Published Article / This article argues that, whether she recognises it or not, the translator is an agent, i.e. someone with an active hand in the intercultural communication process. This position endows the translator with the responsibility to make decisions in intercultural communication that can have far-reaching ideological effects. For this reason, translators should be educated to be able to take up this responsibility. In this regard, the author proposes the notion of wisdom as the aim of translator education. The article also argues in favour of indigenising and even subverting translations in theAfrican context.

One especially contentious issue for Matthew's predominantly Jewish-Christian audience is how to relate to Gentiles, who are also followers of Jesus and desire to be incorporated into their community. To address this issue, Matthew appeals to Israel's wisdom tradition, and particularly to the pilgrimage of Woman Wisdom. In this journey, Woman Wisdom is commanded to dwell in Israel. She makes her home there and calls all people to come to her for wisdom and life. Ultimately, Wisdom is rejected by Israel and she returns to God. This thesis proposes that it is this pilgrimage of Woman Wisdom that is an underlying metaphor for Matthew's gospel. Like Wisdom, Jesus arrives in Israel, calls Israel to follow him, and is ultimately rejected. Woman Wisdom's cry to come to her to receive life is echoed in Jesus' call for all to enter the kingdom of God. The inclusion of the Gentiles in the community therefore demonstrates the presence of the kingdom of God.

This paper was revised and later published in The Other Journal, Issue 14 (January 27, 2009) http://theotherjournal.com/2009/01/27/earths-lament-suffering-hope-and-wisdom/ Accessed: June 25, 2013

This is a revised version of Lambert Zuidervaart's inaugural address presented on November 21, 2003, on the occasion of the author's taking up the position as professor at the Institute.

<p>Using the wisdom of crowds---combining many individual forecasts to obtain an aggregate estimate---can be an effective technique for improving forecast accuracy. When individual forecasts are drawn from independent and identical information sources, a simple average provides the optimal crowd forecast. However, correlated forecast errors greatly limit the ability of the wisdom of crowds to recover the truth. In practice, this dependence often emerges because information is shared: forecasters may to a large extent draw on the same data when formulating their responses. </p><p>To address this problem, I propose an elicitation procedure in which each respondent is asked to provide both their own best forecast and a guess of the average forecast that will be given by all other respondents. I study optimal responses in a stylized information setting and develop an aggregation method, called pivoting, which separates individual forecasts into shared and private information and then recombines these results in the optimal manner. I develop a tailored pivoting procedure for each of three information models, and introduce a simple and robust variant that outperforms the simple average across a variety of settings.</p><p>In three experiments, I investigate the method and the accuracy of the crowd forecasts. In the first study, I vary the shared and private information in a controlled environment, while the latter two studies examine forecasts in real-world contexts. Overall, the data suggest that a simple minimal pivoting procedure provides an effective aggregation technique that can significantly outperform the crowd average.</p> / Dissertation

This compilation thesis, consisting of five articles, focuses on narrative explorations of vocational Bildung and wisdom in practice. It is an explicitly practical and empirical approach to what, for the most part, tends to be limited to philosophical discussions. This is motivated by the relative lack of systematic knowledge about how to enact wisdom in practice and afford vocational Bildung to those engaged in vocational education and training (VET). The absence of such knowledge makes it more difficult to develop VET practice and curricula and also leads to significant parts of the internal goods of practice to remain tacit, personal and local when they need to become articulated and shared. The aim of the five articles has been to explore how Bildung and practical wisdom can enrich our understanding of vocational practice and didactics on a theoretical, methodological and practical level. Conceptually the thesis draws extensively from narrative inquiry (Clandinin &amp; Connelly 1995, 2000), reflective practice (Schön 1983, 1987), Aristotelian philosophy regarding practical wisdom (Aristotle 2009, Nussbaum 1990), MacIntyre’s concept of a practice (2011) and the Bildung-tradition (Rittelmeyer 2012) to create a coherent framework for the inquiry termed vocational Bildung didactics (VBD). It is located in the phronetic social science paradigm articulated by Flyvbjerg (2001) where the main aim for research is to enrich practice rather than generate theory. The methodology for this kind of inquiry is the collection of narrative cases focusing on unusually rich/successful/wise cases of a practice, what Flyvbjerg (2001) terms extreme and paradigmatic cases. On a conceptual level the inquiry has resulted in the framework of VBD that provides the structure for engaging in this kind of research. It has also resulted in some further conceptualizations driven by the interpretation of cases, in particular a differentiation between vocational and cultural practices. On a methodological level it has resulted in a kind of double didactical method: the case narratives function as articulations of practical knowledge regarding vocational Bildung and practical wisdom but also as the didactical tools for teaching this. On a practical level the inquiry has resulted in suggestions for curriculum-development as well as ways in which the case narratives can be used to enrich the understanding of practitioners. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 5: Manuscript.</p>

There is much on-going effort to develop new methods for paring down complexity in decision support models (DSM). Many of these methods are so intricate and prone to bias introduction that they are rarely used. The first part of this work developed, tested, and evaluated a new methodology called Knockout (KO) for pruning unnecessary complexity from a Testbed DSM. Complexity is defined as the number of semantic nodes in the DSM. Unnecessary complexity is the maximum quantity of complexity that can be pruned without violating the requisite DSM fidelity. KO identifies all of the semantic nodes that make up the DSM, and determines their individual semantic contribution to DSM fidelity in a manner that avoids bias introduction. The node of least semantic significance to DSM fidelity is always pruned first. KO is shown to efficiently prune complexity from a Testbed DSM, pruning complexity by 36% while reducing fidelity by only 1%. Thus, the first result of this work is a new methodology to enable organizations to trade DSM fidelity for a reduction in DSM complexity. The second part of this work used KO to investigate the ratio of information nodes (parameters) to knowledge nodes (functions) as the complexity of a Testbed DSM was pruned. The a priori expectation was that this work would support one of two learning models in the literature: (1) the bottom-up model known as the Wisdom Hierarchy in which information is accumulated prior to the mental construction of knowledge, or (2) the top-down model known as the Reverse Knowledge Hierarchy in which knowledge is accumulated prior to the mental construction of information. But this work found that the baseline Testbed DSM (the full DSM prior to pruning) has nearly an equal number of information and knowledge nodes (188 to 191), and the ratio of information-to-knowledge remained within a few percent of unity as the DSM's complexity was decreased by successive pruning of the least-semantically-significant node. Thus, the second result of this work is a new model of human goal-driven learning in which information and knowledge accumulate simultaneously and contribute equally to model fidelity and complexity.

