Communicating The Word ofGod

The Ward of God is addressed to people, to individualsand communities. To understand what this means in concrete circumstances, consider for a moment the following typical communities in Andhra Pradesh, lndia. Mutluru in Guntur District: 1350 persons, practically all Catholics; caste people, mainly Reddy. The village was founded by a Catholic community that goes back to the 18th century; now parish headquarters with primary school, high school and dispensary. Community composed of small farmers; literacy 37%; per capita income a month Rs 32. Personnel: one priest, five sisters, 16lay teachers. (...) ZusammenfassungDie Kommunikation des Wortes Gottes vollzieht sich jeweils in einer bestimmten Situation menschlicher Gesellschaft. Um drei Beispieleaus Andhra Pradesh in Indien zu geben: In Mutluru sind bei 1.350 Einwohnern alle katholisch, denn das Dorfwurde im 18. Jahrhundert von Katholiken gegründet Die Einwohner sind weithin Bauern, 37% können lesen und schreiben, monatliches Durchschnittseinkommen: 32 Rs. In Kavuluru leben unter 3.000 Einwohnern nur 312 Katholiken, die erst in den Jahren 1974175 getauft wurden; sie gehören zu den niedrigeren Kasten und bilden eine eigene Gemeinschaft; 25% können lesen und schreiben, Durchschnittseinkommen: 25 Rs. Gunfaundry isteine katholische Nachbarschaft der StadtpfarreiSt Josefin Hyderabad mit zwei Mio Einwohnern

Deliberate evolution in multi-agent systems

and their applications. SMC is sponsored by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). CWI is a member o

Speed Matters: Relationship between Speed of Eye Movements and Modification of Aversive Autobiographical Memories

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is an efficacious treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. In EMDR, patients recall a distressing memory and simultaneously make eye movements (EM). Both tasks are considered to require limited working memory (WM) resources. Because this leaves fewer resources available for memory retrieval, the memory should become less vivid and less emotional during future recall. In EMDR analogue studies, a standardized procedure has been used, in which participants receive the same dual task manipulation of 1 EM cycle per second (1 Hz). From a WM perspective, the WM taxation of the dual task might be titrated to the WM taxation of the memory image. We hypothesized that highly vivid images are more affected by high WM taxation and less vivid images are more affected by low WM taxation. In study 1, 34 participants performed a reaction time task, and rated image vividness, and difficulty of retrieving an image, during five speeds of EM and no EM. Both a high WM taxing frequency (fast EM; 1.2 Hz) and a low WM taxing frequency (slow EM; 0.8 Hz) were selected. In study 2, 72 participants recalled three highly vivid aversive autobiographical memory images (n = 36) or three less vivid images (n = 36) under each of three conditions: recall + fast EM, recall + slow EM, or recall only. Multi-level modeling revealed a consistent pattern for all outcome measures: recall + fast EM led to less emotional, less vivid and more difficult to retrieve images than recall + slow EM and recall only, and the effects of recall + slow EM felt consistently in between the effects of recall + fast EM and recall only, but only differed significantly from recall + fast EM. Crucially, image vividness did not interact with condition on the decrease of emotionality over time, which was inconsistent with the prediction. Implications for understanding the mechanisms of action in memory modification and directions for future research are discussed

Role of Trust in Automated Distributed Design

Distributed design involves many participants, each with their own expertise and goals. Information acquired from different participants may be valued differently in terms of accuracy and trustworthiness. Human participants in a distributed design setting often know whom they trust, and whose abilities they value. This knowledge is not often made explicit. It does, however, influence distributed design processes (i.e. the way in which members of a design team assess and incorporate each others'designs, objectives, evaluations). These trust relations need to be made explicit to be able to effectively support distributed design

Decision maps: a framework for multi-criteria decision support under severe uncertainty

Abstract not availableT. Comes, M. Hiete, N. Wijngaards, F. Schultman

The hidden dangers of experimenting in distributed AI

Research on multi-agent systems often involves experiments, also in situations where humans interact with agents. Consequently, the field of experimental (human) sciences becomes more and more relevant. This paper clarifies how things can and often do go wrong in distributed AI experiments. We show the flaws in methodological design in existing papers (both with and without humans) and work out an example involving human test-subjects to introduce the fundamental issues of experimental design. Furthermore, we provide researchers with an approach to improve their experimental design. We wish to stimulate researchers to conduct better experiments – which will benefit us all

Multi-Agent Support for Internet-Scale Grid Management

Internet-scale computational grids are emerging from various research projects. Most notably are the US National Technology Grid and the European Data Grid projects. One specific problem in realizing wide-area distributed computing environments as proposed in these projects, is effective management of the vast amount of resources that are made available within the grid environment. This paper proposes an agent-based approach to resource management in grid environments, and describes an agent infrastructure that could be integrated with the grid middleware layer. This agent infrastructure provides support for mobile agents that is scalable in the number of agents and the number of resources