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Only 7 left-handed men have ever won Wimbledon singles.
780
Over 80% of the players, youth and senior in North America are Left Handed.
one
128 male players and 128 female players (singles)
Many British players have won Wimbledon. To see the complete list, refer to the Wimbledon links, below; the champions are listed to the left of each set of scores; the British players are denoted by "(BRI)" (n.b., the links are only for men's and women's singles).
There is always 128 players are selected.
Approximately 10% of the population is left handed.
There are many left-handed guitar players. Among the many are: Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop, Tony Iommi, Slim Whitman and Andrew White.
there would be 6 left handed students
Kay the Left-Handed has 284 pages.
Im left handed :) So one so far. Is there anyone else who is left handed out there? | https://sports.answers.com/Q/How_many_left_handed_players_have_won_Wimbledon |
Gregor Mendel Mendel made the observation that pea plants had characteristics that varied from plant to plant. He carried out experiments crossing (mating) plants with different characteristics.
20/07/2011 · Aside from that, I guess I can't deny the fact that Gregor Mendel is the father of genetics, and that he paved the way for things like Evolution. If you believe in Evolution that is. Personally I believe in Vigo the Carpathian but I won't make judgements.
Ask students to draw the structure of DNA (AfL) and label it. Inheritance - the story of life The work of Gregor Mendel was just the beginning of our understanding of inheritance.
This article is a summary of an oral presentation of the Augustinian monk Father Clemens Richter, OSA, about his great‐great‐granduncle Johann Gregor Mendel given at a celebration in Freiburg, Germany on 19 February 2015 to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Mendel's presentation in 1865 of his experiments in plant hybrids. | http://downdogpoweryoga.com/northern-territory/how-to-draw-gregor-mendel.php |
Lavender is one of the most widely known essential oils and for good reason. It is renowned for being calming, relaxing, and soothing.
Lavender sets the stage for a peaceful environment and has sleep-inducing properties. | https://thetorontoapothecary.com/products/bursera-lavender-essential-oil |
6926 John Deere Dr.,
LOVES PARK, Illinois IL 61111
$188,000 Sold for
4 Bedrooms
2 Full Baths
3 Total Baths
1 Partial Baths
2,212 Square Feet
0.230 Acres
201501738 Listing ID
Virtual Tours (4)
Status Sold
County Winnebago County
Property Type Residential Detached
Residential Detached
Acres: 0.230
Address: 6926 John Deere Dr.
Bedrooms: 4
City: LOVES PARK
Full Baths: 2
Latitude: 42.337024000000
Lender Owned: no
Listing ID: 201501738
Listing Price: $189,900
Longitude: -88.980611000000
Partial Baths: 1
Remarks: Stunning two story in the Park Valley subdivision in Loves Park with over 2900 of finished square feet of living space. Formal dining room with new wood laminate flooring. Separate office with french doors and newer flooring. Large family room with brick gas fireplace. Spacious eat in kitchen with brand new granite countertops, tile floor, and pantry. First floor laundry with sink. Huge master bedroom and master bath with walk in closet. Finished lower level rec room. Updated lighting thruout the home. Oversized garage and deck. Close to Rock Cut State Park.
Square Feet: 2,212
State: Illinois
Status: Sold
Street Direction:
Street Name: John Deere Dr.
Street Number: 6926
Total Baths: 3
Zip Plus: 0000
Postal Code: 61111
Primary Features
County: Winnebago County
Property Type: Residential Detached
Interior Features
Additional Room 5 Length:
Additional Room 5 Level:
Additional Room 5 Name:
Additional Room 5 Width:
Additional Room 6 Length:
Additional Room 6 Level:
Additional Room 6 Name:
Additional Room 6 Width:
Appliance Included:
Basement Type: Full
Bedroom 2 Length: 12.4
Bedroom 2 Level: Upper
Bedroom 2 Width: 10.2
Bedroom 3 Length: 11.6
Bedroom 3 Level: Upper
Bedroom 3 Width: 10.1
Bedroom 4 Length: 11.6
Bedroom 4 Level: Upper
Bedroom 4 Width: 10.1
Cooling: Central Air
Dining Room: yes
Dining Room Length: 12.4
Dining Room Level: Main
Dining Room Width: 10.4
Family Room: yes
Family Room Length: 19
Family Room Level: Main
Family Room Width: 17.8
Fireplace: yes
Fireplace Type: Gas
Half Baths: 1
Heating: Forced Air
Kitchen Length: 17.5
Kitchen Level: Main
Kitchen Width: 13.4
Living Room: yes
Living Room Length: 11.4
Living Room Level: Main
Living Room Width: 10.11
Master Bedroom Length: 20.5
Master Bedroom Level: Upper
Master Bedroom Width: 12.1
Recreation Room: yes
Recreation Room Length: 35
Recreation Room Level: Lower
Recreation Room Width: 20
Stove/Range Fuel: Gas
Additional
Address 2:
Address Search Number: 6926
Approximate Age: 11
Basement: yes
Cumulative DOM: 2
DOM: 2
Estimated Below Grade SqFt: 700
Front: 82.91
Garage: 2.5
General Features: Deck, Laundry 1st Floor, L.L. Finished Space, Security System
Land Features: None
Rear: 80.00
Remarks:
Roof: Shingle
Sale of a Property:
Sewer: City/Community
Side 1: 116.98
Side 2: 130.00
Status Category: Pending
Status Detail:
Style: 2 Story
Type: House
Water: City/Community
Water Heater: Gas
Location Information
Elementary School 1: Rock Cut Elementary
Elementary School 2:
High School: Harlem High School
Located in Flood Plain: no
Middle School: Harlem Jr
School District: Harlem 122
Financial Details
Exemptions: Owner
Fee Includes: None
HOA Fee: 0
HOA Fee Frequency:
HUD: no
Lease:
Original Price: 189900
Rent to Own: no
Sale Price: 0
Sale/Rent: For Sale
Short Sale: no
Tax Year: 2014
Taxes: 6179.24
External Features
Exterior: Brick/Stone, Siding
Zoning Info
Area Info
© 2017 Rockford Multiple Listing Service (ROCKMLS).
Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed.
Listing courtesy of Re/Max Property Source
Information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed. | http://homesearch.rockfordrealestate.com/idx/details/homes/a519/201501738/6926_John_Deere_Dr._Loves_Park_Illinois_61111 |
New bipartisan legislation clarifies an exemption for livestock producers from being subject to the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA), which governs the safe disposal of solid waste.
The Farm Regulatory Certainty Act (H.R. 5685), sponsored by Rep. Dan Newhouse (R., Wash.), would spell out that the RCRA, enacted in 1976 to govern solid wastes in landfills, is not intended to regulate agricultural operations like dairy farms. The RCRA statute has been used inappropriately to target agriculture, specifically dairy and livestock producers, even if they have demonstrated that they have been following approved plans for using manure as a fertilizer. The Farm Regulatory Certainty Act will also protect farmers from citizen suits if they are undergoing efforts to comply with federal orders.
In January 2015, a federal judge in Spokane, Wash., sided with environmental activists who brought a lawsuit against several dairies in the state of Washington under the RCRA for what they claimed was the inappropriate storage and handling of animal manure. However, RCRA was intended to govern landfills and to prevent the opening dumping of “solid wastes.”
The litigation claimed that farms had inappropriately handled and stored animal manure under the RCRA, even though the RCRA was not intended to focus on farming practices or the management of livestock manure. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington determined that the amount of manure deposited exceeded approved limits and constituted environmental and human endangerment.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s own pre-existing RCRA regulations from 1979 acknowledge that the RCRA does “not apply to agricultural waste, including manure and crop residue, returned to the soil as fertilizers or soil conditioners.” [40 CFR 257.1(c)(1)] The novel interpretation of the law stretches definitions to describe manure nitrates as a “solid waste” in order to hold livestock producers liable. Such an interpretation opens up the nation’s agricultural producers who use or store manure or other fertilizers to an additional, expansive, unintended layer of federal regulation under the RCRA.
“As a farmer myself, I know how seriously farmers take our responsibility to be good stewards,” Newhouse said. “The goal of environmental rules should be to assist agriculture producers to improve nutrient management and reduce their environmental footprint, not subject them to lawsuits and put them out of business.”
Newhouse said it is unfair for agricultural nutrients to be exempt from a law but then have a court find farmers at fault for non-compliance with the law. “Farmers need certainty to what rules apply to them,” he explained. “Complying with appropriate federal regulations should never be a guessing game that results in increased liability, especially when many farmers are taking proactive, voluntary steps to manage land and water quality.”
Specifically, the bill reaffirms and clarifies congressional intent regarding the inappropriateness of subjecting agricultural byproducts to the RCRA. It also codifies EPA’s regulations regarding the treatment of agricultural byproducts under the RCRA.
The bill also prevents farmers who are already engaged in legal action or are making a diligent attempt to work with the state or federal government to address nutrient management issues from being targeted by citizen suits. It doesn’t, however, exempt livestock producers from any laws or regulations intended to govern agricultural operations. | https://www.feedstuffs.com/story-legislation-protects-against-litigation-under-solid-waste-law-45-143874 |
Biomedical surveillance: rights conflict with rights.
Medical screening and biomedical monitoring violate individual rights. Such conflicts of right with right are acted upon synergistically by uncertainty which, in some important respects, increases rather than decreases as a result of research. Issues of rightness and wrongness, ethical issues, arise because the human beings who are subjects of medical screening and biological monitoring often have little or no option whether to be subjected to them. We identify issues of rightness and wrongness of biomedical surveillance for various purposes of occupational health and safety. We distinguish between social validity and scientific validity. We observe that principles are well established for scientific validity, but not for social validity. We support guidelines as a way forward.
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The Recovery Star developed by the Association of Mental Health Providers (formely the Mental Health Providers Forum), is an outcomes measure which enables people using services to measure their own recovery progress, with the help of mental health workers or others.
The ‘star’ contains ten areas covering the main aspects of people’s lives, including living skills, relationships, work and identity and self-esteem. Service users set their personal goals within each area and measure over time how far they are progressing towards these goals. This can help them identify their goals and what support they need to reach them, and ensure they are making progress, however gradual, which itself can encourage hope.
The Recovery Star enables staff to support individuals they work with to understand their recovery and plot their progress. The Recovery Star also enables organisations to measure and assess the effectiveness of the services they deliver. | https://mentalhealthpartnerships.com/resource/recovery-star/ |
The two most common product development metrics are R&D spending as a percent of sales and revenues from new products over time. These metrics, although necessary to track, do not predict a result. There’s no linear relationship between R&D spending and new product success. For example, a company might allocate ten percent of its R&D budget toward products in brand new technologies and markets. This allocation should reflect the company’s appetite for risk, the balance in its product portfolio between incremental and entirely new products. While it orients the team in the right direction, the R&D spending number does not gauge the effectiveness of that investment.
Similarly, the revenues from new products over time metric reports on past successes. It does not help forecast the future. It’s typically measured at a corporate or business level, perhaps organizational layers beyond the project team, down in the trenches where decisions are made that add or subtract from the project’s timeline every day.
It’s essential to measure these corporate metrics, but they’re not motivational at the team level and they do not tend to predict results. Predictive metrics help guide the team’s day-to-day decision making. They measure the team’s ability to execute toward defined goals. For example, a tool we have used called the deliverable hit rate chart tracks completed tasks against their target dates. It shows whether programs are on schedule by tracking the rate of task completion. This metric is dynamic, i.e. it is updated throughout the program and indicates the progress of a process over time, rather than measuring a result, after the fact.
A company that wants to discover quality predictive metrics for its teams should first consider the desired outcome. What behaviors would the company like to see in its teams, and what can be measured that will motivate the team to produce the desired outcome? Take these desired organizational changes and divide them into small, incremental steps. Think in terms of a sequence of steps that create larger-scale improvements in team effectiveness. Then choose the most effective levers that will motivate the team to make a small step toward those outcomes and have a target metric for each improvement. When the metric indicates that an incremental step-improvement has taken place, then move on to the next step.
Step-by-step these small improvements should follow in a logical sequence that builds into a larger improvement initiative that unfolds over time. As these improvements show results, they then spread throughout the organization, taking root in other teams.
The most effective predictive metrics for teams are often behavioral. For example, if the team is using a new milestone process, we measure the percentage of teams that use the milestone’s new names in their reports. These simple but precise metrics help companies track how teams are behaving today, rather than the success they enjoyed yesterday.
One caveat: remember to test your metrics. Pilot them with a team before propagating them elsewhere. The adage is true: “You get what you measure.” And what “you get” is sometimes an unintended and undesired consequence. Experiment, test, and pilot before any undesired consequences get out of hand.
The very best metrics for product development are strategic in that they support specific behaviors in the wider system that serve broader goals. Most companies are tracking far too many metrics. They become onerous and hinder more than help. The best product development metrics systems incorporate the critical few predictive metrics that drive decision making at the team level. | https://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2019/02/28/using-product-development-metrics-that-motivate-at-the-team-level/ |
How can I use analytics to estimate the number of virtual users to ramp up to during my load test?
That’s a good question. Nowadays tools like Google Analytics can offer real time monitoring which will give you the best insight into your peak levels of traffic and how that traffic may spike for a few minutes. If you have this information it already provides a good estimate for many peak users you should test for in LoadStorm.
Most commonly though Google Analytics will have data on the number of visits per hour to your site as well as the average duration of those visits. This makes it a bit harder to estimate what volume of users you should test for. With this information we can estimate the average concurrent visitors that were on your site using the following equation:
U = V / (60/D)
Where:
U is the number of load test virtual users (that’s what we are trying to figure out)
V is the average number of visitors per hour
D is the average duration of a visitor
60 is the number of minutes in an hour
Let’s state this formula again in English like a math word problem:
Load Test Virtual Users is equal to the Average Visitors per Hour divided by the User Turnover Rate per Hour.
Ideally you should test for an amount that is a bit greater than this estimate just to make sure you have a cushion for unusual spikes in traffic. For a more lengthy explanation please visit our blog post about virtual user calculations.
-
How do I build a script and schedule a test run?
Excellent question. Click here for step-by-step instructions to begin using LoadStorm.
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Why should I ramp up my test load volume over time?
It helps with performance engineering. We recommend to not begin a large test at the maximum number of virtual users. Rather than run a test for 10 minutes beginning with 5,000 and ending with 5,000, we suggest to start smaller, for example, with 500 users and increase to 5,000 over an hour. This approach has the advantage of allowing your system to get all the parts working properly at smaller load (e.g. caches, threads, database connections) before the heavier volume starts exposing potential bottlenecks in your application. Also if the target server begins to fail during the test this provides more granularity into the number of concurrent users where failure begins. If the test starts at 5,000 and fails all that can be learned from the results is that it fails somewhere between 1 and 5,000 which isn’t very useful.
From what we’ve seen in thousands of load tests with LoadStorm, it is common to see useful patterns in the metrics before the peak traffic is reached, and these metrics point to areas of performance limitations that can be tuned.
Load testing is invariably coupled with performance tuning – an iterative process of test/tune/test/tune. Therefore, we recommend you ramp the volume in order to get more value from the test results.
-
Why doesn’t my test start immediately?
LoadStorm needs a little time to prepare the test resources such as the load generation servers. Our system is using each selected script(s) to pre-calculate the virtual users’ actions, how many servers will need to be instantiated from the cloud, random think times, etc. This produces essentially a test roadmap that our Scheduler and Summarizer modules use to coordinate all the HTTP traffic and correctly capture the metrics. Depending on the number of concurrent users and the duration of your test, the preparation of a load test can take 2 to 15 minutes.
-
How does it generate HTTP traffic against my web application?
LoadStorm is a truly distributed application that leverages the power of Amazon Web Services to scale on demand with processing power and bandwidth as needed to test the largest web projects. As you crank up the testing load from 200 to 1,000,000 virtual users, LoadStorm is automatically adding machines for you (as many as necessary) from Amazon’s data centers to handle the processing. When your tests are done and the extra machines are not needed, they are turned off to wait for another test.
A script is processed as a sequential series of pages that you have defined in the recording. Once a page finishes, the VUser pauses for the specified time (between Min & Max “Think Time” in the script), then the next page proceeds. After the last page completes, the VUser context (session, cache, cookies) is cleared and the script starts from the beginning again with the same VUser. This same VUser will use different data upon script repeat if a CSV of User Data or dynamic response text has been parameterized within the script. As the concurrent users scale up they each begin the script for the first time, and also repeat the script after each completion.
You define the number of concurrent users you want at the start and peak of the test. You can also define a ramp down period to see how well your system recovers as the traffic subsides.
Scripts are repeated until the test is done as defined by the test duration field (in minutes) from when you began the load test.
-
How Can I Increase the Requests per Second in My Test?
Here are some thoughts on increasing RPS in LoadStorm tests:
- Reducing the think time added after each page in a script; the minimum pause is 5 seconds, so set both min & max to 5 seconds.
- Increasing the number of concurrent users.
- Reducing the response time from your server which decreases the time LoadStorm has to wait for a request to complete.
- Compressing the size of the response is one way to decrease the time it takes for the request to complete as well as save on throughput.
RPS will always be impacted by the types of pages/resources your scripts are requesting. The way it works is that LoadStorm cranks up the starting concurrent users shortly after test starts. It then walks each user through the script assigned to it. The GET requests will be made in asynchronous bursts of up to 6 at a time such as HTML, images, JS, CSS, and XML. Each POST request will be made on its own to ensure that any dynamic response text from earlier requests was available for to be passed into the POST data. This also ensures that any response data from the POST is available for subsequent requests. When those responses are all returned, then the system pauses a random time between the Min & Max “Think Time”, then it requests the next page. This process continues until the end of the script. So, having more users going at the same time, without waiting more than a few hundred ms to get a response, will increase RPS.
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If I stop a test before reaching the peak users, are the rest of my users wasted?
You can terminate a test early because the target server fails. When this happens in a test using virtual users, those users may seem “wasted”.
Customers have asked us why the system deducted 5,000 VUsers from their account when the test only lasted 10 minutes and stopped at 500 users. The reason LoadStorm does not prorate the VUsers to the minute or to the actual peak users is because we incur the full costs of the 5,000 VUser test.
Amazon’s cloud is elastic, and we “rent” the servers needed for your tests. However, there is a minimum of 1 hour increments that Amazon will bill us. For example, if your test needs 20 servers to hit your defined peak users, we buy those 20 servers upfront before your test actually starts. Then if your load test dies 5 minutes into it, we are still charged as if the test used all 20 servers for 1 hour.
Thus, we recommend that you start with smaller tests to verify that you have all of the environmental factors properly configured. Growing the volume in several tests that increase in volume will potentially eliminate the “wasted” feeling of throwing 5,000 users at a server that fails at 500 users.
- How do I stop a test that has killed my server?
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Why aren’t the 500 users evenly distributed across all 5 of my servers behind a round robin load balancer?
A round robin load balancer will not work very well for testing your configuration unless you are using a much higher number of virtual users (at least 1000 or more). Each of our simulation servers will resolve the DNS name independently of the others, but each of our servers will simulate hundreds of users. I would expect a peak load of 500 users to get routed to more than one of your servers, but probably not all 5 of them. A peak load of 200 users or less is likely to hit only one of your servers.
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Will the load test show up in the Google Analytics reports?
Most of our clients use a different mechanism for watching the user activity of a load test. There are many tools for monitoring the website, including several excellent options for open source and commercial products such as New Relic, Loggly, and Hyperic. Most of these are very inexpensive or free, up to a certain level. These types of tools provide significant information regarding the user activity as well as important data on your architecture. For example, is your web server memory bound when response times start to increase drastically? Or did your database server hit 99% utilization when throughput drops?
New Relic and Hyperic can monitor server activity from the local server using an agent. Loggly is a tool that has teamed up with New Relic for analyzing server logs which can make your life easier when trying to extrapolate the user activity from your server log.
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Can your system run load tests behind my firewall for non-Internet applications?
Unfortunately not. LoadStorm is only for web applications that can be reached from the Amazon cloud. If you have an intranet application, then opening a hole in your firewall and providing a URL or public IP address that can reach the intranet application will allow LoadStorm to run load tests against it.
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How much does LoadStorm emulate the caching abilities of a real browser client? Will cache be reset across various sessions?
The short answer is: If your browser caches it, LoadStorm will cache it for a virtual user. When a virtual user completes a script it closes the session. Then it clears all cookies and cache before repeating the script.
Our load testing tool is designed to closely mimic the browser, but it offers three settings for caching behavior. There are a few exceptions. We do not cache HTML resources since these are often dynamically generated. | https://loadstorm.com/faq-topics/3-running-load-tests/ |
As we are surrounded by a diverse range of social scientists, we have at least a weekly opportunity to attend a seminar on a colleague’s work. One of our colleagues, Ulrike Weckel, Professor in Media and History, is Richard von Weizsacker Visiting Fellow at the European Studies Centre. Being a historian, she analysed how ‘new media’ in the previous centuries influenced society. She covered amongst other media, paintings and illustrations of the 17th Century as ‘new media’. Her talk comprised reflections regarding manipulation and addiction, and also gender issues. I learned that fear of addiction is not something new, related to the digital age: it has occurred with every type ‘new’ media throughout history. As Ulrike’s fields of research also include the gender history of sociability in the 19th century, she explained that women becoming addicted to reading had been a worry in the past: what about their tasks in the household? What’s more, I was surprised to see 50-year-old TV footage, making clear that addiction was already a pronounced fear with the introduction of radio and television, not so long ago, although people wanted to be ‘updated’ to be prepared for what everybody would be talking about the next day. Ulrike – being a historian – did not talk about the 21th Century, but is it clear that history is repeating itself: what we are calling today ‘social’ or ‘new’ media has a similar impact, although the pace and impact are much more significant.
The same issues have always been prevalent regarding fear of misuse of media for propaganda, and of a kind of literacy-divide in society. The use of media to manage emotions, and to mislead society, and for propaganda purposes are not new either, no more than media also focusing on sensation and profit. New media also could be ‘threatening’, such as with the first ‘moving images’, where people became afraid of becoming part of the scene on the screen. A nice example of this you can see in the first video in history, and people’s reaction to it.
Another interesting talk was given by Professor Jan Zielonka. He presented to us the ideas he is putting together in a new book. He compared the Europe of states to many other concepts, such as a Europe of resources, a Europe of infrastructure. His slides, which are not yet publicly available, used interesting data cartography tools, produced based upon statistical data, here at the University of Oxford. As soon as the maps are public, I’ll share them for inspiration with the EPRS colleagues dealing with graphical issues and animated infographics.
Previous Post The Oxford Martin School, a ‘Foresight College’? | https://evidenceandpolicy.blog/2017/12/06/lectures-at-the-european-studies-centre-ever-inspiring/ |
Movement 11: Facing Mortality
All that lives is mortal and will die. Death is inevitable and normal and cannot be separated from living. Yet ours is a culture that likes to deny and ignore death, both the prospect of our own personal death and reality of the deaths of nature and animals that we cause through our actions. Denying death, we end up also denying aspects of life. Facing our mortality makes life more precious. Can we live like we know we are dying?
Inspiration
“A civilization that denies death ends by denying life.” —Octavio Paz
“The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.” ― Carl Sagan
“All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral—both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one, and nowhere.”― Marcus Aurelius
“My refuge exists in my capacity to love. If I can learn to love death then I can begin to find refuge in change.” —Terry Tempest Williams
i don’t pay attention to the world ending.
it has ended for me many times and began again in the morning.
—Nayyirah Waheed
Spiritual Exercises
Exercise One: A Memento Mori
Memento mori translates to “remember you must die”, and it refers to art or objects that can be frequent reminders to us of our own mortality. You can see many examples of different memento mori here: History of Memento Mori (dailystoic.com)
Try using a memento mori in your own daily practice. You can be as simple or as creative as you like. You could purchase a piece of art that reminds you of mortality, or you could sketch a skull and crossbones on a sticky note. Or choose a quote about death or a more subtle symbol, such as an hourglass, if you like. Whatever your symbol or visual reminder is, place it in a spot where you will see it everyday. Encounter the memento mori and let it remind you that life is temporary, and as such is precious.
Exercise Two: Observe Death and Decay
In nature, death and decay are all around us and are a natural part of the cycles and systems of life. On a hike through the woods you might encounter fallen leaves, rotting stumps, possibly even animal bodies. But in our human-centered artificial environments, we usually strive to keep decay well out of sight (unless you count the food going bad in the fridge!). In some spiritual traditions, such as Buddhism, there is a meditation on mortality referred to as “corpse contemplation” where you observe a dead body and meditate upon mortality. This is a simple variation on that:
Get some cut flowers and place them in a vase with water. Put them somewhere you will see them everyday. Don’t change the water or do anything to prolong them. Watch and observe as they wilt and decay. Make note of the feelings this brings up for you. Reflect on the inevitable mortality of all life. Keep them and observe them for as long as you can before you dispose of them (preferably to compost so they can complete their decay process).
Exercise Three: Dead for a Day or A Day Off
This exercise, based on an idea by Stephen Levine (A Year to Live by Stephen Levine | Book Excerpt | Spirituality & Practice (spiritualityandpractice.com)), challenges us to imagine the world going on without us in it anymore. It’s a bit similar to a movie like It’s a Wonderful Life, where you catch a glimpse of what life would be like without you. It’s simple enough to do. For one whole day, as you engage in your life, imagine to yourself what would happen to the objects, people, and places around you after you were dead. Your toothbrush? Would it be thrown away? Your clothes? Your home? Your family? Etc. Continue through your whole day, imagining a future where you are dead.
This exercise can be followed up with A Day Fully Alive, where you repeat the process but switch from imagining yourself as dead to visualizing yourself as fully and vibrantly alive. How do you interact with the world around you when you are fully present to the precious life you are living?
Exercise Four: Write Your Own Obituary
If you died today, would you be happy with the life you’ve led and the legacy you leave behind? Use this writing exercise to explore that question: sit down and write a truthful obituary for yourself of your life so far. How would you be remembered? Read it over and ask yourself: am I happy with how I’m living my life? What’s missing from my life? What might I need to do to make my life feel complete?
And then, if you like, you can follow up with a fantasy or dream obituary. Write one for yourself as though you’ve lived your dream life, done the things you most truly want to do, and left the legacy you want to leave behind. What kind of life does that dream obituary describe? How could you live that life?
Practical Exercises
Exercise Five: Advanced Care Planning
Facing mortality means planning ahead for the inevitability of your own dying and death. Do your doctors and loved ones know how you want to be cared for? Do they know what your wishes are for your remains and how you want to be remembered? Have these conversations now and get your plans in place. An excellent resource for this work is Five Wishes.
Community Exercises
Exercise Six: Organize a Community Conversation About Death
Death and dying are often treated as taboo topics in our culture, leaving us unpracticed in talking about death. However, I believe most people need and welcome a chance to confront mortality and grief together and discover how universal this experience really is. People are organizing ways to have this conversation, in a variety of ways. You could organize a Before I Die Project or a Death Café, or create another option of your own invention.
Resources
Articles:
Mindfulness of death: How to meditate on your mortality – Vox
Facing Death | Spiritual Literacy in Today’s World | Spirituality & Practice (spiritualityandpractice.com)
Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene – The New York Times (nytimes.com)
Video:
Griefwalker: Griefwalker | Orphan Wisdom
Flight From Death: Watch Flight From Death: The Quest for Immortality | Prime Video (amazon.com)
End Game, available on Netflix
Reflection Questions:
- When did you first become aware of death? What experiences have shaped how you view death?
- What are your spiritual, religious, or philosophical beliefs about death? How do these beliefs shape the way you think about and face mortality? How do they shape the way you live your life?
- What, if anything, do you find scary, disturbing, or difficult about facing the fact of mortality and death? How do you address those feelings?
- If you knew you were dying, would you change anything about the way you are living your life? Are you living your one life well? Are you leaving the legacy you want to leave behind?
- How could we, as a society, do a better job at facing our own mortality? Would facing mortality help us face other issues, such as climate change? | https://practicalspiritualresiliency.org/?page_id=118 |
# Daphne Guinness
Daphne Diana Joan Susanna Guinness (born 9 November 1967) is an English designer, actress, producer, and musician.
## Early life
Her father is Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne, the eldest son of Diana Mitford and Bryan Guinness. Diana Mitford was the daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, the father of the Mitford sisters. Mitford divorced Guinness and married the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet of Ancoats. Daphne Guinness has said she did not know of Mosley's political affiliations, before she heard in 1980 on the BBC News that he had died.
As a child, Guinness grew up moving between the country houses owned by her family in England and Ireland, and a villa in Spain, where Salvador Dalí was a family friend. She later lived in New York with her half-sister, Catherine Guinness, who was working as a Personal Assistant to Andy Warhol.
## Fashion
Guinness's first work in fashion was with Isabella Blow. She has worked with Karl Lagerfeld, NARS, MAC, Akris, Gareth Pugh, and Philip Treacy, working with them artistically or as a model or both.
She was a friend of the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Scheduled to model for charity on the runway the day his suicide was announced, Guinness veiled herself in mourning.
She designs clothes, jewelry, and perfume. Since 1994, she has been on the International Best Dressed List. In 2011, she created a make-up line for MAC cosmetics.
In 2011 Guinness was featured on the cover of Zoo Magazine.
## Film
### Producer
Guinness has produced and edited three short films:
Cashback, short film nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, was later made into a feature-length version. Guinness produced this film for the photographer Sean Ellis.
### Acting
In 2011, Guinness starred in Joe Lally's film, "The Murder of Jean Seberg".
At the end of 2011, photographers Markus Klinko and Indrani, Guinness, and stylist GK Reid produced "The Legend of Lady White Snake", a film based on a Chinese legend, where Guinness played the central role of Lady White Snake. Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote her dialogue for the film.
In 2012, Guinness starred in Shakki, a short sci-fi fiction directed by Julien Landais.
## Music
David Bowie encouraged Guinness to pursue music, introducing her to Tony Visconti, who had produced three of her albums as of August 2020.
### Optimist in Black (2016)
After the deaths of her brother Jasper and friends Isabella Blow and Alexander McQueen, Guinness went to a studio in Ireland, intending to record a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row.” While there, she wrote and recorded original songs which became the basis for her first album, Optimist in Black. Optimist In Black was released on May 27, 2016, through private label Agent Anonyme/Absolute. The album was described by Kim Taylor Bennett of Vice as “drama-pop with a gothic tinge” and by Matthew Schneier of The New York Times as having “a glam-rock-ish, slightly psychedelic flavor.”
### Daphne & The Golden Chord (2018)
In April 2018, Guinness released her second album, Daphne & The Golden Chord, also produced by Visconti. The album was recorded on analog tapes at British Grove Studios in a three-week session. The band included 58 instrumentalists including timpani, tambourine, and bassoon players. Will Hodgkinson of The Times of London described the album as “aristocratic glam fuelled by wit, character and a clear and abiding love of rock’n’roll.”
### Revelations (2020)
Guinness’ third album, Revelations, was released in August 2020. Like her prior two albums, it was produced by Visconti. Thomas Barrie of British GQ said Revelations features “lusher, disco-inflected instrumentation, with flourishes arranged by Visconti in strings, and parts written for more experimental, obscure instruments like the theremin and ocarina.” Guinness collaborated with LaChapelle on a three-part film series also titled Revelations, which featured songs from the album and explored references to the Book of Revelation.
### Music Videos
Guinness’s music career began with the release in 2013 and 2014 of several music videos of songs for songs which would later be included in her first album. These early videos include “Fatal Flaw” (directed by Nick Knight) in 2013, and “Evening in Space,” directed by David LaChapelle, in 2014. Jessie Peterson of MTV News said the video took the “fashion world to space.” It featured costumes from designers such as Iris van Herpen and Noritaka Tatehana.
Guinness also released music video versions for two songs that were on the 2018 Daphne & The Golden Chord album – “Talking To Yourself” and “Remember to Breathe”.
Two music videos directed by LaChapelle were released in 2020 for the songs from the Revelations album LaChapelle on the videos for “Hallucinations” and “Heaven”, two of the songs on the Revelations album.
## Charity work
Guinness has walked in two of Naomi Campbell's Fashion for Relief shows to raise funds for disaster victims. In April 2008, she auctioned off part of her wardrobe, with the proceeds going to a British charity called Womankind Worldwide, which deals with women's issues, such as domestic violence.
In June 2010, Guinness purchased at auction the entire wardrobe of Isabella Blow, her friend who died by suicide in 2007. The lot was purchased prior to an auction, which was arranged at Christie's. She later announced that she would be displaying the wardrobe at Central Saint Martins and online, as well as starting a foundation to help with mental illness. The official show, entitled "Isabella Blow: Fashion Galore," is set for display in November 2013 at Somerset House in London.
In February 2013, Guinness, along with Baroness Monica von Neumann and Lynn Ban, donated a collection of her shoes to the Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology's Shoe Obsession exhibit.
## Personal life
In 1987, she married Spyros Niarchos, the second son of Stavros Niarchos. The couple had three children. Her $39 million settlement, obtained at the time of her 1999 divorce, was added to her Guinness inheritance.
She lives in London and Manhattan with her three children: Nicolas Stavros Niarchos (born 1989), Alexis "Lex" Spyros Niarchos (born 1991), and Ines Sophia Niarchos (born 1995).
She has been romantically involved with French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy for a number of years. In the February 2011 issue of Harper's Bazaar, Guinness confirmed to journalist Derek Blasberg: "He is obviously the love of my life." | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Guinness |
Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to grow at the highest rate in 10 years to 7.5 per cent in 2022, with an expected surplus in the state’s budget of about 6.3 per cent, according to credit rating agency S&P.
S&P expects the Saudi economy’s productive capacity to grow in the long run due to the development of general finances and significant economic reforms.
S&P has updated its outlook for Saudi Arabia to “positive” and assessed the Kingdom’s short and long-term foreign and local currency sovereign credit ratings to A-/A-2.
The agency said the positive outlook reflects the kingdom’s strong GDP growth, financial policies and government reform programmes, which aim to diversify the economy.
READ: Aramco profits rise 82% in the first quarter of 2022
In terms of flexibility and performance, the agency expects support for financial balances in the years 2022-2025. This is due to government efforts to develop public finances and a commitment to improving spending policy and raising its efficiency, despite the rise in oil prices.
The agency predicts that the cost of sovereign debt will not rise significantly, given that most of the public debt portfolio is running at a fixed rate.
The agency has also said that inflation rates in the kingdom were relatively low compared to its counterparts, as the government subsidises fuel and food prices as well as tying the local currency with the relatively strong US dollar. | https://islamreligionguardian.com/saudi-gdp-predicted-to-grow-to-highest-record-in-10-years/ |
Haims: Be your own advocate for heart disease and heart attacks
Unless you have overt symptoms of a heart concerns, getting testing can be challenging. Many medical providers monitor risk factors for heart disease by watching people’s cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, body-mass index and suggesting people quit smoking. Unfortunately, these risk factors do not always paint a full picture of one’s true risk.
For many years, I have had my primary care physician monitor my blood — not with just the common complete blood count test, but with about five or six different blood panels. I chose to do this not for concerns of any one issue, but to give me a better understanding of my overall well-being. So how was it that I experienced a heart attack with no warning signs?
Since my last column about heart attacks, (not cardiac arrest — there’s a distinct difference) my office has received more than a dozen calls and emails from people sharing their stories of similar situations. Some stories had happier endings than others. But overall, the consensus was that people had thought they had been proactive in monitoring their risk of heart disease only to find out that situations were far graver than they had anticipated. So, how could this be?
The answer may very well be that many medical providers rely too much on the traditional risk factors indicated by blood tests. Additionally, navigating insurance hurdles and costs muddy things up a bit.
Regardless, the answer to addressing concerns of potential risk factors lies solely on each of us. We must be our own advocate and educate ourselves and loved ones on not just risk factors, but also symptoms and courses of correction.
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Before I proceed further, I feel I should make a clarification — heart attacks are not the same as cardiac arrest. Therefore, the symptoms that we need to be aware of are different. Heart attack symptoms are like a plumbing issue while cardiac arrest is an electrical issue.
Symptoms of a heart attack can be both overt and subtle, even “silent.” Often signs may consist of chest pain, a feeling of shortness of breath and or dizziness, breaking out in a cold sweat, discomfort in one of your arms, back or neck, and even a feeling of nausea or vomiting. These are often subtle signs. While perceptions of someone grabbing their chest and being in extreme pain before collapsing to the ground do occur, these obvious signs are not always present.
Symptoms of a cardiac arrest are overt. Often, signs include disrupted or stalled breathing and a loss of consciousness. While warning signs can be present weeks earlier, they are sometimes difficult to gauge. Chest pain is most common among men, while women often report shortness of breath. Unexplained fainting, dizziness, fatigue and/or a racing heart are also commonly experienced.
If you want to be proactive in addressing concerns of a heart attack, you must not only be aware of your cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, and physically activity, but you must also speak to your medical provider about other types of testing and preventive therapies.
The following two tests may provide more clarity on your risk factors:
A coronary calcium scan: This is a low-radiation imaging test that identifies plaque deposits in the blood vessels. This test is often covered by insurance and is paid for by Medicare. If your insurance does not cover it or your provider gives you hard time about getting it, you can pay for the test yourself. Here in the mountain towns, the test costs between $100 and $200. That’s a nominal amount to pay for such valuable insight to your risk.
A coronary CT angiography: This imaging provides high-resolution images of your heart and its blood vessels and is used to check for narrowed or blocked arteries in your heart caused by plaque. This is a more expensive test often costing between $1,500 and $2,000. However, while this imaging procedure is often covered by insurance, you may have to undergo other testing before this will be covered.
These two heart scans may provide results that will motivate people who are at risk to make important lifestyle changes and follow treatment plans.
There are many factors that are used to determine one’s risks for heart disease. First and foremost, diet and lifestyle are easiest to control and monitor. But, if that is not enough and you still have concerns, you must advocate for yourself. Speak to you medical providers about options available and know that there is testing available that can provide greater detail of your risk. Educate yourself and ask questions.
Please read my next column addressing cardiac arrest. A little education of what to do and understanding of tools available can save a life.
Judson Haims is the owner of Visiting Angels Home Care in Eagle County. He can be contacted at VisitingAngels.com/comtns or by calling 970-328-5526. | https://www.vaildaily.com/opinion/haims-be-your-own-advocate-for-heart-disease-and-heart-attacks/ |
On July 1, 2013, all employers with more than ten employees will be required participate in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify system in order to obtain a business license as part of the Illegal Immigration and Enforcement Act (IIEA). The law has serious consequences for construction companies that perform public work in Georgia.
The IIEA went into effect on July 1, 2011, but the E-Verify requirement was phased in over time. Effective January 1, 2011, the IIEA required all employers with 500 or more employees to attest to their registration and participation in E-Verify as a condition of obtaining a local business license. Beginning July 1, 2012, the E-Verify requirement applied to employers with 100 to 499 employees.
Form affidavits to assist in obtaining business licenses and bidding can be found here. The compliance deadline posted by the Attorney General on the Department of Law's official website can be found here. The law does not require employers to use E-Verify to review immigration status of already existing employees. It applies to the employment eligibility of all newly-hired employees.
Failure to comply with the IIEA is grounds to reject a bid on state, local and county public projects in Georgia. A signed, notarized affidavit, which attests to the contractor's registration with the federal program and use of E-Verify, must be submitted with the bid as part of the bid package.
