The Promise of an Actualistic Pneumatology: Beginning with the Holy Spirit in African Pentecostalism and Karl Barth

Christians in the developing world are sending a clear message to all who will listen: more attention needs to be paid to the Holy Spirit than ever before in the history of Christian thought. This essay explores what African Pentecostalism could teach Karl Barth and in particular how the actualistic Christology that Barth is known for can be applied to concrete acts of the Holy Spirit. The essay employs James Buckley's distinction between what Barth says versus what Barth shows to demonstrate profound possibilities that exist within Barth's thought for beginning theological reflection from the concrete acts of the Spirit.     

Errors in children's subtraction

Many of the errors that occur in children' subtraction are due to the use of incorrect strategies rather than to the incorrect recall of number facts. A production system is presented for performing written subtraction which is consistent with an earlier analysis of the nature of such a cognitive skill. Most of the incorrect strategies used by schoolchildren can be accounted for in a principled way by simple changes in the production system, such as the omission of individual rules or the inclusion of rules appropriate to other arithmetical tasks. The production system model is evaluated against a corpus of over 1500 subtraction problems done by 10-year olds and is shown to account for about two-thirds of the (nonnumber fact) errors. It also provides an alternative, simpler interpretation of the subtraction errors analysed by Brown and Burton (1978). Some implications for teaching are discussed.     

The Subtle Temptations of State Sponsored Theological Education: A New Zealand Perspective

Abstract. Over the past fifteen years in New Zealand, theology has come in from the tertiary educational cold in various ways. One of the results or reasons for this has been willingness on the part of the state to accredit and provide funding for theological education and research. This has taken place largely through a compliance system of accreditation and resource allocation. The result has been academic recognition and a precarious financial boon for theology and some theological institutions and their students. But little attention has been paid to the epistemological and pedagogical temptations of compliance. Drawing on the recent experience of the writer, this article seeks to identify a number of the subtle temptations posed by state sponsored theological education and research.     

The Behavioral Logic of Collective Action: Partisans Cooperate and Punish More Than Nonpartisans

Laboratory experiments indicate that many people willingly contribute to public goods and punish free riders at a personal cost. We hypothesize that these individuals, called strong reciprocators, allow political parties to overcome collective action problems, thereby allowing those organizations to compete for scarce resources and to produce public goods for like‐minded individuals. Using a series of laboratory games, we examine whether partisans contribute to public goods and punish free riders at a greater rate than nonpartisans. The results show that partisans are more likely than nonpartisans to contribute to public goods and to engage in costly punishment. Given the broad theoretical literature on altruistic punishment and group selection as well as our own formal evolutionary model, we hypothesize that it is being a partisan that makes an individual more likely to be a strong reciprocator and not vice versa.     

Efficacy of the Health Belief Model for Predicting Intention to Pursue Genetic Testing for Colorectal Cancer

This study examined the Health Belief Model’s efficacy to predict intention to undergo genetic testing for the Colorectal Carcinoma (CRC) gene within a rural/frontier setting. Survey data were collected on 558 Southwest Montanan residents. Regression analysis revealed that perceived benefits, including affordability and satisfying curiosity, were the strongest indicators of intention to undergo genetic testing for CRC. Select consumer barriers and cues to action variables were also found to be significant predictors. Collectively the model explained approximately 36% of the variance. These preliminary findings have implications for genetic counselors, health practitioners and health care providers concerned with genetic counseling and addressing the public health issue of CRC.     

Animalism and the varieties of conjoined twinning

We defend the view that we are not identical to organisms against the objection that it implies that there are two subjects of every conscious state one experiences: oneself and one’s organism. We then criticize animalism—the view that each of us is identical to a human organism—by showing that it has unacceptable implications for a range of actual and hypothetical cases of conjoined twinning: dicephalus, craniopagus parasiticus, and cephalopagus.     

Eyetracking for two-person tasks with manipulation of a virtual world

Eyetracking facilities are typically restricted to monitoring a single person viewing static images or prerecorded video. In the present article, we describe a system that makes it possible to study visual attention in coordination with other activity during joint action. The software links two eyetracking systems in parallel and provides an on-screen task. By locating eye movements against dynamic screen regions, it permits automatic tracking of moving on-screen objects. Using existing SR technology, the system can also cross-project each participant’s eyetrack and mouse location onto the other’s on-screen work space. Keeping a complete record of eyetrack and on-screen events in the same format as subsequent human coding, the system permits the analysis of multiple modalities. The software offers new approaches to spontaneous multimodal communication: joint action and joint attention. These capacities are demonstrated using an experimental paradigm for cooperative on-screen assembly of a two-dimensional model. The software is available under an open source license.     

Attentional and interpretative biases in appearance concern: An investigation of biases in appearance-related information processing

The present study examined associations between high levels of appearance concern and information processing biases in interpretation and attention. An opportunity sample (N = 79) categorised ambiguous stimuli as related or unrelated to appearance. Participants then responded to the same stimuli in a modified visual dot-probe task assessing attentional bias. Participant responses were assessed in relation to level of appearance concern. The results indicated a valence specific bias towards interpretation of ambiguous stimuli as negative and appearance-related in individuals with higher levels of concern. There was also evidence of attentional bias towards information perceived as appearance-related in participants with higher levels of appearance concern. The study findings suggest that association between appearance-orientated information processing biases and level of appearance concern; this association may lead to mutually reinforcing bias and concern.