Waldorfpedagogiken – religion eller inte?

Waldorfpedagogiken har utvecklats från antroposofin och används idag i skolor över hela världen. Antroposofin uppfyller flera av de viktigaste kriterierna i de vanligaste definitionerna av religion.  I denna artikel behandlas frågan om huruvida waldorfpedagogiken ska uppfattas som religiös eller inte. Mitt material består av skriftliga och elektroniska källor av olika slag, intervjuer samt observationer på en waldorfskola. Frågan kommer att diskuteras utifrån tre aspekter: ideologisk frikoppling, lärarens roll samt potentiellt religiösa inslag relaterade till morgonspråket och religionsundervisning. Jag föreslår att waldorfpedagogiken ska ses som en hybrid i den terminologi som Siv-Ellen Kraft använder. En hybrid är en företeelse där en för­ståelse med religiösa inslag utgör en av flera möjligheter (Kraft 2011: 78). Trots tillämpandet av detta perspektiv kvarstår dock andra problematiska områden gällande relationen mellan waldorfpedagogik och religion.

Motion cue analysis for parkinsonian gait recognition

This paper presents a computer-vision based marker-free method for gait-impairment detection in Patients with Parkinson's disease (PWP). The system is based upon the idea that a normal human body attains equilibrium during the gait by aligning the body posture with Axis-of-Gravity (AOG) using feet as the base of support. In contrast, PWP appear to be falling forward as they are less-able to align their body with AOG due to rigid muscular tone. A normal gait exhibits periodic stride-cycles with stride-angle around 45o between the legs, whereas PWP walk with shortened stride-angle with high variability between the stride-cycles. In order to analyze Parkinsonian-gait (PG), subjects were videotaped with several gait-cycles. The subject's body was segmented using a color-segmentation method to form a silhouette. The silhouette was skeletonized for motion cues extraction. The motion cues analyzed were stride-cycles (based on the cyclic leg motion of skeleton) and posture lean (based on the angle between leaned torso of skeleton and AOG). Cosine similarity between an imaginary perfect gait pattern and the subject gait patterns produced 100% recognition rate of PG for 4 normal-controls and 3 PWP. Results suggested that the method is a promising tool to be used for PG assessment in home-environment.

Religion and Subjective Well-Being Among China’s Elderly Population

Evidence from developed and developing countries alike demonstrates a strongly positive relationship between religiosity and happiness, particularly for women and particularly among the elderly. Using survey data from the oldest old in China, we find a strong negative relationship between religious participation and subjective well-being in a rich multivariate logistic framework that controls for demographics, health and disabilities, living arrangements and marital status, wealth and income, lifestyle and social networks, and location. In contrast to other studies, we also find that religion has a larger effect on subjective well-being on men than women.