O conceito de sabedoria bíblica como corpus, tema ou estilo costuma ser aplicado livremente à leitura da Bíblia Hebraica. Ao mesmo tempo, estudiosos admitem a falta de precisão para a eleição daquilo que deveria ou não compor um tema ou estilo sapiencial, tanto para a análise do texto bíblico quanto para os estudos comparados. Este trabalho apresenta uma breve introdução às abordagens acadêmicas que pretenderam reconhecer a sabedoria bíblica como um gênero literário, enfatizando suas peculiaridades em termos de forma e conteúdo a fim de distingui-la de outros discursos encontrados na Bíblia Hebraica. Além disso, a pesquisa também expõe como os estudos comparados aplicaram os conceitos elaborados por biblistas para a compreensão da sabedoria no Antigo Oriente Médio. / Biblical Wisdom as a corpus, theme or style is frequently applied freely to the reading of the Hebrew Bible. At the same time, the academicians admits the lack of precision on the preference for what should be considered or not as a sapiential theme or style, both for the analysis of biblical texts and for comparative studies. The following research presents a short introduction to the academic approaches which intented to recognize biblical wisdom as a literary genre, enphasizing its peculiarities in terms of form and content in order to make a distinction betweem them from the other discourses found in the Hebrew Bible. Likewise, the research also presents how the comparative studies applied the concepts formulated by biblicists for a comprehension of wisdom in the Ancient Middle East.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T17:27:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernando Luis do Nascimento.pdf: 891738 bytes, checksum: 5bea318c81add2883ccdc3c4096efdbc (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-04-08 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This thesis intends to philosophically explore the concept of practical wisdom as proposed by Paul Ricoeur in his "Little Ethics". Practical wisdom is a core concept on the Aristotelian tradition that has been discussed and incorporated by several contemporary thinkers like H.G. Gadamer, A. MacIntyre, M. Nussbaum and P. Ricoeur. In order to promote a deeper analysis of the concept we propose an indirect approach via the person who is recognized as someone with practical wisdom, the phrónimos. Through this approach we suggest the concept of phronetical identity by using several categories of the ricoeurian reflection about narrativity in order to recognize phronimos's distinctive attributes. Among them emerges the phronetical plurality as a key concept to understand and further explore the possibilities of practical wisdom in the context of the contemporary ethical debate / O objetivo central desta tese é explorar o conceito de sabedoria prática a partir da proposta ética de Paul Ricoeur. A sabedoria prática é um conceito cardeal da tradição aristotélica que tem sido recuperado por vários pensadores contemporâneos como H. G. Gadamer, A. MacIntyre, M. Nussbaum e P. Ricoeur. Para a investigação mais profunda do conceito, é desenvolvida uma abordagem indireta através da pessoa que é reconhecida como alguém que possui a sabedoria prática, o phrónimos. Nessa abordagem, é sugerido o conceito de identidade phronética, que procura aplicar várias categorias das reflexões ricoeurianas sobre a narratividade para o reconhecimento dos atributos distintivos do phrónimos, entre os quais a pluralidade phronética, que emerge como um dos traços mais significativos

The purpose of this content analysis research was to develop a biblical-theological model of Cognitive Dissonance Theory applicable to pedagogy. Evidence of cognitive dissonance found in Scripture was used to infer a purpose for the innate drive toward consonance. This inferred purpose was incorporated into a model that improves the descriptive fidelity of previous research observations and extends the prescriptive facility of Cognitive Dissonance Theory. The qualitative research design consisted of five phases. In the first phase, individual cases were identified by examining every verb in the New American Standard Bible for potential evidence of cognitive dissonance. In the second phase, the primary researcher examined every case isolated in Phase One for the elements of cognitive dissonance using criteria from the cognitive dissonance research literature. In the third phase, outside coders repeated coding of a stratified, random sample of cases, and intercoder reliability was established. In the fourth phase, the results were analyzed and evaluated. In the final phase, a biblical-theological model was proposed. There was an apparent progression in the type of cognitive tension experienced by people in Scripture. In the Old Testament, most cases of cognitive tension included a commitment to a decision consistent with Leon Festinger's description of cognitive dissonance. In the New Testament, particularly after Pentecost, the cognitive tension seems to have changed so that Christ-followers no longer demonstrated a commitment to a decision before experiencing cognitive tension. This change revealed cognitive tension consistent with both Piaget and Hegel. Alternatives were offered to explain the apparent progression in cognitive tension and a model was proposed that described Cognitive Dissonance Theory as a metatheory of cognitive tension that allows for subtypes of tension recognized by other researchers. Cognitive tension in Scripture seemed to be related to a sapiential drive manifested as learning aimed at orthodoxy--rightly aligned propositional wisdom, orthopathy--rightly aligned dispositional wisdom, and orthopraxy--rightly aligned enacted wisdom. The implications and applications of these conclusions were discussed.