This interview with Dr. Tony Adams examines autoethnography as a vital, evolving method in adult education and human resource development. Positioned within the special issue Exploring the Depths of Self, the conversation moves beyond introductory discussions of the method to explore its ethical tensions, narrative craft, institutional politics, and commitments to justice and relational accountability. Adams reflects on his intellectual formation, mentorship under leading autoethnographers, and the formative life experiences that shaped his scholarly trajectory. Across the interview, Adams addresses persistent critiques of autoethnography, clarifies distinctions between evocative and analytic traditions, and emphasizes the importance of methodological integrity. He offers practical guidance on vulnerability, fictionalization, collaborative writing, and navigating publication in traditional academic venues. Drawing on examples from his own scholarship and editorial leadership, he highlights the risks and transformative potential of writing personal experience into public scholarship. Central to Adams's perspective is the belief that autoethnography must be both ethically responsible and narratively compelling. He underscores storytelling as a methodological imperative, arguing that accessibility, thick description, and reflexivity are essential for autoethnography to generate social impact. The interview ultimately invites emerging and established scholars alike to approach autoethnography with courage, care, and craft.
Abstract This book explores the history and present status of unchurched spirituality in the U.S. Nearly 20% of all Americans consider themselves interested in spiritual issues even though they never step inside a church or synagogue. Most would describe themselves as spiritual at a personal level, but in some way alienated from organized religion. Today's alternative spirituality is the outgrowth of long‐standing traditions in American religious life. Colonial Americans were astonishingly eclectic in their religious pursuits, availing themselves of sundry magical and occult religious philosophies. In the nineteenth century, a number of metaphysical systems (e.g., Transcendentalism, Swedenborgianism, mesmerism, and spiritualism) penetrated deep into the spiritual vocabulary of middle‐class Americans who were eager to synthesize science and religion into a single vision of the universe. By the early twentieth century, there was already something of an “American tradition” of unchurched spirituality. Diverse interests including alternative medicine, parapsychology, the hidden powers of the unconscious mind, and Asian religions all contributed to the spiritual journeys of those who looked for religious inspiration outside America's established churches. The book concludes by demonstrating that far from the kooky and self‐absorbed dilettantes they are often made out to be, America's unchurched spiritual seekers embrace a mature and dynamic set of beliefs.
The oversampling technique is a commonly used data-level method to deal with class-imbalance problems. Traditional oversampling techniques use linear interpolation to synthesize new positive patterns between instances. Most methods directly use computer-generated random numbers to synthesize a new positive instance on the line segment between the anchor instance and its nearest neighbor. However, the features synthesized through random numbers do not match the features of real instances. Therefore, a Kolmogorov complexity-based positive instance augmentation technique (KCPIA) is proposed. This method employs standard binary encoding, adaptively and dynamically adjusting the bit width of the encoding space based on the feature values of the sample space. In the operator, information content similarity replaces the traditional geometric distance. It searches for nearest-neighbor instances with similar Kolmogorov complexity in the encoding space and uses crossover and mutation to generate new offspring codes. Finally, a reversible decoder losslessly reconstructs the synthesized minority instances. Furthermore, we use the maximum Mahalanobis distance of the original positive instance to the positive data center as a constraint to prevent the synthesis of noisy positive instances in the negative region. Experimental results on 30 real-world datasets show that KCPIA has obvious competitive advantages compared with other oversampling techniques, pioneering a new direction in dealing with class-imbalance problems.
Under the current global biodiversity crisis, there is a need for automated and noninvasive monitoring techniques that can gather large amounts of data cost-effectively at various ecological scales, from local to large spatial scales. These data can then be analyzed to inform stakeholders and decision-makers. One such technique is passive acoustic monitoring, which is commonly coupled with automatic identification of animal species based on their sound. Automated sound analyses usually require the training of sound detection and identification algorithms. These algorithms are based on annotated acoustic datasets which mark the occurrence of sounds of species inside sound recordings. However, compiling large annotated acoustic datasets is time-consuming and requires experts, and therefore, they normally cover reduced spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales. This data paper presents WABAD, the World Annotated Bird Acoustic Dataset for passive acoustic monitoring. WABAD is designed to provide the public, the research community, and conservation managers with a novel and globally representative annotated acoustic dataset. This database includes 5047 min of audio files annotated to species-level by local experts with the start and end time and the upper and lower frequencies of each identified bird vocalization in the recordings. The database has a wide taxonomic and spatial coverage, including information on 91,931 vocalizations from 1192 bird species recorded at 72 recording sites in 29 recording locations (mainly countries) and distributed across 13 biomes. WABAD can be used, for example, for developing and/or validating automatic species detection algorithms, answering ecological questions, such as assessing geographical variations on bird vocalizations, or comparing acoustic diversity indices with species-based diversity indices. The dataset is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license that permits redistribution and reuse on the condition that the original work is properly credited.
Purpose: The current study presents the results of a qualitative investigation into the perspectives and experiences of Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jewish mothers of children who are deaf and hard of hearing. Method: Six mothers, recruited via convenience and snowball sampling, participated in semistructured interviews in person or via phone. The interviews were transcribed and coded for thematic analysis. Results: Identified themes fell under the umbrella of "relationships," including language, professionals, community, and family. Conclusion: Based on the thematic analysis of the participants' responses, key themes and implications for professional practice are proposed, such as the importance of culturally responsive practice, understanding the unique counseling needs of this population (particularly regarding genetic testing and educational placement), and considerations regarding technology use.
