Digital Commons Network^™

A Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Audit Of The American Families Of Faith Project: Exploring Lifespan Spiritual Development In Religiously And Racially Diverse Families, David C. Dollahite, Justin J. Hendricks, Loren D. Marks

Faculty Publications

Social science and religious studies scholars should endeavor to broaden theories, methods, and samples to be more inclusive. Therefore, we have conducted an “equity audit” of the American Families of Faith (AFF) project. We evaluated the diversity, equity, and inclusion of the AFF project’s (a) research team, (b) products, and (c) samples. We then discuss the reasoning behind the decisions that resulted in the existing strengths and limitations of the project, the fruits of this and previous evaluations (including a presentation of some narrative accounts from parents and youths across several religious-ethnic communities across the US), opportunities for growth, and …

Creating The Listener Language: A Constructed Language With Semantic Rhythms And Tones, Dallyn H. Mccracken

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through creating a language that uses semantic rhythms to convey information in ways that typical intonation does not, I was able to see the benefits and drawbacks of strict semantic intonation. The Listener language replaces intonation with rhythms, and it uses rhythms in place of intonation in cases where intonation would generally be used in other languages, though it also uses rhythms in all other speech. Rhythms in the Listener language are grammatical, and speaking the language without the rhythms is considered to be ungrammatical. During the language construction process, there were several setbacks, both expected and unexpected. The Listener …

A Model For Multi-Input Mechanical Advantage In Origami-Based Mechanisms, Jared Butler, Adam Shrager, Timothy Simpson, Landen Bowen, Mary Frecker, Robert Lang, Eric Wilcox, Paris Von Lockette, Larry L. Howell, Spencer P. Magleby

Faculty Publications

Mechanical advantage is traditionally defined for single input and single-output rigid-body mechanisms. A generalized approach for identifying single-output mechanical advantage for a multiple-input compliant mechanism, such as many origami-based mechanisms, would prove useful in predicting complex mechanism behavior. While origami-based mechanisms are capable of offering unique solutions to engi neering problems, the design process of such mechanisms is complicated by the interaction of motion and forces. This paper presents a model of the mechanical advantage for multi input compliant mechanisms and explores how modifying the parameters of a model affects their behavior. The model is used to predict the force-deflection …

Gyno-Gerontological Discourse And The Dearth Of Old Women Narrators In British Fiction 1790-1860, Lavender Elisabeth Earnest

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the remarkable dearth of old woman narrators in British fiction between 1790 and 1860, both documenting their under-representation and explaining it as, in part, a product of a wave of medical discourse disparaging the physical and mental vitality of post-menopausal women. Regarding methodology, I perform a random sample upon a corpus of first-person novels published in the period and categorize each according to the gender and age of the narrator. This analysis exhibits, unsurprisingly, that most narrators in the dataset are either in the first half of their life, male, or both. Old women represent only a …

Made In His Image: How Christian God Image Influences Interpersonal Judgments Of Severe Mental Illness, Austin Davis

Undergraduate Honors Theses

After a review of the relevant literature on God image and interpersonal judgment theories and research, a priming study was used to analyze the relationship between God image and judgment of people with severe mental illness. Participants made judgments of a video presentation of a man with schizophrenia either before or after being given a questionnaire about their God image. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) analysis showed no statistically significant differences between those who were primed to reflect on their God image before making the judgment and those who were not, although the small effect size (d = -0.30) indicated …

Extra, Extra, Read All About It: An Analysis Of News Platform Preferences, Gabrielle Shiozawa

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis analyzes the correlation between age, political leaning, and the way people interact with news media by examining data from a sample survey of 254 news consumers. Results indicate that older and/or more conservative people are more likely to get their news from print newspapers, cable news, broadcast, and radio, while younger and/or more progressive individuals are more likely to get their news from social media. Younger and/or more progressive people are also more likely to trust the news than their older and/or more conservative counterparts. Subjects across the board preferred reading articles to watching the news, with no …

Bookbinding In The Middle Ages: Presenting Book History In A University Setting, Louisa Eastley

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Original bindings on historical books can provide important and interesting context to the book’s contents, including the class status of the original owner, the aesthetic standards of the time period, and the priorities of the bookbinder. Oftentimes, however, the bindings are ignored or neglected by those interested solely in the book’s content.

This thesis project centered around providing visitors to the Harold B. Lee Library in Provo, Utah, with the opportunity to see books from the Middle Ages on exhibit, alongside educational material created to help them understand the significance and relevant characteristics of the books’ original bindings. The project’s …

Byu-Pathway Area Guide, Joseph Diaz

Instructional Psychology and Technology Graduate Student Projects

This paper provides a detailed overview of the development of a comprehensive training resource for Area Coordination Missionaries (ACMs) serving with the BYU-Pathway program. The training resource, in the form of an area guide, aims to provide ongoing training and support for ACMs to manage the needs of service missionaries working with BYU-Pathway students. The project was initiated by the Training and Development team with the primary goal of reducing technical training given during onboarding, which can be a time-consuming process for new ACMs.