If you have questions about complying with the IIEA or other concerns about E-Verify, please contact the author of this alert, Ben Shapiro. | https://www.bakerdonelson.com/Georgias-Illegal-Immigration-and-Enforcement-Act-05-10-2013 |
Regular support for the funds under the European programs managed by the MRDPW continues
The Ministry of Regional Development and Public Works continues to make payments for projects to beneficiaries - municipalities, regional administrations, ministries, non-governmental organizations and others.
Regardless of the complicated epidemic situation and the declared state of emergency in the country, related to the spread of COVID-19 in the territory of Bulgaria, as well as the emergency measures introduced in the territories of the neighboring countries, the necessary organization was created and there is no delay in the processing and reimbursement of costs to beneficiaries. In the period from March 13, when the state of emergency was announced, funds amounting to EUR 90 407 have been paid to beneficiaries for implemented activities under the INTERREG-IPA Bulgaria-North Macedonia 2014-2020 Program.
The processing and reimbursement of expenditure incurred by the beneficiaries of the Programme continue to contribute to the fullest extent to addressing the crisis and minimize the negative consequences in the social and economic systems. The timely response from beneficiaries and contractors is also an important prerequisite, as in case anybody within the Managing and control bodies - Beneficiary – Contractor system fails to fulfill their commitments or control functions, reimbursement of expenditure is more time consuming. | http://www.ipa-cbc-007.eu/news/regular-support-funds-under-european-programs-managed-mrdpw-continues |
From AEAStat staff:
On May 11, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors invited public comment on the design and implementation of the annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) through 2023. Comments are due by July 10, 2020.
The SHED is used to collect insightful information from consumers concerning the well-being of U.S. households and how individuals and their families are faring in the economy. The collected information could be used for the Board's Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households; Board studies or working papers; professional journals; the Federal Reserve Bulletin; testimony and reports to the Congress; or other vehicles.
The SHED questionnaire includes such topics as individuals' overall financial well-being, employment experiences, income and savings behaviors, economic preparedness, access to banking and credit, housing and living arrangement decisions, education and human capital, student loans, and retirement planning. The overall content of the SHED questionnaire depends on changing economic, regulatory, or legislative developments as well as changes in the financial services industry. In April 2020, the Board conducted a SHED supplemental survey to ascertain the impacts of the pandemic on household economics and decisionmaking.
Federal Register notice:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/05/11/2020-09940/proposed-agency-information-collection-activities-comment-request
SHED website -- including October 2019 report with April 2020 COVID supplement:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/shed.htm
Public use files:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/shed_data.htm
Draft 2020 supporting statement:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/reportforms/formsreview/FR%203077%20OMB%20SS.pdf
Point of contact: [email protected]
The Board proposes to revise the SHED questionnaire by changing some of the core questionnaire questions to reduce the time respondents spend on specific questions by simplifying the language, as well as incorporating additional questions on emerging economic issues, and removing questions that do not require that new data be collected on an annual basis. These proposed revisions would be effective immediately.
The Board anticipates conducting the SHED questionnaire annually with as many as 21,500 respondents per survey, including those who are sent the questionnaire but opt not to complete it. The SHED data collection will be performed by a third-party a vendor selected through a competitive bidding process who maintains an online probability-based Internet panel. An online probability-based Internet panel is defined here as a panel of voluntary respondents that have been recruited through an address-based sampling methodology (ABS) using the Delivery Sequence File of the United States Postal Service technique or other similar technique that would allow for equal probability of selection into the panel for all potential respondents. The ABS Internet panel allows the same respondents to be re-interviewed in subsequent surveys, as the respondents remain active in the panel for several years.
The Board expects the questionnaire would be conducted in the third or fourth quarter each year. The Board expects to publish the SHED questionnaire used each year, the responses to that questionnaire (without any individual respondent’s PII), and the final report regarding the results of the questionnaire on the Board’s public website. This information is typically posted in the second quarter of the year, approximately 6 to 9 months after the data was collected on the SHED questionnaire.
The SHED questionnaire is comprised of a significant section of core content, which remains largely the same each year. The SHED questionnaire also normally includes a number of special questions to address the Board’s need for information on emerging risks and trends that affect consumers.
The core content of the SHED questionnaire is comprised of the following topics:
Living Arrangements: respondents report information on the types of people living in the household and why these individuals are living together.
General Well-Being: respondents report information on the major life events that have affected them in the last year and how they are managing financially.
Employment: respondents report information on their:
• recent or current labor market status and desired status,
• recent employment benefits and satisfaction,
• interactions with the labor market, and
• perception of their human capital and skills.
Gig Economy: respondents report information on infrequent, informal activities (also known as gig activities) that they performed in to earn money, including the amount of time spent on these activities, the main reasons for performing them, and the amount of income earned.
Housing: respondents report on their housing arrangement and satisfaction with their housing situation.
Rent: respondents report information on:
• whether they have even been evicted,
• the reason for their current rental status,
• their rental experience, and
• their monthly rent payment.
Homeownership and Mortgage: respondents report information on the amount of their monthly mortgage payments.
Banking: respondents report on whether they have an account with a bank and whether they have recently used alternative financial services.
Credit Application: respondents report on their confidence in being approved for credit and their recent experiences applying for credit.
Credit Condition: respondents report on:
• the ways that they manage their finances,
• the perception of their credit score, and
• their experiences with having and using credit.
Education: respondents report information on:
• their recent, current, and expected future education,
• the reasons for not attending or completing an educational program, and
• their perceptions of the value (cost vs benefit) of their most recent educational program.
Student Loans: respondents report information on their use of and experiences with student loans.
Retirement Planning: respondents report information on:
• the types of retirement savings or pension plans they have and their use of these plans,
• their comfort with making investment decisions related to these plans,
• their reasoning for or planned age in which to retire, and
• their source of funds for retirement.
Income and Consumption: respondents report information on their savings and expenses, as well as sources and variability of income.
Financial Support From Outside the Home: respondents report information on whether they receive assistance from and/or provide assistance to anyone outside of the household for bill payment.
Emergency Fund: respondents report information on their emergency savings and their ability to pay emergency unexpected expenses.
Health and Insurance: respondents report whether:
• they recently chose to forgo medical treatment due to the expense,
• paid for an unexpected medical expense out of pocket, and
• are currently covered by health insurance.
Financial Hardship: respondents report information on economic hardships that they recently experienced and the financial strain the hardships caused.
Childhood Background: respondents report information on where they grew up and the highest level of education that their parents received.
Financial Literacy: respondents answer questions used to gauge their understanding of financial markets.
Other Ad-hoc Topics Related to Financial Well-Being: examples of previous ad-hoc topics include issues such as experiences with auto loans, usage of mobile banking tools, experiences with discrimination, desired neighborhood characteristics, as well as follow-up questions related to the core content areas above.
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Andrew Smith is an undergraduate student at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at The University of Dundee, Scotland.
He focused his final year dissertation project on ASMR to fulfill the requirements for his Bachelor of Design degree (with Honors).
Andrew’s completed dissertation was 47 pages (~10,000 words), was titled, “An investigation into the interconnected nature of aesthetics, sensory perception and sensory phenomena” and weaved together the following topics:
- ASMR
- The Golden Rectangle (a shape linked to art, design, and architecture)
- Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (a therapy for trauma patients)
- Brain Wave States, Hypnosis, & REM, Sleep
- Brain Default Mode Network & Synaesthesia
- Interpersonal bonding
- Senses, Sensory Processing Disorder, & Autism
In my interview with Andrew he explains the main hypothesis of his dissertation, the methods he used, interesting perspectives of ASMR he uncovered, his challenges with writing his dissertation, and tips for others writing a dissertation about ASMR.
Below are my questions in bold, his replies in italics, a link to his completed dissertation, and links to connect with Andrew.
What inspired you to do your dissertation on ASMR?
My life has taught me that most often, everything is connected, whether that be physically, emotionally or spiritually. ASMR remained a very large part of my life throughout my studies and still is today. Although ASMR is something that I have always experienced (I referred to it as “the fuzzies” in my head when growing up), I always assumed that everyone experienced it but just didn’t talk about it.
ASMR as a phenomenon is something that has always been present in our lives, but went virtually unnoticed, or masqueraded as a form of Frisson for example until there was a platform in which to discuss it, mainly, the internet.
I am highly intrigued by phenomenology and phenomena such as The Golden Rectangle. After some research it became apparent to me that therapies such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing) and the viewing mechanisms of The Golden Rectangle are intrinsically linked to phenomena such as ASMR.
With evidence of so much interconnected aspects of therapy, aesthetics and sense perception, it seemed very obvious to me that a deeper understanding of ASMR as a whole, and as a piece of a much bigger pie, could lead to advances in offering support and relief to people living with various sensory processing difficulties.
What was the main hypothesis of your dissertation?
My main hypothesis is that a better understanding of sensory phenomena such as ASMR, and how they connect to other phenomena, may provide the ability to offer support to individuals living with sensory processing difficulties such as is often present in people with Autism for example.
The viewing mechanisms of aesthetic phenomena such as The Golden Rectangle, which has long been known as a tool to aid aesthetics in design and create visual harmony, uses what is known as bilateral stimulation and is intrinsically linked to phenomena such as ASMR, which also utilises bilateral stimulation to create a form of aesthetic harmony.
Bilateral stimulation is also a very important factor in EMDR. I suggest that the positive therapeutic elements associated to bilateral stimulation during EMDR is potentially a result of ASMR, further suggesting the potential applications of ASMR as a tool for therapy.
What methods did you use to write your dissertation?
My dissertation began by writing a literature review titled “The Golden Rectangle as a design myth and the interconnected nature of maths, art, music and nature”. In this I researched The Golden Rectangle as a phenomenon and how it had gained the reputation that it has.
By doing this I discovered that The Golden Rectangle is both a social, psychological and biological phenomenon. One of the reasons we perceive The Golden Rectangle to be most appealing is that it facilitates the flow of information to our brain in the fastest and therefore easiest way. The idea that a phenomenon is grounded within us biologically, suggested to me that other phenomena may also have a biological function.
From this I began by researching what little scientific research has been conducted into ASMR, through publications of research experiments. An example of this being “An examination of the default mode network in individuals with autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR)” (Smith et al). As ASMR is still a relatively new phenomenon, what little information is available is quite condensed, making it rather easy to find.
I began by reading everything I could about ASMR, including “the idiots guide: ASMR” by Julie Young and Ilse Blansert and this proved invaluable. This book reinforced a lot of connections that I had felt were present within the ASMR phenomenon, and this helped give me some confidence in what I was writing. As as artist and designer it is my job to find connections and bring disparate themes together.
What do you think is the single most important perspective in your dissertation related to ASMR?
I believe that the single most important perspective is the fact that we cannot look at ASMR with one perspective. It needs to be considered as part of our sensory processing capabilities and debated alongside other conditions.
I believe that by understanding how conditions like ASMR, Synaesthesia and Misophonia function and are connected on a sensory level, that we can open up new routes of research or practical applications to better understand and treat those people who suffer from sensory processing difficulties, whether that be as a result of a specific condition or as a symptom of another condition.
What other interesting things about ASMR did you learn about or uncover?
I think that the shear growth of ASMR is fascinating and what it represents socially and anthropologically is also worthy of further study. For example a YouTube search for ‘asmr’ in 2015 returned 1.5 million results, compared to 11.1 million in February 2018.
This shows the scale of ASMR as a digital phenomenon, highlighting the importance of a digital platform to how we live our daily lives and the evolution of our aesthetic requirements as socially functioning beings.
What were your biggest challenges to writing and completing your dissertation?
Word count was the biggest challenge. As ASMR is such an interconnected phenomenon it became more and more apparent how many phenomena, such as synaesthesia, can be linked to ASMR. My first draft had twice the word count it should have and so editing became an issue for me. The connections between ASMR and other phenomenon are so vast, it became very difficult to choose the most relevant factors to make my point and stay within the word count.
Confidence in what I was doing was also an issue. My tutor advised me that the subject matter was ‘pushing it’ in terms of a design focused course. I genuinely believe though that artists and designers have a pivotal role to play in the development of support mechanisms for people living with various difficulties.
For example, pictures are often used in place of words to help people dealing with Autism. Graphic Designers are very aware of ‘design for accessibility’ which aims to support making design features more accessible and understandable to people living with various difficulties i.e hearing impairment, dyslexia, autistic spectrum etc.
I completed a module at university called “Art, Science and Visual Thinking” and this really highlighted the scope and need for artists, designers and scientists/researchers to work together. All of these factors to me, reinforced that ASMR as a phenomena needs to be better understood in a more multi-disciplinary way, inclusive of all industries so that we may work together and find better ways of supporting people.
With very few people to talk with about the subject matter, it became quite difficult to keep my confidence up, especially with such limited research available. I think in these times it is important to have faith in your gut instinct and go with it. Once you have decided on something you feel that strongly about, I think it is best to keep going forward, make the most out of it and give it your all.
What advice would you give to others writing a dissertation about ASMR?
My advice would be to structure your research. I used a colour coding system in order to clearly define which factor of my research related to other factors, for example certain aspects of synaesthesia can be related to methods for aiding people with dyslexia. With so many connections, it is important to keep track of what you have covered.
I would also advise to enjoy it. ASMR by its very nature is positive, relaxing and therapeutic, although at times stressful due to the pressure of work, writing it was positive, relaxing and therapeutic. I think that if you are passionate about something you should give it a go.
As an art student the subject matter of my dissertation is slightly off topic (due to the lack of knowledge surrounding it) but I genuinely feel that every industry, especially the creative industries, can prove invaluable in providing support to those who need it. I truly feel we need to understand ASMR better in order for people to know what else we could do with it.
Oh…. and manage your references, it’s a nightmare if you forget where you read something!
Andrew’s completed dissertation:
- Read Andrew’s dissertation HERE
Links to connect with Andrew:
- Website: http://www.shiftedperspective.org
- Instagram: @shifted_perspective
- E-mail: [email protected]
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ShiftedOPerspective
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-smith-822bab163/
Click the links below to learn more about ASMR research:
- Tips: How to be an ASMR researcher.
- Insight: Interviews with ASMR researchers.
- Browse: ASMR research and publications.
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This post brought to you by ASMR University. A site with the mission of increasing the awareness, understanding, and research of the Art and Science of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. | https://asmruniversity.com/2018/06/01/dissertation-asmr-aesthetics/ |
PROCESSED meat company Tiger Brands has been hit by yet another set back after test results revealed traces of Listeria at its Pretoria plant.
This comes a few weeks after products from its Polokwane and Germiston plants had to be recalled after it was announced that they were sources of the listeriosis outbreak in the country.
The company announced on Monday that tests had revealed that its Pretoria base was in the same boat.
“Tiger Brands continued extensive testing of our products and production facilities beyond Polokwane and Germiston, and discovered the presence of very low levels of Listeria at the Pretoria meat processing factory. These results have been sent for whole genome sequencing to determine whether ST6 is present or not at the facility. The results will only become available in due course,” the company said.
“Although the level detected was well within the range of government standards for the presence of Listeria, Tiger Brands has taken the precautionary measure of closing the factory and has instituted a product recall of all Snax products manufactured at the Pretoria factory with immediate effect. In addition, we will be sending samples for genome sequencing to establish the specific strain of Listeria.”
The company added that given the suspension of operations at the Polokwane, Germiston and Pretoria sites, which are the primary recipients of the production of the Company’s Clayville abattoir, operations at the Clayville abattoir would be wound down with the objective of suspending operations completely at the end of March 2018.
Tiger Brands CEO Lawrence Mac Dougall said the decision was due to a promise to its stakeholders that they would not compromise on quality, safety and internal controls.
“These are values and principles that I have actively communicated since being appointed CEO 18 months ago. It is therefore devastating that despite this focus and ensuring that we more than meet legislated industry standards, test results show that Listeria ST6 has been found in the environment at our Polokwane facility,” he said.
Mac Dougall has maintained the company’s stand that they are not responsible for the over 180 reporter deaths associated with the outbreak.
The Department of Health has reported that people have lost their lives as a result of Listeriosis and according to the Minister of Health, 90% of these are as a result of LST6.
“Although no link has, as yet, been confirmed between the presence of LST6 at our Polokwane plant and the loss of life I deeply regret any loss of life and I want to offer my heartfelt condolences to all those who have lost their loved ones. Any loss of life, no matter the circumstance, is tragic,” he said.
Mac Dougall said they acknowledged that they were dealing with a national crisis and want to assure the public that in the event that a tangible link is established between their products and listeriosis illnesses or fatalities, Tiger Brands woulr take steps to consider and address any valid claims which may be made against it in due course.
“During this period of investigation and discovery we have decided to be extra cautious and to take immediate precautionary action when traces of Listeria are detected where they are not expected. We are investing all our time and energy into not only understanding the cause of the LST6 detection, but also how it could have come into our facility. Local and international experts are helping us put measures in place to prevent this happening again in any of our meat processing facilities. While every effort is being made to get to the bottom of this outbreak it will take time to complete our investigation,” he said.
Mac Dougall said Tiger Brands was working with a team comprising some of the world’s leading local and international scientific experts in listeria management.
He said their Polokwane, Germiston and Pretoria factories were undergoing an extensive deep clean of all the equipment, machinery and some structural upgrades of the facilities with the view of ensuring that the facilities exceed the highest, best practice standards for meat processing facilities.
“We will continue to work closely with the Capricorn and Ekurhuleni Departments of Health as we progress with these remedial actions. Listeriosis is a complex and global challenge with increasing outbreaks and mortality rate caused by a variety of food sources. Other potential sources of listeria may well exist and hence a country wide response is needed to address the tragic consequences of listeriosis. A sustainable national solution for South Africa will only be achievable through a collaborative multi-sectoral approach involving industry, government, regulators, scientific experts and civil society groupings,” he said.
Mac Dougall added that a key focus will need to be reviewing and revising the current standards to take into consideration the unique South African context.
“Tiger Brands would like to be at the forefront and play a leading role in this initiative,” he said. | http://www.africantimesnews.co.za/2018/04/13/listeria-tiger-brands-pretoria/ |
Teach Like A Ranger V - The Campfire SWAG Method
In 2009, I had embarked on a solo road trip through Northern California and into Southern Oregon. One of the places I stopped with Lava Beds National Monument, a small park in the northeastern corner of California that is home to a devils playground of craggy lava fields and stories of an epic struggle between the indigenous people who called it home and the US government soldiers sent it to dislodge them.
My first day in the park saw me getting in late, and by the time I set up my tent it was dark enough to see that a campfire had been lit at the central amphitheater. I wandered over and sat down just in time to hear one of the rangers conducting a program focused on some of the myths the parks original residents, the Modoc, used to explain the creation their homeland. The ranger started out by sharing the story with all of us, and at the end began telling us a little about the Modoc people, their history, and how they were eventually hunted down and dislodged from their homes by the military. She then asked that as we explored the lava beds we keep in mind how important this area was to them and respect the rules and regulations the park put in place to preserve it. She then invited anybody who had further questions or comments to join her by the fire and bid the rest of us a good night.
Even 15 years later I still remember this program and the woman who presented it. She wasn’t just good. LeBron James is good, this woman was a national treasure. Apparently I have a very bad poker face, because the man sitting next to me saw my expression as she used her words to weave tapestries and said to me, “Is this your first time at one of her programs?” When I nodded yes, he pointed at her and said, “Yeah, she’s got Campfire Swag.”
It was only a few years later that I realized that the effectiveness of that program she presented was the result of a well known interpretive framework used for educational programs at parks across the country. This formula which I am attributing to the ranger at Lava Beds, is the same one employed when you attend an animal talk about elephants at the zoo or if you watch a TED talk. Heck when I bought my last car it was what the dealers did when he tried to close the deal. This same formula has been re-purposed and reused in almost every imaginable circumstance where somebody is trying to use knowledge as a form of persuasion, and you can use it as a way to reoganize your lessons to make them more engaging and effective.
I’ve heard it called affective persuasion, the SAWP technique, but in honor of that ranger at Lava Beds, I’m go call it Campfire SWAG. Let's go through the major components.
Story - the hook that gets learners engaged intellectually with the subject. It gives them something to chew on and gets them primed to ask questions. It also provides foundational knowledge as a means to go deeper later on.
What this looks like in the classroom;
While this could take the form of a lecture, not all students find that intellectually engaging. The story component is important. Videos are a good example. A guest speaker is a good one as well. You can also make it more learner-centered by making it an activity that helps students create their own story, like exploring a website or participating in a simulation activity.
Why - give people a reason to care. Emotionally engage them with the topic. Help them to place the knowledge fro, the story into a context that is meaningful to them.
What this looks like in the classroom;
Clarify how the knowledge is helpful or how it is going to be useful. Give them an opportunity to ask their own questions and establish their own why. This is the point where knowledge becomes understanding as they seek to relate it to what they are doing in class to previous knowledge or their own world. Providing them guiding questions or facilitating a discussion about the relevance of the Story activity is particularly helpful here.
Action - provocation. Gives the audience an outlet for what they have learned. Connects them with other resources or experiences that will expand their knowledge.
What this looks like in the classroom;
This is where you challenge the learners to apply what they have learned. It could be in the form of project work, another experience, or creating something that they will then use to further the knowledge in class like a presentation or an organizer for use in a discussion. Providing choice here when possible is also highly useful.
Gauge - measure the effectiveness of what you’ve just shared. Allows you to understand and reflect on how good your program was. Things like contextual clues are critical and helping you were fine tune and improve upon the program the next time you present it or when creating your next one.
What this looks like in the classroom;
Here’s is where you use formative assessments. Did your students understand? Were they engaged? Is there anything you could have made better or clearer based on the questions they’re asking at the end or your chosen formative technique? This step can take many forms, such as an exit ticket or something as simple as the amount of on-task behavior you observe associated with the action step. | https://www.festeredu.com/single-post/teach-like-a-ranger-v-the-campfire-swag-method |
1. Apple And Amazon sales are down due to weak global economy.
2. Tech Giants warns and fear about their upcoming profits.
3. Amazon shares falls more than 15% after US stock market closed.
4. Amazon company forcast weak or low sales for festive season than expected.
5. Apple shares also falls after slowing demand for gaming and advertising.
6. Founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos warned about worrying signals coming from the economy.
7. Amazon's sales overall rose 15% Y-o-Y but its international business decrease.
8. In july 2022, Amazon sales are strong but in august and september 2022 sales are weaken. | https://allnews.co.in/web-stories/amazon-share-fall-20-after-us-stock-market-closed/ |
基因演算法的程序如下 :
GAs encode candidate solutions as chromosomes. The way of encoding chromosomes is referred to as representation, which is essentially related to the problem to be solved. For example, bit strings are widely used in functional optimization problems while orders (sequences) are used in combinatorial problems. Depending on representation, GAs can be classified into three genres: binary-coded GAs, real-coded GAs, and order-based GAs. Instead of a single chromosome, GAs evolve with a set of chromosomes, called the population. The fitness function is devised to evaluate the quality (fitness) of candidate solutions (chromosomes). Intuitively, for a maximization problem, the better the solution, the higher the fitness.
The evolution of GAs begins with initialization of the population. Afterwards, GAs embark on the process of reproduction. First, the selection operator picks two chromosomes from the population to serve as parents. Next, GAs perform crossover on these two parents to reproduce their offspring. The predetermined probability, crossover rate, defines the probability to perform crossover. Analogously, mutation is performed with a probability, mutation rate, on the offspring reproduced by crossover to slightly alter some genes. This process of reproduction repeats until the set of offspring, called the subpopulation, is filled. Acting on "Survival of the Fittest", the survivor operator draws the fittest chromosomes out of the subpopulation with (or without) the primitive population; the chosen chromosomes will constitute the population for the next generation. Following this procedure, GAs evolve until a predetermined termination criterion is met.
以下為一些基因演算法的 Java applet 範例 :
621 嘉義縣民雄鄉大學路168號
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COPYRIGHT 2008 LOGOTYPE. AII RIGHTS RESERVED. | http://cilab.cs.ccu.edu.tw/res_research.html |
Trespassers will be prosecuted; a phrase familiar to all property owners. Often, the highest priority for a property owner is to regain possession as quickly as possible. Compensation for damages can be secondary to just getting the property back. A recent case has provided welcome clarification that property owners can prioritise the pursuit of repossession in the courts without compromising subsequent claims for damages.
In Farrar v Leongreen*, Leongreen had successfully pursued a claim for possession of a flat in London from Peter Farrar, who had been trespassing since his lease expired. At the time, Leongreen did not pursue a claim for damages for trespass called mesne profits (usually the ordinary letting value of the property).
When Leongreen brought the claim for possession, the trespass had not been going on for very long. Leongreen’s priority was to get Peter Farrar out of the property as quickly as possible. Adding a claim for mesne profits to the proceedings would have incurred additional costs and delay, which were not justified given the likely value of the mesne profits. Leongreen did, however, reserve the right to claim for mesne profits at a later date.
The claim for possession was more complicated and took a lot longer than originally anticipated. By the time Leongreen’s claim had been successfully concluded, the amount of mesne profits had increased significantly. Leongreen subsequently brought a successful claim to recover mesne profits. Peter Farrar appealed. In his appeal, Peter Farrar stated that the subsequent claim for mesne profits was a breach of the principles of res judicata and, therefore, should be dismissed.
Res judicata is a term that covers a broad set of legal principles that, together, mean that a person cannot bring the same proceedings in court more than once. Peter Farrar’s argument on appeal was that the application of the principles of res judicata should mean that Leongreen could not bring an action for mesne profits. Farrar argued that this was because the cause of action for mesne profits was the same as the cause of action for possession, namely, trespass.
The Court of Appeal disagreed. The Court stated that although the wrongful act itself was the same, that is, Peter Farrar’s trespass, the act itself was not the cause of action. The Court said that the trespass gave rise to two distinct causes of action; that is, an action for the recovery of the land and an action for damages for trespass. The Court clarified that these two distinct actions do not have to be brought at the same time.
This case provides property owners with the confidence to prioritise getting back their property from trespassers as quickly and efficiently as possible without having to worry about losing the right to pursue damages for the illegal possession.
A few words of caution, however. The fact that the Court has confirmed that two actions do not have to be pursued simultaneously, does not mean that they need not be considered at the same time. When pursuing a claim for possession, it is important to obtain expert advice and consider all remedies available. This will ensure that any subsequent claims made will not fall foul of the principles of res judicata.
It may be also advisable when pursuing a claim for possession to specifically reserve the right to subsequently claim mesne profits, as Leongreen did. This was remarked on by the Court. | https://www.barrellison.co.uk/property-owners-getting-trespassers-out-as-quickly-as-possible/ |
About this Research Topic
Development of the visual system includes ocular growth and components such as visual stimulation, neurological development. This process of visual development involves structural ocular embryogenesis as well as functional postnatal development of visual formation. Visual impairment is a serious threat to human health and quality of life. Visual development is complex and can be affected by many pathophysiological mechanism. Therefore, elucidating the molecular mechanisms involved in eye disease pathogenesis will provide a reliable basis for the development of effective targeted therapies.
New intelligent diagnosis and treatment technology is urgently needed to meet the huge demand of blindness prevention and treatment. With the continuous development of economic globalization, artificial intelligence and other new technologies, including multi-omics and single-cell sequencing, tissue engineering and regenerative technology, nanotechnology and intelligent imaging assessments are closely related to ophthalmic medical decision-making and molecular medicine study. In addition, the development of medical artificial intelligence in ophthalmology has obvious disciplinary advantages, including high clinical safety and application scalability．
The aim of this Research Topic is to publish the most recent findings about the application of artificial intelligence and other advanced biological technologies in study the development of the visual system and the reconstruction of visual system disorders caused by eye diseases.
We welcome the submission of Original Research, Methods, Review and Mini-Review articles that cover, but are not limited to the following topics:
- Integrative omics and single-cell sequencing studies associated with eye diseases and visual development.
-Using artificial intelligence to identify novel signaling pathways and molecular mechanisms of eye diseases.
-Using artificial intelligence to identify the association between ocular and systemic diseases.
-The latest advances on the immunology, cell biology, and inflammation in eye diseases
-Applications of stem cell technology for ocular regenerative medicine.
-Refining data analysis algorithms to improve imaging technology in eye.
-Imaging assessments of structural and functional alterations in the eye, to improve understanding of pathophysiology, prognosis and underlying clinical sub-types.
-Applications of virtual reality and augmented reality in eye disease and visual development.
Keywords: Eye diseases, Visual development, Artificial Intelligence, Advanced technology, Translational vision science
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review. | https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/17382/the-application-of-ai-and-other-advanced-technology-in-studying-eye-diseases-and-visual-development |
The Center for Diversity & Inclusion (CDI) is seeking an undergraduate student to provide support to the center’s dialogue & other student programs and initiatives.
Work Environment
- The Center for Diversity & Inclusion (CDI) promotes a diverse, respectful, and inclusive learning, living, and working environment for the university community.
- CDI enhances the personal growth of our students by providing specialized university-wide educational programs and training; Intergroup Dialogue; supports first generation, LGBTQ+, multicultural, and the Summer Transition Enrichment Program (STEP) students.
Expectations/ Responsibilities
-
- Facilitate and design peer educational programs & dialogues
- Support program management, facilitator training, and implementation of educational programs, specifically Intergroup Dialogue
- Develop assessments for each program/dialogue in consultation with Coordinator, Dialogue & Diversity Programs
- Support the administrative functions of Center’s operations by:
- Organizing virtual meeting spaces/platforms
- Promoting program logistics via media
- Developing registration processes
- Provide administrative support during Center programs to admit participants, track attendance, etc.
- Assist in hiring processes by reviewing applications, interviewing, and participating in the selection of applicants
- Other duties as assigned
Qualification
- Strong facilitation skills with the ability to navigate difficult conversations about social issues & identity
- Knowledgeable of multi-layered aspects of identity, including ability, race, religious belief and practice, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and ethnicity.
- Works well with other students, staff, and faculty on collaborative projects
- Ability to provide program recommendations based on students’ needs
- Strong organization skills to effectively manage multiple priorities
- Strong written communication skills with attention to inclusive language
Position Type/ Expected Hours of Work
- Part-time 10 hours per week
Salary Range
- $15 per hour
Education
- Open to all undergraduate students with Federal Work-Study. | https://careers.american.edu/Student/job/Washington-Dialogue-&-Education-Programs-Assistant-DC-20016/724880100/ |
The general guidelines proposed in this article may be applicable for two groups of individuals with autism spectrum disorder - those that have typical cognitive ability but who have a delay in developing receptive and expressive communication skills, and those who have a mild to significant cognitive impairment in addition to difficulties with receptive-expressive communication. This latter group may contain adults as well as children.
While the initial decision making process may be similar for the two groups of individuals with an autism spectrum disorder, the rate of change and eventual outcome will probably be different. Many from the first group will probably develop adequate speech by age five and will have achieved that end through a variety of intervention efforts. Many in the latter group, the group with cognitive impairment, may not progress from a limited skills base to the development of adequate (i.e., frequent, functional, flexible) oral speech communication skills. Instead, many may continue to require some degree of augmentative communication support throughout adulthood.
Regardless of the eventual outcome, however, service providers must face the question of getting started with an intervention program. This article does not pretend to cover all of the complexities of the initial decision-making process and the subsequent implementation of an intervention plan. It will, however, present an overview of a basic process and will address some of the primary issues.
Guideline #1: Select a speech language pathologist who has training in a variety of intervention approaches, especially augmentative communication.
While some people attempt to develop a communication program without the involvement of a speech language pathologist, it is not always a successful endeavor. It is important for someone to know about typical and atypical communication development, to know a variety of intervention approaches, and to know when to shift from one strategy or focus to another.
While familiarity with autism spectrum disorders should be considered when selecting a service provider, that background can be obtained through reading, viewing videos, attending workshops, and mentoring by others with more experience. Thus, one does not need to be an expert in autism at the moment of selection or assignment to an individual’s case, but the individual will need good motivation and self direction to quickly become familiar with the intricacies of the disability.
Speech language pathologists will either need to be multi-talented in implementing various interventions or they will need to devote energy to quickly achieve this status. Intervention approaches that cross disabilities and which are important for individuals with autism spectrum disorder include augmentative communication, functional communication training, social pragmatic intervention, natural language teaching, incidental teaching, milieu language teaching, and other applied behavior analysis approaches. Many, if not most, speech language pathologists may not initially have all of these intervention strategies in their repertoire. Most college training programs find it impossible to teach their students everything they may need to know for their professional career. Given this situation, it is important to select someone as a service provider who will explore unfamiliar options and get the necessary training. Once armed with knowledge about the full range of options, a service provider can offer optimum long term intervention to the child with an autism spectrum disorder and to his or her family.
Guideline #2: Identify communication partners across environments and interview them about the child’s present communication skills.
During the interview, determine if the person with an autism spectrum disorder takes an active role, a passive one, or a combination of roles with each partner. Some partners might be very good at guessing what the child wants without the child having to engage in any active or overt overtures. In this case, the child may simply stand waiting for someone to guess his or her needs. This contrasts with a child who insistently takes a partner to the location of the object that he or she wants. A different child may use the same strategy of taking someone to a location but will only exhibit this behavior with certain people or to request a few select objects.
Guideline #3: Consolidate interview, observation, and assessment data and construct a hypothesis regarding the initial goals for the communication intervention program.
From the interviews, observations, and assessment, the following should be known:
- Is the person intentional and does he or she have some notion of cause and effect? Does the person deliberately signal any messages through behaviors such as taking someone to the place where a desired object is located? If the answer to these questions is “no,” then intervention may need to begin with fostering the understanding that communication is intentional.
- Does the person have object permanence? If the person consistently shows a lack of awareness/interest in preferred objects when they are out of sight during practice teaching trials, then the person may need to start with a non-symbol based communication system rather than a symbol based one.
- If the person is intentional, what is the frequency of messages provided to others during the course of the day? If intentional messages are rare, then circumstances may need to be altered to increase the need to communicate.
- Does the person engage in joint attention? Can his or her attention be directed to near and far objects? Does the child direct communication partners attention to near and far objects for identification, desire, or sharing?
- What behavioral issues are noted during the course of a typical versus an unusual day? What behavior problems occur during a typical week? To what degree are behavioral issues really communication issues? Will the person need a means of communicating specific messages instead of using unacceptable behavior, (e.g., functional communication training) as well as the development of an effective general means of communication?
- What types of communication messages are sent (e.g., requests for objects but not for actions)? How restricted are his or her interests? Who understands any of his or her messages and who doesn’t? Does the individual need to be taught some global communicative strategies such as pointing?
- What type of comprehension of directions, messages, and vocabulary is generally exhibited by the individual?
- What degree of interest or recognition of pictures (two dimensional symbols) is exhibited? What is his or her matching or visual memory ability? Does the child perform better when matching objects versus pictures of various sizes and types of representation?
- Does the child have good motor coordination/motor planning for gesturing or signing?
- What is the intelligibility of his or her oral speech, if any? How reliable is the child at using any words meaningfully and consistently?
- How is echolalia used-type, function, and frequency?
- Is the child able to read print in any form (e.g., logos, single words, complex text)?
- Can the person “voice” his or her preferences or opinions about communication needs and display options? (This would require the individual to be able to think about communication in an abstract or meta-linguistic manner.)
- How does this individual seem to learn-demonstration of step by step or the gestalt (whole sequence), long trials of practice or sudden insight, prompting, etc.?
Guideline #4: Decide what resources are needed.
- People resources might include a second adult who acts as a prompter if one is going to begin a Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) program. A similar person might be needed to initially prompt the use of a communication board or device within a functional activity. Someone will be needed to prepare communication displays or to program singular devices such as the BigMack® or a comprehensive device such as the AlphaTalker. For a child who has limited interests, an adult might be assigned to take the child’s lead and to expand his or her interests during scheduled play periods. People resources need to be defined in terms of who is needed, for what purpose, when needed, what training will be needed, who will supervise and mentor (as needed), how information will be shared about daily outcome, and how this person will be involved with the child’s intervention team.
- Material resources might include access to several software programs that provide evaluation opportunities and access to galleries of line drawings, pictured objects, and manual signs. Other resources might include equipment such as single switch devices, mini-electronic communication devices for restricted messages, dynamic display communication devices, lamination machines, velcro, and other supplies.
- Time is the most elusive resource. Without time for evaluation, planning, preparation of materials, data collection, information sharing, and collaborative problem-solving among members of the child’s team, including the parents, the best designed plan may be less effectively implemented.
Guideline #5: Decide how to build comprehension along with expressive skills.
- Facilitate the comprehension of common directions and basic information. Make a list of what is important to know and frequently teach these directives/ information in the context of planned activities with the help of another person (e.g., peer, staff member, volunteer). Foster active listening and fading of prompts.
- Use visual supports to aid comprehension. For example, showing a miniature school bus could support the transition directive about leaving the school building to board the bus at the end of the school day. Touching the chair where the child is supposed to sit, would support the directive to “Sit down.” Using a familiar stop sign on the door of the classroom might remind the child to wait for the adult instead of bolting into the hallway.
- Know what the person’s interests are and build activities and teaching routines around them. It is preferable to build on the child’s interest rather than to attempt enticing and sustaining him or her with an adult chosen point of focus or activity.
- Provide opportunities to practice a routine so that it becomes automatic to the targeted verbal message. For example, if the directive is “Come to the table; time for snack” the objective is to have the child recognize the key words of “table” or “snack.” Be alert for other forms of cuing to which the person may be responding. For example, the child may be cued to come to the table by the sight of the boxes of crackers, by the movement of the other children, or by the schedule routine.
Guideline #6: Consider options for building expressive output (nonverbal and verbal, if appropriate) and select a tentative starting point for the intervention program.
Options might include but not be restricted to:
- Teaching singular nonverbal/ nonsymbolic behaviors such as touching to get attention, taking someone across the room, or a negative head shake.
- Teaching combined or complex nonverbal sequences such as taking someone to the cupboard and then pointing.
- Reinforcing greater use of vocalization and speech, if this is a viable component. Vocalization can be used to get attention and to express other messages. The person may need touch and visual cues to modify his or her oral production. Some people have tried various applied behavior analysis techniques or programs.
- Teaching manual signs or baby signs (temporary idiosyncratic gestures) to convey specific messages to a targeted audience.
- Teaching an exchange system such as Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) using pictures or objects. The child should be intentional and have some preferences to begin the formal PECS program.
- Teaching a “point to” system such as a communication board using pictures, tangible objects, or text (if the child can read).
- Teaching the child to activate an electronic system to convey a message(s).
Guideline #7: Select or design opportunities for fostering communication skill development.
- Select situations/activities during which the child can have opportunities to successfully learn new communication skills or to utilize acquired skills.
- Select goal(s) to be targeted within each activity.
- Select procedures, prompts (if needed), and personnel to be used in the activity.
- Develop or prepare the support materials needed such as a topic communication board or a BigMack® to request a turn during an activity.
- Have an alphabet board available so the adult can model spelling of a key word, if appropriate, as a means of showing how to expand vocabulary beyond a fixed display.
- Allow peers to also become familiar with a communication display; they may model some examples for the student.
Guideline #8: Train others to be active members of the intervention program.
It will be difficult for a child to learn the power of using alternative means of communication if initial efforts are not consistently reinforced. In the initial stages, it can be acceptable to have a limited number of communication partners but, in order for the child to grow in terms of skills, the circle of partners eventually will need to be expanded.
