Digital Commons @ SPU

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  ReCentering Psych Stats

  Lynette Bikos

  To center a variable in regression means to set its value at zero and interpret all other values in relation to this reference point. Regarding race and gender, researchers often center male and White at zero. Further, it is typical that research vignettes in statistics textbooks are similarly seated in a White, Western (frequently U.S.), heteronormative, framework. ReCentering Psych Stats seeks provide statistics training for psychology students (undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral) in a socially and culturally responsive way. All lessons use the open-source statistics program, R (and its associated packages). Each lesson includes a chapter and screencasted lesson, features a workflow for statistical decision-making, and includes all R code necessary to conduct the statistic. Research vignettes are drawn from the published psychology literature. When possible, these articles are authored by individuals who hold identities that have, been marginalized in the scientific literature; correctly use the statistic that is being taught in the lesson; and focus on issues of justice, equity, inclusion, or and diversity. When possible, lessons include interviews with researchers from the featured vignettes. Each chapter includes suggestions for practice that are graded in complexity, such that learners can choose the degree of challenge. ReCentering Psych Stats is perpetually-in-progress; suggestions for corrections or chapters are welcomed: ReCenteringPsychStats@spu.edu

  Link to full online book and supplemental materials (first page includes links to .pdf, .doc, and ebook formats): https://lhbikos.github.io/ReCenterPsychStats/

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  Elementary New Testament Greek

  Owen Ewald

  This open-access textbook helps students learn to read New Testament Greek at the elementary level. It includes clear, concise explanations of grammar and syntax, helpful examples, and essential vocabulary, with no assumption of previous language study, and it does not require accents for most forms. At the end of each of its twenty chapters, students will find short Greek-language episodes from the life of a fictional early Christian family of Jewish ancestry, short readings from the Greek New Testament and Septuagint, and review/homework exercises that can help reinforce new concepts and vocabulary. This book can help students prepare to read Nijay Gupta and Jonah Sandford’s Intermediate Greek Reader: Galatians and Related Texts, also available as an open-access textbook.

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  AI, Faith, and the Future

  Michael J. Paulus Jr. and Michael D. Langford

  Artificial intelligence is rapidly and radically changing our lives and world. This book is a multidisciplinary engagement with the present and future impacts of AI from the standpoint of Christian faith. It provides technological, philosophical, and theological foundations for thinking about AI, as well as a series of reflections on the impact of AI on relationships, behavior, education, work, and moral action. The book serves as an accessible introduction to AI as well as a guide to wise consideration, design, and use of AI by examining foundational understandings and beliefs from a Christian perspective.

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  Audiobook of A World from Dust

  Ben McFarland

  A World From Dust is a popular science book about the chemical sequence behind the evolution of creation.

  It’s about how geology, biology, and chemistry worked together over billions of years, providing a hidden order under the random flow of genes and lava and water.

  It’s about the chemical job that each element takes up in life, and how that job is predictable from its place on the periodic table.

  It can be told as the story of many elements: how iron and sulfur gave a spark of life; how manganese was a key for oxygen; and how copper and zinc formed the basis for your immune system and growth patterns.

  It can be told as the story of one element: the story of how oxygen was hidden from life, then killed life, then gave new energy and new shapes for life to become more complex than before.

  It’s also about how, if we rewound and replayed the “tape of life”, what we would “hear” in evolution would be much the same the second time around. It’s about how, at certain levels, life is predictable and ordered — and at other levels, it’s not.

  To use big words, it’s about chemistry, convergence, and contingency. To use little words (that are probably better), it’s about fate and free will.

  The book is written by Ben McFarland and illustrated by Gala Bent and Mary Anderson. Audiobook produced by Seattle Pacific University's department of Educational Technology and Media.

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  Beyond Borders

  Kathleen Braden, Wilbur Zelinsky, Sergei Rogachev, Thomas Baerwald, Aleksei Naumov, John Florin, Raymond Krishchyunas, Aleksei Novikov, and Stanley Brunn

  Is it possible to look out over the Ural Mountains and see Appalachia? To find the character of the American West in the vast open space of Siberia? To smell the citrus and feel the warm sun of the Black Sea coast and be struck with a sense of Florida?

  This book is based on just such an idea: that we can look beyond our borders and discover fundamental realities about places that transcend differences of culture, language, and politics. Five American and four Russian geographers wrote this book to provide glimpses of understanding about the United States and Russia. Despite the size and power of our two nations and more than seventy years of cold war, we seem to have a meager comprehension of each other, perhaps because each country is so often viewed as a monolith and we emphasize our differences, rather than similarities.

  The authors of this book worked together in the hopes of overcoming some misimpressions of the past. Beyond Borders became an experiment - an attempt to compare the United States and Russia by pairing up and analyzing eleven regions. We have therefore taken the rather risky step of suggesting similarities between New England and Novgorod, between Odessa and New Orleans, between Moscow and New York. But perhaps the time has never been more appropriate for such a new approach to geography because so many people seem adrift on the changing world map. In an era when establishes states are breaking up, new alliances are forming, and the very idea of state sovereignty is being transformed, we may begin to question whether all these lines on the map actually mean anything to people. Is there an underlying "real" geography which can provide an anchor?