Papers

System Design

A New E-Commerce Protocol: Proposing a New Model for Facilitating Business to Consumer E-Commerce Transactions

By comparing the dominant entries in the B2C e-commerce marketplace in terms of their security features, ease of implementation, flexibility for merchants, and ease of use in day-to-day operations, significant weaknesses in both security and convenience were found. Many of these weaknesses can be mitigated using an XML document to represent the transaction between merchant and acquirer. This XML document can then be authenticated with a signed hash shared between the acquirer and merchant. Many of the design details required to implement such a system are specified and discussed.

Great Plains Free-Net User Management System (UMS)

The GPFN is embarking on a comprehensive modernization strategy. As part of this strategy, GPFN is offering a number of new services and adopting a more member-centric philosophy. One problem with the existing User Management system is that very few volunteers understand or can manage it. It relies on an inter-related set of some 300 shell scripts and flat file tables from which to manage its database. The new design utilizes a relational database engine for the back-end and a secure, web-enabled interface from which members, users, guests and volunteers can apply for accounts, upgrade accounts and approve, reject or revoke applications and accounts.
The system is designed to use a volunteer pool of developers to develop and implement the new system.

Academic Papers

An Introduction to Bayesian Networks and their Contemporary Applications

Bayesian Networks are becoming an increasingly important area for research and application in the entire field of Artificial Intelligence. This paper explores the nature and implications for Bayesian Networks beginning with an overview and comparison of inferential statistics and Bayes' Theorem. The nature, relevance and applicability of Bayesian Network theory for issues of advanced computability forms the core of the current discussion. A number of current applications using Bayesian networks is examined. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the appropriateness and limitations of Bayesian Networks for human-computer interaction and automated learning.

The Disease Model of Alcoholism Revisited: Why People Drink

The view of alcoholism which currently boasts wide acceptance is the disease model approach. This approach views alcohol as a disease of the individual. Compared to a view of alcoholism as moral degeneration, a personal weakness or failure, the disease perspective is a more desirable approach in that it provides both an impetus for treatment, assigns a profession to respond to the problem, creates social sympathy and empathy for the alcoholic, and removes or at least minimizes the guilt and reluctance to seek treatment which the alcoholic experiences.

But is it a disease? The medical model seems incapable of "curing" this disease, offering instead only life-long treatment combined with abstinence. This paper reviews the existing literature supporting a disease model and then contrasts the benefits and problems with this model against that of viewing alcoholism as a learned behaviour using the paradigm of learning psychology. A more comprehensive view of alcoholism, its causes and possible treatment strategies results.

 

Faith and Spirituality

Back to the Garden: Recovering the Divine Union through our Sexuality

In the summer of 2005, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in convention deliberates the question of how to respond to homosexual or same sex couples and whether to bless these unions.

 

This paper marks my contribution to the discussion of how we understand Scripture and sexuality and how we must authentically respond to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people within our churches.

Brief on Interim Ministry

In 2004, the Saskatchewan Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) began to draft a new policy on the practice of Interim Ministry within the territory of the synod. While this proposal seems to have started out as a practical response to the particular issues faced by the synod (and to a wider extent the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada at a national level), the direction of this policy hints at some more significant implications.

 

In particular, the policy effectively redefines the Canadian Lutheran understanding of ministry, ecclesial call, ordination, and the role and division of powers between congregations and their judicatory bodies. If left unaddressed, we may end up with a church that is exists in stark contrast to the nature of church first defined by the reformers. We may also end up with a church that is even more impotent in any ability to proclaim the Gospel within our modern milieu.