Training others to be active members of the intervention program can involve several dimensions. First, partners need to understand the dynamics of augmented communication. It is always very easy for a speaking partner to dominate an interaction. Second, it is important for the partner to believe that the person with an autism spectrum disorder has thoughts about various things, has specific interests, preferences and dislikes, has memories of experienced events and may experience confusion about aspects of the world about him or her. It might take time before the individual shares much, if any, of this internal confusion/information other than expressing refusal and requests.
If a partner understands the challenges faced by the person who is nonverbal and the potential content to be expressed, then it may be easier to convince that partner of his or her role in developing effective communication skills. The person who is nonverbal must have the means by which to communicate and the opportunities in which to do so. This means partners may need to encourage use of alternative forms, to be sure needed equipment is available and ready to use, and to practice the patience needed to allow the person with an autism spectrum disorder to communicate his or her message.
Training of partners will depend on what type of partner a person will be. Different training will be needed for the individual who will be a frequent partner such as the parent or teacher versus the infrequent, casual partner who may be a neighbor or the principal.
Guideline #9: Decide how to monitor and chart progress since data can suggest the need for program changes such as an increase of supports or a change of direction.
Collection of information can take various forms, but the important issue is that there is a plan in place to guide the process. Decisions about the effectiveness of a strategy or intervention should be based on information and data and not just subjective impressions. Print materials such as articles or books can be reviewed and mentors or other resource people can be contacted for input. Options can be proposed and evaluated before modifications to procedures are introduced, a program is expanded, or a new focus is adopted.
Guideline #10: Evaluate what additional areas need to be fostered to support communication development.
Several skills or experiences may need to be fostered. Literacy training would be important from the preschool years and onward. Knowing how to functionally spell, as needed, will supplement augmentative communication systems with limited vocabulary access. Experiences provide the basis for developing or expanding interests and building new vocabulary. Supported social opportunities provide the environment from which to develop broader communicative skills. Independence in terms of responsibility for communication equipment is crucial. The person must identify with the communication materials as empowering him or her to lead a better life.
Summary
This article over-simplifies the complexities of planning and implementing a communication program for an individual who has limited expressive communication skills. It hopefully, however, provides parents, teachers, and providers with an overview of a possible process. Additional information and resources are listed in other IRCA articles. These include the following which are located on the IRCA website at www.iidc.indiana.edu/~irca .
- Communication Issues and Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A Selected Bibliography
- Augmentative Communication: A Selective Bibliography
- Visual Resources for Enhancing Communication for Persons with Autism Spectrum Disorders and Other Disabilities
- Communicative Functions
- Aiding Comprehension of Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders during One-on-One Interactions
- Visual Schedules and Choice Boards: Avoid the Misinterpretation of Their Primary Function
- Functional Categories of Immediate Echolalia
- Functional Categories of Delayed Echolalia
Vicker, B. (2001). Initial guidelines for developing a communication intervention plan for individuals with autism spectrum disorders and significant limitations in communication ability. The Reporter, 7(1), 18-25, 29. | https://www.iidc.indiana.edu/pages/Initial-Guidelines-for-Developing-a-Communication-Intervention-Plan-for-Individuals-with-Autism-Spectrum-Disorders-and-Significant-Limitations-in-Communication-Ability |
A. Mahdavi, K. Kiesel, M. Vuckovic:
"A Framework for the Evaluation of Urban Heat Island Mitigation Measures";
Talk: sb13 -munich - Implementing Sustainability - Barriers and Chances, München, Deutschland; 2013-04-24 - 2013-04-26; in: "sb13 -munich - Implementing Sustainability - Barriers and Chances", G. Hauser, T. Lützkendorf, N. Eßig (ed.); Fraunhofer IRB Verlag, 1/1/1 (2013), 8 pages.
In the last few years, the general awareness concerning the urban heat island (UHI) phenomenon has been steadily rising. Likewise, a deeper understanding is emerging concerning UHI's farreaching implications for microclimate, energy use, and human requirmente pertaining to health and comfort. In this context, in many cities around the world adaptation and mitigation measures are being conceived - and, in a number of instances implemented - that are expected to address the negative impacts of UHI phenomena. Such measures generally require a considerable level of effort and investements. Hence, their effectiveness should be assessed and evaluated a priors and systematically.
As a contribution to the present efforts in this direction, this paper presents results of an on-going research project which investigates the urban heat island phenomena in the Central European area. The proposed methodology can be seen as a contribution tothe UHI issue in terms of reducing the negative effects of this phenomenon. Moreover, the present paper introduces a systematic framework for the evaluation of urban heat island mitigation measures.
The aforementioned UHI project involves the consideration of potential pilot actions toward mitigation of the urban heat island effect. A spatial domain associated with the area in which such a pilot action is envisioned, could be defined in terms of an U2O. These well-defined segments may share characteristic features in view of geometry, massing, or other aspects of the physical structure. In order to predict, estimate and verify the effect of urban heat island mitigation actions on reduction of urban heat island intensity, we need to express such actions in terms of changes that they introduce in an U2O. We thus need a structured approach to systematically capture the essential geometric and physical features of an U2O. Once U2Os and their respective variables are defined, potential mitigation measures may be expressed in terms of respective changes to the variable attributes. Once the specifics of an envisioned mitigation measure are determined (specifically, in terms of implied changes in the U2O variables), their impact can be estimated based on appropriate calculation tools and modelling methods.
Given its complexity, we are providing the summary of the proposed framework by listing the steps that will provide us meaningful results:
i) Definition of "urban Units of Observation" (U2O): These are properly bounded areas within an urban setting selected as the target and beneficiary of candidate UHI Mitigation measures.
ii.) Description of the status quo of U2O in terms of a structured set of geometric and physical properties. The first set includes variables such as built volume ratio, urban envelope factor, etc. The second set captures information on surface albedo, admittance, etc.
iii.)Specification of the existing UHI effect intensity in terms of a set of pertinent variables (e.g. the difference between urban and rural temperatures).
iv.)Specification of the candidate mitigation measures in terms of projected changes to the geometric and/or physical properties captured in step ii above.
v.)Predicitve assessment of the effect of mitigation measures using empirically-based and/or numeric micro-climatic models.
vi.)Expression of the mitigation measures' impact in term of predicted changes in UHI effect intensity variables mentioned under step iii above.
vii.) Overall evaluation of the mitigation measures' effectiveness on the basis of modelling results together with their estimated financial and logistic ramifications.
none - see english version
Urban Heat Islands, Mitigation and Adaptation, modelling, evaluation
Project Head Ardeshir Mahdavi: | https://publik.tuwien.ac.at/showentry.php?ID=217935&lang=6 |
The U.S. Census Bureau’s new and experimental Small Business Pulse Survey (SBPS) provides weekly insight into the condition of the country’s small business sector as this unprecedented economic crisis unfolds. This analysis covers data from the week of August 16th to August 22nd.
Here are six things we learned about the small business economy last week:
- The online transition is limited. While much attention has been paid to the shift of white collar employees to working from home, the Small Business Pulse Survey reveals the limits of the broader trend. Nationally, 53 percent of respondents reported having no employees who worked from home last week. The high percentage alludes to just how hard it is for many segments of the economy and workforce such as the accommodation and food services and retail trade sectors to go online (79 and 69 percent of businesses in each sector respectively do not have employees who work from home). These industries contrast sharply with professional, scientific, and technical services where only 23 percent of businesses reported not having employees who work from home. When it comes to respondents shifting business online, 45 percent report that their business does not use online platforms to offer goods or services. Roughly 1 in 4 businesses report increasing their use of online platforms to offer goods and services, implying that the nation’s small business sector has only partially adjusted to the new normal.
- Fewer than 1 in 5 businesses have been able to weather the pandemic without asking for some kind of assistance. Around three quarters of businesses requested assistance through the Paycheck Protection program while more than 25 percent have sought Economic Injury Disaster Loans. More than 1 in 10 businesses have turned to some form of self-financing, a higher percentage than have used state and local government programs or banks outside of a federal program.
- Even in rural areas most insulated from the virus itself, the share of businesses back up and running at their pre-pandemic level of operation is below 15 percent in all but one state. The good news is that some businesses don’t expect to return to normal operating levels— they already have. The bad news is that this share is 9 percent nationally and, while it varies somewhat across states, the state with the highest share of businesses reporting such a return (North Dakota) has only 16 percent of businesses operating at pre-pandemic levels.
- The share of businesses missing loans or other payments is at its lowest since the end of April, despite relief phasing out. The share of businesses missing payments including rent, utilities, and payroll dropped beneath 10 percent for the first time since late April when it peaked at 24 percent. The share of businesses missing a loan payment is also down to its lowest point. As of the week of August 16th, only 3 percent of businesses report missing a loan payment while that number stood at 11.5 percent at the end of April.
- Of the states with a high share of businesses expecting to need additional capital or financial assistance in the next six months, nine are likely to vote Democratic, five are likely Republican, and one is a swing state. At the national level, 25 percent of businesses report expecting to need additional capital or financial assistance in the next six months. Fifteen states have shares higher than the national average. Of these states, nine states including New York and California are likely to vote Democratic while four states including Texas and Kentucky are likely Republican votes in the presidential election according to Cook Political Report. Pennsylvania stands alone as the only swing state with an above average share of businesses expressing the need for further financial assistance.
- Metro-level perspectives on the pandemic diverge strongly across swing-state Florida. In Florida, there are distinct gaps in reported negative effect and resulting long-term recovery outlook across metro areas. In the state as a whole, 33 percent of businesses report a large negative effect of the pandemic and 46 percent report expecting a return to normal operations to take longer than six months. Beneath those toplines, however, a split is evident. In one camp, businesses in Republican-leaning Jacksonville and more contested Tampa report much lower shares of businesses experiencing strong negative effects and lower shares expecting an extended recovery. Democratic-leaning Orlando and Miami, on the other hand, have much higher shares of businesses reporting strong negative effects and expecting longer recoveries. Per capita case counts are highest in Miami but roughly comparable across the other three metro areas. The Orlando and Miami economies are more dependent on the reeling tourism sector, which may help explain the difference. Regardless, if you asked a Floridian business owner how they are feeling about the crisis, their answer depends on where they are. | https://eig.org/news/taking-the-pulse-of-americas-small-business-sector-august-28th |
Outline and evaluate one study into obedience (12 marks)
Milgram was interested in why normal German people followed the orders of the Nazis, leading to their treatment of the Jews. He was interested in whether normal Americans would also blindly follow instructions from authority, even if it led to them hurting other people.
Milgram set up a study where participants believed they were taking part in a learning experiment. Each participant was a `teacher` who read out word pairs to a `learner` (who was actually a confederate). Every time the learner gave an incorrect response, the participant had to give them an electric shock. With each shock, the voltage was increased up to a final level of 450 V, labelled `XXX`. At 300 V, he was silent. If the participant asked to stop, they were told that the experiment had to continue.
Milgram found that no participants stopped the experiment before 300 V, and 65% actually continued as far as 450 V. Milgram concluded that ordinary Americans obey orders even if it leads to them acting against their conscience and hurting others.
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Approaching Distributed Epistemic Responsibility
There are various research areas that have provided invaluable insights to crucial aspects of being responsible in knowing within entangled socio-technical epistemic systems. To open up this topic, I will in the following sections briefly introduce crucial insights from three different fields of research: research on epistemic responsibility in (social) epistemology, research on (distributed) moral responsibility in philosophy of computing, and research on distributed or entangled responsibility in feminist theory.
4.1 Epistemic Responsibility: Insights from (Social) Epistemology
Epistemic responsibility can be understood in terms of the duties of knowers in giving and accepting reasons. Within analytic epistemology, for instance, it is discussed whether and to what extent epistemic responsibility is a condition for epistemic justification and knowledge. Some theoreticians focus on very basic questions concerning our duties to revise beliefs in light of new evidence, fundamentally related to the topic of doxastic voluntarism, i.e. the question whether we can voluntary control our beliefs. Others address the question of what being a good informant implies (Craig 1990), focus on concepts of epistemic praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and relate epistemic responsibility to moral responsibility (Corlett 2008), or assess what our responsibilities are in granting authority to sources of information (Origgi 2008). While the topic of epistemic responsibility can be addressed with respect to different sources of knowledge, such as memory or perception, it is most interesting in the context of testimonial knowledge practices, i.e., practices related to receiving knowledge through the spoken or written words of others.
In recent years, testimony has emerged as a central topic within social epistemology, the philosophical discipline addressing the various ways in which knowledge is social. In contrast to the abundance of publications on testimony (e.g. Coady 1992; Fricker 2007; Adler 1994) and related topics such as epistemic trust (e.g. Origgi 2004; Simon 2010), epistemic authority (e.g. Origgi 2008), epistemic injustice (especially Fricker 2007), epistemic responsibility itself has only very recently attracted attention within analytic social epistemology.
Although insights from social epistemology, in particular those addressing epistemic practices in more applied settings are highly crucial for a notion of epistemic responsibility for the 21st century, there are several shortcomings: First and foremost, due to this origin in the debates around the epistemology of testimony, the focus of attention in this discourse of epistemic responsibility is also mostly on epistemic interactions between human agents, i.e. on the responsibilities of speakers and hearers in testimonial exchanges. Yet, taking into account that processes of knowing take place in increasingly entangled systems consisting of human and non-human agents, systems in which content from multiple sources gets processed, accepted, rejected, modified in various ways by these different agents, the notion of epistemic responsibility needs to be modified and expanded to account for such socio-technical epistemic processes. Two issues need to be addressed in more detail than is currently the case in most analytic accounts of epistemic responsibility: (a) the role of technology and (b) the relationship between power and knowledge. To ut technology in general and ICT in particular into the equation, we should turn to philosophy of technology and philosophy of computing. Regarding the relationship between power, knowledge and technology, it has been feminist theoreticians in particular who have provided highly valuable insights. Thoughts from both fields will be briefly introduced in the next two sections.
4.2 Responsibility & ICT: Insights from the Philosophy of Computing
The complexity and entanglement of social and technical compounds in many digital systems has lead to difficulties in locating agency, accountability and responsibility, which various philosophers of computing and computer ethicists aim to tackle. Unsurprisingly, there is a growing amount of research on moral and legal responsibility in computing (cf. Coleman 2004), specific foci being autonomous agents (e.g. Coeckelbergh 2009) and robotics (e.g. Pagallo 2010). With respect to accountability, Nissenbaum's (1997) paper on accountability in a computerized society is surely an early seminal piece, in which different causes for contemporary difficulties in accountability attribution are already worked out: the problem of many hands, the problem of bugs, using the computer as a scapegoat, and ownership without liability.
Of particular importance for the goals of this paper are Floridi and Sander's (2004) early considerations on the morality of artificial agents as well as Floridi's more recent analyses regarding distributed morality (Floridi 2012). According to Floridi and Sanders (2004) something qualifies as an agent if it shows interactivity, autonomy and adaptability, i.e. neither free will nor intentions are deemed necessary for agency. Such a concept of “mind-less morality” (Floridi and Sander 2004,
p. 349) allows addressing the agency of artificial entities (such as algorithms) as well as of collectives, which may form entities of their own (such as companies or organizations). Another merit of their approach lies in the disentanglement of moral agency and moral responsibility: a non-human entity can be held accountable if it qualifies as an agent, i.e. if it acts autonomously, interactively and adaptively. However, it cannot be held responsible, because responsibility requires intentionality. That is, while agency and accountability do not require intentionality, responsibility does. Therefore, it seems that non-human agents—as long as they a) do not exhibit intentionality and b) are considered in separation—cannot be held responsible even if they are accountable for certain actions.
While these considerations on responsibility and accountability in socio-technical systems are highly developed, the specific problem of epistemic responsibility in ICT has not yet been in the focus of attention within philosophy of computing. Hence, it appears worthwhile to take the best from both fields of research to develop a sound notion of epistemic responsibility within entangled socio-technical epistemic environments. Yet, instead of starting from scratch taking a look at feminist theory proves highly illuminating, because different feminist theoreticians have not only focused on the responsibilities of knowers in complex environments. They have also emphasized the important relationship between knowledge and power.
4.3 Epistemic Responsibility in Entangled Socio-Technical Systems: Insights from Feminist Theory
Despite the fact that epistemic responsibility has only very recently attracted attention within analytic epistemology, the term itself has already been used in 1987 as the title of a book by Lorraine Code (Code 1987). In this book, Code addresses the concepts of responsibility and accountability from a decidedly feminist perspective and argues that in understanding epistemic processes in general and epistemic responsibility and accountability in particular; we need to relate epistemology to ethics. Criticizing the unconditioned subject S who knows that p, “the abstract, interchangeable individual, whose monologues have been spoken from nowhere, in particular, to an audience of faceless and usually disembodied onlookers” (Code 1995, p. xiv), Code emphasizes social, i.e. cooperative and interactive aspects of knowing as well as the related “complicity in structures of power and privilege” (Code 1995, p. xiv), “the linkages between power and knowledge, and between stereotyping and testimonial authority” (Code 1995, p. xv).
While Code's work highlights the relationship between knowledge and power, research by Karen Barad and Lucy Suchman adds technology to the equation and therefore appears particularly suited to explore the notion of epistemic responsibility within entangled and distributed socio-technical systems:
Barad's “agential realism” (Barad 1996; Barad 2007) delivers an “[…] epistemological-ontological-ethical framework that provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other social-material practices” (Barad 2007, p. 26).
Barad's approach is theoretically based upon Niels Bohr's unmaking of the Cartesian dualism of object and subject, i.e. on the claim that within the process of physical measurement, the object and the observer, Barad's “agencies of observation”, get constituted by and within the observation process itself and are not pre-defined entities. The results of measurements are thus neither fully constituted by any reality that is independent of its observation, nor by the methods or agents of observation alone. Rather, all of them, the observed, the observer and the practices, methods and instruments of observation are entangled in the process of what we call “reality”. For Barad, reality itself is nothing pre-defined, but something that develops and changes through epistemic practices, through the interactions of objects and agents of observation in the process of observation and measurement. Reality in this sense is a verb and not a noun.
Yet, interaction is a problematic term in so far as it presupposes two separate entities to interact. Thus, to avoid this presupposed dualism, she introduces the neologism of “intra-action”, to denote the processes taking place within the objectobserver-compound, the entanglement of object and observer in the process of observation. This terminological innovation is meant to discursively challenge the prevalent dualisms of subject-object, nature-culture, human-technology, and aims at opening up alternative, non-dichotomous understandings of technoscientific practices.
A crucial concern of Barad is the revaluation of matter. Opposing the excessive focus on discourse in some other feminist theories, Barad emphasizes the relevance of matter and the materiality of our worlds. Taking matter serious and describing it as active, means to allow for non-human or hybrid forms of agency, a step that has been taken already with the principle of generalized symmetry in Actor-NetworkTheory. Yet, if we attribute agency to non-human entities, can and should they be held responsible and accountable? Plus, isn't that an invitation, a carte blanche to shirk responsibility by humans? Do we let ourselves off the hook too easily and throw away any hopes for responsible and accountable actions?
It appears that Barad's view on non-human agency and her stance towards the ontological symmetry between humans and non-humans has changed from earlier articulations (Barad 1996) to later ones (Barad 2007). In 1996, she still underscores the human role in representing, by stating that “[n]ature has agency, but it does not speak itself to the patient, unobtrusive observer listening for its cries—there is an important asymmetry with respect to agency: we do the representing and yet nature is not a passive blank slate awaiting our inscriptions, and to privilege the material or discursive is to forget the inseparability that characterizes phenomena” (Barad 1996, p. 181).
However, it seems that this special treatment of humans and especially the notion of representing does not well match her posthumanist performativity, as depicted some years later (Barad 2003). Finally, in “Meeting the Universe Halfway” Barad offers a more nuanced dissolution of the distinction between human and non-human agency. By stating that “[a]gency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has” (Barad 2007, p. 261), Barad moves the locus of agency from singular entities to entangled material-discursive apparatuses. But even if agency is not tied to individual entities, it is bound with responsibility and accountability, as Barad makes very explicit: “Learning how to intra-act responsibly within and as part of the world means understanding that we are not the only active beings—though this is never justification for deflecting that responsibility onto other entities. The acknowledgment of “nonhuman agency” does not lessen human accountability; on the contrary, it means that accountability requires that much more attentiveness to existing power asymmetries (Barad 2007, p. 218 f). Thus, the possibility to understand agency not essentialist as a (human) characteristic, but as something which is rather attributed to certain phenomena within entangled networks could be regarded as an invitation to shirk of responsibility. But this is clearly not the aim of Barad. When developing her posthumanist ethics, Barad concludes that even if we are not the only ones who are or can be held responsible, our responsibility is even greater than it would be if it were ours alone. She states: “We (but not only “we humans”) are always already responsible to the others with whom or which we are entangled, not through conscious intent but through the various ontological entanglements that materiality entails. What is on the other side of the agential cut is not separate from us—agential separability is not individuation. Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterio/ized (sic!) other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part” (Barad 2007, p. 393).
This focus on responsibility and accountability relates back to Barad's initial framing of agential realism as an “epistemological-ontological-ethical framework”, a term by which she stresses the “[…] fundamental inseparability of epistemological, ontological, and ethical considerations” (Barad 2007, p. 26). Barad insists that we are responsible for what we know, and—as a consequence of her onto-epistemology for what is (Barad 2003, p. 829). Accountability and responsibility must be thought of in terms of what matters and what is excluded from mattering, what is known and what is not, what is and what is not.
This acknowledgement that knowledge always implies responsibility, not only renders issues of ethics and politics of such knowledgeand reality-creating processes indispensable. It also relates directly back to Barad's emphasis on performativity: epistemic practices are productive and different practices produce different phenomena. If our practices of knowing do not merely represent what is there, but shape and create what is and what will be there, talking about the extent to which knowledge is power or entails responsibility gets a whole different flavor.
Lucy Suchman shares many concerns of Karen Barad and her insights promise to be of particular importance for considerations regarding computationally mediated environments due to Suchman's background in Human-Computer Interaction. Acknowledging the relational and entangled nature of the sociomaterial, Suchman claims that agency cannot be localized in individual entities, but rather is distributed within socio-material assemblages. Resonating with Barad, she notes “[…] agencies—and associated accountabilities—reside neither in us nor in our artifacts but in our intra-actions” (Suchman 2009, p. 285).
The question, however, remains how exactly to be responsible, how to hold or to be held accountable if agency is distributed. How can we maintain responsibility and accountability in such a networked, dynamic and relational matrix? Although I think that Suchman goes into the right direction, she remains quite vague about this in her concluding remarks of Human-Machine-Reconfigurations by stating that “responsibility on that view is met neither through control nor abdication but in ongoing practical, critical, and generative acts of engagement. The point in the end is not to assign agency either to persons or to things but to identify the materialization of subjects, objects, and the relations between them as an effect, more and less durable and contestable, of ongoing sociomaterial practices” (Suchman 2009, p. 285).
- Confer for instance the conference on “Social Epistemology and Epistemic Responsibility”, which took place at Kings College in May 2012. kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/philosophy/ events/kclunc2012.aspx (Accessed 18 September 2013).
- It would be inadequate to argue that the role of technology or the role of power have been entirely neglected in social epistemology. On the one hand, there have been attempts to account for ICT (e.g. some works by Alvin Goldman (2008) and Don Fallis (2006), the special issue of the journal EPISTEME (2009, volume 6, issue 1, on Wikipedia). Moreover, Fricker's book on “Epistemic Injustice” (2007) has also stirred a lot of interest in the relationship between power and knowledge. However, these developments are rather recent and the classical assessment of testimonial processes remains focused on communication between humans often still conceived as an unconditioned and a-social subject S, who knows that p. | https://ebrary.net/24661/philosophy/approaching_distributed_epistemic_responsibility |
New Literaria is an International, peer-reviewed, and open-access journal that aims to explore the myriad prospects in English Literature, and cultural studies. The Journal is committed to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural issues in literary understanding and interpretation, aesthetic theories, conceptual analysis of art, literature, philosophy, religion, mythology, history of ideas, literary theory, history, and criticism. It presents the highest quality in English Literature, linguistics, and cultural studies from the interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective that characterizes humanities in this world. It provides an interdisciplinary approach to unravel Linguistics’ features as well as Literature and different aspects of cultural studies, thus broadening its view. The Journal’s focus is to publish depth insights and semantic analysis of traditional and contemporary theories leading to new horizons in the field of humanities and thereby generate an academically serious and healthy debate in the literary circles. It aims at critical and creative functions to co-exist and cross-fertilize each other. Rather than producing miscellanies of essays from across the disciplines, the Journal aims to publish substantial scholarly and critical interventions, from various perspectives, on chosen themes, thereby influencing the agenda in its disciplines. It encourages dialogues between Literature and other disciplines of humanities, aiming to establish an international platform for scholars to exchange innovative views that stimulate critical interdisciplinary discussions.
It provides a shared platform for the exchange of information and ideas to keep in touch with the advancements in the field of multidisciplinary Literary Studies, Linguistics, Language and Communication, Discourse Analysis and any other topic relevant to it among the students, researchers, and teachers of arts and Literature and humanities as well for creating knowledge-based community. It publishes articles, review papers, book reviews, etc. It is our pious duty to let you inform with ongoing fashions in writing, anthology, self-publishing, and all and on. We, along with readers, writers, and editorial team members, will complete this detour.
Welcome everyone on this eternal detour of the voyage. | https://newliteraria.com/home/about-the-journal/ |
Artificial Intelligence: AI Cannot Be an Inventor, Says USPTO
.The decision by the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) confirms the same view by the European Patent Office. Only natural persons can be inventors.
The USPTO has unequivocally confirmed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) cannot be an inventor. The USPTO’s decision, published on April 27, is in line with similar decisions from the European Patent Office (EPO) and the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO). (Intepat)
Background
In July 2019, Stephen Thaler filed a patent application for an invention by inventor “DABUS.” The inventor’s family name was “Invention generated by artificial intelligence.”
The application “Devices and Methods for Attracting Enhanced Attention (DABUS)” is number 16/524,350.
The inventor designated in the application – DABUS – is actually a series of neural networks that operate as a creativity machine.
The USPTO, through a Notice to File Missing Parts, directed Thaler to identify each inventor by his or her legal name.
Thaler asserted in his reply petition that he had correctly detailed the inventorship. However, the USPTO rejected the petition.
The applicant thereafter requested the USPTO to reconsider its stand.
The USPTO has again dismissed this application, confirming that AI cannot be deemed an inventor.
Logic
The main planks of the USPTO’s arguments are:
- Title 35 of the US Code refers to inventors as “natural persons”
- The law makes references such as “whoever,” “himself,” and “herself,” clearly displaying the law’s intent to cover only natural persons in its intent
- Further, the inventor who executes an oath or declaration must be a “person.”
- Therefore, including machines within the definition of “inventor” would contradict the reading of the patent statute
- In the case of Utah v. Max-Planck-Gesellschaft Zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e.V., the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit the court held that only natural persons could be inventors
- It ruled that a state, corporation, or sovereign could not be an inventor.
EPO
The European Patent Office similarly denied two applications, also filed by an AI system called DABUS.
The EPO considered much the same issues. In its dismissal, the EPO said, “AI systems or machines have at present no rights because they have no legal personality comparable to natural or legal persons.”
A legal person, such as a corporation, is a creature of law, and because no legislative or court issued law categorizes AI as a legal person, AI cannot be an inventor.
Related Story: Artificial Intelligence: Can AI Predict a Child’s Future? No, it Can’t.
Latest Alternative Investment News
Alternative Investments/Digital: Two Canadian Fund Managers Launch Metaverse Themed ETFs
Canadian fund managers Horizons ETFs and Evolve Funds have launched the Horizons Global Metaverse Index ETF (“MTAV”) and the Evolve Metaverse ETF (“MESH”) respectively, on the Toronto Stock Exchange. | https://dailyalts.com/artificial-intelligence-ai-cannot-be-an-inventor-says-uspto/ |
The Center for Civic Engagement & Learning hosts and supports community service trips that enable students to get involved in service beyond Cleveland. Rather than engage in typical break activities, students on Alternative Breaks engage in projects with non-profit organizations and community members in different cities and countries. It is a great way to make a difference, learn about a new place, and meet new people!
CCEL Serves student leaders lead volunteer groups each week to local nonprofit sites and provide transportation to all volunteers in the CCEL vans. CCEL Serves includes both sites with a flexible commitment as well as Semester Serves sites which require at least one semester of commitment.
Civic Engagement Scholars commit to completing at least 50 community service hours while also attending trainings and educational programs about community and social issues throughout the academic year. This initiative is designed to promote student involvement in the Cleveland community and beyond through significant and meaningful service.
CCEL's Service Days give students the opportunity to contribute to the local community at least one day a semester. Service days include the Saturdays of Service, CCEL's New Student Service Day, the Graduate Community Service event, and other special events.
The summer is a wonderful time to be in Cleveland and many community organizations host a variety of internship programs that allow students to become civically engaged by living, learning and working in the city. In the past, the Center for Civic Engagement and Learning has also hosted summer service programs that enable Case Western Reserve University students to participate in summer job experiences that also make a difference in the community.
Browse CWRU's actively-maintained list of service opportunities. | https://students.case.edu/community/service/ |
Our curriculum reflects our high ambitions and expectations, ensuring all students experience a rich and meaningful maths education. We believe every student can behave mathematically and that all students can succeed in our subject. Our fully inclusive curriculum means that classes work simultaneously through the content, with those who excel stretched though depth rather than breadth, and those who lack the prerequisite knowledge or who are disadvantaged, supported to overcome barriers. It is our fundamental belief that, through effort, all pupils are capable of understanding, applying and improving at mathematics.
Our curriculum is planned as a coherent progressive journey from primary school through to post 16 education, ensuring pre-acquired knowledge, concepts and skills are reinforced and built upon, whilst equipping all students with a secure foundation for successful future study. Our curriculum encompasses both a mastery and spiral approach. We spend longer on topics to gain a deep understanding and make connections but also recognise that students need to revisit content in different contexts and at different stages of their mathematical maturity to help them to truly develop. Considerate sequencing ensures previously learnt concepts and procedures are embedded and connected to new learning thus supporting students in understanding the coherent and connected nature of the subject.
Content is atomised and delivered succinctly so students are not burdened with cognitive overload. Modelling and multiple representation alongside considerate questioning and prompts secure understanding. Core knowledge is practised regularly, to build an unconscious competence in the fundamentals of mathematics. Such practice builds fluency, freeing up working memory and facilitating the capacity for the new. Regular, low stakes quizzing and daily review tasks promote retrieval and deliberate practice thus building retention and transfer. Evidence based practice, educational research and professional collaboration underpin curriculum development to ensure effective pedagogical approaches for achieving quality first teaching.
What it’s like to be a mathematician at MHS?
We hope that if you ask any of our students what maths lessons are like at MHS they would respond with ‘challenging’, ‘hard’ or ‘difficult’. It is all three, but ultimately, it is one of the most rewarding subjects students will study during their school education. Its remuneration comes in the form of illumination and excitement – those ‘aha’ moments when the ‘penny drops’ and the sense of satisfaction that is felt when a problem is solved. We nurture young people into mathematicians, they visualise, describe, experiment, create and communicate. They are curious and reflective, they enquire and conjecture. Questioning pushes boundaries whilst ensuring nothing is just beyond their grasp. Students think hard, are resourceful, adaptable and resilient. They preserve when the answer is not immediately apparent to them and flourish when faced with the unfamiliar. Through the enjoyment of success, students are empowered, enthusiastic and confident, they relish in thought and embrace challenge.
Learning maps – At MHS we use learning maps to support retrieval and reinforcement of knowledge. We use these in class and as homework, you may find it useful to see what is coming up through the year for your child in their year group. We are continuing to develop these and update them through the year so you may notice some subjects have uploaded the first term, future work will be added at the appropriate time. | https://www.mhs.school/page/?title=Mathematics&pid=58 |
The bead discussed in this article represents the dielectric structure for mechanical support of coaxial microwave components. The main features of the bead are its electrical performance and mechanical ability to keep all parts of the component together. The electrical performance includes low reflection and suppression of high mode resonances. The insertion loss caused by the dielectric is insignificant and usually does not influence performance due to the bead's relatively short length.
The mechanical properties are particularly important for precision adaptors because an adaptor should be able to withstand a large number of connect-disconnect cycles (typically many thousand). In typical coaxial components such as a connector or an adaptor, the bead is the only supporting structure of the center conductor. Some components contain more than one bead, either of the same or different shape.
There are many materials that can be used for dielectric supporting structures in microwave components. Traditional materials for bead manufacturing are Rexolite™ for precision adaptors, Noryl-PPO™ and Ultem™ for manufacturing grade adaptors and connectors, as well as Teflon™ for connectors and adaptors. Rexolite and Ultem are the strongest materials mechanically. Noryl and Ultem can either be machined or molded, which will reduce the price. Teflon has the lowest dielectric constant, lowest insertion loss and highest operating temperature (and therefore power handling), but it is the softest of these materials.
Ultem has the second highest operating temperature of 165°C and is strong mechanically. However, the dielectric constant of Ultem is approximately 3.05 at microwave frequencies, requiring a significant part of material to be removed, which is not always convenient. Rexolite and Noryl have a low maximum operating temperature of approximately 100°C and generally should not be used for components in military applications. For hostile environments some special materials can be used, an example being PEEK (polyetheretherketon). For the new bead design, Ultem was chosen as the best-suited dielectric material.
MODE RESONANCE
The ability of the bead to maintain a single mode operation in the component is an important part of the electrical performance. The principal mode alone (in this case TEM) is unable to satisfy the boundary conditions imposed by any discontinuity, including the bead. Every internal step in the transmission line generates higher modes of the transverse magnetic types. However, those modes are attenuated very fast. The main danger for transmission in a coaxial line is contained in the second mode type -- the transverse electric mode TE11 (in some references this mode has a designation H11 ). TE11 is a waveguide mode and therefore has a frequency-dependent impedance and velocity of propagation compared to TEM. A dual mode transmission is not desired in a coaxial line because of signal distortion. In addition, the second mode resonance can result in overvoltage and overheating in the transmission line. The second mode can propagate from one certain frequency often referred to as the cut-off frequency (or critical frequency). The approximate value of the TE11 cut-off frequency in a coaxial line can be calculated from
where
Fco = value of cut-off frequency in GHz
D = internal diameter of outer conductor in inches
d = external diameter of inner conductor in inches
ε = dielectric constant
Note that cut-off frequency typically does not imply the second mode transmission. It suggests the possibility of transmission. The resonant frequency is higher than the cut-off frequency and is highly dependent on the length of the bead. Calculations of the resonant frequency can be obtained from the work of H. Neubauer, et al.3
The field distribution for TEM and TE11 modes are shown in Figure 1. The second mode resonance can occur in the dielectric bead area or in the interface area (for Teflon loaded interfaces such as in SMA or TNC connectors) despite the short length of the dielectric region. Since an air-line has an inductive impedance at the frequencies of interest for the TE11 mode, the effective length of the bead is also increased by the reactive load, which can excite a resonance to occur even for relatively short beads. One method to suppress the resonance is to load the bead in low impedance lines.1 This method has been successfully used to push the operating frequency of special TNC connectors higher. Traditionally, the second mode resonance was particularly important for TNC2 because some military applications require high power connectors for extended frequencies. Some companies today are marketing special SMA connectors with extended frequencies up to 27 GHz. There are also reports devoted to the suppression of unwanted resonances in precision connectors and adaptors.3,4
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It should be noted that the bead cannot be considered to be alone because there is another one in the mating connector. The short distance between the two beads can excite a resonance to occur.
It can be seen from the field distribution drawing that the TE11 mode does not have symmetry in the transverse plane. Thus, there are two important points to note: Any asymmetry in the radial plane can generate the second mode, and there is the possibility of two independent TE11 mode resonances in the different cross-perpendicular planes.
It is not always easy to detect the second mode resonance in a component. Jim Kubota2 noted that, in some cases, the second mode resonance should be excited. Besides, if the component passed the sweep test of reflection (SWR), it does not mean that the component, in this case a connector, is resonance free. It is necessary to screen the insertion loss (IL) for resonance using a frequency sweep. This conclusion is important. For example, the data depicted on Figure 2 comes from the test of an assembly with K connectors. The SWR curve does not show any significant mismatches up to 45 GHz; however, IL data shows a resonance at a frequency around 44 GHz.
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It is not always easy to test for insertion loss because of the special fixtures required (panel mount connectors, for example). Besides, if the component is terminated in a non-ideal load, it could be an additional reason for the second mode resonance. A calibrated vector analyzer test-port is an excellent load for components and will not excite a resonance. This means that if the second mode resonance spikes are absent in the IL sweep test, it does not fully guarantee the same performance in real operation. In addition, a typical vector analyzer test-port contains 3.5 mm air-line connectors, which have a higher cut-off frequency (up to 36 GHz). It is convenient for the testing of SMA components but it does not reflect real use. Normally most SMA connectors will be connected to other SMA connectors. This connection reduces the resonance frequency to a lower value than the test situation. The standard (without any special features) SMA connector should not be specified for operation at frequencies higher than 25 GHz even if it does not have any visible resonance ripples on the IL and SWR curves. A typical (not precision) N connector with a Teflon insulator has a cut-off frequency at 10.4 GHz, but, according to military standards, should work up to 12.4 GHz. This specification can be a cause of problems for some applications, particularly if the Teflon bead has a significant length. Hermetically sealed components typically have a glass bead fired inside the connector body. The dielectric constant of glass is approximately two to three times that of Teflon. Thus the microwave glass-sealed components have a typical lower operation frequency because of the possibility of the second mode resonance.
H. Neubauer, et al.,3 have noted that waveguide resonances in straight lines arise from contact faults, particularly in the outer conductor. According to the authors, even a very slight irregularity of the outer conductor is enough to fulfill the condition for the generation of waveguide resonances. For this reason, it is important to keep some distance between the contact point on the connector and the bead. One additional note is that a push-on connector is more apt to show resonance compared to a threaded one.
Theoretically, it is not complicated to avoid the second mode -- just reduce the dielectric constant (and therefore radial dimensions) of the dielectric in the line and the cut-off frequency will increase. A typical example is the SMA 2.9 connector from Radiall, where the supporting bead for the 2.92 mm air-line has reduced radial dimensions.5 This connector is mode free up to the air-line cut-off frequency (in this case 46 GHz). However, this design is not convenient for all components and most standard dielectric beads (including precision items for 7, 3.5, 2.92 and 1.85 mm air-lines) are not mode free. Theoretically, the second mode can be excited. On the other hand, these components were designed so that the mode resonance would never happen, up to their highest operation frequency (for example, 18 GHz for 7 mm air-line). Some plug-connectors have a thick wall option on the interfaces, which can also push the operating frequency higher.6 Typically, the cut-off frequency of the bead is lower than the cut-off frequency of the air-line. The maximum operating frequency of the component is between these two values. The maximum operating frequency depends on the length of the bead. The closer the length of the bead approaches zero, the closer the maximum operating frequency approaches the cut-off frequency of the air-line. Consequently, the farther the length of the bead is from zero, the closer the maximum operating frequency approaches to the cut-off frequency of the bead.3
REFLECTION CONSIDERATIONS
The component with the lowest reflection consists of a coaxial air-line without any beads and steps. The bead can only increase reflection. Beadless lines have a wide use in metrology, but are inconvenient for manufacturing grade components.