The area guide created serves as a just-in-time resource for ACMs to access the information and …

Sources Of Atmospheric Dust Deposition On Utah Lake, Justin Telfer

Theses and Dissertations

Atmospheric deposition (AD) is a significant source of nutrient loading to waterbodies around the world. However, the sources and loading rates are poorly understood for major waterbodies and even less understood for local waterbodies. Utah Lake is a eutrophic lake located in central Utah, USA, and has high nutrient levels. Recent research has identified AD as significant sources for nutrient loading to the lake to better understand the dust AD sources, we sampled suspected source locations and collected deposition samples around the lake. We analyzed these samples using Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) for 25 metals to characterize their elemental fingerprints. …

Role Of The Cytosolic Chaperonin Cct In The Folding Of Novel Substrates, Theresa M. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

All cells depend on properly folded proteins for survival and function. Misfolding of proteins results in loss of critical functions and may trigger the misfolding of other nearby proteins leading to toxic aggregation. While many proteins can fold on their own, others with complicated domain structures require assistance from protein folding machines called chaperones. The most complex and highly specialized of all chaperones is the eukaryotic chaperonin complex CCT which is necessary for the folding of a wide variety of essential proteins. These include the cytoskeletal proteins actin and tubulin as well as the Gβ subunit of the G protein …

Full Issue

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Call For Papers

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The Institute invites interested persons to submit papers for a conference on Latter-day Saint views on the sacrifice of Isaac. The conference will be held at BYU on 11 October 2003.

Brown Bag Report

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

25 September 2002: BYU professors John W.Welch (law) and John F. Hall (classics) reported on projects involving the Institute’s Early Christianity Initiative.Welch spoke of a presentation he gave in Berlin to the International Society of Biblical Literature in which he showed the results of an Institute team’s digital imaging of a dozen early New Testament manuscripts. He also described imaging projects involving (1) a large collection of early manuscripts damaged during World War II (among them are eighth- and ninth-century copies of the Pauline epistles, including a rare copy of an apocryphal epistle of Paul to the Laodiceans); and (2) …

A Note On Benjamin And Lehi, John A. Tvedtnes

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

Mosiah 1:2–6, which describes how King Benjamin taught his sons, seems to be patterned after Lehi’s teaching of his son Nephi. The italicized words in the extracts below highlight the parallels in the two accounts.

Internal Textual Evidence For The Egyptian Origin Of Nephi’S Name, Matthew L. Bowen

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

A proposed etymology of the Book of Mormon name Nephi is that it derives from the ancient Egyptian word nfr,1 which as an adjective means “good,” “fine,” or “goodly” and as a noun denotes “kindness” or “goodness.”2 By Lehi’s time, this word was probably pronounced “ne˘fe¯” (NEH-fee).3 Two Book of Mormon passages contain strong evidence for such an etymology.

Treatise On Ethics Launches Eastern Christian Texts Series

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The Institute is pleased to announce the publication of the first volume in the Eastern Christian Texts series, part of the Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. The Reformation of Morals was written by Yahyå ibn ‘Ad• (893–974 C.E.), one of the most important Christian authors to have written in Arabic. Although devoutly Syrian Orthodox, Yahyå ibn ‘Ad• studied in Baghdad under the Muslim philosopher al-Fåråb• and counted Muslims and Christians of all sects among his own disciples. He was a leading figure in the 10th-century translation movement in Baghdad and the author of numerous works of philosophy and theology.

New Review A Double Issue

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The latest FARMS Review of Books is actually two issues in one. It reviews 15 books in the usual categories of Book of Mormon, Mormon studies, and biblical studies but also devotes more than 100 pages to a multipronged response to an evangelical book titled The New Mormon Challenge: Responding to the Latest Defenses of a Fast-Growing Movement.

