Via Conrad Gempf’s blog I see that New Testament scholar Ben Witherington III has a blog. Not only that but but he’s blogging about the Fantastic 4! And Conrad Gempf posts a comment there about the one, true Green Lantern – Hal Jordan (though Alan Scott is also a favourite).

I enjoyed Witherington’s commentary “Conflict and Community in Corinth” (1995) when I was doing a NT Epistles paper a few years back. One of the few commentaries that was often not returned on time to the closed reserve desk because the student reading it was throughly engrossed in it!

Coincidentally, just finished re-reading “Green Lantern : The Road Back” last night, having seen it lurking in the library yesterday.

A long time ago (circa 1994-96) in a galaxy far, far away (Waikato University, Hamilton, NZ) I was involved in the team that created the original WEKA data mining software. Since then the software has evolved into a significant open-source data mining package. Ian Witten and Eibe Frank published the book Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with Java Implementations which described how to use Eibe’s Java version (WEKA 3) (Second edition info here), and now the WEKA software has been awarded the ACM SIGKDD Service Award. From the award notice,

SIGKDD Service Award is the highest service award in the field of data mining and knowledge discovery. It is is given to one individual or one group who has performed significant service to the data mining and knowledge discovery field, including professional volunteer services in disseminating technical information to the field, education, and research funding.

…

Weka is a landmark system in the history of the data mining and machine learning research communities, because it is the only toolkit that has gained such widespread adoption and survived for an extended period of time (the first version of Weka was released 11 years ago). Other data mining and machine learning systems that have achieved this are individual systems, such as C4.5, not toolkits.

Since Weka is freely available for download and offers many powerful features (sometimes not found in commercial data mining software), it has become one of the most widely used data mining systems. Weka also became one of the favorite vehicles for data mining research and helped to advance it by making many powerful features available to all.

In sum, the Weka team has made an outstanding contribution to the data mining field.

The full description of WEKA, the award and the many people involved can be found here: KDnuggets News 05:13, item 2, Features.

Other related links are:

• Waikato University : Weka’s winning ways
• Waikato University Machine Learning Research Group (including WEKA download and publication pages)
• KDD05 – The Eleventh ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
• Data Mining : Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques (Second Edition, July 2005) by Ian Witten and Eibe Frank.

When I heard about the award I went looking in my old photos and found this picture of four of us from the Waikato ML group at the International Machine Learning Conference at Lake Tahoe in 1995 (where I did a workshop presentation on the infant WEKA). From left to right – Ian Witten, Len Trigg, Stephen Garner and Craig Nevill-Manning.

Congratulations to the WEKA team. Nice to see the hard work that lots of people put in being recognised.

This book looks interesting. Engaging Technology in Theological Education: All That We Can’t Leave Behind by Mary E. Hess.

Link to Mary Hess’ faculty overview here.
Link to additional resources here. (Including links to the Religious Education and Challenge of Media Culture Project and her dissertation “Media literacy in religious education: Engaging popular culture to enhance religious experience”)

Thanks to Paul for mentioning the book. Thanks also to Tim who supplied the link to the resources page.

Take the Ecological Footprint Quiz.

The quiz is based on national consumption averages and is meant to give you an idea of your Ecological Footprint relative to other people in the country you live in. It is not highly detailed, but should give most people an idea of where they stand.

I don’t stand as well as I’d like – with the killer negative rating being on the food front. Still better than the average they give for NZ but not good for the world overall. Some stuff to work on.

Quiz link from maggi dawn: What’s your ecological footprint?

The New Zealand Herald : Technology and Science : Mind-enhancing drugs likely to be developed over next 20 years.

“We are on the verge of developments which could possibly move us into a world where we could take a drug to help us learn, think faster, relax, sleep more efficiently or even subtly alter our mood to match that of our friends,” Sir David said.
“This would have implications for individuals, and could lead to a fundamental change in the way we behave as a society,” he said.

Similar to the stuff I heard Eric Kandell talk about at Auckland Uni last year-the use of particular chemical compounds to enhance long-term memory.

Following on from the previous posting on rejecting an ethical-doctrinal dualism, Theodore Jennings Jr’s comments on the ethical project seem apt.