The general equation for the reflection coefficient from two discontinuities is
where
in = total reflection coefficient at the reference plane
1 = reflection coefficient from the first discontinuity
2 = reflection coefficient from the second discontinuity
L1 = distance from the reference plane to first discontinuity
L2 = distance from the reference plane to the second discontinuity
ß = phase constant, ß = 2¼/λ
According to W. Anderson et al.,11 for small reflections, waves travelling between discontinuities can be neglected ( 1 2 0). This means that for small discontinuities the total reflection is zero if
2 = 1 e2jß(L2L1)
Thus the small discontinuity can be compensated for by the second one of equal magnitude but of the opposite sign ( 2 = 1 ) in the same location (L2 = L1 ). In this case, the compensation occurs over a wide band because the frequency dependent parameter ß (L2 L1 ) is equal to zero. For example, the fringing capacitance can be compensated for by a series inductance and this compensation can be frequency independent.
There are several patents and articles devoted to the design of microwave supporting structures with low reflection. Some examples are depicted in Figures 3, 4 and 5.7,8,9
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Most of the bead designs are similar. On the edges of the bead there are two short lines with high impedance for the fringing capacitance compensation. Along the bead there is a coaxial line with constant impedance equal to or close to the characteristic value (50 Ω for microwave transmission lines). Calculations of the fringing capacitance and compensation have been reported in the literature.10,11 The main difference between the designs is in how to keep constant impedance and avoid unwanted resonance at the same time. The typical design decision is to make holes in the dielectric, usually through it, in order to reduce the effective dielectric constant and to keep a constant impedance along the bead as shown in the patented designs. This kind of dielectric structure employs a normal incidence. It means that the Pointing's vector is perpendicular to the surface of incidence (in this case the plane of the bead). By definition, this vector has the direction of the cross-product of vectors E and H. Thus, in a coaxial line, the Pointing's vector is parallel to the center conductor, but the distribution of the Pointing's vector is not uniform. The Pointing's vector (and therefore the energy) in the coaxial line is densest near the center conductor. This fact will be important for the new design.
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The oblique incidence, shown in Figure 6, can be successfully used to design the bead. The angles of oblique incidence can be calculated from Snellius' laws, and the complex magnitude can be calculated from Fresnel's equations.12 As it is known from optics, there are two different kinds of Fresnel equations: parallel polarization and perpendicular polarization. Here, parallel polarization means that vector E is parallel to the plane of incidence. Consequently, perpendicular polarization means that the direction of vector E is perpendicular to the plane of incidence. Fresnel's equations for both polarizations are
where
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=
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reflection coefficient for perpendicular polarization
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||
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=
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reflection coefficient for parallel polarization
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i
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=
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angle of incidence
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t
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=
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angle of refraction
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n
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=
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index of refraction, n =
If the TEM field distribution in a coaxial line is examined, the vector E can be observed to be at any angle to the plane of incidence. This means that a TEM wave in a coaxial line is not uniform (unlike the same wave in free space or between plane conductors). However, because of the symmetry of the field distribution, it can be concluded that the electromagnetic field in the coaxial line consists of two equal parts: one in the perpendicular and the other in the parallel polarization. It is known from optics that there is one particular angle of incidence, referred to as Brewster's angle, which makes total refraction of the parallel-polarized signal to the second medium. In other words, if the dielectric is installed at Brewster's angle, the coefficient of reflection from the interface will be zero for all parallel-polarized signals. In the typical case for an air dielectric interface, Brewster's angle can easily be calculated as arctan , where ε is the dielectric constant of the bead material. Figure 7 shows curves calculated from the theoretical reflection coefficient magnitudes of two cases: first for normal incidence, and second for oblique incidence at Brewster's angle. Fresnel's equations were used in these calculations. In the first case, the incidence angle is equal to zero and the effective reflection coefficient is a sum of the magnitude's parallel and perpendicular polarization's coefficients. In the second case, the angle of reflection is a Brewster angle and the perpendicular polarization coefficient is only calculated because the parallel one is automatically equal to zero. The curves show that for materials with dielectric constants between 2.0 and 3.5 the overall reflection is approximately the same for both cases. Those values of dielectric constants were picked because of the typical data for insulating materials used in the microwave applications. Note that the curves shown depict the theoretical maximum values of the reflection. The reflection can be partially or totally compensated. There are some important additional issues. It is not totally correct to apply laws of Optics to microwave transmission lines. The Brewster, Snellius and Fresnel equations are only applicable if the transverse dimensions of the transmission line are much larger than the wavelength, which is typically true in optics. A coaxial line with radial dimensions of a few wavelengths can be designed, but it is not practical because such a line will generate and transmit a huge number of higher modes.
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Some designs use an oblique bead, which closes off the whole line.13 However, this is not always convenient. The power distribution is non-uniform in the coaxial line and most of the power is in the vicinity of the center conductor as mentioned previously. Because of this, it is possible to install only part of the dielectric in the vicinity of center conductor at Brewster's angle.
A NEW DESIGN
It can be seen from both issues above that the theoretical calculations could not predict the electromagnetic performance of the bead. An electromagnetic modeling and design of experiment process were initiated in order to guarantee a good electrical performance.
The bead with oblique incidence has some advantages. First of all, it can be designed without matched holes. The dust cannot be collected without these holes. Some microwave components have an optional dust washer. According to Anderson, et al.,11 the beads with axial holes should theoretically have very low reflection at high frequencies. However, those beads cannot have radial symmetry. The new bead can be totally symmetrical in the radial plane and thus will not excite the second mode resonance.
Figure 8 shows a drawing of the Ultem bead proposed for use in the 2.92 mm air-line K connector for frequencies up to 40 GHz and higher. In the middle of the bead, there is a line with low impedance, but other parts of the bead have high impedance. Both parts are designed to compensate each other. The bead could be designed with compensation at the same plane, but in this case it would have too complicated a shape. The edges of the bead have even higher impedance for fringing capacitance compensation. The faces have a special shape, which positions the dielectric at the angle of total refraction in the vicinity of both conductors. It is important to have Brewster's angle near the center conductor only, but the present shape is more convenient for manufacturing. The low impedance line has a low cut-off frequency, but its length is very short and it is much shorter than the limiting values.3 Also, the bead has total radial symmetry, and therefore cannot excite the second mode. Additionally, the V-groove increases the cut-off frequency.
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The new bead can be either machined or molded. The new design was tested at the Astrolab Inc. facility in Warren, NJ, with 32022-2-29094K-36, Minibend K-12 cable assemblies and 2.9 to 2.4 mm adaptors (Astrolab part-number 29839). The current design passed a thermal shock test at 65° to +165°C. A typical test of the cable assembly's electrical performance is shown in Figure 9. The pair of adaptors is being tested under a mechanical durability test. It is mated and demated by wrenches, and every 50 connections the interface was gauged and the electrical performance was checked. At the release of this article, the pair passed 4750 connections without significant degradations.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank John Zorzy from Gilbert Engineering, as well as his colleagues from Astrolab, Stephen Toma and Andrew Weirback. Ultem and Noryl are trademarks of General Electric Company. Rexolite is a trademark of Rex Corporation. Teflon is a trademark of Dupont. K connector is a trademark of the Anritsu-Wiltron Company. Minibend is a trademark of Astrolab Inc. *
References
1. John Zorzy, "18 GHz Mode-resonant-free Standard MIL-C-39012 TNC Connectors," Microwave Journal, Vol. 30, No. 5, May 1987, pp. 365370.
2. James Kubota, "TNC Connectors Meets New Performance Criteria," Microwaves, February 1981, pp. 7779.
3. H. Neubauer and F.R. Huber, "Higher Modes in Coaxial RF Lines," Microwave Journal, Vol. 12, No. 6, June 1969, pp. 5766.
4. John Gilmore, "TE11-mode Resonances in Precision Coaxial Connectors," General Radio Experimenter, Vol. 40, No. 8, August 1966, pp.1013.
5. Radiall, Catalog. See also US Patent 4,456,324.
6. Rudy Fuks, "Assessing Distortion at Microwave Interface Junctions," Microwaves & RF, August 1997, pp. 108116.
7. J. Flanagan, US Patent 4,718,864.
8. J Flanagan, et al., US Patent 4,867,703.
9. H. Bacher, et al., US Patent 5,269,702.
10. M. Ebisch, "Coaxial Measurement-line Inserts of High Precision for the Frequency Range 1-13 Gc," Frequenz, February 1959, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 5256.
11. W. Anderson, H.D. Chai and F.J. Tisher, "Theoretical Analysis of Coaxial Supports," Technical Report by The Ohio State University Research Foundation for Sandia Corporation, February 1962, Columbus, OH.
12. Peter Rizzi, Microwave Engineering Passive Circuits, Prentice Hall, 1988.
13. B.A. Dahlman, "Application of Brewster's Angle to the Design of Coaxial-line Components for Microwaves," RCA Rec., June 1954, Vol. 15, pp. 238251. | http://www.microwavejournal.com/articles/3205-new-dielectric-bead-for-millimeter-wave-coaxial-components |
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS
DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENT
The present invention relates to respiratory equipment, and more particularly to tracheotomy cuffs.
A tracheotomy is a surgical procedure in which an opening is formed in the neck of a subject, in particular the trachea, to allow passage of the air to the subject's lungs. Usually, a tracheotomy tube (a “trach tube”) is placed in the opening to keep it from healing closed.
A tracheotomy typically is performed on a subject who has respiratory failure, or insufficiency such that the subject must be placed on a mechanical ventilator to help them breathe. After their breathing becomes improved—due to medical intervention and/or use of the mechanical ventilator—such subjects are taken off the ventilator, and begin to breathe naturally again with their own respiratory system.
Sometimes, however, the respiration of such recovering subjects is tenuous, and must be assisted. To provide such assistance, supplemental oxygen in gaseous form is supplied to the subject through a tracheotomy cuff. Many times, however, the oxygen supplied through the tracheotomy cuff is compromised, either due to pulmonary secretions occluding the tracheotomy and blocking the oxygen supply, or the accidental or intentional removal of the trach cuff or both. As a result, the subject may become hypoxic (i.e., does not receive enough oxygen), which is some cases, can lead to anoxic brain injury and, in worse cases, death; moreover, such patients requiring tracheotomies are often debilitated from other illnesses and/or medical treatments that can compromise respirations and lead to anoxic brain injury.
To ensure that a trach cuff is adequately installed and provides the required oxygen, a pulse oximeter is used. A pulse oximeter is a device that fits over a finger of the subject to provide an indirect measurement of arterial oxygen saturation. It does not, however, provide information regarding the adequacy of respiration and/or ventilation in a timely manner. For example, arterial oxygen saturation provides a lagging indicator of hypoxemia in the finger, and inferentially the state of ventilation or respiration of the subject. Moreover, the accuracy pulse oximetry is limited by: adequate peripheral arterial perfusion; proper fitting of the pulse oximeter; and the subject's willingness to leave the pulse oximeter installed. Further, pulse oximeters provide frequent false alarms that often are ignored, or responded to in a tardy fashion by an attending healthcare provider. In some cases, where the alarm is true and an attendant fails to timely check the subject, this can lead to harm, and in some cases, death.
The aforementioned problems are overcome by the present invention, which provides a tracheotomy apparatus including a tracheotomy cuff, a port and a sensor. The cuff defines a chamber and wraps around a portion of the subject's neck. A fluid delivery system is in communication with the port to deliver a gas including oxygen to the chamber through the port as the subject naturally respires. The sensor monitors carbon dioxide in another gas exhaled from the subject as the subject naturally respires. An optional securing element is joined with the cuff to secure the tracheotomy cuff to the neck.
In one embodiment, the sensor is coupled to a controller and an alarm. The controller activates the alarm when carbon dioxide or other gases fall outside pre-selected parameters, such as specific carbon dioxide levels, specific frequency or amplitude of inhalation or exhalation, and/or specific changes in the frequency or amplitude of carbon dioxide levels as the subject respires.
In another embodiment, the trach cuff includes a pressure sensor that measures the barometric pressure at the tracheotomy site. Optionally included is a controller that receives input from the pressure sensor and or gas sensor, analyzes the barometric and capnographic information from the sensors for amplitude and/or frequency, and subsequently determines the adequacy of respiration of the subject. If the respiration is inadequate, an alarm is activated.
In yet a further embodiment, the tracheotomy cuff includes a retaining ring defining an aperture. The retaining ring fits around a subject's trach tube to secure the cuff loosely to the tube.
A related method includes: providing a tracheotomy cuff according to any of the embodiments above; aligning the tracheotomy cuff with a tracheotomy tube projecting from the subject's neck; securing the tracheotomy cuff to the subject's neck; delivering a gas to the tracheotomy cuff so that the subject can respire naturally; and monitoring a second gas exhaled by the subject into the tracheotomy cuff. The method optionally includes securing the tracheotomy cuff around a portion of the subject's neck so that a tracheotomy cuff extending from the subject's neck extends at least partially into a tracheotomy cuff chamber defined by the tracheotomy cuff.
In another embodiment, the method includes activating an alarm when characteristics of the second gas fall outside the pre-selected parameters, such as specific carbon dioxide levels, specific frequency or amplitude of inhalation or exhalation, and/or specific changes in the frequency or amplitude of carbon dioxide levels as the subject respires.
In a further embodiment, the method can include monitoring the pressure of the gas exhaled by the subject and activating an alarm when pre-selected pressure parameters are unmet.
The present tracheotomy apparatus and related method provide a simple and efficient way to monitor the adequacy of respiration by a subject and the installation of a tracheotomy cuff at a trach site. With the analysis of capnographic data for amplitude and/or frequency, the adequacy of respiration can be determined. Where a controller and alarm is included, the alarm can be activated to notify an attending healthcare provider that the subject's respiration is unsatisfactory and/or the trach cuff has been removed from the trach site. As a result, the device and method can provide a real time warning of a present and/or impending respiratory problems before serious injury, such as hypoxia, anoxic brain injury, or death occurs. Such early warning also can provide the attending healthcare provider with more time for lifesaving intervention. Furthermore, the device and method provide more timely information to guide treatment decisions, which can reduce treatment cost, discomfort to the subject, and hospital stay.
These and other objects, advantages and features of the invention will be more readily understood and appreciated by reference to the detailed description of the invention and the drawings.
FIG. 1
is a sectional view of an embodiment of the tracheotomy apparatus installed on a subject;
FIG. 2
is a top view of the tracheotomy apparatus;
FIG. 3
is a interior view of the tracheotomy apparatus;
FIG. 4
is a top view of a first alternative embodiment of the tracheotomy apparatus;
FIGS. 5 and 6
FIG. 4
5
5
6
6
are cross-sectional views of the first alternative tracheotomy apparatus taken along lines - and - of , respectively;
FIG. 7
is a retaining ring optionally used with the tracheotomy apparatus;
FIG. 8
is a first graph showing the concentration of a gas monitored with the tracheotomy apparatus;
FIG. 9
is a first graph showing the pressure of a gas monitored with the tracheotomy apparatus;
FIG. 10
is a second graph showing the concentration of a gas monitored with the tracheotomy apparatus;
FIG. 11
is a second graph showing the pressure of a gas monitored with the tracheotomy apparatus;
FIG. 12
is a third graph showing the concentration of a gas monitored with the tracheotomy apparatus; and
FIG. 13
is a third graph showing the pressure of a gas monitored with the tracheotomy apparatus.
I. Overview
FIGS. 1-7
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40
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20
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A tracheotomy apparatus is shown in and generally designated . As shown, the apparatus includes a trach cuff to which a tube is secured. The tube includes an oxygen tube , which is in fluid communication with a gas delivery system . The trach cuff includes a carbon dioxide sensor which is coupled to the controller . The controller is further in communication with an alarm . The controller can actuate the alarm to produce an audible and/or visual signal indicative of the installation of the trach cuff and/or status of respiration of the subject .
20
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120
100
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27
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In general, the trach cuff is positioned over the trach tube , which is inserted in the trachea of the subject , so that at least a portion of the trach tube extends into the trach cuff chamber . An optional retaining ring is used in conjunction with the trach cuff to provide additional and/or alternative securement of the trach cuff to the trach tube .
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Gas, such as oxygen, is delivered from the gas delivery system through the oxygen tube , into the trach chamber . The subject , who is naturally respiring without the aid of mechanical assistance such as a ventilator, can breath the gas delivered to the chamber through the trach tube . The gas exhaled by the subject from the trach tube enters the chamber , and is sensed by the sensor , which optionally can be disposed in an exhaust port . The sensor senses carbon dioxide in the exhaled gas and transmits related data to the controller.
70
The controller monitors pre-selected parameters associated with the sensed carbon dioxide, for example, quantitative and/or qualitative levels of carbon dioxide or other gases in the exhaled gas, and/or the amplitude and/or frequency of the exhaled gas and/or carbon dioxide over time. When the controller determines that the pre-selected parameters fall outside acceptable ranges, which can coincide with specific concentrations of carbon dioxide or other gas, and/or specific frequencies or amplitudes of normal breathing, the controller can control the alarm to produce an audible or visual signal or output to an attending healthcare provider. Usually, when the controller determines that measured values fall outside acceptable ranges and activates the alarm, this indicates to the healthcare provider that the subject is experiencing an undesired respiratory condition or that the apparatus is improperly installed or has been removed from the subject's neck.
II. Construction
FIGS. 1-7
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With reference to , the apparatus will now be described in more detail. The apparatus includes a trach cuff which defines a chamber therein. In fluid communication with the chamber is an air tube , which can include an internal oxygen delivery tube that terminates at a port disposed within the chamber . The tube can include an internal exhaust port through which exhaled gas can travel. The air tube also can be outfitted with a ball connector . This ball connector can prevent kinking of the tube . In addition, the ball connector can increase the comfort of the subject by reducing unnecessary movement of the trach cuff when the subject moves or is repositioned.
20
40
The air tube as shown can be connected to a gas delivery system that produces or stores a desired gas, such as oxygen, for delivery to the trach cuff . The components and operation of the gas delivery system are common, and will not be described in detail here.
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The air tube and trach cuff can be designed to be removable from the ball connector , and/or disposable to prevent the passage of communicable diseases from one subject to the next. Alternatively, the trach cuff and other components of the apparatus can be constructed from materials that are easily sanitized or cleaned before use with a different subject.
FIGS. 1-4
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As shown in , the trach cuff can also include retaining edges that secure a retaining ring . These edges can be replaced with any structure that secures the retaining ring to the cuff as desired. The retaining ring lightly snaps in place behind the edges to prevent lateral movement of the cuff. The ring can define a slit and optionally an aperture designed to fit over the exposed portion of a trach tube extending from subject's neck . The retaining ring need not connect directly to the trach tube , but can instead simply fit loosely around the trach tube . With this low-strength connection of the trach cuff to the trach tube , the risk of pulling the trach tube from the trachea is reduced if the cuff is accidentally pulled or moved. The retaining ring can disposable, and can be constructed from a plastic, elastomeric or rubber material as desired.
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As discussed above, the carbon dioxide sensor can be disposed in an exhaust port in fluid communication with the trach cuff . The sensor is also in electrical communication with the controller . The sensor optionally is adapted to measure levels of a gas, such as carbon dioxide, present in the chamber , as the subject naturally respires.
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FIGS. 3 and 4
Other types of carbon dioxide sensing mechanisms can be used in connection with the present tracheotomy apparatus to monitor gas exhaled by the subject into the tracheotomy cuff . For example, as shown in , the air tube can include translucent or transparent windows . An infrared carbon dioxide sensor can be used to sense the concentration, quantitatively or qualitatively, of carbon dioxide or other gases through the windows . The data collected by the sensor can be transmitted to the controller , which in turn can function as described below.
FIGS. 1-3
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Returning to , the trach cuff can also include a pressure sensor in fluid communication with the trach cuff chamber , and further coupled to the controller via an electrical wire. The pressure sensor is adapted to sense pressure, and thus pressure fluctuations due to respiration, within the chamber and/or other parts of the tracheotomy apparatus . This information is transferred to the controller and can be used alone or in combination with the other data collected by the carbon dioxide sensor as explained in further detail below. Optionally, the sensors and need not be hard wired directly to the controller . Rather, either or both sensors can include infrared or RF transmitters that transmit data sensed by those sensors to the controller .
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FIGS. 1 and 4
The controller as shown in is in communication with and receives input from sensor and optional sensor . The controller also is in communication with the alarm . Optionally, the controller and alarm are positioned in close proximity to the subject, or positioned remotely at a monitoring station as desired.
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The concentration of gaseous carbon dioxide, as well as the optionally measured barometric pressure, fluctuate during respiration at the trach site. For example, the gaseous carbon dioxide levels and barometric pressure increase in the chamber during expiration, and decrease during inspiration. The controller is designed to monitor several conditions based on the sensing of the carbon dioxide and/or barometric pressure during respiration. As a result of this monitoring, the controller can actuate the alarm to produce an audible and/or visual warning to an attending healthcare provider. To the healthcare provider, the warning will signify a respiratory problem or removal of the trach cuff from the trach site, and subsequent removal of the supplemental oxygen flow to the trach cuff. Accordingly, the attending healthcare provider can intervene. Specific, monitored conditions are explained below in connection with operation and method of use.
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Optionally, the controller is adjustable within limits to reflect subject-specific parameters, for example, expected fluctuation in carbon dioxide concentration and/or barometric pressure, as well as frequency of breath. Further optionally, the controller can include an apnea detector which detects when no breath is taken within a -second interval regardless of the detected respiratory rate. When such condition is detected, the controller can actuate the alarm .
III. Operation and Method of Use
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The use and operation of the tracheotomy apparatus will now be described in more detail. The trach apparatus can be used on a subject who has a trach tube positioned in their trachea , and who is able to naturally respire, that is, breath without additional mechanical intervention provided through a closed respiratory system in which a mechanical ventilator or other device pumps a pressurized gas directly into the subject's trachea. Indeed, the tracheotomy apparatus is suitable to wean subjects after they are on a mechanical ventilator, until they are capable breathing on their own without requiring a supplemental oxygen source.
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FIG. 7
To install the tracheotomy apparatus , the trach cuff is first provided. When used, the optional retaining ring is placed over the portion of the trach tube projecting from the subject's neck as shown in . The trach cuff then is aligned with the trach tube , and the optional retaining ring , and secured to the subject's neck with an elongate member . The elongate member can be an elastomeric, fabric or synthetic strap that wraps around the remaining portion of the subject's neck . Additionally, when the optional retaining edges are present, the retaining ring snaps in place behind those edges as the cuff is secured to the patient's neck, to provide further securement of the cuff.
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105
22
20
FIG. 1
When installed, the trach tube is located within the boundaries of the trach cuff . Additionally, a portion of the tube extends at least partially into the chamber defined by the trach cuff as shown in .
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With the trach cuff installed around the subject's neck, the oxygen tube can be connected to the gas delivery system . The sensors and are coupled to the controller , which is further coupled to the alarm . The gas delivery system is activated to deliver a first gas, e.g., oxygen, through the port into the chamber . The subject can then breath naturally, inspiring the gas from the chamber into the subject's respiratory system, and expiring another gas including carbon dioxide from the subject's respiratory system into the chamber . This expired gas can flow into the exhaust tube , and into the environment, or out through a vent open to the environment in the gas delivery system .
Optionally, an attending healthcare provider can calibrate the controller to the specific respiration of the subject. For example, the provider can determine what is the “normal” level of carbon dioxide expired from the subject, and/or the normal frequency or amplitude of the subject's respiration, and program this data into the controller. The provider can then program the controller to activate the alarm if later monitored carbon dioxide levels or respiratory frequency or amplitude fall outside the normal parameters for that subject.
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38
60
With the trach cuff installed, the subject breathing naturally, and the controller calibrated where necessary, the monitoring can begin. Specifically, gas exhaled by the subject is sensed by sensor and optional sensor . Data related to the sensed gas is output to the controller , which processes this information. As noted above, the general operation of the controller is based on the following principal: if the controller determines that the data becomes unreliable and/or falls outside pre-selected parameters, then the controller can activate the alarm to produce an audible or visual warning to an attending healthcare provider.
60
In one embodiment, the controller monitors the difference between inspired and expired carbon dioxide and uses this information to determine whether or not to actuate the alarm. This embodiment relies on the fact that inhaled atmospheric carbon dioxide is around 375 ppm or about 0.033%. In contrast, exhaled carbon dioxide is about 50,000-60,000 ppm or about 5.57%. Exploiting this difference, the controller monitors both inhaled and exhaled carbon dioxide. In general, it can be assumed that a difference of between 2% and 3% carbon dioxide concentration can be expected between breaths.
60
Using this information, the controller is calibrated so that if the difference is less than about 2%, the controller will actuate the alarm. As will be appreciated, the relative percentage difference can be changed by an operator, for example, an attending healthcare provider. In addition, the controller can also monitor an upper limit of the carbon dioxide difference between breaths. For example, if the carbon dioxide difference is over about 5.7%, the controller can actuate the alarm with a specific message that there is a potential problem with the controller because there should not be such a significant level of carbon dioxide detected.
60
10
70
FIGS. 8 and 9
FIG. 8
a
b
b
b
Several conditions can cause the controller to produce the alarm. The following are examples of such conditions. First, removal of the trach cuff from the trach site or respiratory failure can cause the sensed the carbon dioxide levels and/or barometric levels to terminate or to fall below minimum prescribed respiratory frequency and amplitude parameters. Such a condition is shown at the graphs in . The graph at shows the concentration of carbon dioxide (parts per million) in gas exhaled from a subject as detected over time with the trach apparatus . During period T, carbon dioxide concentrations naturally rise during expiration and naturally fall to the baseline ambient room carbon dioxide concentration during inspiration by the subject. The period Tis representative of a condition, such as removal of the trach cuff from the trach site or respiratory failure. During this period, the monitored carbon dioxide levels decrease, as indicated by the smaller peaks during time T. This decrease during time Twould be detected by the controller, and noted as falling outside pre-selected parameters for amplitude representative of the normal concentration of carbon dioxide. As a result, the controller would activate the alarm to indicate that there may be a problem, such as respiratory failure and/or removal of a trach cuff from the subject's neck.
FIG. 9
10
22
a
b
The graph at shows the pressure (kilopascals) of gas exhaled from a subject as detected over time when the trach apparatus includes an optional pressure sensor. Pressure within the chamber due to normal respiration is shown during time Trelative to ambient room air pressure. During time T, which is associated with the condition of respiratory failure and/or removal of the tracheotomy cuff from the subject's neck, the pressure sensed during inspiration and expiration decreases. This decrease in pressure would be detected by the controller as falling outside pre-selected parameters for pressure variation. As a result, the controller would activate the alarm.
60
70
10
70
FIGS. 10 and 11
FIG. 10
c
A second condition that the controller can detect and, if necessary activate the alarm , occurs when a subject outfitted with the trach apparatus undergoes apnea or hypopnea. Such a condition is shown in the graphs at . As shown in , the amount of time Tbetween breaths by the subject is detected by the controller as being longer than a “normal” amount of time between breaths, which is indicative of temporary cessation or excessive slowing of respiration. As a result, the controller can actuate the alarm .
10
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70
FIG. 11
b
a
When the optional pressure sensor is included in the apparatus , the controller also can monitor the pressure generated by breathing to detect apnea and/or hyponea. For example, in , Prepresents a “normal” pressure to be expected during expiration. If the pressure falls below this pressure, for example, to pressure P, this is indicative of temporary cessation or excessive slowing of respiration. As a result, the controller can actuate the alarm . The resultant cessation or excessive slowing of respiration also can indicate excessive sedation or neurological impairment of respiration. The controller can sense this and actuate the alarm when it detects lower than expected amplitude of barometric pressure even when carbon dioxide fluctuations are adequate.
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60
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FIGS. 12 and 13
d
d
Another condition that the controller can indirectly monitor concerns respiratory secretions from pneumonia, pulmonary edema or other diseases or conditions that cause such secretions. For example, excessive secretions can cause an excessive respiratory rate and/or gaseous carbon dioxide concentrations to fall. Such a condition can be monitored and detected by the controller, as shown in the graphs at . Over time T, the detected respiratory rate becomes rapid due to excessive secretions of a subject. This is indicated by an increased frequency of carbon dioxide concentration changes (and corresponding lower levels of detected carbon dioxide), in addition to an increased frequency of pressure change during time T. The controller can determine that these rapid fluctuations and lower concentrations fall outside pre-selected parameters indicative of normal frequencies and concentrations. As a result, the controller can actuate the alarm .
60
FIGS. 12 and 13
Yet another condition that can cause the controller to produce the alarm is when the subject undergoes anxiety and/or pain. Anxiety or pain can cause the frequency of inspiration and expiration, and thus the frequency of changes in carbon dioxide levels and pressure, to increase. Such a condition can be monitored by the controller in a manner similar to that explained above in connection with excessive respiratory secretions and as shown in the graphs at .
FIGS. 12 and 13
70
A further condition detectable by the controller is respiratory fatigue. During respiratory fatigue, the amplitude of carbon dioxide concentration and pressure will be lower. There also may be an increase in the frequency of the subject's expiration/inspiration. Such a condition can be monitored by the controller, as shown with further reference to the graphs at . As explained in connection with the condition of excessive respiratory secretions above, when the fluctuations in amplitude fall outside pre-selected parameters, i.e., pre-selected amplitude expected for carbon dioxide and/or pressure, the controller can actuate the alarm to warn the attending healthcare provider of potential patient respiratory fatigue.
10
It is noted that the above monitored conditions are exemplary only, and that the apparatus can be used to monitor for complications of any medical condition that influences respiration. As desired, the apparatus can further actuate an alarm when the monitored information falls outside pre-selected parameters to indicate that the medical condition has influenced respiration.
The above descriptions are those of the preferred embodiments of the invention. Various alterations and changes can be made without departing from the spirit and broader aspects of the invention as defined in the appended claims, which are to be interpreted in accordance with the principles of patent law including the doctrine of equivalents. Any references to claim elements in the singular, for example, using the articles “a,” “an,” “the,” or “said,” is not to be construed as limiting the element to the singular. | |
can we slow down the process of receiving information and transmitting meaning back into the world? generally speaking (caveat: i am not a brain scientist) we move so very quickly, the turn around time of receiving information and transmitting meaning (i like this/i don’t; this is good/this is bad) happens in less time than it takes to blink our eyes. Patthabi Jois said yoga is an internal practice, the rest is just a circus. like a river, the real work of these practices happens far below the surface, and like water, boundaries only exist insofar as our conception of them: river, creek, tributary, bay, harbor, ocean, rain, ice, snow, fog, cloud…the shape of things, the form things take–how we conceive of them depends entirely upon how we receive them.
one of the tasks these practices present to us is: can we build a moving analytical system? the practice of yogasana, over time and with much repetition can become moving meditation, and probably we’ve experienced that enough to understand it thusly–can we use the tools the yoga practice enables us to hone in order to build an effective and clarified moving analytical system, one in which we intentionally graduate ourselves out of the binary system of attachment and aversion…which isn’t to say we won’t like or dislike, but that the way we conceive and transmit is conscious. in other words, the way in which we collaborate in the daily creation of the world we share is wakeful, and is dependent entirely on the actual context and our ability to present in and with it.
Align/Refine
Integration
In the tarot, water (cups) relates to the field of emotions, and the subconscious mind; earth (pentacles) relates to everything that is of the phenomenal world, in the yoga practice prakrti ; wind (swords) relates to our waking consciousness (Eakins, Tarot of The Spirit), the breath of life.
It is the nature of the mind, like water, to be still, and clear, and reflective. When water, like the mind, has movement, sound, or becomes cloudy it is because it is being tempered by other elements/outside forces. The mind, like water, has no boundaries. Over time we have been conditioned to understand and interact with our world in a way that is boundary-d: Me/You; etc. Which isn’t necessarily bad, but can actually be quite useful much of the time, and can help set up the conditions for healthy, equitable, and loving relationships.
And so it isn’t so much an actual contradiction as it is linguistic and therefore intellectual that we are all one and separate at the same time. The Life that animates me is the same Life that animates you, but I am not You; You are not Me; yet we are One.
Our language shapes our minds, which in turn shapes our world. How we are able to transmit this information into the world is in direct proportion to how we are able to inquire into the experience of Oneness/Aloneness, and practice feeling into that experience in the context of our relationships. How do we rest into what we know without becoming rigid, and how do we lean into what is unknown without becoming lost? Integration of new lessons, of new experiences into the felt understanding of what it means to be human is invaluable. We become lost, or perhaps a better way to express it is, we fall asleep when we are reliant on old patterns, when we cease to inquire, when we cease to be curious.
We are always in process, even in death there is no finality. It is of vast and great importance to get clear in intention: what motivates me? what do I care about? How do I reflect that back to the world, and how do I receive what is reflected back to me?
Inquiring into symbolism is an ancient practice, and like the yoga practice it is a living system. How we interpret what we see, how we express what we interpret is also a living system in process. But unlike dogma or systems that become institutionalized, we have a choice in how we interpret and transmit. And whether we are awake to it or not, we are always choosing. The yoga practice, and the practice of reading the cards are tools, technologies in an interwoven web of infinite connection that enable us to be more wakeful so that we may be our most complete selves. | https://caryluna.com/2016/02/ |
Beit Guvrin National Park and caves – an important town of Judah at the time of the first Temple and during the Roman era when it was developed and fortified by Septimum Severus, the Roman Emperor.
St. Anne's Church was built in the Byzantine Period and then was restored by the Crusaders in the 12th century. The 3rd and 4th century residents were prosperous as can be seen by the elaborate Sidonian graves found in the caves and there is also indication of Jewish life with the remains of a 3rd century synagogue. Close to the remains from the Crusader era is a succession of huge limestone caves from the Hellenistic era. The chalk from these bell-shaped caves was used for to cover the roads in the Arabic period. Other caves served as water cisterns, livestock enclosures and crypts.
Excavations are still continuing and of particular interest is the Roman amphitheatre uncovered at the entrance to Kibbutz Beit Guvrin. Other archaeological artifacts unearthed at the site include a large Jewish cemetery, a Byzantine church, public baths, mosaics and burial caves.
Beit Guvrin National Park is just 38 km east of Ashkelon and 13 km from Kiryat Gat.
Booking Israel is great source for tourist's information about hotels in Israel, guided tours to Israel, car rental in Israel as well as attractions and events throughout Israel. | http://www.bookingisrael.com/israel-attractions/beit-guvrin-national-park |
Why is agreement necessary for an insurance contract?
Insurance has evolved as a process of safeguarding the interest of people from loss and uncertainty. The parties in an agreement must be legally competent to enter into the contract. Consent means that parties to an agreement must agree on a specific thing in the same sense or their understanding should be the same.
What does insuring agreement mean in insurance?
The Insuring Agreement
This is a summary of the major promises of the insurance company and states what is covered. In the Insuring Agreement, the insurer agrees to do certain things such as paying losses for covered perils, providing certain services, or agreeing to defend the insured in a liability lawsuit.
Which is the heart of the insurance contract listing any promises made on a named or open perils basis?
The Insuring Agreement (Clause) is the part of the policy that describes the Insurer’s Promise to Pay and the description of covered perils.
What is the most important element of the insurance agreement?
Because the law of contracts is used to interpret an insurance policy, the basic elements of contract (offer, acceptance, and consideration) must be present for a court to uphold an insurance agreement. The insurer offers indemnification, or “compensation for a past loss,” as its part of the bargained-for exchange.
What is the consideration that an insurer gives to the insured under an insurance contract?
What is the consideration that an insurer gives to the insured under an ins contract? Consideration is the thing of value exchanged under a contract. The insured’s consideration is the premium; in return the insurer promises to pay for certain losses if they occur.
What makes an insurance contract legally binding?
Insurance contracts are legally binding agreements in which the insurer agrees to indemnify the insured in case he or she incurs losses due to an unforeseen future event specified in the policy.
What information is contained in the insuring agreement of an insurance policy?
Insuring agreement: This section summarizes the insurer’s agreement to pay covered claims. For a property policy, it will state the property covered and types of perils, or causes of loss, the policy covers. In a liability policy, the insuring agreement describes the types of activities covered.
Which of the following is true of the insuring agreement?
Which of the following is true of the Insuring Agreement? The promise to indemnify an insured for a covered cause of loss – The insuring agreement is the company’s commitment (promise) of protection to the insured. It specifies the types of property covered, and the perils insured against.
What type of insurance policy insures against all risks of loss?
Open Perils — refers to property insurance that insures against loss to covered property from all causes except those that are specifically excluded. This method of identifying covered causes of loss in a property policy has traditionally been referred to as “all risks” coverage.
What are the five general categories of insurance contracts discussed in this chapter?
Insurance policies are composed of five major parts:
- Declarations.
- Insuring agreement.
- Exclusions.
- Conditions.
- Endorsements and riders.
When the insured and the insurer fail to agree on the amount to be paid for a property loss the dispute resolution method? | https://spoongordonballew.com/insurance/you-asked-why-is-the-insuring-agreement-the-heart-of-an-insurance-contract.html |
At the law offices of Andrew M. Wolfenson, Esq., P.C., we represent plaintiffs and defendants in civil disputes throughout northern and central New Jersey. Attorney Andrew M. Wolfenson has litigated numerous civil cases in both the Superior Court and Chancery Court, and has also argued before the New Jersey Appellate Division. We have law offices in Union and Cedar Knolls.
If you are engaged in a legal dispute or see one on the horizon, we can help you understand how the law applies in your situation and apprise you of your rights and options. The decisions are yours. We are here to provide you with the knowledgeable guidance you need to make the right decisions, and to help you seek a favorable and cost-effective outcome.
Our approach to litigation is to tailor a solution to suit the unique circumstances of each case. We do not apply aggressive tactics when amicable negotiation best serves our clients' purposes. On the other hand, we are always prepared for strong advocacy when appropriate and have the courtroom experience to negotiate from a position of strength.
If you have questions about the advantages and disadvantages of using a formal lawsuit to protect your interests, or need guidance in responding to a lawsuit, contact us for an appointment with Mr. Wolfenson — and for sound legal advice. Your initial lawyer consultation is free. You can reach us by telephone at 908-364-4054 or online by filling out a brief contact form. | https://www.wolfensonlaw.com/General-Litigation.shtml |
The present invention provides for the nucleic acid sequences of plant centromeres. This will permit construction of stably inherited recombinant DNA constructs and minichromosomes which can serve as vectors for the construction of transgenic plant and animal cells.
Dillon N.,Chromatin
BioEssays | Year: 2012
Priming of lineage-specific genes in pluripotent embryonic stem cells facilitates rapid and coordinated activation of transcriptional programmes during differentiation. There is growing evidence that pluripotency factors play key roles in priming tissue-specific genes and in the earliest stages of lineage commitment. As differentiation progresses, pluripotency factors are replaced at some primed genes by related lineage-specific factors that bind to the same sequences and maintain epigenetic priming until the gene is activated. Polycomb and trithorax group proteins bind many genes in pluripotent cells generating bivalent domains that contain both active and repressive histone modifications. The properties of polycomb proteins suggest that they act as gatekeepers, helping to maintain silencing in pluripotent stem cells while establishing a chromatin environment that is permissive for priming by sequence-specific factors. The overall effect of factor-mediated priming is to initiate the input of information required for cell differentiation before the first lineage choices have been made. © 2012 WILEY Periodicals, Inc.
