Aspire Public Schools: Building the Organizational Capacity for Healthy Growth

Two years into an aggressive expansion plan, Aspire Public Schools was on track in terms of school openings but behind on its goals to add a layer of management. The schools were performing well, but the nonprofit's leaders were stretched paper thin and concerned about the organization's ability to perform in the face of more growth. Determined to build an organization that could support their expansion plans, the Aspire team took swift action. Their initiatives included:Articulating criteria for "healthy growth" that they would use to assess expansion opportunities, thereby incorporating organizational sustainability into any future decisions about growth;Addressing a profound anxiety about hiring "outsiders" and delegating responsibilities to an increasingly larger team;Defining the boundaries of accountability for each of the organization's leadership positions;Clarifying decision-making authority at a broad level, and making explicit the roles and responsibilities associated with specific and potentially contentious decisions

Healing Christ\u27s Fragmented Body Through Communal Discipleship: A Review of From Isolation to Community

In slow attention akin to a patient gardener attending her plants, we attend to one another in a Christ-like posture of humility and curiosity. Posting about ­­­­­­­­the book From Isolation to Community from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation. https://inallthings.org/healing-christs-fragmented-body-through-communal-discipleship-a-review-of-from-isolation-to-community

PHASOR MEASUREMENT UNIT TESTING AND CHARACTERIZATION

The power grid is a complex system composed of many different elements. Knowledge of electrical waveform content across the grid is key to managing power and maintaining stability. Electrical waveforms can be represented mathematically as time-varying phasors. Electrical phasors give information pertaining to the magnitude of the waveform as well as the phase relationship of the waveform to a reference. A Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) is a device that is installed at a node on the power grid and measures electrical phasors. The potential of near real time phasor information is powerful and has driven PMU application technology forward at a rapid pace over the last decade. The IEEE C37.118 standard establishes requirement guidelines for PMU performance. Before PMUs are implemented in real time applications researchers may wish to test PMUs to obtain specific device behavior. This thesis will describe the development of a robust PMU test bench that is capable producing dynamic input signals. Dynamic testing and analysis will reveal time domain and frequency domain characteristics of the PMU under test. A discussion on the reported response and the real time response of PMUs will be covered to give more insight into the real time behavior and application of PMUs. Conclusions will take one last look at the project and discuss the potential of this work as a starting point for future PMU testing

Whole Life Worship: A Review of Work and Worship

Kaemingk and Willson’s integration of liturgy and labor is well-researched and creates needed theological and liturgical bridges between work and worship. Posting about ­­­­­­­­the book Work and Worship from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation. https://inallthings.org/whole-life-worship-a-review-of-work-and-worship

Theology and Prince (Book Review)

Reviewed Title: Theology and Prince by Jonathan H. Harwell and Katrina E. Jenkins. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019. 178 pp. ISBN: 978197870417

Beyond Translated vs. Indigenous: Turkish Protestant Christian Hymnody as Global and Local Identity

At Turkey’s first national worship conferences in 2011, a passionate debate arose on whether Western music or indigenous Turkish music was most appropriate for worship. Some Turks felt that the Western missionaries were imposing indigenous musics on Turks as a type of “reverse colonization”. They felt that the current Western musical styles were best for worship. One Turk stated, “the saz is being forced down our throats”. Other Turks felt liberated to sing and play songs in traditional Turkish musical styles. The debate at the conference highlights the desire of missionaries and Turks to see renewal in congregational hymnody. Nevertheless, the Western vs. indigenous Turkish music debate reduces complex historical, musical, and liturgical issues into a divisive binarism. Using hymns sung in corporate worship in Turkey as a source, I will analyze here the quantity of musical localization in Turkish Protestant worship seeking to present musical localization as a lens to examine Turkish Christian liturgical identity

Language Translation in Localizing Religious Musical Practice

The focus of this Special Issue is language translation in the process of localizing religious musical practice. As an alternative to related concepts (such as contextualization and indigenization), musical localization is presented by ethnomusicologists Monique Ingalls, Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg, and Zoe Sherinian in Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide (Routledge, 2018) as an effective way to account for the complex, diverse, and shifting ways in which religious communities embody what it means to be local through their musical practices: Musical localization is the process by which Christian communities take a variety of musical practices - some considered \u27indigenous, \u27 some \u27foreign, \u27 some shared across spatial and cultural divides; some linked to past practice, some innovative - and make them locally meaningful and useful in the construction of Christian beliefs, theology, practice, and identity.https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/books/1064/thumbnail.jp

NetO-App: A Network Orchestration Application for Centralized Network Management in Small Business Networks

Software-defined networking (SDN) is reshaping the networking paradigm. Previous research shows that SDN has advantages over traditional networks because it separates the control and data plane, leading to greater flexibility through network automation and programmability. Small business networks require flexibility, like service provider networks, to scale, deploy, and self-heal network infrastructure that comprises of cloud operating systems, virtual machines, containers, vendor networking equipment, and virtual network functions (VNFs); however, as SDN evolves in industry, there has been limited research to develop an SDN architecture to fulfill the requirements of small business networks. This research proposes a network architecture that can abstract, orchestrate, and scale configurations based on small business network requirements. Our results show that the proposed architecture provides enhanced network management and operations when combined with the network orchestration application (NetO-App) developed in this research. The NetO-App orchestrates network policies, automates configuration changes, and manages internal and external communication between the campus networking infrastructure.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, To appear in the Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Networks & Communications, 28-29 July 2018, Sydney, Australi