In theological ethics, it is generally unwise to approach specific ethical dilemmas in the absence of a wider perspective that will help reveal what may be at stake or even how a particular issue may be helpfully framed. Moreover, theological ethics is productively conceived not as problem solving but as forming a worldview and a set of dispositions that enable believers to respond to their world in ways that embody basic faith values.Jennings, Theodore W., Jr. “Theological Anthropology and the Human Genome Project.” In Adam, Eve, and the Genome : The Human Genome Project and Theology, ed. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, 93-111. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Often, it seems we’re looking for a Christian response to a specific problem that faces us – wisdom for the moment. If we reject the ethical-doctrinal dualism, then Jennings approach of an integrated worldview that the believer(s) operates within seems helpful. Determining a series of “cases” or “rules” of how to “behave” in various specific situations can lead to inflexibility in the face of new problems. We should instead develop a flexible framework that allows engagement quickly and consistently. This is not to say that the initial engagement may not need further refinement and theological reflection at a later date.

The “What Would Jesus Do?” approach is on attempt to do something like this. Effectively a form of imatatio Dei, it attempts to have the individual (primarily) ask what course of action to take based upon an understanding of what Jesus’ basic faith values were, and how they were manifested on earth. The effectiveness of the approach depends, of course, upon the understanding of what Jesus’ key values actually are. Which means that without “doctrinal” components – “What did Jesus say?”, “What did Jesus do?”, and “What did Jesus mean?” – the approach isn’t deep enough to be helpful and one might fall back on “folk theology” or “proof-texting“.

Furthermore, understanding Jesus Christ as moral example (if that’s how you’re going to treat WWDJ?) is rooted in wider theological reflection. For example, how does our understanding of the Incarnation supply wisdom for ethical living today? How do our understandings of creation, eschatology, humanity, sin, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ interact with WWJD?

Building a robust framework seems to me to be key for then engaging with situations both envisaged and not envisaged by the biblical writers. The problem then becomes making it simple enough to be applied in day-to-day life, while rich enough to handle highly specialised situations. (Not that I’m implying a “simple/rich” dualism.)

The teachers I’ve learnt most from have been those who integrated both doctrine and ethics. Indeed, they didn’t see a dualism between the two. Today I was reading an essay by Stanley Hauerwas that summed up this idea of integration nicely. In critiquing the divide he says,

Those trained to do theology ‘proper’, however, seldom stray into ‘ethics’ as part of their job description. Too often theologians spend there time writing prolegomena, that is, essays on theological method meant to show how theology should be done in case anyone got around to doing any. Those who do try to do theology too often assume that their primary task is to construct a systematic presentation of theological loci and their interrelations. Ethics is what is done after one has accomplished these more primary tasks, or ethics becomes the responsibility of those who teach course in ethics.Stanley Hauerwas, “On Doctrine and Ethics” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (ed. Colin E. Gunton).

BTW – There’s a Hauerwas portal of sorts here with links to many online articles.

Thwarted in my efforts to get to see “Batman Begins” this week. Instead I read several articles by David Zimmerman (Strangely Dim) on “Batman Begins” and the “Fantastic Four”. This week I hope to make it in to the cinema, though with the school holidays on my normal 10am morning slot where there’s only a handful of people in the cinema with me won’t be available.

• PopMatters Film Feature | Cape Fear: Courage, Calling and Community in Batman Begins.
• INTHEFRAY Magazine | Everything silly is serious again. (Batman)
• Commentaries: One Fantastic Family – Christianity Today Movies.

Watched the BBC last night as the news came in about London.

We pray, of course. But where to start.
We pray for those affected, we pray for Great Britain, we pray for the world.
We pray for healing, justice, compassion, love, against inaction.
We pray for those who help.
Jesus said to “love our enemies.” We try to understand how that is, we struggle with those prayers.

One thing that is on my heart is to pray against hate, fear, uncertainty and doubt. That the terror visited upon people does not become a monster that consumes communities of neighbours seeing each other as the “other”.

We remember to add London to the other places we pray for too.

Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

The print edition of Reality Magazine may now be defunct but some articles from the last issue have been put online, including an interesting article on God, nature and Christian engagement with the environment. See: Reality. Issue 69: Springs of Living Water, by Nicola Hoggard Creegan,

In Christianity today one of our problems is that there are very starkly different stories out there. We don’t agree about origins; we don’t agree about God’s connection to the world; nor about how the story will end. Christians have set our story over against the scientific story, forcing many to choose between science and faith, even between being educated and being a Christian. Looking at nature within a theological perspective often becomes very painful; ecological/theological reflection is not done.