Hajkova P.,Chromatin
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences | Year: 2011
Epigenetic reprogramming in the germline provides a developmental model to study the erasure of epigenetic memory as it occurs naturally in vivo in the course of normal embryonic development. Our data show that germline reprogramming comprises both active DNA demethylation and extensive chromatin remodelling that are mechanistically linked through the activation of the base excision DNA repair pathway involved in the DNA demethylation process. The observed molecular hallmarks of the germline reprogramming exhibit intriguing similarities to other dedifferentiation or regeneration systems, pointing towards the existence of unifying molecular pathways underlying cell fate reversal. Elucidation of molecular processes involved in the resetting of epigenetic informationin vivo will thus add to our ability to manipulate cell fate and to restore pluripotency in in vitro settings. © 2011 The Royal Society.
Volle C.,Chromatin |
Dalal Y.,Chromatin
Current Opinion in Genetics and Development | Year: 2014
The eukaryotic genome exists in vivo at an equimolar ratio with histones, thus forming a polymer composed of DNA and histone proteins. Each nucleosomal unit in this polymer provides versatile capabilities and dynamic range. Substitutions of the individual components of the histone core with structurally distinct histone variants and covalent modifications alter the local fabric of the chromatin fiber, resulting in epigenetic changes that can be regulated by the cell. In this review, we highlight recent advances in the study of histone variant structure, assembly, and inheritance, their influence on nucleosome positioning, and their cumulative effect upon gene expression, DNA repair and the progression of disease. We also highlight fundamental questions that remain unanswered regarding the behavior of histone variants and their influence on cellular function in the normal and diseased states. © 2013.
Gambetta M.C.,Chromatin |
Muller J.,Chromatin
Developmental Cell | Year: 2014
The glycosyltransferase Ogt adds O-linked N-Acetylglucosamine (O-GlcNAc) moieties to nuclear and cytosolic proteins. Drosophila embryos lacking Ogt protein arrest development with a remarkably specific Polycomb phenotype, arising from the failure to repress Polycomb target genes. The Polycomb protein Polyhomeotic (Ph), an Ogt substrate, forms large aggregates in the absence of O-GlcNAcylation both invivo and invitro. O-GlcNAcylation of a serine/threonine (S/T) stretch in Ph is critical to prevent nonproductive aggregation of both Drosophila and human Ph via their C-terminal sterile alpha motif(SAM) domains invitro. Full Ph repressor activity invivo requires both the SAM domain and O-GlcNAcylation of the S/T stretch. We demonstrate that Ph mutants lacking the S/T stretch reproduce the phenotype of ogt mutants, suggesting that theS/T stretch in Ph is the key Ogt substrate in Drosophila. We propose that O-GlcNAcylation is needed for Ph to form functional, ordered assemblies via its SAM domain. © 2014 Elsevier Inc.
Hajkova P.,Chromatin
Current Opinion in Cell Biology | Year: 2010
Epigenetic reprogramming involves processes that lead to the erasure of epigenetic information. Such instances are typically connected with the reversal of differentiation and can potentially lead to the re-establishment of the pluripotent (embryonic stem (ES)-like) phenotype. Genome-wide epigenetic reprogramming occurs naturally in vivo in the course of normal mammalian development. Although in vitro reprogramming systems that can restore pluripotency in somatic cell have been designed, they are still very inefficient and the process requires considerably more time than the reprogramming processes that occur in vivo. Careful analysis of the developmental reprogramming events can give us mechanistic clues and enable us to design better in vitro experimental strategies. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.
Ballestar E.,Chromatin
Nature Reviews Rheumatology | Year: 2011
The potential roles of epigenetic alterations in the pathogenesis of autoimmune rheumatic diseases are raising great expectations among clinicians and researchers. Epigenetic mechanisms regulate gene expression and are sensitive to external stimuli, bridging the gap between environmental and genetic factors. Considerable evidence of epigenetic changes, particularly altered patterns of DNA methylation, exists in diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and rheumatoid arthritis. The importance of such changes in the pathology of rheumatic diseases has been demonstrated by examining the relationship between gene-specific methylation and SLE in monozygotic twins discordant for the disease, in whom genetic variability is excluded as a cause for discordance. Several studies have highlighted the importance of the tissue-specificity of DNA methylation changes, an aspect whichĝ€ "in contrast with genetic analysisĝ€"must be considered when designing epigenetic studies. Here I discuss the proposed mechanisms and implications of DNA methylation changes in the pathogenesis of autoimmune rheumatic diseases, the prospects for future epigenetic studies in rheumatology, the relevance of specific DNA methylation markers and the potential use of drugs with an epigenetic effect in the clinical management of these diseases. © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
Compositions For Reduced Lignin Content In Sorghum And Improving Cell Wall Digestibility, And Methods Of Making The Same
Patent
Chromatin | Date: 2015-01-30
RNAi vectors comprising a fragment of the SbCSE polynucleotide sequence and transgenic plants, e.g. transgenic sorghum plants, comprising said RNAi vectors are described. Aspects of the technology are further directed to methods of using the RNAi vectors of the present technology to silence SbCSE gene expression or activity in a transgenic plant, such as a transgenic sorghum plant. Silencing the SbCSE gene leads to reduced lignin content in a transgenic plant.
Patent
Chromatin | Date: 2015-08-03
The invention is generally related to MCs containing sorghum centromere sequences. In addition, the invention provides for methods of generating plants transformed with these MCs. MCs with novel compositions and structures are used to transform plants cells which are in turn used to generate the plant. Methods for generating the plant include methods for delivering the MC into plant cell to transform the cell, methods for selecting the transformed cell, and methods for isolating plants transformed with the MC.
Patent
Chromatin | Date: 2015-03-17
The invention is generally related to Sugarcane mini-chromosomes and recombinant chromosomes containing Sugarcane centromere sequences. In addition, the invention provides for methods of generating Sugarcane plants transformed with these Sugarcane mini-chromosomes. Sugarcane mini-chromosomes with novel compositions and structures are used to transform Sugarcane cells which are in turn used to generate Sugarcane plants. Methods for generating Sugarcane plants include methods for delivering the Sugarcane mini-chromosomes into Sugarcane cell to transform the cell, methods for selecting the transformed cell, and methods for isolating Sugarcane plants transformed with the Sugarcane mini-chromosome or recombinant chromosome. | https://www.linknovate.com/affiliation/chromatin-150446/all/ |
Background {#Sec1}
==========
The medical student admissions process frequently involves attempts at the assessment of empathy \[[@CR1], [@CR2]\]. Stepien and Baernstein \[[@CR3]\] describe the importance of different elements of empathy. They suggest that in clinical careers there is a need for more than cognitive empathy, defined as the intellectual understanding of another's perspectives, because high levels of clinical competence also require affective empathy, an emotional understanding and engagement with the patient. Some see the cognitive deployment of empathy in a detached way in medical settings \[[@CR4]\] as a key skill and others believe that emotional resonance and affective displays are important \[[@CR5]\]. Empathy is widely described as being an essential part of clinical competence representing one aspect of broader communication skills \[[@CR6], [@CR7]\] and as such it may be desirable to assess it \[[@CR8]\] for a number of reasons. Empathy allows clinicians to better understand patient perspectives, including the worries or concerns of patients, which may help in knowing where to direct emotional support and information. It is likely to be important for good team-working, good bedside manner and the ability to develop helpful therapeutic alliances, leading to better patient care \[[@CR9], [@CR10]\]. It enables the student or doctor to ask appropriate questions at appropriate times, and gauge what is required for a successful interaction \[[@CR11]\]. Genuine empathy may also lead to the student or doctor being curious about the patient experience and their story \[[@CR12]\], improve patient trust and engagement with suggested treatments, and reduce anxiety for many patients \[[@CR13], [@CR14]\]. Medical students' well-being appears to be better, with lower levels of distress and possibly burnout when they have a good ability to empathize \[[@CR15], [@CR16]\].
Whilst many studies report assessing more general communication skills in examinations \[[@CR17]\], or using clinician rated scores of communication skills in ward or clinic settings \[[@CR18]\], empathy more specifically is less frequently reported as being assessed. Some studies use self-report questionnaires to assess empathy \[[@CR10], [@CR19], [@CR20]\]. One study used clinical observer ratings in clinical examinations for 57 medical students \[[@CR21]\] with Rating Scales for the Assessment of Empathic Communication in Medical Interviews \[[@CR22]\], which comprises 9 items each with a 7 point Likert Scale (6 measuring empathy). Reviews report a variety of ratings of process or outcome in standardized encounters with real or simulated patients \[[@CR18], [@CR23]\], few report assessing empathy by those directly in the encounter (e.g. patient or simulated patient). In a review of 13 peer reviewed studies by Stepien & Baernstein \[[@CR3]\] that sought to measure empathy in medical students, none used patient perceptions or simulated patients to assess empathy. The History-taking Rating Scale has some items that ask the observer about student patient interaction (for example about 'the student's expressed understanding of what the patient is feeling and communicating'), but less than a third of these items are empathy related and they are not validated separately from the whole scale \[[@CR24]\].
Actor Simulated Patients (SPs) have been used in previous studies to rate history taking, physical examination skills and general communication skills \[[@CR25], [@CR26]\], but few studies report SP assessment of empathy specifically in examinations. One study of US students at the end of their third year of medical training in one school did so using a five item rating scale and a single global scale to rate 10 OSCE stations in which SPs encountered the students \[[@CR27]\]. This was alongside the self-reported Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy, which was developed to measure 'cognitively defined empathy' (as distinct from affective or emotional empathy). They found that SPs rated Asian Americans lower than white Americans even though there were no differences on the self-reported empathy questionnaire between these groups. Another study in Korea found very mixed results when correlating emotional empathy ratings with academic performance in clinical examinations \[[@CR28]\].
Our study sought to bring empathy ratings into clinical short case final examinations and test their usefulness using a simple general construct of empathy (including both cognitive and affective aspects) compared to other final year clinical examination scores. We also set out to see whether SP actor ratings were comparable to clinical examiner ratings, and how they correlated to independent examinations scores. We hypothesised that SPs would be good at rating empathy in the clinical examination encounter and that empathy ratings would be able to predict candidates with low overall examinations scores.
Methods {#Sec2}
=======
Ethics approval to use the empathy scores from examiners and simulated patients as a formative score only in the final year examination was granted by the Hull York Medical School Ethics Committee. Participants were 133 students at Hull York Medical School (England/UK) sitting their final examinations in May 2012. The final year examination consists of 6 OSCE (Objective Structured Clinical Examination) stations each of 7 minutes in length and four 30--minute OSLER (Objective Structured Long Examination Record) stations, which are cases with real patients. Scores for each of these ten stations are combined for an overall clinical examination score \[[@CR29]\]. This is a sequential examination in which those students with low scores, from this first day who do not demonstrate satisfactory competence are called back for further clinical examinations the next day.
In the six OSCE stations, two examined procedural skills of cannulation and completing a prescribing chart and four OSCE stations explicitly examined interactional areas around communication, teamwork, and patient interactions. These were:explaining diagnosis of cancer,responding to concerns about the conduct and performance of a colleague,discharge planning andsuicide risk assessment.
OSCE stations were scored on a six point scale (A, B, C+, C-, D, E) with A (excellent) to E (unsatisfactory). The descriptors for each grade are shown in Table [1](#Tab1){ref-type="table"}.Table 1**OSCE and OSLER grade descriptors**ACapable in all components to a high standardBCapable in all components to a satisfactory standard and high standard in manyC+Capable in all components to a satisfactory standardC-Capable in a majority of components to a satisfactory standard, inadequacies in some componentsDCapable in a minority of components. No serious defectsECapable in a minority of components. One or more serious defects
For these four interactional OSCE stations, as part of our research, we additionally asked the single clinical examiner and the SP to independently rate empathy on a 5 point scale (with 5 being the highest rating and 1 the lowest).
Two psychiatrists and two general practitioners (all clinical tutors) formulated the empathy descriptors for the 5 point rating (see Table [2](#Tab2){ref-type="table"}). These were derived from two strands of the research literature. The first relates to cognitive aspects of empathy where the students can recognise that the patient has their own thoughts, intentions or beliefs \[[@CR30]\]. The second relates to the emotional component where students recognise the emotions of the patient and demonstrate an ability to tune in to them and adapt their responses accordingly \[[@CR31]\]. The precise wording was chosen pragmatically to be appropriate for the clinical examination context. Clinical examiners and SPs were given instructions as part of the training before the exams on using the guide descriptors shown in Table [1](#Tab1){ref-type="table"}, but also were asked to consider the term "empathy" in the rating to relate to "an ability to understand and respond to the thoughts, feelings and sensations of the other person"; in other words, a broad concept of empathy incorporating both cognitive and affective empathy.Table 2**Empathy grade descriptors**5Excellent Empathy skills. The candidate tunes consistently well to the patients perspectives, knowledge and concerns and develops a good rapport.4Good empathy skills. The candidate develops good rapport, but does not always respond to the patient's questions or concerns or explain things in appropriate emotional tone or language.3Some empathy skills in evidence, the candidate appears to understand the patient's perspective at some points but less at other points.2Some empathy in evidence at times, but largely misses what the patient's needs are, and their concerns, regularly uses inappropriate emotional tone or language.1Poor empathy. There is little attempt to understand the patients needs, factual information is delivered without sensitivity. Consistently uses inappropriate emotional tone or language.
A maximum empathy score for a student would be 40 with 2 raters in each of four stations (range 8--40).
The OSLERs (4 longer clinical cases) were examined by two experienced tutors, one hospital consultant and one general practitioner, rating the students in five areas: gathering information, physical examination, problem solving, patient management, and relationship with patient. The descriptors were the same as for the OSCE and are shown in Table [1](#Tab1){ref-type="table"}.
These OSLERS did not have empathy ratings as a separate judgement. We wished to see if the empathy scores correlated with existing measures of patient interactions and did not want to potentially redirect the examiners too much to consideration of empathy rather than on the existing five criteria with which they were familiar. Scores in these separate exams (OSCEs and OSLERs) were compared to empathy scores in the OSCE stations.
The existing clinical examination uses a scoring system for both the OSCEs and OSLERs, where an A, B or C + is considered as reflecting adequate competence at this stage of their career. Scores of C-, D or E reflect increasingly poor clinical performance and attract 'penalty points' of -1 -2 and -3 respectively. The two OSLER examiners' penalty point scores × 4 patients in 5 areas were added together along with the six penalty point scores from the OSCE stations with one examiner per station. The SPs did not rate students on clinical performance.
The total (OSCE + OSLER) penalty point scores could therefore potentially range from 0 to 138. The actual range of penalty points was 0 to 41. All students see the initial 6 OSCE stations and 4 OSLER patients. However, the full sequential examination requires students who have not demonstrated competence over these initial 10 stations, based on accumulating penalty points from C-, D and E ratings, to return for a second part of the examination to gather more data on which to base a decision. The cut-off point is set at a predetermined level to bring back approximately a third of students with the lowest scores. After the second part of the examination, consisting of another 6 OSCE stations and 4 OSLER patients, an overall passmark is set by the Borderline Groups method. The details of the exact procedures can be found in Cookson et al. \[[@CR29]\].
Results {#Sec3}
=======
Empathy scores on each OSCE station were given by the clinical tutor and the simulated patient. The mean empathy score per station given by SPs was 3.64 (SD = .91) and by clinical tutors was 3.69 (SD = .81), with both groups using the full range of possible scores (1--5). The range of total scores given across all students was 20--38 with a possible range of 8--40. The reliability of the Empathy scale scores measured by Cronbach's alpha was .74.
Spearman's correlations were run for the empathy scores and various of the examination scores. There was no correlation between empathy scores and penalty points on the two procedural skill based OSCE station scores (r~s~ = .07, see Figure [1](#Fig1){ref-type="fig"}).Figure 1**Empathy score versus penalty points on procedural OSCE stations.** Empathy score total awarded by examiners and simulated patients versus penalty points accumulated on the two procedural OSCE stations (Spearman's correlation r~s~ = 0.07, p = 0.43).
However, there was a significant negative correlation of r~s~ = −.54 (n = 133; p \< 0.0001) between empathy scores and penalty points for the four OSCE stations involving interactional and communication skills (Figure [2](#Fig2){ref-type="fig"}).Figure 2**Empathy score versus penalty points on interaction based OSCE stations.** Empathy score total awarded by examiners and simulated patients versus penalty points on the four interaction based OSCE stations (Spearman's correlation r~s~ = −0.54, p \< 0.0001).
Using the penalty point scoring on the OSLERs, the correlation between the empathy scores accumulated on the OSCE stations and the OSLER penalty point scores was r~s~ = −.38 (n = 133; p \< .0001). The data are shown in Figure [3](#Fig3){ref-type="fig"}. One student accumulated 59 penalty points. When this outlier is removed from the analysis, the correlation is r~s~ = −.29 (n = 132; p \< .001).Figure 3**Empathy score versus total OSLER penalty point score.** Empathy score total awarded by examiners and simulated patients versus total OSLER penalty point score (Spearman's correlation r~s~ = −0.38, p = \<0.001).
Thirty nine students were called to the second part of the examination. The average empathy score for the 94 students not returning was 30.2 and the average for the 39 sitting the second part of the examination was 27.2. An independent t-test for the two groups indicates a significant difference (t = −4.2, df = 131, p \< .0001). The Cohen's d = 0.81, indicating that the two groups' means differ by 0.81 standard deviation, a 'large' effect size \[[@CR32]\].
Inter-rater reliability {#Sec4}
-----------------------
Inter-rater reliability was measured between clinical examiners and actor simulated patients in the OSCE, using the individual empathy scores for each station. The intra-class correlation (ICC) is a measure of inter-rater reliability used when students are being rated by a number of different raters and yields a value between 0 to 1. The ICC (1,1) was used, which is a one-way random single measure ICC. This was chosen because each subject was assessed by a different set of randomly selected raters. Overall the reliability as measured by the ICC is 0.645 (95% CI 0.593-0.692) indicating substantial agreement \[[@CR33]\]. The station *Addressing concerns about a colleague's conduct* shows excellent reliability of 0.754 (0.670-0.819), with the lowest reliability on the station *Suicide risk assessment* 0.502 (0.363-0.619). Other ICCs were *Explaining a cancer diagnosis* 0.603 (0.481-0.701) and *Discharge planning concerns* 0.658 (0.549-0.745).
Discussion {#Sec5}
==========
In relation to the first question posed about how independently assessed empathy scores in clinical finals examinations relate to performance in the clinical examinations more generally, we found that empathy scores show significant correlation with the interaction based OSCE stations and virtually no correlation with the skills based stations. This could be because a good ability to empathize is more likely to influence performance in the interaction based OSCEs than the practical OSCEs where neither involved interaction with a patient or colleague. Students with poor empathy scores were distributed across the range of practical skill scores suggesting that empathy is not discriminatory in these stations. By contrast, in the clinically based OSCEs those students with poor empathy scores were more likely to do worse on the stations, accumulating more penalty points.
The empathy scores given in the OSCE stations showed a significant correlation with the OSLER penalty point scores given by a completely different set of raters, r~s~ = −.38 or r~s~ = −.29 with outlier removed. Those with low empathy performed worse on these long case clinical examinations. It may be that though examiners are not explicitly being asked to measure empathy when rating OSLER performance in areas such as 'gathering information' and 'patient relationship', the ratings may reflect allied or overlapping qualities. It is relevant that this correlation is moderately high given that the OSLER examinations and OSCE empathy raters are completely separate from each other. This shows that a skill measured in one context (OSCE) appears to be relevant in a clinical examination in a different independent context (OSLER clinical examinations), giving some indication of construct validity for the empathy measure.
This is also important because it has been argued that simulated patients, or indeed, any examination context, cannot validly assess empathy because the situation is too artificial \[[@CR34]\]. While it is true that a simulated patient encounter is not "real", this study has shown that empathy ratings by SPs and by clinicians correlate significantly, though not perfectly, with ratings of communication and relationship with real patients in the OSLER. This would indicate some veracity for the claim that these ratings are capturing some aspects of a student's ability to relate to a patient, particularly when these ratings did not correlate with performance on procedural skills stations, which would be the case if a high empathy rating was simply a proxy for a generally good student. There is also the larger question of how a student's ability can be assessed before they begin practicing independently. Is observing a student with a real patient in a GP clinic authentic enough, or is it too artificial because the student is aware of the gaze of surveillance? These are questions that should be seriously explored, but the judgement of simulated patients should not be dismissed as irrelevant, even if the "performances" of SP and student are not the actual target encounter.
It is reasonable to ask whether an individual's ability to empathize could be better measured using a standardised questionnaire. Empathy ratings using standard validated questionnaire scales in medical school do seem to have some predictive validity when compared to subsequent ratings by clinical tutor/training programme directors post-qualification \[[@CR35]\] and so research in this area is worthy of more attention. However, fixed self-rating questionnaires such as these are not as useful in assessment for medical school courses, as students are adept at learning to answer questions of accessible fixed questionnaires in a manner to ensure progression \[[@CR36]\]. Furthermore results may not always correlate well with demonstrated empathy \[[@CR37]\], which may vary with each encounter. We chose not to use a standardized measure alongside our ratings for this reason. It has also been suggested that paper tests cannot capture behavioural aspects of empathy \[[@CR24]\] and empathy is a prime area where students 'may not know what they don't know'. Answering questions about empathy at an intellectual level may be very different from demonstrating it in clinical examinations or clinical practice. The results of this study suggest that it would be useful to conduct more research on the utility, reliability and validity of assessing empathy in clinical examinations.
In relation to the second question about whether an SP (actor) can rate empathy and how this compares to the clinical tutor rating, we found that inter-rater correlation was reasonably good. Whilst it is known that empathy ratings from questionnaire assessment correlate well with broader communication skill ratings by simulated patients \[[@CR19]\], few studies have used simulated patients as a mechanism for assessing empathy \[[@CR3]\], despite the fact that SPs are directly in the clinical encounter and therefore likely to be in a position to assess empathy. There may be a concern that actors may not be skilled enough to rate students but we found good inter-rater reliabilities with empathy ratings of clinical examiners who were assessing, even though they were rating independently from each other. All of the simulated patients used in this examination were very experienced and supported medical student teaching throughout all five years of the medical school. They were well versed in the expected level of competence of the fifth year students and given annual training for their role.
Conclusions {#Sec6}
===========
This study raises the question of how such measures of empathy might be used. Given their apparent reliability and the fact that perspective taking and empathy are often explicitly stated in medical school learning outcomes, it seems reasonable to use feedback in a formative way. Simulated patients' feedback can easily be included in communication skills laboratory sessions, and communication skill workshops. They can be used in video feedback sessions or in certain types of problem based learning sessions. The correlation with overall examination performance in our study gives encouragement to further research on whether these measures (or measures like them) can be used across different medical schools, and to develop more evidence of their use for summative assessments.
There are a number of limitations with this study. The first is that these clinical examinations are snapshots in a contrived setting and it begs the question whether empathy can really be adequately assessed in these circumstances. The second is that empathy is a broad concept with different definitions, and choosing a clear construct to assess is not a straightforward task. Clear guidance also needs to be given to assessors since they may conceptualise empathy in different ways leading to them assessing for different things. However, the empathy scores from the OSCE stations did show good correlation with the scores from long patient encounters in the OSLER, which were rated by a different set of examiners, indicating that this may be a reliable assessment of demonstrable behaviours in patient interactions. This study was carried out in one medical school and further replication work would be advisable. Finally, assessors may have their own attributions based on potentially unrelated factors, such as ethnicity, that influence the way they score the students on empathy \[[@CR27]\], and there needs to be adequate training and screening of raters to ensure no discrimination takes place. Nevertheless, the correlations found here with other areas of performance are worthy of note. Further work needs to be done to explore whether scores relate to well validated questionnaire-based empathy constructs, and are predictive of clinical performance in the real world.
What we have found is that empathy scores on OSCE stations are meaningfully related to ratings on longer patient cases (OSLERs) and overall clinical examinations of patient encounters. We also found that simulated patients can effectively rate empathy and give valuable insights into the clinical interaction that correlate moderately well with the observing clinical examiners.
**Competing interests**
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
**Authors' contributions**
BW conceived and led the study and the initial drafting of the paper. JM was involved in design and initial paper drafting. LM collated and managed the database. VA and JM carried out statistical analysis. AB led the OSCE and was involved in integrating the research into the examination process. BW and JM managed the study. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Thanks to Anna Hammond and Janine Henderson for advice and support during the research and to the students and examiners for their co-operation.
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About Al-Faisal College - Campbelltown
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cultural heritage while at the same time fostering an understanding and respect for other cultures and
religions within the Australian society.
To achieve success, we provide constant encouragement and first class teaching programs, enabling our
students to maximise opportunities to learn and grow in a positive, safe and inclusive environment,
while contributing and adding value to the broader school community.
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College - Campbelltown remains relevant and encourages our students in the pursuit of excellence. In
2018 and 2019, the Primary school was ranked first in the Macarthur region in NAPLAN while High
School was ranked third both years.
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Finally, the success and achievements would be meaningless if we did not have the ongoing support of
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We look forward to the continued success for Al-Faisal College - Campbelltown in the future.
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From search and social media platforms to apps, much of our digital experience relies on language.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some languages that are already widely used and reflected digitally are becoming increasingly dominant online.
However, there are many global communities that do not use these dominant languages, or for whom these languages are not their mother tongue. As a result, they could be locked out from accessing certain digital tools and resources. Technological advances such as word recognition are particularly challenging to those who speak a language that can’t be recognized digitally.
To help address the digital language divide, OUP’s Oxford Languages team has enabled more interactions with digitally under-represented languages through its Oxford Global Languages programme. Through the programme, the team has partnered with language specialists, content creators, and local speakers from language communities with limited digital presences to build quality lexical data and resources for speakers, learners, and developers worldwide. More than 20 low-resource languages are currently available through the programme, including Urdu, Tok Pisin, Serbian, Tamil, and Northern Sotho.
In addition, the team has also been advancing lexical data in leading languages, to make sure that we aren’t reliant on one single variation of language to drive forward a digital community. For example, our English datasets cover Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and US and we recently added 26 Korean English words to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Alongside this ongoing work, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for crucial information to be available in various languages so that communities worldwide could access the right information about the crisis.
In response, the Oxford Languages team worked established the COVID-19 Multilingual Project. The aim of the project was to create a standard vocabulary—based on corpus data—and subsequent translations around COVID-19, so that information could be shared clearly, precisely, and as widely as possible.
As efforts continue to tackle the digital divide on a global scale, it is vital that those working in publishing and technology consider language when exploring how to make resources as widely available as possible. | https://oup.foleon.com/report/digital-divide/case-study-language-in-an-increasingly-digital-world/ |
Home Sports Law Who determines the time at which a sporting event will be held?
Who determines the time at which a sporting event will be held?
The dates and the actual time that an event is played can be integral to any sporting event. In most cases the decision as to when an event will take place rests with the body in control of the event.
For example when looking at the football World Cup the actual timing of the matches will be set at three different times on a daily basis by the governing body, FIFA.
These timings will be set in stone before the event, meaning that there will be no change in the actual times of matches.
How will FIFA make the decision on timing?
For which match will FIFA arguably be able to change the original timing?
During the World Cup matches are played continually every day meaning that there is very little scope to change the original schedules timing of a match.
However, the timing of the final is something which could potentially be subject to change.
For what reason would this be changed?
There could be a variety of reasons cited to necessitate a change in this manner with the most likely being some form of security concern. If for example the police feel the safety of supporters may be guaranteed by playing the match at an earlier time then this may be taken into consideration.
However, the final decision will always rest with the governing body.
Are other major sporting events as rigid in timing as the World Cup?
The World Cup schedule needs to be set in stone due to the nature of the tournament meaning there is little scope for change.
However, an event such as the Olympic Games may be able to switch the days of certain events. The reason for this is due to the nature of the Olympics it is made up of a number of different events so if one was moved it wouldn’t necessarily affect the schedule for the rest of the event.
Why would the timing of an Olympic event be moved?
Many of the events contained during an Olympic Games will be played within the Olympic arenas meaning that they have no effect on the outside world. However, this is not the case in relation to certain events which may have an effect on the city hosting the games. In relation to these events the government of the country or city may wish to have the timing of the event changed.
Recently the mayor of London has stated his desire to have the marathon event during the 2012 Olympic Games moved from a weekday to a weekend.
The reason for this requested change is that when the marathon is held in London it will be done throughout much of the city and will require closure of many of the roads. The mayor feels that if the event were held on a weekend it would cause far less disruption to the city than if it were held during the week.
Which body is charged with making this change?
The body which is in charge of the scheduling for the Olympic Games is the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and it is their final decision as to whether to make the scheduling change. They are required to listen to any proposed changes from the government but they are not necessarily obliged to make them.
Can any other bodies have an influence over the timing of a sporting event?
Using the example of Football Association Premier League matches this influence is able to be seen.
When the Premier League fixture list is first produced the games will be scheduled force certain times. Accordingly the police can make a request to the Premier League to have this time changed.
What would be the reason for this request?
This often happens when two teams with a huge rivalry, often located in close vicinity to each other or in the same city, play each other. For these matches there may be an increased risk of supporter violence especially where alcohol is concerned. If this is the case the police may make a request to the Premier League to have the match moved to an early afternoon kick-off.
If the match is an early afternoon kick-off there may be less chance of spectator violence as the possible time for supporters to spend drinking before the match severely decreases.
The Premier League would be bound to listen to the advice of the police in this situation.
The Premier League is in agreement with Sky for the broadcast of live football matches. It follows that when the Premier League issues the fixture list Sky will decide which matches it wishes to broadcast. This will mean that the timing of the match is moved to a time and date when it is legal for it to be broadcast. For example matches shown between 3 and 5 on a Saturday cannot be broadcast live under the Broadcasting Act.
If Sky wishes to show these matches live then they will have to be moved. The Premier League will be under an obligation to do this under the agreement between them and the broadcaster.
Is there any reason why the Premier League may decide to move the scheduling of the match themselves?
Often the Premier League will be required to move the scheduling of an event themselves if there is a clash between fixtures as one of the teams involved may be participating in a different competition. In the case of one of the teams playing in the FA Cup or League Cup the game will have to be rearranged.
In other cases one of the teams may have been playing in European competition so the Premier League has moved the match forward or back a day to give the team more time to rest. | https://www.inbrief.co.uk/sports-law/timing-sport-events/ |
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and its director, Christine Lagarde, must “catalyze” a new Bretton Woods gathering with the goal of writing rules to address unprecedented digital challenges facing the world. At least, that’s the idea Jim Balsillie, co-founder and chair of the board at CIGI, introduced this week in Washington. Balsillie delivered a keynote address and took part in a question-and-answer period about the data economy with Lagarde at the IMF on Tuesday.
“The IMF, with its mandate to promote international financial stability and monetary cooperation as well as employment and reduction of poverty is in a unique position to catalyze a new Bretton Woods moment,” Balsillie said in his address.
In seeking a Bretton Woods-type moment, or gathering, Balsillie, of course, is referring to the landmark Bretton Woods agreement, which created the IMF and a system of commercial and financial relations among the United States, Canada, Western Europe, Australia and Japan after World War II. Economists from allied nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944, to discuss and ultimately approve the agreement, which shaped the current international monetary system. Key organizations took effect in 1945 after enough nations had ratified the deal.
Flash forward to 2018. Balsillie is suggesting that a new meeting of similar significance is necessary to head off dangerous and turbulent forces down the road, and should be helmed by the IMF and made up of the agency’s 189 member countries and their experts in the digital economy. The objective would be to address what he sees as the significant challenges posed to “the integrity of the democratic processes” by big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
“Any data collected can be reprocessed and analyzed in new ways in the future that are unanticipated at the time of collection and this has major implications for the global economy and for democracy,” he suggested.
As examples of digital challenges, Balsillie noted that Facebook’s algorithms played a central role in the genocide in Myanmar, and that social media was used to influence elections in Kenya and the United States, and in the Brexit vote.
Monisha Das, associate professor at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, pressed Balsillie about which he saw as the more pressing issue: that the next Cambridge Analytica-level breach could threaten the existing global system, or that robots might one day be running the local McDonald’s franchise. Her comments follow allegations of data misuse by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting group, which was employed by the Trump campaign and acquired access to millions of Facebook users’ data without their consent.
“Without a doubt a future Cambridge Analytica [is a bigger threat] because the robots are coming and the whole shift of work, as long as you manage the adjustment systems, well, I think the future of the McDonald’s is just fine,” Balsillie said. “What you are seeing is social, democratic, normative, security and health capital being appropriated into narrow and specific private and corporate capital, because they can.”
But even with major issues at play, Lagarde and others in the room suggested that it may be difficult to create a consensus on new digital rules with the same significance as Bretton Woods without a massive crisis emerging first. A key difference: the parties that signed the Bretton Woods agreement were extremely motivated, as the deal was approved by a group of allies who fought together against a common enemy in World War II. In contrast, the current geopolitical system involves great powers rising in rivalry without common interests. It’s unclear whether countries could join together with a common goal in mind, and produce a solution.
“In terms of common threat, apart from the toxic non-state actors, I can’t think of any common denominator that will be the beginning of a platform from which you build something on a broader scale,” Lagarde noted. “Unless you demonstrate the counterfactual, which is probably difficult; unless you have the collision, you don’t really believe in the outcome of that possible collision.”
Balsillie pushed back, saying that he was optimistic that the IMF and member countries could work together to address challenges, arguing that there are shared interests seeking to promote international stability and sustainable growth. The IMF can create “safer spaces for discourse,” he suggested, so that countries could reach common goals.
“Mankind has proven that it doesn’t always need a massive crisis to finally move forward,” he said.
For now, Balsillie said he expects more geopolitical and economic turbulence to come if the IMF and its members don’t come together to produce new rules of the road for a digital age.
“If we don’t [address unprecedented digital challenges] the trend will be much more turbulence before we come to the final realization that we should have done something some years before and have to pay the very big price of turbulence,” he said. | https://www.cigionline.org/articles/imf-should-spark-bretton-woods-moment-digital-age-says-balsillie |
Professionalism, responsibility, and service in academic medicine.
Academic medical centers have responded to health care reform initiatives by launching a series of strategic plans designed to maintain patient flow and reduce hospital expenditures. Thought is also being given to processes by which the faculty can individually and collectively adjust to these changes and maintain morale at a time when reductions in the labor force and pay cuts are virtually certain. Physicians are concerned because managed care threatens their autonomy and jeopardizes the traditional ways in which they have carried out their multiple missions. Some doctors believe that it will become increasingly difficult to obtain genuine satisfaction from their job. The strategies that academic medical centers have begun to use to address the numerous challenges posed by a system of health care based on managed competition are reviewed. Potential mechanisms by which academic departments can continue to find fulfillment in an environment that threatens their traditional missions and values are discussed. A study of the social and historical origins of medicine in the United States reveals that the introduction of corporate medicine in the United States was destined to happen. Strategies implemented by academic medical centers in response to managed care include building an integrated delivery network, the acquisition of primary care practices, increasing cost-effectiveness, and creating physician-hospital organizations. Emphasis must be placed on integrating traditional core values (excellence, leadership, and innovation) with newer values such as patient focus, accountability, and diversity. A shift from rugged individualism to entrepreneurial teamwork is crucial. These reforms, although frightening at the onset, can serve to reaffirm our commitment to academic medicine and preserve our mission. The evolving managed care environment offers unique opportunities for academic medical centers to shape and positively impact health care delivery in the twenty-first century. In a reconfigured model that combines core values with newer values, university-based physicians can continue to reap the intangible rewards derived from patient care, research, and education.
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When you see or hear something in your environment, how does your brain recognize what you are seeing or hearing? This lesson introduces the cognitive perspective in psychology, including the difference between sensation and perception.
We’ll also discuss the famous Gestalt principles of perception that you do automatically every day but didn’t necessarily know there were names for what your brain was doing.
Introduction
Look at this image of a famous optical illusion. What do you see here? Can you simultaneously see two things at once? If we take the visual image away, can you re-create it in your mind?How your mind responds when a stimulus is presented in your environment is complicated, but at the same time, these complicated responses are often automatic.
The cognitive perspective in psychology is an area of the field that studies how people acquire, perceive, remember and communicate information. It includes how we respond to images we see or sounds we hear, how our minds change these stimuli into meaningful ideas and how we remember these ideas later. Several lessons will discuss the ideas of the cognitive perspective in psychology. This lesson is an introduction to the foundation of the cognitive perspective, which is sensation and perception.
Sensation
We all have five senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste and smell. All five senses work because something in the environment sets off a sensory neuron in our bodies, and those neurons send a signal to the brain.
So, sensation is the process of an environmental stimulus starting the chain of events from one of our five senses to our brain in order to be recognized.Let’s think about touch as an example. When something touches any part of your skin that signal sets off the end of a sensory neuron, which is a cell in your skin. The end of the cell moves slightly, which sets off an entire series of electrical and chemical signals that go all the way to your brain. All of our five senses work in basically the same way. But in the process of sensation, those signals haven’t been transformed yet into recognizable ideas. That’s where the next step in the process begins.
Perception
After an electrical and chemical signal has gone all the way from a sensory neuron to the brain, perception occurs. Perception is when your brain transforms sensory experiences into meaningful ideas that can be processed and understood.For example, when something touches your skin, the process of sensation sends a signal to your brain, but perception is when you realize what just happened. What is it that touched you? Was it something gentle, like a feather? Was it something hot, burning you? What part of your body was touched? Another example of perception is with vision. On the sensation level, all that happens is that the rods and cones inside your eyeball process light and color. But on the perception level, your brain recognizes images, such as what your mother looks like compared to your cat or when you look inside your fridge to decide what to eat.
Perception is when your mind decides what just happened to you, and what it means.The sensation and perception processes occur so quickly and automatically that we don’t need to consciously think about them or even realize that they’re happening. When your mind does something so often that it occurs without your conscious thought process, it’s called automaticity.
We have automaticity for certain well-practiced motions, like how to walk or even how to drive after years of practice. We also have automaticity for sensation and perception. However, this automaticity can lead to certain interesting mistakes, as well.
For example, look again at this optical illusion. At first glance, your perception of it might be that you interpret it in one way.
However, when you look at it more closely, you can realize that there’s another way to see the same image. In the early 1900s, a group of psychologists decided to identify some basic ways that our minds automatically process stimuli. Typically, these tendencies help us understand the world, but sometimes they lead to interesting illusions. These psychologists are called Gestalt psychologists, and they identified several rules or principles of perception organization. The word Gestalt can be translated as essence, or sometimes people refer to the Gestalt idea using the phrase, ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.’ The rules identified by the Gestalt psychologists are usually called the Gestalt principles of organization. Let’s go over some of these rules.
Gestalt Principles of Organization
Probably the most famous of the Gestalt principles or rules is one called figure/ground. Figure/ground refers to the automatic tendency we have when we see an image of trying to pick out the most important figure in the visual field and filter everything else into the background. Typically, this is relatively easy, such as when looking at paintings of flowers or fruit. We can see that the figure, or central image, of the painting is the fruit, while everything else, like the table or room behind it, is the background. However, the figure/ground principle is what causes certain famous optical illusions as well.
Remember the famous image seen here? It’s a perfect example of this principle because you can’t tell if the figure is supposed to be the two faces looking at each other or if the figure is the vase or the candlestick in the middle. Which is the figure and which is the ground or background? The automaticity of vision and the figure/ground principle are what make this optical illusion interesting to us.Another Gestalt principle is called similarity, and that’s when we automatically group images that are similar with each other.
Look at this image. What do you see? If you’re like most people, you’ll group the circles of one color all together and group the circles of the other color all together. So, here, you see certain shapes, like a square form. This particular example is actually what eye doctors use to test whether people are color blind.