Perspectives On Lifespan Religious And Spiritual Development From Scholars Across The Lifespan, Megan Gale, Justin J. Hendricks, David C. Dollahite, Loren D. Marks

Faculty Publications

The purpose of the article is to share our perspectives on the key influences of lifespan religious and spiritual development as scholars from across the lifespan (i.e., the four authors are from different generations, including Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Gen Z). Our perspectives are heavily influenced by our combined 60+ years of research experience in examining the connections between religion and family life. Our discussion is organized around Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological framework and the process-person-context-time model. Within this framework, the key factors we discuss that influence religious/spiritual development include (a) process (i.e., person-religion mismatch and family processes), (b) person …

Nutrient Loadings To Utah Lake From Bulk Atmospheric Deposition, Mitchell Matthew Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Atmospheric deposition is a marginally understood source of nutrient loadings to waterbodies. Atmospheric deposition occurs via wet (rain, snow) and dry (gaseous and particulate transport) pathways. Bulk atmospheric deposition is defined as the total deposition from both wet and dry pathways. Utah Lake is a shallow eutrophic freshwater lake located in central Utah, USA. Recent studies have shown atmospheric deposition to be a significant contributor to the nutrient budget of Utah Lake. This study presents the analysis using three different methods of six years' worth of wet atmospheric deposition samples from nine locations around the lake, though these samples do …

Hierarchical Joint Entity Recognition And Relation Extraction Of Contextual Entities In Family History Records, Daniel Segrera

Theses and Dissertations

Entity extraction is an important step in document understanding. Higher accuracy entity extraction on fine-grained entities can be achieved by combining the utility of Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) models. In this paper, a cascading model is proposed that implements NER and Relation extraction. This model utilizes relations between entities to infer context-dependent fine-grain named entities in text corpora. The RE module runs independent of the NER module, which reduces error accumulation from sequential steps. This process improves on the fine-grained NER F1-score of existing state-of-the-art from .4753 to .8563 on our data, albeit on a strictly …

Full Issue

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Institute News

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The Institute recently benefited from a generous gift of books and Mesoamerican artifacts from Jay and Ursula Krenusz. The donation of books, initially made to BYU's Harold B. Lee Library, was divided among the Lee Library, BYU- Idaho, and the Institute. The large collection of artifacts was donated to BYU's Museum of Peoples and Cultures.

Joseph's Coat And Moroni's Covenant Of Liberty, Matthew Roper

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

In the biblical account, after Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery, they kill a goat, dip Joseph's coat in the blood of the animal, and send the coat to their father, Jacob, to make him think that Joseph has been killed by a wild beast (see Genesis 37:3 1-33). Later we read that Joseph refused the advances of Potiphar's wife in order to remain faithful to God but was nevertheless falsely accused and imprisoned (see Genesis 39).

Jbms Welcomes New Editor

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The Institute welcomes S. Kent Brown as the new editor of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. A professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University and former associate editor of the Journal, Brown is its third head editor.

New Volume Honors Truman G. Madsen

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The distinguished career of Truman G. Madsen has earned him wide respect in and outside of LDS circles as an outstanding teacher, scholar, researcher, speaker, university administrator, church leader, and religious ambassador. With the publication of Revelation, Reason, and Faith: Essays in Honor of Truman G. Madsen, the Institute pays tribute to this remarkable man whose many accomplishments include helping to advance Book of Mormon scholarship and related interests of the Institute.

Full Issue

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Forthcoming Publications

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

FARMS Review of Books (vol. 14, no. 1–2), edited by Daniel C. Peterson, reviews books on Book of Mormon geography limited to the Great Lakes region, a book on the life of Joseph Smith, a book by evangelical scholars who challenge LDS apologetic scholarship, and other books. Available in late November 2002.

Institute News

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The Institute is pleased to have assisted with a new publication by the American Center for Oriental Research, in Amman, Jordan. Titled The Petra Papyri I, this volume on the carbonized scrolls from ancient Petra features 26 full plates of multispectral images taken by Steven Booras and Gene Ware during their Institute-sponsored work of imaging the Petra papyri. Access to the superior MSI images enabled scholars to transcribe the burned scrolls with greater accuracy than ever before. The Institute looks forward not only to providing additional images to ACOR for the remaining volumes of its Petra series, but also to …

“Let Us Be Strong”: Nephi’S Courage In The Context Of Ancient Near Eastern Military Exhortations, David E. Bokovoy

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

The ancient Near East often witnessed the rise and fall of powerful nations, a fact of life reflected in the literary and cultural traditions of the time. Given the constant specter of war, military leaders frequently needed to exhort their people to extraordinary levels of bravery. Literary evidence shows that the phrase to “be strong” was commonly used in a military sense. The Book of Mormon, with its roots in the ancient Near East, also reflects that usage.

Joseph Smith Right On Target, New Book Shows

Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship

In his writings over the years, Hugh Nibley has often pointed out “hits” and “bull’s-eyes” in the Book of Mormon—details about the ancient world that were unknown until recent times but that Joseph Smith got right anyway. Serious Book of Mormon research took shape in the early 1900s but has accelerated in recent decades, establishing an entire field of scholarly endeavor and yielding many clues to the book’s ancient origins.