Browsing by Subject "Trust"

Christian teachers lead godly change in the lives of people whom they influence. The preparation of people to lead as teachers in the church requires the development of inner character that is consistent with Christian purposes. One of the fundamental attributes of this sort of character is empathy because it engages the heart in all of its dimensions. My argument in this thesis is that the qualities of empathy can be used as a means to highlight specific practices and skills that Christian teachers need. Helping Christian teachers to cultivate such practices and skills provides them with a more sustainable foundation than any set of teaching techniques found in teacher training materials. This approach enables the church’s education program to effectively shape people’s hearts to follow Christ and serve one another.

Drawing upon a broad selection of literature that includes narrative theology, adult educational philosophies, developmental psychology, and business leadership perspectives, this study begins by examining the nature of empathy and spiritual practices. I propose that a teaching ministry is most effective when it encompasses two specific practices that cultivate identity and integrity. A practice of formative presence highlights the incarnational nature of the teacher’s role and identity, and a practice of resilient trust establishes a framework for building and sustaining integrity. Both of these are patterns of communal action in which the benefits of God’s presence and power are made available to people. Furthermore, these practices depend on some underlying skills that help Christian teachers develop empathy. My discussion includes three specific skills: reception is a collaboration between people that communicates acceptance and understanding; reflection is a way of fostering shared meaning-making; and response is a type of action that expresses accountability with collective wisdom. When these practices and skills are wrapped in empathy and empowered by God’s Spirit, godly character and shared learning are cultivated in both teachers and students.

Christian teachers lead godly change in the lives of people whom they influence. The preparation of people to lead as teachers in the church requires the development of inner character that is consistent with Christian purposes. One of the fundamental attributes of this sort of character is empathy because it engages the heart in all of its dimensions. My argument in this thesis is that the qualities of empathy can be used as a means to highlight specific practices and skills that Christian teachers need. Helping Christian teachers to cultivate such practices and skills provides them with a more sustainable foundation than any set of teaching techniques found in teacher training materials. This approach enables the church’s education program to effectively shape people’s hearts to follow Christ and serve one another.

Drawing upon a broad selection of literature that includes narrative theology, adult educational philosophies, developmental psychology, and business leadership perspectives, this study begins by examining the nature of empathy and spiritual practices. I propose that a teaching ministry is most effective when it encompasses two specific practices that cultivate identity and integrity. A practice of formative presence highlights the incarnational nature of the teacher’s role and identity, and a practice of resilient trust establishes a framework for building and sustaining integrity. Both of these are patterns of communal action in which the benefits of God’s presence and power are made available to people. Furthermore, these practices depend on some underlying skills that help Christian teachers develop empathy. My discussion includes three specific skills: reception is a collaboration between people that communicates acceptance and understanding; reflection is a way of fostering shared meaning-making; and response is a type of action that expresses accountability with collective wisdom. When these practices and skills are wrapped in empathy and empowered by God’s Spirit, godly character and shared learning are cultivated in both teachers and students.

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In recent years, leadership research has focused on the concept of “authentic leaders” who act consistently with their values, make balanced decisions, are self-aware, and are transparent in their relationships (Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing and Peterson, 2008). Authentic leaders have the dual tasks of remaining true to their own values and beliefs (in order to be perceived as authentic) and simultaneously projecting an expressive persona (in order to be perceived as a leader). In this research, personality (extraversion and conscientiousness) and impression management (self-monitoring) constructs are used to capture the aspects of authentic leadership that reflect authenticity (expressiveness and other-directedness) and are shown to predict authentic leadership using ratings of followers. The analysis also includes the different dimensions of the self-monitoring scale, using mini-scales that reflect expressiveness (public-performing) and consistency (other-directedness or self-directedness), and show that they predict authenticity in leaders using self-ratings of leaders. The studies help to explain which leaders meet the challenge of being themselves and projecting their persona. Finally, there is evidence that authentic leadership is a mediator of the relationship between previously studied personality variables (extraversion and conscientiousness) and job satisfaction.

Trust has played a central role in the design of open distributed systems that span distinct administrative domains. When components of a distributed system can assess the trustworthiness of their peers, they are in a better position to interact with them. There are numerous examples of distributed systems that employ trust inference techniques to regulate the interactions of their components including peer-to-peer file sharing systems, web site and email server reputation services and web search engines.

The recent rise in popularity of Online Social Networking (OSN) services has made an additional dimension of trust readily available to system designers: social trust. By social trust, we refer to the trust information embedded in social links as annotated by users of an OSN. This thesis' overarching contribution is methods for employing social trust embedded in OSNs to solve two distinct and significant problems in distributed information systems.

The first system proposed in this thesis assesses the ability of OSN users to correctly classify online identity assertions. The second system assesses the ability of OSN users to correctly configure devices that classify spamming hosts. In both systems, an OSN user explicitly ascribes to his friends a value that reflects how trustworthy he considers their classifications. In addition, both solutions compare the classification input of friends to obtain a more accurate measure of their pairwise trust. Our solutions also exploit trust transitivity over the social network to assign trust values to the OSN users. These values are used to weigh the classification input by each user in order to derive an aggregate trust score for the identity assertions or the hosts.