If you can’t differentiate the shape in this image from the rest of the image, then you aren’t able to tell the difference between the two colors of the image. The similarity principle helps us in our daily lives by making our brains very efficient in sorting through all of the individual aspects of our visual field.
The next Gestalt principle of perception that we all use every day is called closure. Closure is when our minds automatically fill in missing parts of an image, or gaps, to see the image as complete, even when it’s not really.
Look at this image. Does your brain automatically fill in the missing lines to create the idea of an animal? Even though some of the information is missing, our minds realize what should be there. We do this when we walk down a city street, and we see cars parked, but there are things like light posts or parking meters in front of the visual image of the car. We don’t think, ‘Wow! That car is in two separate pieces, chopped in half!’ Instead, we simply realize that the light post or parking meter is covering up a missing part of the image, and our brains automatically fill in the missing piece.
Or, imagine that you’re in a jungle, and you see a snake wrapped around a tree branch. You realize that the parts of the snake that are on the far side of the tree branch are not viewable, but your brain knows that they’re still there.Another principle of perception that we use automatically is called proximity, which is the automatic tendency to group images that are close to each other. Think about the night sky.
Do you recognize images like the big dipper or Orion? The reason we see constellations in the stars is because we like to group stars that are close to each other and turn these random dots in the sky into recognizable images.Finally, let’s talk about the principle called continuity. When you look at this image, try to mentally follow a path along one line. When you got to the middle, your visual path probably didn’t suddenly change direction. Continuity is the automatic tendency to favor continuous paths when looking at a series of points or lines. Continuity is very helpful when we’re reading a road map, trying to see what towns we might pass through on a given highway.
It’s also helpful when we’re reading a spreadsheet, and we want to keep track of which column or row we’re on.
While there are other Gestalt principles, you get the idea. Our minds have automaticity in the processes of sensation and perception to help us organize our worlds in the most meaningful and efficient way possible.
While usually these principles are very helpful, you can see how they could also create interesting optical illusions. Even though this lesson focused mostly on visual examples of organizational principles, you can imagine how we use the same principles for our other senses as well. For example, when you’re in a busy restaurant talking to your friend, you can filter out what your friend is saying from the noises in the rest of the room. That’s the principle of figure/ground at work but using the sense of hearing instead of the sense of vision. Your conversation with your friend is the figure, and all the chatter, the radio or TV and the glasses clinking away is the ground, or auditory background. Can you think of other examples?
Lesson Summary
The cognitive perspective of psychology studies how we think about, remember and perceive the world.
This perspective is sometimes called the information processing perspective.While sensation is how our brains receive stimulus information from our sensory neurons, perception is how our brains understand those pieces of information as meaningful ideas.The automatic tendencies we have as we interpret our world were identified by the Gestalt psychologists, who identified several principles of organization.The next time you walk around your house or town, try to recognize when you’re using these principles.
You’ll be surprised at how often you do!
Lesson Objectives
After watching this lesson, you should be able to: | https://finnolux.com/cognitive-perspective-of-learning-information-processing/ |
Important Announcement: the Beaverton City Council meeting schedule will change beginning in March. Regular council meetings will occur on the first and third Tuesday of each month, with the fourth Tuesday of each month held for Beaverton Urban Redevelopment Agency (BURA) meetings. The Council will no longer meet for regular business items on the second or fourth Tuesday of the month, unless a Special Council meeting is required to discuss or act on important, timely city items. Please note: an upcoming exception to this schedule change will occur when the City Council meets on May 10, 2022. Other May meetings are cancelled in observance of Eid al-Fitr and due to the Primary Election and already scheduled Budget meetings.
Your Vision: What Do You Want the City to Look Like in 10 Years?
Community Vision Work Continues in 2022 Get ready to share your thoughts about Beaverton’s future. The Community Vision is a citywide project and opportunity for community members to help inform city priorities and activities.
What Is the Community Vision? The Community Vision is an opportunity for residents to help guide city functions. The vision identifies the actions that the city will work on over the next decade and is determined through a community outreach process that includes surveys, focus groups, interviews, and other opportunities for public comment. The last Community Vision was completed in 2016.
The Visioning Advisory Committee (VAC) is the volunteer group that leads this process and gives community members a say in the visioning process. The VAC is prioritizing public participation as well as involvement from underrepresented communities.
Why Does the Community Vision Matter? The Community Vision is the guiding document for the city. The 2016 Community Vision realized and inspired many city projects that have been completed or are currently in development. The current update will reflect outcomes that will inform the city’s vision in a new and different way.
What Has the Community Vision Accomplished? The 2016 Beaverton Community Visioning process resulted in five key themes to guide city programming, as well as 104 specific projects. The Community Vision focuses on a wide range of topics like climate action, transportation, housing, equity, public safety, and so much more!
2022 Community Vision Process. The 2022 Visioning Process began with a brief in-the-moment survey to capture community thoughts on topics of interest. More than 600 city residents responded to this initial survey, identifying some key areas of interest. Those topics were housing, transportation, public safety, climate action, economic development, emergency preparedness, land-use planning, community building/inclusion, and homelessness. Look out for a community survey and other engagement happening this spring.
Visit www.BeavertonOregon.gov/Vision to find out more!
Downtown Parks and Open Space Planning Effort Underway
Exciting things have been happening in downtown Beaverton. New housing, diverse restaurants and the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts are making it a vibrant place.
It’s time to plan for the additional parks and open spaces we need in our downtown. The city is partnering with Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District (THPRD) on a new downtown parks and open space framework.
We’ve seen the magic shared outdoor spaces bring to our downtown. The Beaverton Farmer’s Market and City Park have long brought visitors of all ages, cultures, and abilities. Now, let’s plan for our next great outdoor spaces.
The city and THPRD will be reaching out to see what additional parks and open spaces you want in downtown. What unique design features or amenities do we need? How do we make the spaces welcoming, inclusive, and reflective of our full community?
The city and THPRD will spend much of 2022 developing this new plan, with strategies to achieve downtown Beaverton’s future as a parks and open space magnet.
For more on this exciting project, sign up on Beaverton Notify Me List at www. BeavertonOregon.gov/NotifyMe, or contact Sara King in the Community Development Department at downtownparks@ BeavertonOregon.gov.
Find out how you can take part at www.BeavertonOregon.gov/Vision.
Making Downtown Welcoming to All
The Downtown Equity Strategy is a joint initiative of the city and the Beaverton Urban Redevelopment Agency (BURA) that aims to guide redevelopment in and around downtown Beaverton to ensure that downtown develops as an inclusive place for racially diverse communities, and that displacement is prevented, minimized and mitigated. Six top themes emerged in previous community feedback, which we are following up on during community engagement for this project:
- Community gathering spaces.
- Increase in thriving small businesses.
- Increase in housing security and affordability.
- Increases in green space in the project area.
- Systems of accountability, transparency and trust between the community and the city.
- Real inclusion.
Get involved! The project team is involving community members throughout this important work. Visit www.BeavertonOregon.gov/DES to sign up for project updates and learn more about upcoming engagement opportunities. For more information, contact Rachel Thieme, Community Development Department, at [email protected].
Visit www.BeavertonOregon.gov/taxprep for requirements and more. | https://beavertonresourceguide.com/city-news-city-council-visioning-parks-building-a-better-beaverton/ |
Description: This course surveys recent developments in applied cryptography. Research in this field is motivated by privacy and security issues that arise in practice from areas like cloud computing, databases, surveillance and finance. Topics will vary each year.
In Fall 2019, the topic will be crypto for social good. We will learn how surveillance has been (and currently is) used to suppress dissent and how new surveillance technologies are deployed against social protest movements, intimate partners and immigrants. We will study how modern cryptography enables new privacy-enhancing technologies and investigate how cryptography can be used to protect dissent and enhance the safety and welfare of marginalized groups.
Prerequisites: None but CS 166 recommended (email instructor if not sure).
Syllabus: pdf
Overview
Topics (tentative)
1. Privacy
2. Surveillance of social movements
3. Sexual misconduct and intimate partner abuse
4. Human trafficking
5. Privacy-enhancing cryptography (e.g., secure multi-party computation, encrypt ed databases, differential privacy)
There is no textbook required for this course but students may find Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Katz and Lindell helpful to gain familiarity with cryptography. Other recommended (free) resources include Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Bellare and Rogaway and Course in Cryptography by Pass and Shelat.
Schedule
Sept. 05 (Th): Introduction and Overview
Sept. 10 (Tu): Discussion
- P. Rogaway. The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work. | http://cs.brown.edu/~seny/2950v/ |
At the 2017 Telegraph Festival of Education at Wellington College, I spoke on the future of the Humanities. The posting that follows summarises my some of my key points.
A common modern rationale for the study of the Humanities is the acquisition of skills that can be applied to particular workplace occupations.
The incompleteness of the transferable skills argument lies in the assumption that the knowledge content acquired is, at the least of a secondary value and at worst interchangeable, redundant or irrelevant. The notion that Humanities knowledge is somehow chaff to the grain of skills presents, I would contend, a threat to the breadth of education over the longer term. My argument is that to measure the value of the Humanities predominantly or solely by the yardstick of their workplace utility misunderstands their broader significance and value within society.
We need to re-frame our understanding of where the Humanities fit in our society. I think one of the greatest challenges to the Humanities has been what I would see as the unhealthy distinction between the “useful” skills to be gained, and the knowledge, which is so often seen to be disposable.
It is in the interrelationship of the skills (of ordered thought, analogy, critical understanding, expression, evaluation etc.) and the knowledge content being studied that we gain emotional and intellectual insight into the human condition, whether we are studying the poetry of Ovid, the plays of Shakespeare, the art of El Greco or the Battle of the Somme.
Humanities knowledge has value to society as a whole, far beyond its utility to those occupations where it can be directly applied – e.g. academia, teaching, the heritage industry, the media, arts and publishing, among others.
The case for the societal value of Humanities content knowledge is not helped by the complexities of its own geometry. Whereas laws, principles and formulae give the numerical and natural sciences a self-reinforcing cohesion and universality, the Humanities lack canonical knowledge and pre-requisite foundations in the modern age. While much of scientific knowledge can be expressed through the universal language and processes of Mathematics, experimental method and coding, the Humanities rely on the more fragile and contingent communicative modes of linguistic expression and text.
Notwithstanding these challenges, my argument is that the Humanities, and the knowledge that we gain through their study, have a societal value and relevance that need a more coherent restatement.
Proposition 1
The Humanities give us a textured, layered and multi-dimensional understanding of the human experience – through text, space, material culture and the senses. These have the power to fire the imagination, curiosity and emotions of anyone, whether reading a poem, studying a building, or visiting a war cemetery.
Proposition 2
The Humanities help us to bridge the internal experiences of emotion, spirit, faith, imagination and understanding, and the external settings of political and social organisation, cultural expression, economic activity and associational life. Studying the Humanities is an exploration of the connections between individuals and groups within infinitely varied relationships, physical contexts and periods of time.
Proposition 3
The Humanities can be a force for societal cohesion, emphasising the intersections and commonalities of the human experience that transcend barriers of nationality, race and social-economic status, while also seeking to critically understand what has divided us through war and other conflicts. The Humanities have the power to unify through a shared emotional and intellectual response.
In my defence of the Humanities I am very mindful of the counter argument that in an era of austerity these disciplines might be considered luxuries, or the preserve of the socially advantaged. At a time of vigorous debate over access to Higher Education, the Humanities may be seen in some quarters as a preserve of the privileged.
My argument is that the Humanities must be for all. Indeed, subjects such as the Classics and Art History should not become the preserves merely of those schools that have the best resources, and all pupils should have access to a broad curriculum. We need Humanities Hubs (as much as we need Maths Hubs), linking cultural centres such as museums, galleries and monuments, with universities, colleges and schools of all types – following the organic growth model of ISSPs and Teaching School Alliances. | https://alastairjdunn.com/2017/08/15/the-poverty-of-utility-why-we-need-a-higher-rationale-for-the-humanities/ |
Ultrasound Diagnosis of Skin Tumors and Lymph Nodes
One focus in our practice is the ultrasound diagnosis of skin tumors and peripheral lymph nodes by means of the latest high-end ultrasound equipment. As a trainer of the German Society for Ultrasound in Medicine (DEGUM), I am available to you as an expert.
High-frequency sonography (18 MHz) can assess skin cancers and distinguish their depth and their extent from surrounding healthy tissue. This leads to improved therapy planning and increased operational safety.
Medium-frequency sonography (9-15 MHz) is used to assess structures located beneath the skin (such as fatty tumors or cysts) and the lymph nodes in the neck, armpits and groins. This is the most important imaging technique for follow-up of patients with cutaneous melanomas.
There is also the possibility of using sono-elastography, an innovative diagnostic method to obtain supplementary information to distinguish between benign and malignant lesions. | https://ioz-muenchen.de/dermatology/ultrasound-diagnosis.html |
Mastering A Persuasive Essay Outline: Learn To Convince PeopleHWA
Students write various kinds of essays or study various kinds of things, but most of them are so blind to whatever they study that they don’t even know the basics of it. It is however extremely important to know what you are studying, for it is only when you know the basics of what you are studying that you excel at that thing. Therefore, if you are a student about to write a persuasive essay, you should know its basic definition.
A persuasive essay is an essay in which you bring up an idea and through a connected series of arguments and evidence, try to convince your reader to either support of go against that idea. Writing a persuasive essay involves the art of rhetoric, because you have to manipulate your reader at a psychological level through words. Therefore, we will discuss the outline of the art of mastering a persuasive essay in this article.
Best Tips to Master A Persuasive Essay
Read on to find out what that outline is:
Outline of A Persuasive Essay
Before you can move on to writing your essay, it is necessary to structure your thoughts. A persuasive essay is not a free flow of the mind. Everything should be in the right place. If you want to learn how to convince people more efficiently, it is time to master creating a persuasive essay outline.
An outline is more than a plan. It is a strategic tool used to accomplish the goal of your writing. After a bunch of preliminary notes, you should pull yourself together, observe the inevitability of the next step, and write the outline according to the structure.
Introduction:
The introduction of an excellent persuasive essay features a catchy message, which is used to spark the interest and make the reader eager to read further. It may be informative, but it should be put in the correct words. You are better to start an essay with a narrative sentence. It can be a thought-provoking fact of a controversial statement.
Topic:
Just like in any other essay type, a persuasive essay intro presents the topic under consideration. Make sure you are thoughtful while choosing the topic, it should highlight your strengths as much as possible.
Thesis Statement
Each essay introduction has to contain one. What makes the most difference in the case of a persuasive essay is that you should present the thesis in the form of a problem. The arguments of your persuasive essay are solutions to this problem.
Writing an introduction outline is also the time to choose whether you are going to write your essay in the first, second, or third person. It is good to tell about your experience using the first person singular, but the best choice is the second person. When you address people directly, it is easier to influence them.
Body Paragraphs
The main body of a persuasive essay usually consists of three paragraphs. Each of them is a reason why the reader should adopt your viewpoint or/and do what you say. You are better to demonstrate this reason as a problem as well, and you should support it with evidence. You can replace the evidence by solutions to the problem you state, or it can be the mixture of both.
Conclusion
A persuasive paper outline has to include the preliminary plan of the conclusion. Like the introduction, this part of a persuasive essay has peculiarities of its own. Your conclusion has to include summarizing your topic and the key arguments.
To conclude, structure and arguments are very important. The stronger the facts and evidence you rely on, the better. But it is most vital to understand that a persuasive essay should be aimed at making your readers emotional. Dry statistics will not impress anybody, even if you swear it is true. Emotional background of your essay is a determining factor of your teacher’s response. There are plenty of ways to appeal to people’s emotions: from humor to personal stories from your life. Use right stylistic devices to be more convincing.
Knowing how to write a persuasive essay can be of great help in your future life. A good essay starts with an outline, which, in its essence, is a half of a job. Use the template we described here, and you’ll have no difficulty with your writing. In fact, we will provide some sample topics here, which might help you in the practice.
- The US population must complete minimum a year of community service
- Illegal immigrants must have a right to get driving license
- The government should punish citizens who try to download music & video files for free
- People must start receiving licenses to become parents
- Manufacturers must label unhealthy food with the warning tables
- They should lower the voting age to 15
- It is necessary to reform most of the immigration laws to make them fair
- American cities must have free public Wi-Fi
- Students must have a right to take meals during the class time
- Educational institutions with low scores on standardized tests have no right to exist
- Can female sports players join males in some team games?
- Should children with disabilities be placed in separate classes?
- Is it important to isolate infected students? | https://www.helpwithassignment.com/blog/persuasive-essay/ |
After reaching stadium-filling, multimillion-selling heights as lead guitarist for the Police, Andy Summers is starting over from zero again — Circa Zero, that is.
The guitarist formed the group last year with Rob Giles, a singer and multi-instrumentalist who also works with the Rescues, a Los Angeles band. Circa Zero released its debut album, Circus Hero, this year.
Even after decades in the business, Summers is OK with being back in a rock ’n’ roll startup again.
“You’ve got to remember that I came out of a band that was probably one of the biggest of all time,” the 71-year-old guitarist said by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “It was an incredible band with a really great vocalist (Sting), and that’s a very hard thing to follow with another band and not get slagged off for it. So you’re not going to even try it unless you just find some absolute magic with another singer.”
The British-born Summers certainly has a track record that merits both trust and attention. He started his career playing rhythm and blues with Zoot Money’s Big Money Band in the mid-1960s before moving on to brief tenures with the Soft Machine and Eric Burdon & the Animals, with whom he recorded one album, Love Is (1968). He also worked with Kevin Ayers, Deep Purple keyboardist Jon Lord and Neil Sedaka before joining Strontium 90, a group that featured his future Police mates, singer-songwriter Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland.
Summers released jazz and avant-rock solo albums during his tenure with the Police, collaborating on a couple with Robert Fripp. After the Police broke up in 1984, Summers ventured into film scoring, most notably for Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986) and Weekend at Bernie’s (1989). And he even wrote books — including the memoir One Train Later in 2006 and the photography collection I’ll Be Watching You a year later.
Given his diverse list of credits, it’s no surprise that Summers acknowledges a desire to do “ anything but rock,” but it’s clear that the Police reunion tour of 2007-08, one of the most successful tours of all time, whetted his appetite to make that type of music again.
“It was obviously exciting to be out there playing rock again,” Summers admitted, “and I certainly felt like I could do it again. But, with my own ego, I wanted to be the leader, which I did for many, many years. I didn’t want to be playing instrumental rock because I didn’t think that there was much to it. I think it’s a bit lacking in depth.”
Summers was introduced to Giles in 2012 by a British friend who was managing the Rescues at the time and asked him to come see the group perform.
Not until a year later, when Summers went to see the Rescues again, did he begin to see Giles as his musical partner of the future.
Summers invited Giles to his home studio in Venice Beach, Calif., where the two “had a really nice chat,” then started jamming.
“I knew in about 10 minutes that this guy’s really got it,” Summers recalled. “I loved his voice and his ability to phrase. I had a track that already had another guy singing on it, but Rob just completely blew it away. It was like fate putting a hand in the studio room.
“And Rob said, ‘You know, we should really do a great rock record together.’ ”
Summers didn’t require much persuasion. The resulting album — the 13-track Circus Hero, titled after a radio DJ’s mispronunciation of the band name — hits hard, maybe even harder than what Summers did in the past.
“I think it’s heavier and edgier than most of the Police stuff,” the guitarist said. “It’s more aggressive, generally. The basic goal was, ‘Let’s make a rock record,’ as simple as that, and when we say ‘rock’ we mean rock, not soft rock or folk rock or anything else but a real rock-driven band record.
“I’m not trying to play jazz or anything else on this record,” he said. “It’s rock.”
The songs on Circus Hero “are great to play live,” Summers said, though he and Giles haven’t done much of that since the album’s release. Instead the duo has chosen to remain mostly in the studio, working to build a repertoire that will be to sustain a more substantial live show than they could do with only their debut disc to work with. | http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2014/08/14/ex-police-guitarist-returns-to-rock-with-new-singer.html |
This necklace features three delicate charms inspired by treasures of the ocean. A nautilus motif, a seashell, and a blue glass bead dangle gracefully from an intricately detailed 18" chain.
SIZE & MATERIALS
- Composition: 14k yellow gold plate over brass, recycled Montana blue glass
- Measurements: chain length: 18"
- Read about how to care for our jewelry here. | https://www.pamelalove.com/collections/core-necklaces/products/shipwreck-charm-necklace |
Located within an exclusive resort community in Hawaii, this home was designed for a retired couple who desired a beach home that embodied the traditional Hawaiian plantation architecture of the early 1900s. With an irregular site layout, due to a preserved lava flow along the south boundary and a six-foot elevation change from the main road, the residence was thoughtfully conceived as a series of separate terraced villas: the Main House, the Garage, and the Guest House. Light and airy, the residence epitomizes the Hawaiian beach lifestyle. The Main House, which contains the main living areas and master bedroom suite, features an open plan Great Room that opens to a generously sized lanai and lap pool, showcasing the amazing views of Kua Bay and Maui’s Haleakala Mountain to the west. The Garage and storage areas are located centrally within the property, and the Guest House, with two Guest suites, is located at the entry of the property enjoying views of Hualalai Mountain and on clear days, Mauna Kea Mountain. Carefully detailed, the residence boasts a rich palette of materials: white coral stone, painted wood tongue and groove siding, Caspian seashell limestone, Turkish travertine, western red cedar, and carved limestone reliefs from Bali.
Builder: Aina Ola, Inc. | https://sunnlandarchitects.com/portfolio/maniniowalivilla5/ |
I just finished reading one of the most helpful books on writing I’ve ever read—and that’s saying a lot considering how many titles decorate my shelves.
But I hesitate to tell you the title. You might faint. You might freak out. You might jump back from your computer screen or iPhone or whatever device you’re reading this on and chuck it out the nearest window.
One word, in particular, in this book’s title is generally known to make writers quake in their pink bunny slippers as if they are witnessing a wolf spider crawl up the bathtub drain.
Are you still with me? Can you peek through your fingers long enough to read this title? This most awesome, five-star book on writing is called: Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success by K.M. Weiland.
The word, of course, that brings dread into the heart of most writers is outlining. I get the shivers just typing it out here.
But after reading Weiland’s book, the old nightmares of roman numerals and capital letters that have plagued me since elementary school have been replaced by visions of mind maps, pictorial outlines (drawings), setting or world maps, scene cards, and other brainstorming and outlining tools.
Besides giving us a tool chest full of tips, tools, and ideas, the author makes outlining FUN. I can draw with my colored pencils? I can cut out pictures from magazines and webpages? I have more than one way to organize my outline? Yes to all!
I especially appreciated the short interviews with other authors at the end of each chapter. I learned there are many ways to outline and that sometimes your method will change from book to book.
From author Becky Levine, I learned that she uses, as I do, the software program for Macs called Scrivener to create note cards for her scenes. On each note card she tries to include the following: her main character’s goal, obstacles, how she overcomes the obstacles (or doesn’t), if she wins or loses and what’s at stake if she loses. She might also add setting or character notes or anything else that seems important.
From author Roz Morris, I learned that she uses index cards for her scenes. She might also write a detailed synopsis of her story where she can explore themes and ideas.
Author John Robinson says his outlines are usually short—a few pages in a yellow legal pad—which turn out to be more of a list of plot points.
Each interviewee also answers questions about the greatest benefit of outlining and the pitfalls. Weiland also asks them if they ever recommend “pantsing” their story instead of outlining.
And that’s how all this started for me. Originally, I purchased Weiland’s book because I was stuck in my story. I knew some of the coming scenes but not enough of the rest of the framework to really go forward. I was spending too much time writing scenes and digging around for the pieces to make the scenes work. I needed to step back and outline the rest of my story—pulling the many scenes I have stored in my brain and putting them down on paper—so that I can see the entire novel.
When I know what I’m writing — what my goal is — I’m a quick, clean writer. So I know the extra time I spend now outlining or mapping out the rest of my story will save me months of writing time. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
I guess I need to check that book out. . . .
Sounds like a great book. K.M. Weiland certainly knows her stuff.
Thanks for sharing! 😀 Looks like it’s done good things for your writing. ‘Quick’ and ‘clean’ – that sounds like bliss. | https://onewildword.com/2013/10/09/how-to-make-outlining-fun/ |
Since early 2018, rising U.S.-China trade tensions have become one of the top risks to global economic growth. With trade negotiations now stalled between the world’s two biggest economies, there is growing sentiment that the stalemate will continue for an extended period of time, with far-reaching implications beyond just the U.S. and China.
The widespread impacts of this bilateral trade war could be ascribed to the butterfly effect. First discovered by theoretical meteorologist Edward Lorenz, the butterfly effect describes “a property of chaotic systems by which small changes in initial conditions can lead to large-scale and unpredictable variation in the future state of the system.” Here we focus our analysis on global supply chains and geographical revenue exposure beyond country of risk to examine the broad ramifications of this ongoing trade dispute.
As of the end of 2018, approximately 6% of the total revenue of the S&P 500 was generated from China; less than 20 years ago, this share was zero. In fact, China is the biggest source of revenue for the S&P 500 outside the U.S.
Let’s focus on Amazon, which has the third biggest weight in the S&P 500 (3.2%). While the two biggest companies in the index have greater direct revenue exposure to China (Microsoft 10.3%, Apple 18.3%), as of December 2018, just 2.7% of Amazon’s LTM revenue ($241.5 billion) was derived from China. However, by drilling into Amazon’s supply chain we uncover much greater exposure to China than meets the eye. Of Amazon’s 786 unique supply chain relationships, 25 of them are based in China (including Hong Kong). When drilling into the second layer, looking at the supply chain relationships of Amazon’s suppliers, there are 493 unique companies out of the 4,908 relationships that are China-based.
The numbers increase dramatically on a gross count basis, which counts a single company each time it appears as a partner, customer, or supplier. There are 62 direct suppliers/customers/partners from China out of a total 1,128 companies, and 891 out of 7,808 relationships on the second layer.
This indicates that, even if a company has no direct suppliers/customers/partners in China, the company is still indirectly exposed by the secondary relationships or beyond. This revelation begs several questions. Can a company correctly measure its actual exposure to a country? How should a company make, plan, and forecast cost/pricing/hiring decisions in the face of current uncertainties? How should investors in these companies measure, forecast, or hedge their risk from a supply chain perspective?
Tensions escalated further between the U.S. and China when the U.S. Commerce Department announced on May 15 that it was adding Huawei Technologies to its Entity List. The move effectively bans the company from acquiring technology from U.S. companies without government approval if the technology could be used “in ways that potentially undermine U.S. national security or foreign policy interests.” Although the Commerce Department on May 21 released a temporary waiver of 90 days on the ban, the impact on Huawei’s overall supply chain is substantial as companies scramble to move away from Huawei.
Huawei is the world’s second largest mobile phone producer after Samsung and a leader in global 5G technology. Based on the most recent supplier data released by Huawei in late 2018, 33 of its 92 suppliers are headquartered in the U.S. Of these U.S.-based companies, 31 are part of the S&P 500 and/or NASDAQ indices (20 of them are part of the S&P 500 and 30 are listed on NASDAQ).
Based on FactSet’s RBICS taxonomy, over 20% of S&P 500 revenue is generated from the Technology sector. What are the implications for technology companies, considering the intricate supply chain relationships described above? As of December 31, 2018, the 20 suppliers that are included in the S&P 500 made up more than 8% of the total index weight and nearly 38% of the Technology sector weight. Fifteen of the companies have China as their top geographical revenue exposure country, with eight of them having more than 40% of company revenue generated from China.
If the ban stays in place for the foreseeable future, how do these companies address the short-term shock given that supply chain relationships are not easily changeable? Are they likely to find equivalent revenue-generating alternatives to replace the Chinese market? So far, a stream of companies, including Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Xilinx, have suspended selling components to Huawei following the Commerce Department announcement.
When we look at entity structures, we see that among the companies that make up Huawei’s U.S. supply chain are subsidiaries or potential subsidiaries of bigger companies.
Clearly the impacts from the ban on doing business with Huawei will not be limited to the Technology sector.
On a sector level, 16 of Huawei’s 31 listed U.S. suppliers are in the Semiconductors sector. Looking at the constituents of the Nasdaq PHLX Semiconductor Index, 14 of the 30 companies are suppliers for Huawei, representing nearly 61% of the total index weight (as of May 31). More than one third of the revenue for this index comes from China. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the index has recently been hammered, recording a 16% negative return in May.
How can we model the market disruption from trade tariffs given the complexity of the potential repercussions? In times of volatility and uncertainty, besides having a more diversified portfolio, investors can use factor-based stress testing to evaluate the probable impact of such events on their portfolios. Stress testing incorporates interrelationships across a broad set of systematic factors to model the effects on portfolios and benchmarks through various shock scenarios. This works in both single-asset class as well as multi-asset class contexts.
Looking at the 10-year return history of the S&P 500 index, we can assess the evolution of return correlations across economic sectors. While Technology, Communication Services, and Consumer Discretionary sectors have shown strong positive return correlations, this is not the case for defensive sectors like Energy, Healthcare, and Utilities. This is consistent with the view that cyclical sectors tend to perform well during bull market runs while defensive sectors underperform in comparison. Investors can thus take a systematic approach to identify diversifiers that are relevant to their investment holdings.
Using the Barra U.S. Equity Short Term risk model, a -30% return shock to the U.S. Semiconductor model factor will have -0.18% return impact on the overall S&P 500 as of May 31. However, the effects are not uniform across sectors. While the Technology sector sees a -1.72% impact on returns, the Health Care sector gains 0.71%, making it a potential candidate for a sector hedge. We could easily expand this analysis to examine the effects from shocks to other S&P 500 sectors or other asset classes using our model.
Conclusion
Over the last 20 years, global supply chains have become infinitely more complex. Truly understanding the financial impacts of a trade war between two countries requires drilling down beyond the first level of company supplier/customer/partner relationships. These complex linkages can reveal potential effects spanning multiple companies and industries. The large-scale and unpredictable consequences of a heightened and sustained trade dispute can be likened to the butterfly effect.
Sara B. Potter, CFA also contributed to this article
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Harmony joined FactSet in 2018 and is based in Sydney, Australia.
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Based on earnings calls, geographic revenue exposure, and stock price movements, the article identifies UK industries that may be... | https://insight.factset.com/the-butterfly-effect-of-a-disruption-to-global-supply-chains |
Authorities are looking for the owner of a pleasure craft that capsized but remains attached to a yellow buoy in East Porpoise Bay.
Residents near Kontiki Road noticed the 24-foot fibreglass boat with the name Bald Eagle had capsized Aug. 3. “It was in very bad shape,” said Greg Deacon, secretary with the East Porpoise Bay Community Association, who lives along Kontiki Road.
The vessel has been attached to a “big yellow can buoy” a few hundred metres north of a nearby marina for at least five years “and it hasn’t moved,” said Deacon.
A Coast Guard official examined the partially submerged boat last week and confirmed it is not touching the bottom, remains at anchor and isn’t at risk of leaking fuel.
“Although the vessel does not pose a risk to pollute, it is a hazard to navigation,” said
Coast Guard communications officer Michelle Imbeau in an Aug. 10 email.
“Should the hazard increase with this vessel due to a sudden change in circumstance, [the Canadian Coast Guard’s] Vessels of Concern program may take immediate measures to mitigate that hazard.”
As of Monday, the Coast Guard had yet to reach the owner.
Residents were also concerned about the person who they believe was living on board, and called the RCMP after reporting a foul odour emanating from the site. An officer paddled over Aug. 7 and confirmed there was no concern for the safety of the resident, who is not the owner, and believe the smell was wafting from the Sechelt landfill, according to Sunshine Coast RCMP Const. Jihan McDougall.
Residents have raised concerns over the abandoned and derelict vessels accumulating in the area, said Deacon, who wants the District of Sechelt to establish a harbour authority to create more oversight.
Currently, under the Wrecked, Abandoned or Hazardous Vessels Act, the Coast Guard and Transport Canada share responsibility for boats affected by the Act.
Another concern about Bald Eagle came from Dianne Sanford of the Salish Sea Nearshore Habitat Recovery Project.
She feared the boat may interfere with a nearby eelgrass bed, but later confirmed it is resting offshore beyond the depth of the eelgrass growth. “There is a nice healthy bed between the shoreline and the sunken vessel, with a good-sized gap between,” she told Coast Reporter.
Porpoise Bay has been the site of several restoration projects led by the Habitat Recovery Project, including two in July.
Volunteers removed a derelict dock that was located near the dock used by Harbour Air Seaplanes, and planted 1,100 eelgrass shoots. Another 800 shoots were planted near the Lambs Brook beach access in Tuwanek. The area used to be an old log dump and sort, according to Sanford, who described the restoration attempt as “triumphant,” since planning had long been underway.
Eelgrass is a vital habitat for salmon smolts on their journey to the ocean. It also stabilizes the ocean floor, scrubs out toxins and releases oxygen.
The Nearshore Habitat Recovery Project has been underway for four years and 2021 will be the last for the federally-funded program. Launched by the SeaChange Marine Conservation Society, the program has also enabled restoration projects in Howe Sound, the Gulf Islands and Burrard Inlet. | https://www.coastreporter.net/news/local-news/coast-guard-seeks-owner-of-capsized-boat-in-porpoise-bay-1.24184004 |
Purpose – This study investigates the importance of communication that occurs just before workplace meetings (i.e., pre-meeting talk). We explore how four specific types of pre-meeting talk (small talk, work talk, meeting preparatory talk, and shop talk) impact participants' experiences of meeting effectiveness. Moreover, we investigate the role of participants’ personality in the link between pre-meeting talk and perceived meeting effectiveness.
Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained using an online survey of working adults (N = 252). Because pre-meeting talk has not been studied previously, a new survey measure of meeting talk was developed.
Findings – Pre-meeting small talk was a significant predictor of meeting effectiveness, even while considering good meeting procedures. Extraversion was identified as a moderator in this context, such that the relationship between pre-meeting talk and perceived meeting effectiveness was stronger for less extraverted participants.
Research limitations/implications – Our findings provide the first empirical support for the ripple effect, in terms of meetings producing pre-meeting talk, and suggest that pre-meeting talk meaningfully impact employees' meeting experiences and perceptions of meeting effectiveness. To address limitations inherent in the cross-section correlational design of the study, future research should experimentally test whether pre-meeting talk actually causes changes in meeting processes and outcomes.
Practical implications – Managers should encourage their employees to arrive in time to participate in pre-meeting talk. Side conversations before a scheduled meeting starts can have beneficial effects for meeting outcomes and should be fostered.
Originality/value – There is very limited research on the role of pre-meeting talk. We identify that small talk is a predictor of meeting effectiveness even after considering previously studied good meeting procedures.
Comments
The final published version of this article can be found at: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/JMP-09-2012-0265?journalCode=jmp. This article is (c) Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/psychfacpub/119/. Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
Recommended Citation
Allen, Joseph A.; Lehmann-Willenbrock, Nale; and Landowski, Nicole, "Linking Pre-meeting Communication to Meeting Effectiveness" (2014). Psychology Faculty Publications. 119. | https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/psychfacpub/119/ |
Encouraging thoughtful discussion in the classroom can be challenging, but Voices of Democracy makes the task a little easier by providing instructors with discussion starters and additional classroom activities to use when teaching notable speeches form American history.
This question and others, along with additional activities that encourage student research and civic engagement, may be found under the “Teaching-Learning Materials” link located in the “Atoms for Peace” VOD Unit.
Want to check out classroom activity ideas for a different VOD Unit? Browse through the list of VOD Units, select the speech that interests you, then click on the “Teaching-Learning Materials” link for that address.
Samantha Baskin, Undergraduate intern at the Center for Democratic Deliberation, Penn State University. | http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/teaching-eisenhowers-atoms-for-peace-speech/ |
This role straddles strategic aspects such as stakeholder relationship management, executive communication, budgeting, technology roadmaps, services portfolio, as well as operational aspects such as successful project delivery, software application availability, customer satisfaction and incident management.
Provide leadership to the Application Development Teams that consists of Managers, Business Analysts/ Solution Owners, Application Developers and Subject Matter Experts. Responsible for building, maintaining, and providing business support for the IT portfolio of applications for all business units and departments. Provide oversight to all IT aspects of the area including business process management, requirement management, design, development, policies, and procedures using innovation where applicable.
- Build and develop teams including hiring, onboarding, maintain high retention and performance management.
- Set goals through collaboration with leaders and cascade goals to teams
- Effective communicate with senior leadership through presentation, well-crafted written communication, and face to face meetings
- Maintain high levels of Application Availability and internal Customer Satisfaction
- Manage all aspects of vendor relationships such as selection, contracts, and performance accountability
- Proactively manage annual budget within cost boundaries
- Provide stakeholders with realistic application roadmaps that supports the operational and business growth needs.
- Effectively collaborate with associates across the functional organization(s) and leverage project management skills to capture project details, manage resources, oversee go-live deployments, and provide progress reports to deliver projects on-time and on-budget.
- Manage the support aspects of their team in a way that promotes a continuous improvement environment and reduces the support burden on the organization.
- Remain current with, and provide recommendations for, new and changing relevant 3rd party technology solutions, as well as development languages and techniques that will improve company productivity and optimize performance on developed solutions. This includes, but is not limited to, providing systems and applications for improved decision-making.
- Collaborate and co-author IT policies and procedures including design and code reviews that ensure associates adhere to sound SDLC standards, coding standards, revision control and quality assurance best practices, and audit for compliance.
Create and maintain support documentation for their applications and interfaces, and cross-train associates on issue resolutions to maximize application availability and performance and ensures security of data and applications.
BS degree in Computer Science/Information Technology; and/or MBA and related degree preferred.
- 10+ years’ experience with internal customer and stakeholder liaison, business requirements management and business process level solutioning
- 10+ years’ experience with Application Development and Support – including software selection, program design, code analysis and system performance
- 10+ years’ experience with People Management and leadership, preferred
- 10+ years’ experience with Project Management, preferred
- Experience and knowledge in the following areas:
- ERP Systems – JD Edwards experience is preferred
- IT Business facing applications like Business Intelligence
- Microsoft suite of products including SQL
- Working experience with all aspects of the SDLC
- Proven experience developing IT Policies/Procedures
- Proven ability to introduce new innovations to the business
- Strong verbal and written communication skills
Demonstrated ability to effectively plan, prioritize and make sound decisions..
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What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Giving Compass' Take:
• Laura S. Hamilton describes how coronavirus has affected schooling, focusing on differences in opportunities, student well-being, and engagement.
•Why is data essential in understanding how coronavirus has affected schooling? What can we do to improve research on the matter in order to implement strategies that improve upon current remote learning?
• Learn about opportunities to support coronavirus response efforts in education and other fields.
In April and May, we surveyed roughly 1,000 teachers and 1,000 principals in the AEP to gauge how the pandemic has affected schooling, what supports they need, and how they are thinking about the next school year.
Almost all teachers engaged in distance learning with their students, but only 12 percent reported covering the full curriculum they would have covered if schools hadn't closed. Teachers indicated a need for lesson plans as well as support to keep students engaged and motivated to learn remotely.
The pandemic likely exacerbated existing disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes, and the survey results point to some areas of concern. For example, only nine percent of teachers in schools serving high percentages of low-income students or students of color reported that all or nearly all of their students were completing assignments, compared to roughly a quarter of teachers in other schools. Understanding these disparities will be crucial for addressing them in the coming months and years.
