV operator error. One important source of error is inattentional blindness--the failure to detect unexpected but clearly visible stimuli when attending to a scene. We compared inattentional blindness rates for experienced (84 infantry personnel) and naïve (87 civilians) operators in a CCTV monitoring task. The task-relevance of the unexpected stimulus and the length of the monitoring period were manipulated between participants. Inattentional blindness rates were measured using typical post-event questionnaires, and participants' real-time descriptions of the monitored event. Based on the post-event measure, 66% of the participants failed to detect salient, ongoing stimuli appearing in the spatial field of their attentional focus. The unexpected task-irrelevant stimulus was significantly more likely to go undetected (79%) than the unexpected task-relevant stimulus (55%). Prior task experience did not inoculate operators against inattentional blindness effects. Participants' real-time descriptions revealed similar patterns, ruling out inattentional amnesia accounts

Parametrization of global attractors experimental observations and turbulence

This paper is concerned with rigorous results in the theory of turbulence and fluid flow. While derived from the abstract theory of attractors in infinite-dimensional dynamical systems, they shed some light on the conventional heuristic theories of turbulence, and can be used to justify a well-known experimental method. Two results are discussed here in detail, both based on parametrization of the attractor. The first shows that any two fluid flows can be distinguished by a sufficient number of point observations of the velocity. This allows one to connect rigorously the dimension of the attractor with the Landau–Lifschitz ‘number of degrees of freedom’, and hence to obtain estimates on the ‘minimum length scale of the flow’ using bounds on this dimension. While for two-dimensional flows the rigorous estimate agrees with the heuristic approach, there is still a gap between rigorous results in the three-dimensional case and the Kolmogorov theory. Secondly, the problem of using experiments to reconstruct the dynamics of a flow is considered. The standard way of doing this is to take a number of repeated observations, and appeal to the Takens time-delay embedding theorem to guarantee that one can indeed follow the dynamics ‘faithfully’. However, this result relies on restrictive conditions that do not hold for spatially extended systems: an extension is given here that validates this important experimental technique for use in the study of turbulence. Although the abstract results underlying this paper have been presented elsewhere, making them specific to the Navier–Stokes equations provides answers to problems particular to fluid dynamics, and motivates further questions that would not arise from within the abstract theory itself

Bellinger\u27s Jesus v. abortion: They know not what they do. (Book Review)

Bellinger, C.K. (2016). Jesus v. abortion: They know not what they do. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books. 340pp. $66.00. ISBN 978149823505