In particular, the first problem involves the assessment of the veracity of assertions on identity attributes made by online users. Anonymity is one of the main virtues of the Internet. It protects privacy and freedom of speech, but makes it hard to assess the veracity of assertions made by online users concerning their identity attributes (e.g, age or profession.) We propose FaceTrust, the first system that uses OSN services to provide lightweight identity credentials while preserving a user's anonymity. FaceTrust employs a ``game with a purpose'' design to elicit the

opinions of the friends of a user about the user's self-claimed identity attributes, and uses attack-resistant trust inference to compute veracity scores for the attributes. FaceTrust then provides credentials, which a user can use to corroborate his online identity assertions.

We evaluated FaceTrust using a crawled social network graph as well as a real-world deployment. The results show that our veracity scores strongly correlate with the ground truth, even when a large fraction of the social network users are dishonest. For example, in our simulation over the sample social graph, when 50% of users were dishonest and each user employed 1000 Sybils, the false assertions obtained approximately only 10% of the veracity score of the true assertions. We have derived the following lessons from the design and deployment of FaceTrust: a) it is plausible to obtain a relatively reliable measure of the veracity of identity assertions by relying on the friends of the user that made the assertion to classify them, and by employing social trust to determine the trustworthiness of the classifications; b) it is plausible to employ trust inference over the social graph to effectively mitigate Sybil attacks; c) users tend to mostly correctly classify their friends' identity assertions.

The second problem in which we apply social trust involves assessing the trustworthiness of reporters (detectors) of spamming hosts in a collaborative spam mitigation system. Spam mitigation can be broadly classified into two main approaches: a) centralized security infrastructures that rely on a limited number of trusted monitors (reporters) to detect and report malicious traffic; and b) highly distributed systems that leverage the experiences of multiple nodes within distinct trust domains. The first approach offers limited threat coverage and slow response times, and it is often proprietary. The second approach is not widely adopted, partly due to the

lack of assurances regarding the trustworthiness of the reporters.

Our proposal, SocialFilter, aims to achieve the trustworthiness of centralized security services and the wide coverage, responsiveness, and inexpensiveness of large-scale collaborative spam mitigation. It enables nodes with no email classification functionality to query the network on whether a host is a spammer. SocialFilter employs trust inference to weigh the reports concerning spamming hosts that collaborating reporters submit to the system. To the best of our knowledge,

it is the first collaborative threat mitigation system that assesses the trustworthiness of the reporters by both auditing their reports and by leveraging the social network of the reporters' human administrators. Subsequently, SocialFilter weighs the spam reports according to the trustworthiness of their reporters to derive a measure of the system's belief that a host is a spammer.

We performed a simulation-based evaluation of SocialFilter, which indicates its potential:

during a simulated spam campaign, SocialFilter classified correctly 99% of spam, while yielding no false positives. The design and evaluation of SocialFilter offered us the following lessons: a) it is plausible to introduce Sybil-resilient OSN-based trust inference mechanisms to improve the reliability and the attack-resilience of collaborative spam mitigation; b) using social links to obtain the trustworthiness of reports concerning spammers (spammer reports) can result in comparable spam-blocking effectiveness with approaches that use social links to rate-limit spam (e.g., Ostra); c) unlike Ostra, SocialFilter yields no false positives. We believe that the design lessons from SocialFilter are applicable to other collaborative entity classification systems.

Background: Pneumococcal vaccines could protect children from being infected by some of the deadly Streptococcus pneumonia bacteria. However, since the pneumococcal vaccines have not yet been listed in China’s National Immunization Program (NIP), their coverage remains low due to the non-mandate and self-paid features. Parents are usually the key decision makers regarding their children’s PCV13 vaccine taking. Their exposure to vaccine information from trusted sources might influence this decision-making process. This study aims to explore the association between trust in information sources and parents’ knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding PCV13 vaccination for children in the Yangtze River Delta region, China.Methods: This study applied an explanatory sequential mixed-method design, combining a web-based quantitative survey (N = 1,871) and qualitative interviews (N =19). Adult parents who had at least one child aged less than 24 months (including 24 months) and lived in the Yangtze River Delta region were recruited. A Five-Point Likert scale measured the level of trust in different sources. Adjusted Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression model was applied to estimate the association between participants’ level of trust in different information sources and the primary outcomes. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted. A thematic analytic approach was adopted to analyze the transcripts. Results: CDC received the highest trust score (4.48/5). High levels of uncertainty were identified in parents’ PCV13 knowledge. Age, gender, education, and annual household income were related to varied trust levels in specific sources. After controlling the effect of covariates, trust in healthcare institution sources was significantly associated with better PCV13 knowledge, less vaccine hesitancy, and a higher likelihood of vaccine uptake. Trust in official media was negatively associated with vaccine uptake. Trust in online community sources was positively associated with vaccine uptake. The qualitative study also identified parents’ trust in healthcare-related sources. Parents would consult multiple sources for vaccine information. Insufficient information provision during the vaccination process was one of the key drivers of vaccine information seeking. Parents had varied informed levels about PCV13 when making vaccination decisions. Conclusion: Healthcare institution sources were highly trusted and crucial in enhancing parents’ vaccine knowledge and acceptance of PCV13. The influence of online community sources on vaccine uptake is worth more attention. Public health policymakers could utilize media platforms with high engagement among parents for future optional vaccine promotion. Public health workers could consider embedding vaccine information provision into the pediatric vaccination process to inform parents’ decision-making better.