Looking ahead to next fall, teachers plan to prioritize student well-being (e.g., their safety, sense of community, and social and emotional well-being) more than they did last fall, and principals anticipate more emphasis on family engagement and addressing performance gaps. Principals also recognize the need for supports for their teachers, with 50 percent indicating that professional learning for teachers will be a higher priority this coming fall than last.
We invite others to use our results to inform their own work and the guidance they are providing. Moreover, we hope that others will contribute to the broader effort to coordinate the work of researchers. A few strong evidence-based strategies could help schools navigate reopening in fall as well as planning to meet the new challenges that will likely arise.
Read the full article about how coronavirus has affected schooling by Laura S. Hamilton at RAND Corporation. | https://givingcompass.org:443/article/a-new-study-reveals-how-coronavirus-has-affected-schooling |
The Afro-Asian Conference, known generally as the Bandung Conference, was to that date the largest gathering of Asian and African nations. On April 18 to 24, 1955, twenty-nine representatives of nations from Africa and Asia came together in Bandung, Indonesia, to promote African and Asian economic coalitions and decolonization. The Conference expressly declared its opposition to both colonialism and neocolonialism not only by the European powers then in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but also by the United States and the Soviet Union.
Of the twenty-nine nations that were represented in the Bandung Conference, six were from Africa: Egypt, Ethiopia, Gold Coast (present-day Ghana), Liberia, Libya, and Sudan. The leading contributors to the Bandung Conference were the nations of Burma, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The primary organizer was Ruslan Abdulgani, former Prime Minister of Indonesia.
The conference came during the midst of decolonization and against a backdrop of a world increasingly divided between the Western democracies and the Communist nations. Conference delegates vowed to take a middle ground in the ongoing Cold War. They also pledged support for those nations still colonized by the Western states, especially the nations of Africa. The delegates discussed and agreed upon economic alliances, respect for human rights in their countries, and emphasized peace between Africa and Asia. The Africa and Asia nations also pledged to mutually support their economic development, vowing to rely on themselves instead of Western foreign aid.
Conference delegates adopted a 10-point program that called for, among other things, settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations, and recognition of the equality of all races and the equality of all nations large and small. The program also called for non-intervention in the internal affairs of other nations and repudiated acts or threats of force against other nations.
Many western powers, including especially the United States, were wary of the alliance between Africa and Asia. The United States feared that the nations of Asia and Africa, many of them who had just received their independence from colonization, would become infatuated with the leftist ideology. However, their worries proved unfounded as the members of the Bandung Conference, for the most part, stuck to their vow to chart a middle course between the Western democracies and the Communist nations.
The Bandung Conference inspired the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961. Members of this Movement eventually became known as the Third World. The Non-Aligned Movement allowed these countries to remain neutral during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. | https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/bandung-conference-1955/ |
issued 20th Sept 2018 Difficult driving conditions in many parts. Central highlands is no-travel, North & East sleet & Snow, South East sand storms.
Weather:
Weather alert for the whole country September 19-21. Very strong winds, up to 25 m/s (90 km/h). Sleet or snow in the north, north east and central highlands. No travel conditions at all in the central highlands and many roads have closed. Some other roads have become covered in snow/ice with slippery and difficult driving conditions, especially above 100-200 m above sea level. Chances of sandstorm in south east Iceland.
Conditions in the highlands:
Tourists often mistake 4×4 for a vehicle that can take on all terrain, which is of course not the case and this must be explained as damages can cost thousands of dollars. Drivers who get stuck in rivers, snow or mud have to get themselves out at own expense – there‘s no insurance in the world that covers damage linked to crossing a river. GPS devices also tend to lead drivers on to closed roads. For this reason, it’s very important they know where to access information about road conditions/closures. It is illegal to drive off-road, including on sand!!
F-roads are closing quickly these days. To be up to date see www.road.is
Þórsmörk/Goðaland: The road is only suitable for 4x4s. It is not advised to attempt crossing the river Krossá unless you are on a larger modified 4X4 and have experience crossing it. There are walking bridges over Krossá both from Básar to Langidalur and on the way to Húsadalur. The rivers on the way to Básar/Goðaland have also been very difficult in the past few days and only recommended for big jeeps.
Fjallabak: Fjallabak N is open for 4x4s. F225 were recently fixed. F208 was fixed from Hrauneyjar to Landmannalaugar but not south from there, that part of F208 is in bad condition, espcially that part that was flooded by the Skaftá river in August. Other roads in the area are also in bad shape. Smaller 4x4s recommended to park before the river Námskvísl and walk over the walking bridge (should not take longer than 5 minutes.) Fjallabak S is only passable for bigger jeeps and modified vehicles. In Bláfjallakvísl river there‘s a deep spot that‘s hard to direct inexperienced drivers from and it has „drowned“ a few cars this summer.
Kaldidalur: Open for 4×4 – uneven and rougher than normal gravel roads though.
Kjölur: In pretty bad shape south of Hveravellir! This is normal for this time of year but important to show caution and not drive too fast.
Lakagígar: Road F206 is open for 4×4 yet in bad shape after the summer. Guidelines are to be found through the river crossings at Hellisá river and Varmá river.
Askja: All roads to there are closed/impassable.
All F-roads in the area north of Vatnajökull are now closed/impassable. See www.road.is
Huts in the area north of Vatnajökull have closed.
Snæfell: Road is closed.
Sprengisandur: Closed/Impassable!
Kverkfjöll: Road is closed. But VERY important to follow instructions by the icecave and not go near it all year around!
Conditions in popular tourist sites:
Conditions depend entirely on the weather so that must be checked every day. Many trails are now wet and muddy and therefore it‘s important to wear proper footwear as the mud is slippery and can cause accidents.
Reykjanes: Construction going on by Gunnuhver where they are fixing the decks and more. Valahnjúkur is closed due to dangerous conditions! The road to Selártangar is in very bad shape.
Þingvellir: Road closure on road 36 from the Visitors Center to the eastern crossroads of Vallarvegur (361) until October. Detour around the closure via road 361.
Geysir: Nothing remarkable about conditions. Please stay on marked paths.
Gullfoss: Nothing remarkable about the condition. Please stay on marked paths.
Western Iceland: Dangerous area around the landslide in Hítardalur. Please do not go there! Nothing remarkable about other conditions in West Iceland.
Snæfellsjökull National Parl: It has snowed on the Snæfellsjökull glacier and the fresh snow hides the old cravasses, so going there without a guide is highly not recommendet.
Westfjords: In general winter conditions on roads higher than 100-200 m above sea level. The mountain pass over Dynjandisheiði (and other gravel roads) are in very bad condition, big potholes and when it rains it gets muddy. Note that at bridges are sharp edges and deep holes, show caution because it’s easy to damage cars.
Látrabjarg and Rauðisandur: Worth mentioning that in heavy rain Látrabjarg becomes very slippery and trails become muddy. The road to Rauðisandur is very steep, threads the mountain with out protective rails which can be challenging for inexperienced drivers.
Hvítserkur: Nothing remarkable about the conditions.
Goðafoss: Nothing remarkable about the conditions.
Mývatn: Nothing remarkable about the conditions.
Dettifoss og Selfoss: The area is pretty wet and slippery – caution must be shown.
Hengifoss: Nothing remarkable about the conditions.
Reynisfjara: The beach can always be dangerous due to the unpredictability of the waves. It‘s not every wave – it‘s every 7th or 10th or 12th wave that goes a lot further up the beach than the rest making it difficult to assess danger upon arrival. There are no rocks in the ocean that break the waves and only a few meters of shore there‘s an underwater cliff so the pulling factor of these already powerful waves becomes even greater. On top of this the sand is very fine ash which makes it extra difficult to get away from these waves. Rocks have also been falling by the cave.
Same applies to Djúpalónssandur in Snæfellsnes Peninsula and Kirkjufjara beach but it‘s CLOSED for this reason.
Svínafellsjökull: Civil Protection advises against travel on Svínafellsjökull due to landslide danger and guided tours on the glacier are discouraged. Travelers are advised to stop only for a short while at viewpoints by the glacier tongue.
Dyrhólaey: The road to Háey is only for 4×4 vehicles.
Seljalandsfoss: Nothing unusual about the conditions – the trail behind the waterfall is wet and one must be careful when going back up the rocks on the west side.
Fjaðrárgljúfur: Important to stay on the trails and not go over ropes that indicate closures as nature is very vulnerable.
Conditions on hiking trails:
Hiking in Iceland requires proper equipment even on shorter hikes as trails are often not like the ones travelers are used to. Please study our equipment list as preparation is key for successful travel in Iceland. The way down can often be harder than the way up so hiking poles are a good tool to help tired knees.
Esja: Important not to underestimate the elevation gain but there’s nothing unusual about the conditions.
Reykjadalur: Nothing remarkable about the conditions. Important though to follow trails as the area remains sensitive to traffic.
Básar: Trails are in good condition.
Fimmvörðuháls: The past few days have been cold and wet. Autumn is there and bad weather conditions a fact. The huts have closed. A challenging hike and conditions vary a lot on the weather! Fog on the top and even snow is common which limits the visibility. You‘ll hit snow just after Baldvinsskáli and walk for about 4 km. Snow can be very wet and slushy so it‘s more time consuming and hiking poles are recommended. Foot prints in the snow should never be 100% relied uppon. Important to keep in mind that access to water is very limited after the river, on the pass itself.
Þórsmörk: Trails are in good conditions.
Landmannalaugar: All marked trails are open.
Laugavegur: The huts between Landmannalaugar and Þórsmörk have closed so it’s not recommended to do the hike. Winter conditions on the way and as huts have closed there’s no shelter for bad weather.
The huts in Langidalur and Básar (Þórsmörk) have not announced exact closing dates yet but will be open until end of September at least. Volcano Huts in Húsadalur is open year round. The hut in Landmannalaugar is also open most of the year.
Þakgil: Campsite has closed.
Kjalvegur: Nothing remarkable about the conditions.
Kerlingafjöll: Snow above 800 m. Apart from that, nothing remarkable about the conditions.
Skaftafell: Snow at the top of Kristínartindar. Apart from that, nothing remarkable about the trails.
SE of Vatnajökull: VERY strong winds Thursday and Friday.
Víknaslóðir: Wardens were in the huts until September 7th.
Jökulsárgljúfur: Nothing remarkable about the conditions.
Ásbyrgi: Main walking paths in good conditions, for example the one leading from the car park to Botnstjörn and continues to the view point platform. Smaller walking paths are wet and muddy and will be kept closed until conditions get better.
Hornstrandir: The scheduled boats have stopped sailing there. Winter conditions in general.
Glymur: Log is placed over half of the river until September 23. One must step on rocks for the first half but due to high river levels it’s unavoidable getting wet as the river flows well over these rocks. Not recommended except for those with good sense of balance as the current is quite strong in these conditions. Light wading shoes recommended. After the log has been removed there is no way but wade the river.
Best regards
Safetravel team
Aurora on Canvas
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Sign up to get regular updates of new tour dates, coupon codes, and last minute deals. | https://www.icelandaurora.com/articles/safe-travel-weather-alert/ |
Inspired by our list of The Very Best N Names for Boys and Girls, I present the name Nova.
Nova comes from the Latin word novus which means "new". A nova is also a space term for when there is a cataclysmic nuclear explosion on a white dwarf planet. It causes a sudden brightening of the star. A nova is slightly different than a supernova which is a stellar explosion that briefly outshines an entire galaxy with as much energy as the sun before fading.
As a name, Nova has been in use for girls since 1885 in the US but it was never popular until it exploded within the past 5 years. It ranked below the Top 1000 at #1133 in 2010. By 2013 it was up to #529. As of 2014 Nova ranked way up at #287 with 1,121 births for the year. It also ranks well in the Netherlands and Sweden.
Nova has recently spiked for boys, too. It has always been given to males here in the US but not regularly until 1996. In 2014 there were 102 boys named Nova for a rank of #1553. Do you like this name more for a boy or a girl?
What middle names would you pair with Nova for a boy? | http://www.theartofnaming.com/2015/08/nova.html |
We received an order from the Pulangi IV Hydroelectric Plant in the Philippines in November of 2012. The purchase was made to optimize the life span of the battery banks consisting of sixty 2V deep cycle batteries.
However, due to the maintenance schedule they had to adhere to, the desulfators were only installed in April of 2014. During which time, the batteries were kept in storage in a discharged state for two months. Using the Infinitum Desulfators ensured that the batteries were free from the sulfation that accumulated during its time in storage.
125 VDC Standby DC Battery Bank Information
- Battery quantity: 61
- Battery brand: EverExceed
- Battery voltage rating: 2V
- Battery configuration: serial
- Total battery voltage: 120V
- Battery type: Tubular sealed gel VRLA
- Battery amp hour rating: 600Ah
- Battery desulfator: 12V Infinitum Desulfator
- Total desulfators used: 10
- Desulfator installation: One 12V desulfator installed in parallel on six 2V batteries in series
Client: Pulangi IV Hydroelectric Plant
Location: Maramag, Bukidnon, Philippines
Purpose: To optimize the performance and life span of a 125VDC Standby DC battery bank consisting of sixty-one 2V VRLA batteries. | https://infinitumstore.com/articles/infinitum-desulfators-used-on-battery-banks-in-pulangi-iv-hydroelectric-plant-philippines/ |
The artistic connotation of nationalization in the process of graphic design In fact, the content of nationalization mainly includes some national aesthetic ideals, self-confidence and spirit reflected in the historical traditional culture and folk customs of the nation. It is the content of these ethnic groups that promotes the further inheritance and development of traditional Chinese ethnic groups, and realizes the inheritance of culture and history for thousands of years. In the development process of different ethnic groups, the main difference comes from the differences in the cultural roots of different ethnic groups, as well as the differences in the forms of daily life of different ethnic groups.
which can reflect the specific characteristics of each ethnic group. Photo Manipulation Services Therefore, the national characteristics themselves need to be displayed in certain aesthetic activities. In the modern graphic design, some nationalized application designs need to reflect some traditional national cultures, seek the cultural spiritual connotation and the core spirit of different nationalities, and can show a more personalized and unique national consciousness. Then form a rich modern graphic design works . In the process of modern graphic design, the application of some content and elements of nationalization is also a concrete manifestation of social diversity. | https://www.sssvapi.com/forum/welcome-to-the-forum/the-application-of-miao-photo-manipulation-services |
This story was originally published and posted on DenverPost.com on December 13, 2004
Gracie Su, almost 7 months old, sat in front of her mother in a Boulder laboratory, reaching for toys offered by a student researcher.
She banged on the table and gurgled happily. After about 20 minutes of playing with green and gray and blue and red shapes – standardized tests disguised as fun – experimenter ethany Gorski told Lin Su they were done.
“Is she clever?” Su asked. Gorski smiled.
“That’s not what we do,” she told Su. “But she seems very normal.”
In some ways, though, understanding babies’ smarts is what they do in the colorful rooms that make up the laboratory of Yuko Munakata, a University of Colorado psychologist.
Are babies born powerfully smart, understanding that objects tend to stay put and not disappear, for example – an idea researchers call “object permanence?” Or are they born clueless about such basic physics, as Swiss researcher Jean Piaget theorized back in the 1930s?
Based primarily on work with his own children, Piaget suggested that to babies, hidden objects simply cease to exist, but dozens of more recent experiments seem to show babies do get it and can even understand the basics of addition and subtraction.
After compiling the results of two recent experiments with dozens of children, Munakata is arguing for a middle ground in the long debate about what babies know. Some colleagues say her work – accepted for publication in Psychological Science and for a spring conference – could heal a divided field and give solace to parents worried they’re not getting their children the “right” toys.
“In some ways, it’s obvious, but our idea is that babies have some sense of the physics of objects, but it’s not a fully developed idea,” Munakata said.
“Experience matters and plays a role in how long they remember things.”
In Munakata’s new paper, she found that babies search harder for familiar objects than novel ones, if the toys are hidden in the dark.
“When it’s hidden, it’s easier for them to remember something familiar,” Munakata concluded. “Kids realize objects are permanent based on their experience.”
Young Gracie Su demonstrated beautifully what the CU researcher concluded from trials with dozens of babies. When toys were set in front of her on a table, Gracie Su picked new ones that she hadn’t seen before. She quickly chose a green doughnut-shaped object over the yellow star she handled earlier. But, when the experimenter hid the objects behind a screen, Gracie seemed to work harder to get at the familiar yellow star.
However, not everyone buys the idea that babies need experience to help them remember objects. “I personally don’t think that idea will stand the test of time,” said Renee Baillargeon, a University of Illinois psychologist.
In other studies, even months-old babies seem to know that objects usually stay put, she said. In some of Baillargeon’s own research, 5-month-olds seemed to know something was wrong when an experimenter put a toy behind a screen, lifted the screen and nothing was there. The infants looked longer at “unexpected events,” she said.
“We’re not saying it’s all innate, but we think there’s a tiny bit of knowledge given to the baby,” Baillargeon said.
Munakata’s “intriguing” results could be explained if babies go for familiar things when they’re in strange situations, such as the dark, Baillargeon said. But Marshall Haith, a University of Denver psychologist, scoffed at Baillargeon’s criticism.
“She is among those who have made very strong claims about infants,” he said. “My own feeling is that virtually all the results obtained can be interpreted in terms of babies learning.
“Yuko’s work is outstanding. … She’s tried to walk the line between me on one end of the continuum and these people who are making great claims for babies at the other end.”
For Munakata, other recent experiments with 3-year-olds have firmed up the idea that children’s experience with objects matters most to learning.
To many, the subtle debate about what young babies know can seem purely academic. But Toni Linder, a DU education professor, said the difference is crucial to those developing early-education programs.
“If you believe babies are born with it all in there, you may feel you need to present them with information that matches up to specific structures or abilities,” she said.
Many back-to-basics educational programs rely on drill sheets and flashcards to “pull” information out of kids, she said. If you believe babies develop knowledge through experience, a more flexible learning paradigm may be important.
Linder, whose philosophy lines up with Munakata’s, said she teaches about winter that way, asking children to melt snow, listen to a story about winter wearing their coats and hats, and make snow angels in a pile of scarves.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or [email protected].
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On Monday, December 5, schools across Maine will raise awareness about alcohol use and abuse for Alcohol Awareness Day.
This Alcohol Awareness Day, consider using one or more of the following resources to prepare a message or activity to enhance your health education curriculum. Click on the titles to learn more.
When You Say No To Alcohol, What Are You Saying Yes To? (Maine Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services (SAMHS) This video profiles five Maine students who discuss their interests and reasons for choosing not to drink. The message is that despite assumptions, not all students drink. The video discussion guide can be found by clicking here.
Too Smart to Start helps prevent underage alcohol use by offering strategies & materials for youth, teens, families, educators, community leaders, professionals and volunteers.
Brain Power takes students on an age-appropriate exploration of the science behind drug abuse, explaining the effects of drugs on the brain and body. This curriculum program has modules spanning grades K-9.
A collection of articles and teacher lesson plans designed to teach students the facts about timely and practical topics in drug education, including alcohol.
Beyond observing Alcohol Awareness Day, it is important that Maine students be provided with education and awareness about alcohol, tobacco and other drug use. This should be part of an SAU’s pre-K through high school health education curriculum and aligned to the Maine Learning Results: Parameters for Essential Instruction, Health Education Standards. Ongoing curriculum programs are a vital piece of alcohol, tobacco and other drug prevention education.
The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Tobacco and Substance Use Prevention and Control Program also offers an online guide to assist Maine schools in creating, updating, and enforcing a substance use policy. The 2014 revised guide, Substance Use Policy: A Comprehensive Guide for School Policy Development, is available on the Maine CDC website. It provides recommendations and practical suggestions for a complete policy, based on the latest available research and best practices.
Schools seeking assistance or ideas for planning an Alcohol Awareness Day activity can contact the Maine CDC Tobacco and Substance Use Prevention and Control Program at (207) 287-8901 or [email protected]. | https://mainedoenews.net/2016/11/16/44850/ |
Nature has developed optimal solutions to numerous problems in the course of the evolutionary process (Begon et al 1990). Scientists in engineering contexts and engineers often try to learn from their natural counterparts and solve problems by following approaches in nature. Software engineering (SE) has already exploited many natural phenomena to improve the efficiency of algorithms, tools, models, and processes. For example, evolution and genes serve as the role model for genetic algorithms, where natural selection is applied to computer programs and data (Goldberg 1989). Ant colony optimization has been inspired by ants and their behavior of finding shortest paths from their nest to sources of food (Bilchev and Parmee 1995). Other examples are neural networks, swarm robotics, and bee algorithms. Recent developments and trends in software product line engineering have made us ponder about the term software ecosystems. It is evident that the term was coined to reflect the organization of software vendors, third-party developers, suppliers, and users (Bosch 2009). The name is obviously derived from the archetype natural ecosystem. However, not much work has been reported which compares characteristics of natural and software ecosystems. Several research reports have emphasized the importance of considering software ecosystems from a business perspective (Jansen et al 2009). However, the key questions are how the two kinds of ecosystems can be mapped to each other, and how software ecosystems researchers and practitioners can benefit from insights taken from natural ecosystems.
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Jonathan Leech, Blog
22 July 2013, Arts, events and places,
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Just thought I would post a few pictures of the forestry festival, which is the first of its kind in Cumbria. The event was organised by Cumbria Woodlands and Woodland Inspirations. Cumbria is very rich in its woodland and the main idea of the festival was to promote forestry as a main sector of the regions economy. The range of displays was diverse – it was great to see all aspects of the industry, from heavy timber extraction and processing machinery, to beautifully made willow sculptures and greenwood crafts.
What a perfect day out! Blue skies, plenty of sun and loads to do – this really is what Sundays are for. I arrived just in time for an early lunch and then set about exploring. I seemed to be drawn towards the big machines, but I guess that is to be expected! There was a lot to see and some very impressive demonstrations.
Forestry seems to have moved on these days, certainly with respect to technology. There seemed to be a lot of smaller scale machinery available and attachments for the farm sized tractor – I guess land owners are now more able to develop an income from their woodlands, without involving the larger contractors.
This mini digger has a conical screw, which can dig in, lift and then split a piece of timber…
Chipping on an industrial scale. This machine made short work of some pretty big trees…
Huw from DF Timber on a well deserved tea break…
A beautiful selection of willow baskets and sculptures – made by the very courteous Phil Bradley! The large sheep will be part of a selection of sculptures lining first stage of the 2014 Tour De France, as it passes through Yorkshire…
Some more of Phil’s beautiful work…
I didn’t have a go at this, but wish I did – the axe throwing looked like good fun. Just had to make sure I took the photo from the right vantage point!...
The hand carvings by this chap were quite amazing. No surprise I was only able to get this one photo – there were so many customers in the way!...
Written by Jonathan Leech
Jonathan Leech is a woodturner working and living in Cumbria. He specialises in making bowls, dishes and platters from local sustainably sourced timber. Read more or about Jonathan or see a selection of his work.
Huge natural edge yew bowl
The new addition to my workshop...
Natural edge burr elm bowls... | http://www.jonathanleech.co.uk/blog/forestry-festival/ |
What is process hazard analysis OSHA? process hazard analysis checklist.
Contents
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How can you encourage parents to be a part of the art process and understand what creativity is all about?
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What should you do as an early childhood educator to keep the focus on the visual arts process rather than product )?
An example of a Process Art activity could start with a large ball of clay being presented on a tray. A group of toddlers could then play with the clay and explore the material’s properties in different ways. There is no right or wrong in what the toddler do with the clay.
Process Art is art that is child-directed, choice-driven, and celebrates the experience of discovery. In process art, the final product is always unique and the focus lies in the creation of the work, not the outcome.
Process Art and the Preschool Curriculum Process Art nurtures social and emotional health, reinforcing such skills as relaxation, focus, self-esteem and emotional sharing. It helps to build such cognitive skills as comparison, prediction, planning and problem-solving.
The quick answer to this question is that with process art, the value is in the experience of creating the artwork and exploring materials and techniques. In contrast, with product art the value is in the final result rather than in the experience of producing it.
Process based management measures the full set of activities in one business. For instance, it focuses on internal processes such as customer satisfaction, quality of product and security as well as financial results including revenues, profits, costs, and budget.
- 2D Art. Drawing, printmaking, painting, and photography.
- Drawing. Most basic art process, composed of making marks on a surface with a tool.
- Printmaking. …
- Matrix. …
- Relief printmaking. …
- Intaglio printmaking. …
- Litography. …
- Screen printing.
- Prepare, prepare, prepare. Cover surfaces with newspaper or plastic tablecloths. …
- Set up space. …
- Compile a selection of safe materials to offer. …
- Organize your materials. …
- Try making a collage. …
- Encourage creative independence. …
- Discuss your child’s creations and creative process.
Product-focused art is also a great way to teach children about specific shapes, colors, etc. Process-Focused Art also allows children to practice their fine motor skills, however, how and what they practice ends up being up to the child and how they decide to create.
Children can learn, create and begin to understand concepts like size, shape, making comparisons, counting and spatial reasoning. Language skills. As children describe and share their artwork, as well as their process, they develop language skills.
What is Process-based Approach? Process approach is simply a way of looking at all your activities and thinking of them as sets of inputs and outputs. I like to tell people to think of it as a chain of activities, where one process feeds into the next.
Process based design makes design iterative in which the process is repeated a multiple times and in multiple ways until an appropriate design solution is born.
Definition. Process-oriented strategic theory refers to models describing or explaining how strategies are developed, implemented and changed. Strategy process models outline patterns in decisions or actions over time, and address mechanisms and paths that shape and govern strategies.
- Describe your artwork as if you were talking to someone who couldn’t see it.
- Describe the mood of your artwork as well as the visual characteristics.
- Always mention the colors, but make sure you use words that describe the colors and their effect.
Arts disciplines are organized by four artistic processes: creating, performing, responding, and connecting.
Process is a base of every product, without process no any product can be built so with that reason it show that process plays a major role in getting a good product. Product and process both are equally important if there is any error find in processing then it cannot get the right the right product.
Why process is more important than product The process is the learning opportunity for the child. Encouraging children to engage within the making process provides great learning opportunity through exploration, expression, and discussion. … It has the potential for the child to feel unable to achieve what is expected.
Cultural Commentary Along with personal expression, Contemporary Art allows the artist to make commentary on the culture around them. … With imagery, shapes, and other varied media the artist can create a dialogue or narrative of their views. When the viewer engages with the piece, they engage with the artist’s dialogue.
- Introduce your child to new ideas and concepts. …
- Encourage your child to ask questions. …
- Emphasize the arts. …
- Consider enrolling your child in a school that also prioritizes creativity.
- Approach art like open-ended play—for example, provide a variety of materials and see what happens as the child leads the art experience.
- Make art a joyful experience. …
- Provide plenty of time for children to carry out their plans and explorations.
The process approach is important to ISO 9001 as it places an overall focus on all processes in the QMS. This approach aims to iron out any inefficiencies, making it easier for your organisation to work on continual improvement.
This perspective refers to internal business processes. Metrics based on this perspective allow the managers to know how well their business is running, and whether its products and services conform to customer requirements (the mission).
The purpose of the process approach is to enhance an organization’s effectiveness and efficiency in achieving its defined objectives. Process effectiveness and efficiency are usually assessed through internal or external review processes.
Process orientation (PO) means focusing on business processes rather than emphasizing functional structure or hierarchy.
Process-based organizational structures are designed around the end-to-end flow of different processes, such as “Research & Development,” “Customer Acquisition,” and “Order Fulfillment.” Unlike a strictly functional structure, a process-based structure considers not only the activities employees perform, but also how …
Process-based organizations are different from traditional organizations in several key ways: (1) they design and manage end-to-end business processes rather than tasks, (2) they measure and manage process- level results instead of departmental efficiency, and (3) they think in terms of customer goals instead of …
Weaving. Weaving skills have been passed across generations. Brunei produces fabric for making gowns and sarongs. “The weaving and decoration of cloth as well as wearing, display, and exchange of it, has been an important part of Bruneian culture for years (Orr 96).” Weaving became significant in the 15th century.
Traditional categories within the arts include literature (including poetry, drama, story, and so on), the visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.), the graphic arts (painting, drawing, design, and other forms expressed on flat surfaces), the plastic arts (sculpture, modeling), the decorative arts (enamelwork, …
The elements of art are color, form, line, shape, space, and texture. The principles of art are scale, proportion, unity, variety, rhythm, mass, shape, space, balance, volume, perspective, and depth. | https://interesting-information.com/what-is-process-focused-art/ |
An artist, teacher and author highlights new materials and components in the art of jewelry-making—including rivets, gears and other unusual pieces—and provides projects and other examples that incorporate these items into the beading and crafting process. Original.
Metal clay for jewelry makers : the complete technique guide
by
Sue Heaser
Provides instructions for creating metal clay jewelry, discusses the materials needed, and offers techniques, from forming hinges and beads to working with paper clay and adding gemstones
The jewelry maker's design book : an alchemy of objects : techniques and design notes for one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces
by
Deryn Mentock
Presents information on tools and techniques, design advice on texture, color, shape, balance, and proportion, and instructions for making such vintage pieces of jewelry as necklaces, earrings, and bracelets
Chained create gorgeous chain mail jewelry one ring at a time :
by
Rebeca Mojica
Learn to create beautiful chained jewelry! | https://www.libraryaware.com/1004/NewsletterIssues/ViewIssue/25674ffa-3e37-4458-89bb-539151609682 |
Conflict management and conflict resolution are often used synonymously. But are they synonymous concepts? Or is there a difference between the two? And if there is a difference, is it significant enough to matter? As with lots of issues, the answers to these questions are; it depends. It depends on who you use as your authority on the concepts and the level of interaction of the parties involved in the conflict.
Well, for me and my life experiences, there are significant differences between the two concepts. And with these differences come different skills needed to address each aspect of the conflict. Managing conflict implies that the conflict exists, but it is controlled in such a way that the conflict is not a major problem. On the other hand, resolving conflict means that some end or solution to the conflict has been determined.
Perhaps an example can serve to clarify the differences. In my earlier life and career as a counselor, and being pretty idealistic, I believed that all conflicts could be resolved if you just talked about the issues long enough. Then I had a situation that challenged my beliefs. I was working with two individuals who were having a major conflict. The conflict was such that it was interfering in both the individuals' lives, families, social worlds , and work environments.
I proceeded with my normal routine of interviewing each individual separately to gain each person's perspective on the conflict and what would be needed to bring it to an agreed upon solution. Then I brought the two individuals together to begin the process of hearing each other and start the healing needed.
To make a long story shorter, after 4 or 5 sessions over several weeks, not only was the relationship not improving, it was actually getting worse. There were several times when physical violence could have been a natural outcome of the sessions.
After many hours of reflection, I decided a new strategy was needed. I began researching the literature on dispute resolution, conflict management, and conflict resolution. I became convince this was one of those cases that could never be resolved without some major personality shifts and the intense therapy to make that happen. I turned my attention instead to managing or controlling the conflict. I started looking for ways to get the two individuals, and others involved on the periphery, to agree to restructure the environments.
We began identifying ways these two individuals could function in their individual worlds with as little interaction as possible. While it was not easy and it took time and trial and error, it did work. However, the conflict did not go away or get resolved. It became manageable.
Are there conflicts in your world that need to be managed instead of resolved? Or conflicts that need resolving and not managed? If so, how do we go about using the best approach for the conflict situation?
In the next post, I will share the skills needed to resolve a conflict, the skills needed to manage the conflict, and the skills that are helpful to both.
Until next time, spend some time observing conflicts, whether international, national, local, or personal, and determine if you think the conflict should be resolved or managed. | https://www.extension.iastate.edu/hr/conflict-management-or-conflict-resolution |
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Add date: 2015-12-26
In Paris, Corinne "Coco" brings her chief Valérie to spend the Christmas Eve with her family. Valérie is depressed since she is newly divorced and Coco decides to tell the story of her sister Isabelle to Valérie to cheer her up. Isabelle is a dentist that has been living with and working in the same office of her boyfriend Pierre for ten years. When they decide to get married, Isabelle and Coco are worried about the family curse that every first marriage ends in divorce. Isabelle and Coco arrange a marriage for Isabelle with a student in Copenhagen so that she can immediately divorce to marry Pierre to live happily ever after. In the flight, Isabelle meets the inconvenient free-spirited tourism columnist Jean-Yves that is traveling to Kenya. When the student does not show up, Isabelle decides to travel to Kenya to marry Jean-Yves. She has the chance when they travel to visit a Masai people when they get married. Isabelle returns to Paris and when she goes to schedule her wedding with ...
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Add date: 2010-11-10
Paris 1913. Coco Chanel is infatuated with the rich and handsome Boy Capel, but she is also compelled by her work. Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is about to be performed. The revolutionary dissonances of Igor's work parallel Coco's radical ideas. She wants to democratize women's fashion; he wants to redefine musical taste. Coco attends the scandalous first performance of The Rite in a chic white dress. The music and ballet are criticized as too modern, too foreign. Coco is moved but Igor is inconsolable. Paris 1920, Coco is newly wealthy and successful but grief-stricken after Boy's death in a car crash. Igor, following the Russian Revolution is now a penniless refugee living in exile in Paris. Coco is introduced to Igor by Diaghilev, impresario of the Ballets Russes. The attraction between them is instant and electric. Coco invites Igor along with his wife - now sick with consumption - together with his four children and a menagerie of birds to stay at her new villa, Bel Respiro, in Garches.
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Guilty (2011)
Azur et Asmar (2006)
Once upon a time there were two children nursed by same woman. Azur, a blonde, blue-eyed son of a noblewoman and Asmar, the dark skinned and dark-eyed child of the nurse. As kids, they fought and loved each other as brothers do. As grown ups, they mercilessly become rivals in the quest years later, when Azur is being haunted by memories of the legendary Djinn-fairy, and takes it upon himself to journey all the way to Asmar's homeland to seek it out. Now reunited, he finds that she has since become a successful merchant, while Asmar is now a member of the royal guard. However, Asmar also longs to find the Djinn-fairy, and only one of the two youths can be successful in their quest.
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Perspectives of low-income chronically ill patients on complex care management.
Low-income, chronically ill adults disproportionately experience poor health outcomes despite increased health care use and costs. Complex care management (CCM) programs are an innovative approach to improving outcomes for these patients, but little is known about the patients' experiences in CCM programs in safety net primary care settings. The authors conducted semistructured interviews with 13 CCM participants in a safety net primary care clinic to explore their perceptions of their health and their experiences with CCM. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, independently coded, and analyzed through an iterative process using grounded theory methodology to identify themes in the participants' experiences. From our interviews, 3 themes emerged-(a) participants mourned the loss of physical function and social well-being as a result of poor health; (b) participants reported increased health-related motivation due to relationships with the care team; and (c) participants experienced a newfound sense of control as a result of improved care navigation and self-management. Complex care management improved health-related motivation and provided a renewed sense of control for study participants, who were experiencing the loss of physical function and social well-being due to their chronic diseases. These findings support the importance of relationship-centered care models in programs for low-income, chronically ill patients. Future research should focus on identifying and spreading best practices that effectively empower patients to feel more in control of their health. (PsycINFO Database Record
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City Attorney Yibin Shen has promoted Wesley Cheung to Assistant City Attorney and selected him to lead the Prosecution Unit of the Alameda City Attorney’s Office.
Cheung enters the role after serving as a felony prosecutor with the Kern County District Attorney’s Office (Kern County is Southern California) and more recently as a Deputy City Prosecutor in the Alameda City Attorney’s Office.
The Alameda City Attorney’s Office’s Prosecution Unit, first established by the City Council in 2019 and reaffirmed by the voters in 2020, is responsible for filing and prosecuting misdemeanor crimes committed in Alameda. Examples of such includes sexual battery, drug possession, driving under the influence, burglary, assault, and certain weapons charges. The unit is further charged with educating the public and enforcing laws governing fair housing and consumer protection.
“We are thrilled that Mr. Cheung has agreed to lead the Prosecution Unit,” said Shen. “Having served as a prosecutor in this office, Mr. Cheung is very familiar with Alameda. His experience, which has included significant work on building this first in Northern California prosecution program, makes him ideally equipped to work with the Alameda Police Department (APD), the Rent Program, our many housing and consumer protection colleagues, the courts, and the community as the criminal justice system continues to adapt to new approaches for ensuring public safety.”
During his time in Alameda, Cheung has distinguished himself in helping build the city’s ground-breaking Prosecution Unit. In just two years, the unit has reviewed close to 700 case referrals from APD and secured countless convictions including sexual battery with sex registration consequences, driving under the influence, brandishing of weapons and firearms, shoplifting, assault, and many others. The unit has also taken affirmative actions, including the filing of enforcement actions, to secure fair housing rights for victims and deter consumer fraud.
“I welcome this opportunity to serve the city in this new role. I feel uniquely qualified to continue to represent the people of the State of California, along with my distinguished colleagues in the Prosecution Unit, to enhance public safety, bring justice to victims, effectuate fair housing for all, protect consumers from fraud, work with leaders in the community to better serve our constituents, and help move the City forward as we work towards a criminal justice system that is equitable, transparent, and provides justice for all,” said Cheung.
Cheung holds a B.A. from the University of California, Davis and a J.D. from Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
To reach the Prosecution Unit of the Alameda City Attorney’s Office, call 510-747-4772 or email [email protected]. | https://alamedasun.com/news/wesley-cheung-selected-lead-prosecution-unit-city-attorney%E2%80%99s-office |
The invention discloses a clothes selection and purchase method based on a network clothes selection and purchase system, the network clothes selection and purchase system comprises a background control system, an information storage system and a client system, and the background control system comprises a clothes virtual try-on system and a background management system; the clothes selecting andpurchasing method comprises the steps of A1 logging in a system, A2 supplementing personal information, A3 searching clothes information, A4 trying on clothes, A5 purchasing and forwarding and the like. According to the clothes selection and purchase method based on the network clothes selection and purchase system, through the clothes virtual try-on system, personal virtual try-on effect video schemes of various kinds of clothes under various actions are constructed, and the try-on effect is good, clear and visual; and meanwhile, through clothes selection and purchase of the network clothes selection and purchase system, the fitting time of clothes purchase of the user can be greatly shortened, and meanwhile, merchants can conveniently know the demand conditions of the user for various clothes styles. | |
In today’s increasingly complex world of resilience, particularly as the country manages through the COVID-19 pandemic, compliance with a broad range of standards, regulations and other criteria has grown in importance.
Compliance with government-issued mandates, such as new laws, regulations and even executive orders, is critical if we are to survive and emerge from the pandemic. In this article we’ll examine how automation, leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), can improve an organization’s ability to achieve compliance.
When examining resilience, several existing standards, guidance documents, and audit materials addressing business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) are important to compliance. For example, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has published several global standards covering a broad range of resilience issues. Of the ISO 223XX series of standards, the most prominent BC and resilience standard is ISO 22301:2019, Security and Resilience – Business Continuity Management Systems – Requirements. It is accepted and used worldwide. In the U.S., three key resilience standards are NFPA (National Fire Protection Association) 1600:2016, Standard on Disaster/Emergency Management and Business Continuity/Continuity of Operations Programs and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) SP 800-34, Contingency Planning Guide for Information Technology Systems, and the FFIEC (Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council) Business Continuity Handbook and Work Program (designed primarily for financial institutions but can be used in all types of businesses).
Compliance with these important documents is considered essential for an organization to demonstrate its ability to respond to and recover from a broad range of unplanned and potential disruptive events.
Each of the above documents is formatted to encourage compliance and to support potential audit engagements. They can be used to identify controls for which compliance can be demonstrated. From an audit perspective, each document’s structure simplifies the process of conducting audits of each standard’s controls. It’s not uncommon for these activities to be performed manually, using audit and compliance tools (e.g., spreadsheets) based on the standards themselves. Unless such compliance and audit documents are already prepared, it can take several hours or even days to prepare tools for compliance and audit initiatives.
Suppose it were possible to automate and simplify the audit and compliance process. Leveraging something that might be called a “compliance engine” such a system could greatly simplify the process of examining various documents, such as policies and procedures, and creating reports that demonstrate how the company’s documents and controls support its compliance obligations.
Recently, Diligent Corporation (www.diligent.com) unveiled a system called Diligent Compliance that examines compliance documents, activities, controls and other materials and analyzes them against specific standards, regulations and other relevant compliance content. Leveraging AI technology, the system uses a library of compliance-related materials for comparing user-based materials to specific baselines. The system permits users to specify how analyses are performed, define what results are to be generated, and generate reports for presentation to management.
According to Liam Healy, Senior VP & Managing Director with Diligent, “The system also has audit capabilities to support the preparation of audit reports and to facilitate audit engagements.” He added, “It can be launched quickly and replaces traditional compliance tools such as spreadsheets or antiquated legacy systems.” For analysts performing compliance projects, the system helps facilitate collaboration among various teams across an organization. | https://www.riskandresiliencehub.com/using-automation-to-achieve-compliance-in-business-continuity/ |
Cleartrack 200 is a tool developed and maintained by the Broome Tioga BOCES and the SCRIC. As such, any data uploaded to the system is in the hands of an “educational agency.” As you may know, educational agencies are exempt from the strict compliance required of third-party contractors for data security and privacy required by New York Education Law §2-d. Nevertheless, we have adopted this protocol to assure Cleartrack 200/RTI Edge customers of our commitment to data security and privacy, protecting the confidentiality of student information under our stewardship. This Privacy Notice explains how we collect, share, use, and protect the student information within the systems and services that we manage on behalf of school districts.
The ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge Development Team has access to personally identifiable information on students and staff for the sole purpose of providing support to School Districts and sending health related data required for Medicaid reimbursement. Any data collected is necessary in order for districts to manage the day-to-day operations of their schools and comply with New York State reporting and billing requirements.
Databases may reside on servers managed by SCRIC (South Central Regional Information Center) or other Regional Information Centers across New York State. All student data housed within these systems belongs to the respective school districts.
ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge will not release or provide access to student data to parents, students, other vendors or other unauthorized agencies, without the expressed consent of the school district that is responsible for the data. Requests for student information or access received by ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge from unauthorized parties will be referred to the respective school district for authorization.
If, for any reason, ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge intends to use student information in a manner different from that stated at the time of collection, we will notify the school district. School administration will have a choice as to whether or not ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge can use student information in such a way.
If students or parents wish to review, update or correct student information, they should follow the policies and procedures of their local school district.
Only student information relevant and necessary to the application is collected. No other student information is collected. The specific information that is collected includes Personally Identifiable Information (PII). PII is data that identifies a specific student, can be used to distinguish one student from another or be used in combination with other information to identify the student.
PII includes, but is not limited to, a student’s name, address, social security number, email, unique school identification number, student photos, individualized education programs (IEPs), testing and evaluations, medical records, date of birth, and any access codes or passwords that permit access to personal records. NOTE: ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge does not require SSNs, including for Medicaid Billing.
ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge and the SCRIC also regularly promote awareness of student data security and privacy issues and trains staff on security and privacy standards. This includes participating in an annual training session for all SCRIC staff and managers regarding security and privacy policies, guidelines and practices. We consider data to be confidential and is not used for any purpose other than providing services on the district’s behalf.
Sometimes individuals and organizations outside the schools and ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge, such as software support teams and technical consultants, have access to student data by the nature of the work they do.
In these cases, ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge requires stringent contractual obligations (the same as the SCRIC) for security and privacy of student data in compliance with the New York State Common Core Implementation Reform Act of March, 2014. Contracts with these providers include the following stipulations:
School districts are solely responsible for the accuracy of the student data that their employees enter into and utilize within ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge.
New York State has defined a multi-level process for exporting student data to the New York State Education Department Student Information Repository System (SIRS database). The first step in this process is to import data to Level 0 of the system, resolve any errors that result and validate the accuracy of this data.
For Medicaid purposes, Broome-Tioga BOCES (Board of Cooperative Educational SO Le) Medicaid Service Bureau (MSB) adheres to a Medicaid Billing Compliance Program. We ensure data encryption, and secure data transfer is used to move the data from school districts enrolled in eMedNY.
ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge monitors its privacy policies and practices, including this Privacy Notice, to ensure compliance with the most recent state and federal laws.
ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge also self-monitors to ensure that internal security and privacy processes and procedures meet the requirements described in this Notice. This includes processes for the regular assessment of risks and regular review of security and privacy procedures and documents.
All choices available to students and parents regarding the collection, use and disclosure of student information are governed by the policies and procedures of each student’s respective school district and are outside the jurisdiction of ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge. All requests received to opt-out or limit data collection, data use and information disclosure for a specific student will be referred to the school district of that student.
Inquiries, complaints, disputes or Freedom of Information requests concerning specific student data should be directed to the local school district(s) responsible for the student information. If you have an inquiry, complaint, or dispute specific to ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge’s privacy policies or practices, please allow thirty (30) days for us to document and respond to your request. All documented inquiries, complaints and disputes will be collected and reviewed by SCRIC’s Security and Privacy Committee to determine whether appropriate actions were followed and to assess if changes to procedures and/or policies should be implemented to further improve SCRIC services. All submissions will be documented and cataloged and an appropriate response will be provided.
Please send all inquiries, complaints or dispute information to: Dan Myers
Acting SCRIC Chief Privacy Officer
[email protected]
607-766-3750
If there is an accidental or an intrusive data security breach, ClearTrack 200/RTI Edge will adhere to Student Data Breach Protocol. Employees who become aware of a suspected or actual security breach must report the matter immediately as follows: | https://www.cleartrack200.com/privacy.aspx |
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This large 10 x 5 metal shed is created from special hot dipped galvanised steel. This steel brings immense durability, which is reinforced by a 20-year non-perforation guarantee. You also have a building that is special in that it requires no maintenance throughout its life.
A unique double-hinged door and apex roof are two other features of this pleasing and very practical building. The apex roof adds height, so you can store large and bulky tools in the shed, making for even more practicality. | https://whatshed.co.uk/10-x-5-biohort-europa-metal-shed-size-4a/ |
2. Angular Misclosure
Angular misclosure is the difference between the measured angles' sum on a traverse and the angle condition for the traverse configuration.
The amount of allowable angular misclosure is dependant on the survey purpose. The limits are generally expressed as an Error of a Series:
|Equation B-4|
|C: Allowable misclosure, seconds
|
k: expected error in each angle, seconds
n: number of angles
Traditional formal standards from the FGCS Standards and Specifications for Geodetic Control Networks are:
|Table B-1|
|Angular Misclosure|
|Order||Class||k (sec)|
|First||-||1.7|
|Second||I||3.0|
|II||4.5|
|Third||I||10.0|
|II||12.0|
Example
What is the allowable angular misclosure for a five-sided traverse if it is to meet Second Order Class II standards, Figure B-5?
|Figure B-5
|
Allowable Misclosure
From Table 1, k = 4.5". Substituting into Equation B-4:
Because this is a five-sided loop traverse, using Equation B-1 the angles should sum to:
Therefore, the total should be in the range 539°59'50" to 540°00'10".
Informal standards can be created which reflect equipment, experience, conditions, project needs, etc.
Example
A control network is to be established for a construction project. Sight distances will be relatively short (under 300 ft) so measuring angles consistently will be a challenge. Testing under these conditions, our survey crew was able to measure an angle to a consistency of ±0°00'12". For this project, we will use an allowable misclosure of: | http://jerrymahun.com/index.php/home/open-access/topic-trav-comps/41-travcomps-chap-b?start=1 |
Education, from early years, through to further and higher education, plays a key role in a person’s employment and labour market outcomes.
Our research and consultancy spans compulsory and pre-16 education to post-16 choices, including apprenticeships, technical education, and higher education for young people and adults.
We summarise knowledge and good practice, evaluate interventions, and advise policymakers, whilst exploring specific issues, including social equity and mobility. Our studies frequently involve gathering the views of pupils, learners and students, providers and employers, as well as comparing national and international approaches and their impact.
Apprenticeships have been subject to intense policy interest over time with a particular focus on increasing the number and quality of apprenticeships.
We have a strong track record of research on apprenticeships, having led the evaluation of the earliest Trailblazer networks and having contributed to the evaluation of the apprenticeship grant for employers. We have explored apprenticeships from the perspective of equality and diversity and the under-representation by ethnicity, gender and disability, whilst providing analysis to contribute to international reviews of apprenticeship models and outcomes.
Our research covers post-16 education transitions and decisions to pursue the academic route (A-Levels) or further education and vocational qualifications. This education phase also provides second chances: for adults from basic/entry levels to continuing professional development using vocational routes; and for learners aged 16-18 who require qualifications from entry level to GCSE (and equivalent) and beyond into courses focused more specifically on the occupational and technical skills that employers require.
‘T-Levels’ are a new vocational qualification in the UK, aimed at improving provision, moving it closer to employer skills demands and better preparing learners for the labour market, or to transition to higher education. We have contributed to the T-Levels' development through an evaluation of the pilot work placements which form an integral part of T-Level strategy. Other recent studies include our review of effective curriculum for 'Below Level 2' learners (who will require the new T-Level transition year), a review of Adult Funding, and a study into social mobility resulting from further education participation.
Even before children start school, they are developing literacy and numeracy skills which prepare them for their education and career ahead. Pre-16 education in the UK encompasses everything from the early years through to Year 11 and closely overlaps our other work areas, such as careers education and apprenticeships and technical education. IES is building a programme of research in pre-16 education and has worked for clients such as the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Network (STEMNET), the Education Endowment Foundation the Careers & Enterprise Company.
Recruiting the right teachers and retaining them in schools and colleges is crucial to the education landscape, as the government recognises that good quality teaching is one of the best ways to improve educational outcomes for young people.
IES has a long history of examining the schools and colleges workforces and issues that affect them, such as working conditions, training, diversity and pay. Sitting within the broader framework of employment expertise that we offer, this work also recognises the unique challenges at play with the schools and colleges workforce, where, for example, we find some of the longest working hours of any profession.
Not all people achieve their full potential when in full-time education or training. There are adults currently in work who do not possess the qualifications now expected for job entry (eg 5 high-quality GCSEs). People feel ready to return to education at different times in their lives, for different reasons, and some may wish to enter work before they consider undertaking any other education or training.
We explore adult skills and evaluate programmes and interventions that aim to provide opportunities for people to gain the foundation and intermediate skills to enable them to progress and advance in the workplace. This includes the evaluation of the Train to Gain Learner Experience, as well as a detailed insight study into adult decision-making about training and development.
The means through which young people make the transition from school to work or further study, and how successfully they make it, can have a major effect on their lifetime potential. Their choices and the ways in which these can be influenced can help shape a more productive and equal society.
We have a considerable track record in researching the factors and policy interventions that influence these transitions and engagement in the labour market. We have also completed studies into how young people can develop employability skills and attributes in education settings that will help their future transitions, whilst contributing to international analyses on these themes. | https://www.employment-studies.co.uk/what-we-know/education-and-path-employment |
Unlike divorce, an annulment is retroactive. This means that an annulled marriage is considered to be invalid and void from the beginning, almost as if it had never taken place. In the eyes of the law, the marriage never occurred, which can be important for a number of reasons. However, not all marriages can be annulled. Annulment is a legal protection set up for those who truly should not have been married for one reason or another, therefore annulment is not available as an escape route for a normal marriage. In order to obtain an annulment, you need to meet certain criteria that vary from state to state. In order to determine whether an annulment is available to you and whether it would be advantageous to you, it is advisable to consult with a qualified attorney.
Availability of an Annulment
Generally speaking, an annulment may be available if the validity of the marriage can be called into question by mental, physical, or legal considerations.
Annulment Mental Considerations
There are a number of factors that can affect a person’s mental state and therefore their ability to consent to a marriage. A marriage may be annulled if one party was mentally incompetent at the time of the marriage. If one party was under the influence of drugs or alcohol when the marriage took place, the marriage may be annulled. A marriage can be annulled if one party was coerced/forced into marriage, as it would not have been of one party’s own free will. If a person entered into a marriage as a joke or on a dare, without the intention to truly be bound to it, the marriage may be annulled. Finally, if a person entered into a marriage because of a belief and reliance on untrue statements by the other person, the marriage may be annulled.
Annulment Physical Considerations
Incurable impotence, so that intercourse cannot occur and the marriage cannot be consummated, can be grounds for an annulment. However, the other party must not have known prior to the marriage of the impotence of their spouse.
Annulment Legal Considerations
There are several factors that can make it illegal to marry and can therefore be a basis for annulment. Some states may have other legal remedies, besides an annulment, in place for a person who entered unknowingly into an illegal marriage. If one party was still married at the time of the wedding, the marriage may be annulled. If one party was underage and did not have the required parental or court consent for marrying, the marriage may be annulled. However, if the underage spouse achieves adult age and is still married, there is the possibility that an annulment after that point will not be allowed. A marriage can usually be annulled if it is an incestuous one; most states consider blood marriages closer to second cousins to be incestuous.
Advantages of an Annulment
The principle advantage of an annulment is that the marriage is treat as having never existed. This could be attractive for religious and/or financial reasons. The effects of a divorce can be long lasting and far-reaching, which is generally not the case with an annulment. An annulment also does not usually include the dividing up of property or the determination of support payments.
Disadvantages of an Annulment
There are some disadvantages to getting an annulment. In many states there are no-fault divorces and you can get a divorce without having to provide any proof. With annulment, you are required to state the grounds for the annulment and provide proof. Also, unlike divorce, there may be time constraints as to when an annulment is allowed. We at Legal Help Lawyers can put you in touch with an attorney who can explain these details to you. You should also ask your attorney about the complexity of getting an annulment and find out whether it would be easier or more difficult than getting a divorce.
Annulment isn’t for everyone. Only a small percentage of those who are married can even qualify for one. If you believe you fall into one of the categories that provide grounds for annulment, make sure that you speak with an experienced attorney about your options and the best way in which to proceed.
Contact us today for legal aid with annulment! | https://www.legalhelplawyers.com/family-lawyers/annulment-lawyer |
By Lauren Lipuma, AGU.org
Dating back to the first century, scientists, philosophers and reporters have noted the occasional occurrence of “bright nights,” when an unexplained glow in the night sky lets observers see distant mountains, read a newspaper or check their watch.
A new study accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, uses satellite data to present a possible explanation for these puzzling historical phenomena.
The authors suggest that when waves in the upper atmosphere converge over specific locations on Earth, it amplifies naturally occurring airglow, a faint light in the night sky that often appears green due to the activities of atoms of oxygen in the high atmosphere. Normally, people don’t notice airglow, but on bright nights it can become visible to the naked eye, producing the unexplained glow detailed in historical observations.
Few, if any, people observe bright nights anymore due to widespread light pollution, but the new findings show that they can be detected by scientists and may still be noticeable in remote areas. Bright airglow can be a concern for astronomers, who must contend with the extra light while making observations with telescopes.
“Bright nights do exist, and they’re part of the variability of airglow that can be observed with satellite instruments,” said Gordon Shepherd, an aeronomer at York University in Toronto, Canada, and lead author of the new study.
A Historical Mystery
Historical accounts of bright nights go back centuries. Pliny the Elder described bright nights, saying, “The phenomenon commonly called ‘nocturnal sun’, i.e. a light emanating from the sky during the night, has been seen during the consulate of C. Caecilius and Cn. Papirius (~ 113 BCE), and many other times, giving an appearance of day during the night.”
European newspapers and the scientific literature also carried observations of these events in 1783, 1908 and 1916.
“The historical record is so coherent, going back over centuries, the descriptions are very similar,” Shepherd said.
Modern observations of bright nights from Earth are practically nonexistent. Even devoted airglow researchers like Shepherd and his colleagues have never seen a true bright night with their eyes. But even before the advent of artificial lighting, bright nights were rare and highly localized.
“Bright nights have disappeared,” Shepherd said. “Nobody sees them, nobody talks about them or records them any longer, but they’re still an interesting phenomenon.”
Airglow Anomalies
Shepherd knew of the historical observations and could see bright night events reflected in airglow data from the Wind Imaging Interferometer (WINDII), an instrument once carried by NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (1991-2005), but he couldn’t explain why the phenomena occurred.
He and his co-author, Youngmin Cho, a research associate at York University, searched for mechanisms that would cause airglow to increase to visible levels at specific locations.
Airglow comes from emissions of different colors of light from chemical reactions in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The green portion of airglow occurs when light from the sun splits apart molecular oxygen into individual oxygen atoms. When the atoms recombine, they give off the excess energy as photons in the green part of the visible light spectrum, giving the sky a greenish tinge.
To find factors that would cause peaks in airglow and create bright nights, the researchers searched two years of WINDII data for unusual airglow profiles, ruling out meteors and aurora, which have their own distinct signatures. They identified 11 events where WINDII detected a spike in airglow levels that would be visible to the human eye, two of which they describe in detail in the study.
Finally, the researchers matched up the events with the ups and downs of zonal waves, large waves in the upper atmosphere that circle the globe and are impacted by weather. When the peaks of certain waves aligned, they produced bright night events that could last for several nights at a specific location. These events were four to 10 times brighter than normal airglow and could be responsible for the bright nights observed throughout history.
“This [study] is a very clear, new approach to the old enigma of what makes some night skies so remarkably bright, and the answer is atmospheric dynamics,” said Jürgen Scheer, an aeronomer at Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio in Buenos Aires, who was not connected to the study. “We now have a good idea which dynamical phenomena are behind [airglow] events of extreme brightness.”
Observing a Bright Night
From their data, the researchers estimate that at a specific location, visible bright nights occur only once per year, and their observation would rely on a sky watcher looking from a remote location on a clear, moonless night with dark-adjusted eyes. Shepherd estimates that a bright night occurs somewhere on Earth, at different longitudes, on about 7 percent of nights.
If an astronomer wanted to experience a bright night personally, Shepherd suspects that scientists could predict their occurrence if they monitored the waves continuously, so that they could calculate when their peaks would align.
The next challenge will be to reproduce the observed convergence of these waves through modeling and to consider the effects of other types of waves in the atmosphere, Scheer said.
“Maybe it’s an almost dead question,” Shepherd said. “I’m having the last word before it dies.”
The American Geophysical Union is dedicated to advancing the Earth and space sciences for the benefit of humanity through its scholarly publications, conferences, and outreach programs. AGU is a not-for-profit, professional, scientific organization representing 60,000 members in 137 countries. Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The American Geophysical Union is headquartered at 2000 Florida Avenue NW, Washington, DC. | https://greyareanews.com/news/et/scientists-solve-mystery-unexplained-bright-nights/ |
This nutrient dense one pan potato skillet breakfast makes a week worth of meal prep. Perfect for athletes or busy people on the run.
Prep Time
15
mins
Cook Time
45
mins
Total Time
1
hr
Course:
Breakfast
Cuisine:
vegan
Servings:
5
servings
Calories:
404
kcal
Author:
Cassidy Reeser, RDN, LDN
Ingredients
1 and ¼
pounds
russet potatoes, medium diced (skins on)
1 and ¼
pounds
red potatoes, medium diced (skins on)
1
tablespoon
canola oil
1
teaspoon
cumin
½
teaspoon
chili powder
¼
teaspoon
salt
1
red bell pepper, diced
1
green bell pepper, diced
1
large
yellow onion, diced
1
jalapeno, minced
3
cloves
garlic, minced
1
can (15.7 ounce)
black beans, drained and rinsed (about 1.5 cups)
1
bunch (12 ounces)
spinach, stems removed
2
small
avocados, for topping
cilantro, for topping
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 425° F.
In a large cast iron or other oven safe pan, heat 1 tablespoon of canola oil over medium heat. Once hot, add the diced potatoes, cumin, chili powder, and salt. Stir to evenly coat, cooking for just 2 minutes.
Put the cast iron pan in the preheated oven for 20 minutes, stirring halfway through.
After 20 minutes, add the bell pepper, onion, jalapenos, and garlic. Cook another 15 minutes, stirring halfway through. After 15 minutes, return the cast iron the stove.
Saute on the stove over medium heat until the potatoes are lightly browned and fully cooked through. Stir in the black beans and spinach. The skillet breakfast is ready once the black beans are heated through and the spinach is wilted.
Top with avocado and cilantro. Portion into separate containers for a week of breakfast meal prep. Enjoy!
Nutrition
Serving:
1
serving
|
Calories:
404
kcal
|
Carbohydrates:
70
g
|
Protein:
13
g
|
Fat:
9
g
|
Saturated Fat:
1
g
|
Polyunsaturated Fat:
5
g
|
Monounsaturated Fat:
1
g
|
Sodium:
400
mg
|
Potassium:
2135
mg
|
Fiber:
16
g
|
Sugar:
5
g
|
Vitamin A:
7900
IU
|
Vitamin C:
97.4
mg
|
Calcium:
180
mg
|
Iron: | https://cozypeachkitchen.com/wprm_print/recipe/2183 |
A workflow defines a series of tasks within an organization to produce a final outcome. Workflows allow for business process formalization and management. A workgroup computing application allows different workflows to be defined for different types of jobs. For example, in a publishing setting, a document may be automatically routed from writer to editor to proofreader to production. At each stage in the workflow, one individual or group is responsible for a specific task. Once the task is complete, the workflow software ensures that the individuals responsible for the next task are notified and receive the data needed to execute the next stage of the process.
Workflows are commonly authored by software engineers. Applications often include many predefined workflows that target common scenarios. However, the predefined workflows cannot possibly meet the needs of all users. Those who are not familiar with writing source code or who are not privileged to access the source code associated with the workflows cannot create, customize or edit the predefined workflows.
| |
In terms of raw work performance, one's abilities are not all that matters. People (including me) often fall into the trap of thinking that they should always try to improve their so-called abilities. It may include things like being more proficient at given technology or learning new things. What they often miss, is that the amount of work that they can do in a given time depends also on their work environment.
This article's purpose is to show that everybody can take small steps to achieve measurable results. The one problem with this approach is that the work environment is a very broad subject. Here, I will focus on our current season (summer at the time of writing) and also on my practical observations. Let's start off with something obvious.
The room temperature
The topic is now especially important since a lot of people are working from home and most of them don't have HVAC systems to cool their spaces. According to the research, an average room temperature in summer (about 29-30 degrees Celsius) lowers the work performance of an employee, roughly by about 10% (which we can, unfortunately, experience ourselves).
This is a painful thing, but as always, these are things that we can change. The no-brainer solution would be to work in the office whenever we can during the summer period (assuming that the office has an appropriate HVAC system). At home, we can cool ourselves, for example, with fans. My favourite way of lowering room temperature would be to open my window in the morning hours.
Hydration
According to the research, hydration is one of the most important things in summer. Sometimes when we are in the "flow state" when working on some problem, we tend to forget about basic things. Most of the articles about dehydration measure the effects on our physical condition - they are severe. I was able to find one research that measures the effects on mental health. Here's a quick excerpt from scientific research about the mental effects.
No matter how mild, dehydration is not a desirable condition because there is an imbalance in the homeostatic function of the internal environment. This can adversely affect cognitive performance, not only in groups more vulnerable to dehydration, such as children and the elderly, but also in young adults.Adan A. Cognitive performance and dehydration
Body posture
Probably the most important thing we can do to improve our health and work performance is the ergonomics of our workplace. We sit over 8 hours every day, that's the reason why we may encounter muscle pain. But that said, in comparison to two previous things, we can fully control this factor. For example, we may invest in ergonomics, desk & chair, adjust our monitor and learn about proper position. There are many online resources that cover this specific topic, so if you're interested in it, I strongly recommend that you read further.
Exercising
Studies show that exercising is good for our physical health, but as it turns out, it's also great for our brain. Regular exercise provides better focus & sharpens our minds. The best thing about this is that we don't need to run marathons; a 10-minute walk before work, may have an astonishing impact on our performance. It is probably the easiest thing to apply, since there is no cost.
Taking breaks
This is the thing that I can experience nearly every day. I've talked with my co-workers about this subject. Basically, the issue is that we often find ourselves in a situation when there are 3 meetings piled up, one after another, and we sit for even 2 hours in front of the screen without taking any break. The obvious side effect is that we "turn off" after 30-40 minutes. The worst thing is that on top of that, we are often multitasking during video calls.
When we are not particularly interested in the meeting, we tend to start looking at our e-mail, replying to messages on Slack, or just doing our usual work. It shouldn't be a surprise when after 2 hours without breaks, we can't focus on anything till the rest of the day. Unfortunately, we will often have to adjust to our client's schedule, but at least for our internal meetings, we can keep this thing in mind.
Conclusions
I shared my thoughts not only to show all things we can do to make our work experience more pleasurable and easier. I feel like these things are common knowledge, but they are not common practice. Meaning that almost everybody knows that it's good to keep these factors in mind, but at the same time they rarely try to change anything in practice. I hope that I have managed to convince you with some numbers, that it's beneficial to try to change something. My general advice would be to take it easy - start with one thing that we want ourselves to improve and check if it works. | https://appunite.com/blog/make-your-work-experience-more-pleasurable-and-efficient |
What is another name for external nares?
Like other tetrapods, humans have two external nostrils (anterior nares) and two additional nostrils at the back of the nasal cavity, inside the head (posterior nares, posterior nasal apertures or choanae). They also connect the nose to the throat (the nasopharynx), aiding in respiration.
What is the External Nare?
external nares - The pair of anterior openings of the nasal cavity on the inferior surface of the nose to the outside of the body; the entryway for air required in respiration.
What are the names of the nasal cartilages?
The inferior portion of the nose is made up of hyaline cartilages; lateral, major alar, minor alar, and the cartilaginous septum. The lateral and major alar cartilages are the largest, and contribute the most to the shape of the nose here.
What is the common name for the external bony part of the nose?
Skeletal Structure
The skeleton of the external nose is made of both bony and cartilaginous components: Bony component - located superiorly, and is comprised of contributions from the nasal bones, maxillae and frontal bone.
Common name for external nares
What is the side of your nose called?
Nasal Ridge: The midline prominence of the nose, extending from the nasal root to the tip (also called the dorsum of the nose).
Is your nose a bone or cartilage?
Your nose is supported by bone (at the back and bridge) and by cartilage (in the front).
Is your nose just cartilage?
Nose Parts
Deep inside your nose, close to your skull, your septum is made of very thin pieces of bone. Closer to the tip of your nose, the septum is made of cartilage (say: KAR-tel-ij), which is flexible material that's firmer than skin or muscle.
What is the top part of your nose called?
The external part of the nose includes the root (between the eyes), the dorsum that runs down the middle, and the apex at the tip of the nose. Two openings called nostrils (nares) allow air in.
What is the area between the eye and nose called?
The glabella, in humans, is the area of skin between the eyebrows and above the nose.
What are the three functions of the external nares?
It provides air for respiration, serves the sense of smell, conditions the air by filtering, warming, and moistening it, and cleans itself of foreign debris extracted from inhalations. The nose has two cavities, separated from one another by a wall of cartilage called the septum.
What is the purpose of the external nares?
Protruding prominently from the face, the nose serves as a vent for air exchange. anterior nares (or nostrils; exterior nares) allow air to enter the nose and pass into the nasal cavity.
What is the function of nares?
Air enters the nasal cavity from the outside through two openings: the nostrils or external nares. The openings from the nasal cavity into the pharynx are the internal nares. Nose hairs at the entrance to the nose trap large inhaled particles.
What does nares stand for?
NARES, acronym for Non-allergic Rhinitis with Eosinophilia Syndrome.
What is the difference between nares and nostrils?
As nouns the difference between nostril and nare
is that nostril is either of the two orifices located on the nose (or on the beak of a bird); used as a passage for air and other gases to travel the nasal passages while nare is nostril found in the beak of a bird.
What goes in and out of external nares?
Air enters through the external nares. Air is drawn into the nasopharynx or nose chambers where sensory nerve cells detect smell. Here, also, is where the glottis (the opening of the trachea) may be found. The trachea is a tube that extends from the neck to the chest.
What are the different types of noses?
- Fleshy Nose. The fleshy nose is bulbous in nature and has a large, prominent shape. ...
- Celestial Nose. ...
- Roman Nose. ...
- Bumpy Nose. ...
- Snub Nose. ...
- Hawk Nose. ...
- Greek Nose. ...
- Nubian Nose.
How does nasal polyps look like?
Polyps vary in size; they may be yellowish-brown or pink and are shaped like teardrops. As they grow, they eventually look like grapes on a stem. Polyps may grow in one or both nostrils at the same time; they can grow on their own or in clusters.
What's the bit between your nose and lip called?
For humans and most primates, the philtrum survives only as a vestigial medial depression between the nose and upper lip. The human philtrum, bordered by ridges, also is known as the infranasal depression, but has no apparent function. That may be because most higher primates rely more on vision than on smell.
Can you remove cartilage from your nose?
Leaving the bone structure of the nose intact, in a Tip Rhinoplasty or Tipoplasty, a Nose Surgeon reshapes or removes excess cartilage from the nose tip. Your chosen Surgeon may then refine or lift your nose tip and/or refine your nostrils.
Can you damage the cartilage in your nose?
A broken nose, also called a nasal fracture or nose fracture, is a break or crack in the bone or cartilage of your nose. These breaks typically occur over the bridge of the nose or in the septum, which is the area that divides your nostrils.
Can you smell without a nose?
You can't really damage this odor-sensing area by slicing off cartilage. More likely, cutting off someone's nose will affect their breathing, which in turn affects their ability to smell. ... The nostrils direct incoming breaths up and over turbinates located behind the nose.
What parts of your nose is cartilage?
The upper cartilage supports the side of the nose. The lower cartilage adds support, width, and height. It helps shape the nostrils and the tip of the nose.
Why do skeletons not have noses?
Their inner supports are cartilage or 'gristle', which is lighter and more flexible than bone. ... After death, cartilage rots faster than bone. This is why the skulls of skeletons have no nose or ears.
Can you reshape cartilage?
During a typical ear shaping procedure, a small incision is made behind the ear to access the ear cartilage. The reshaping process may involve removing small pieces of cartilage, scoring it, and stitching it to remaining cartilage to achieve the desired shape and/or position. | https://moviecultists.com/what-is-the-common-name-for-the-external-nares |
Stunning lotus flowers are out in force at Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park and are set to last until the end of March.
According to conservation officials, since the turn of the year scores of tourists have visited the park to see the first of this season’s lotus flowers begin to bloom.
The flowers grow in a huge pond amongst 26,000 rai of land located at the Bueng Bua Nature Education Center at Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park.
Mr. Pichai Watcharawongpaiboon, director at the local conservation office, said a variety of different lotus flowers grow in the park, including Nymphaea, Water Lily, and Nelumbo Nucifera, which are pink colour and already in full bloom.
However, February and March is typically when the the lotus flowers are at their most stunning.
In addition to the lotus flowers, there are other aquatic plants and a birding site which is home to more than 300 species of waterfowl, including teal, egret, red herons, and purple swamp-hen, which can be seen all year round.
The lotus flowers grow amidst the specular backdrop of the large limestone mountains at Khao Sam Roi Yot.
Tourists can rent a long-tail boat from the Bueng Bua Nature Conservation Boat Club for 500 baht per boat, which seats 4 people and takes roughly an hour round trip along the Bueng Bua Nature Trail.
In addition to the boat trip, there is a wooden bridge with walkways of 220m and 540m, while a large octagonal pavilion offers a place to relax and enjoy the beautiful scenery with a 360-degree view of a large freshwater field.
Bueng Bua Thung Sam Roi Yot has been internally recognised as a designated world wetland by Ramsar due to its diverse natural environment.
Bueng Bua has been a real success story of conservation.
For more than a decade, flowers had stopped growing at the once popular natural lotus pond.
Officials suspected an increase in salt levels in the swamp had stopped the flowers from growing.
Officials worked with local shrimp farmers to help reduce the salinity of the water in their farm pools before it was released into local water sources.
Since 2015, the lotus flowers started to grow in the pond once more, helping the park to become an attraction for tourists and locals.
If you are looking for a day trip amongst nature within easy reach of Hua Hin, this is the place to go. | https://www.huahintoday.com/hua-hin-news/beautiful-lotus-flowers-bloom-at-khao-sam-roi-yot-national-park/ |
The subsistence of our lives depends on innumerable organic compounds such as food, medicine, and agrochemicals. Our bodies are also composed of organic material like proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. We consume food every day to maintain our health. When we get sick, we take nutritious meals or medicine. Humankind has acquired plentiful health-promoting knowledge from nature, but there is still an abundance of natural phenomena that are unresolved even with modern technologies. Our team has been implementing research on medicinal plants, analyzing their chemical compounds and their potential effects on humans.
We began to study the compounds found in Coreopsis lanceolata (belongs to the Asteraceae family) five years ago. In the spring, beautiful yellow flowers bloom on roadsides, riverbanks, etc. Although they were initially imported from North America for ornamental purposes, they pose a great threat to many domestic species because of their rapid spread across the country. The planting of C. lanceolata is prohibited in Japan, and extensive elimination campaigns are underway. In reality, however, most of them are allowed to grow due to the high cost of elimination. Our team has been studying the possibilities of effectively using C. lanceolata. We believe that adding extra value to the flowers may offset their high eradication costs, and can eventually restore the original ecosystem in this country.
Finding compounds that may possess the same effects as commercial anti-cancer drugs
Our team gathered a large volume of C. lanceolata flowers in and around the major roads in Gifu City. In the lab, we first separated the stalks and flowers from the plant, then soaked the flowers in methyl alcohol for about a week. Next, we filtered the solution and the filtrate was concentrated. Obtained methyl alcohol extract was partitioned with three different solutions (n-hexane, ethyl acetate, and n-butanol), we confirmed a high content of flavonoids in the ethyl acetate fraction. Flavonoids are organic compounds found in nature, whose medicinal functions and health promotion properties have been widely reported both at home and abroad. We recognized that C. lanceolata is rich in flavonoids, an indispensable substance to produce the yellow pigment. Based on the hypothesis that flavonoids can prevent the spread of cancer cells, we tested cytotoxicity of the ethyl acetate fraction on human leukemia cells, and observed far better cancer preventive effects of the fraction than expected.
【Results when flavonoid compounds were
added to human leukemia cells】
Our team continued to isolate flavonoids from the ethyl acetate fraction in order to identify which compounds prevent cancer cell growth. By operating large analysis instruments, we isolated and determined chemical structures of three types of flavonoids such as three chalcones, one flavanone and 2 aurones, all of which are rare types of flavonoid. Among others, we successfully isolated 4-methoxylanceoletin which is one of chalcone and is very rare compound in nature. There were only 2 publications regarding 4-methoxylanceoletin. When we reassessed them with human leukemia cells, 4-methoxylanceoletin showed strong cytotoxicity on cancer the cell. We confirmed that the effect of 4-methoxylanceoletin is as effective as that of paclitaxel which is one of the most powerful anti-cancer drugs widely in use to treat cancer patients.
Our team also studied other chemical compounds found in edible and other types of chrysanthemums and confirmed that six compounds from C. lanceolata were not detected in these chrysanthemums. Two of our research conclusions were C. lanceolata possesses a larger quantity of flavonoids than other chrysanthemums and flavonoids have strong anti-cancer effects.
Even if we pick flowers of Coreopsis lanceolate, they can spread as long as their roots remain deep in the ground. We need to dig out all the roots for complete elimination, but it takes time and needs extensive manual labor and money. People also hesitate to dispose of them because of their beautiful yellow flowers. The first priority, therefore, is to let people know that C. lanceolata is an invasive alien species in Japan.
Our team discovered chemical compounds that may prevent the spread of cancer cells growth, but it takes years and enormous funds to develop new medicinal drugs from these compounds. Our team hopes that the latest research results and findings will provide more accurate information about C. lanceolata for people in Japan. Most plant compounds are still unknown to us and our team is committed to make a genuine effort to bring our research outcomes back to the community in collaboration with the private sector in pharmaceutical sciences, agricultural chemicals, and food businesses in the years to come.
Students from Southeast Asia playing a key role
Sphere of research now expanding overseas
My research has been greatly supported by students/researchers from Southeast Asia etc. For instance, with their assistance, we isolated and analyzed several compounds from medicinal plants indigenous to Southeast Asia. Later, our team proved that they are useful for the development of anti-cancer drugs and have antioxidant effects as well.
I visit foreign developing countries for example Sumatra, Indonesia several times every year and often feel that the research environments there are not always ideal. Researchers have little access to high-performing instruments, and it may take more than one month for chemical reagents to be delivered to the labs (in Japan, it can be delivered the following day). During my visit, I introduced well-endowed research environments of Gifu University to international students and researchers of developing countries. We have so far received so many of the world's best talented students and researchers from Southeast Asia etc in Gifu University. They are all diligent, eager to learn, and strongly motivated for success. Japanese students are gaining inspiration from them, too. After returning to their home countries, these students and researchers will utilize their expertise and knowledge as scholars and teaching staff in the future. I am convinced that our research network will continue to expand not only in Japan but also around the world. | https://www.gifu-u.ac.jp/en/about/pub_news/g_lec/35_2.html |
Aided by the latest tools in 3D visualization, Cornell art history professor Ellen Hoobler and two students are providing a fresh look into ancient tombs and the objects removed from them long ago. Over the summer Hoobler and seniors Catherine Quinn and Ve’Amber Miller traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico to study the tombs of the Zapotec people at Monte Albán.
The group focused primarily on Tomb 118, a crypt that had been previously excavated in 1937 by famous archaeologist Alfonso Caso. The tomb is of interest to historians because it offers valuable insight into the burial rituals of the Zapotecs.
A number of the fragile artifacts found in the tomb were destroyed while they were being shipped to the National Museum of Archaeology in Mexico City, but Caso made detailed cards describing the measurements of the objects and their position within the burial chambers. Some cards also included photos, drawings, and even watercolors.
Hoobler’s goal was to make a visual recreation of the tomb and the placement of artifacts therein based on Caro’s descriptions. Quinn and Miller assisted in measuring the site and taking photos and videos. The group then used the programs Maxon Cinema 4D and Unity to digitally recreate Tomb 118 and its objects, and the images they rendered can be found on their project website.
Miller, an archaeology and English major from Matteson, Illinois, says the summer with Hoobler was great preparation for her future.
“The experience not only expanded my skills in self-discipline, but also helped me start thinking more creatively about technology’s part in the future of fields such as art history and archaeology,” she said. “Anything from social media to even exploring history with games was included in daily conversations we had related to the project.”
Quinn, an art history major, said, “Ellen is a really enthusiastic and passionate professor, so it was fun working with her this summer. I have learned some really useful skills I will definitely be using in future.”
Quinn was inspired to consider pursuing work in museums, which she notes have had a noticeable upswing in use of 3D software. She is pleased to know her hands-on experience puts her ahead of the game.
Hoobler, Quinn, and Miller are now working together to write an article detailing their project, which will be submitted for publication in the journal Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. Hoobler hopes to continue work on this project in summers to come. | http://news.cornellcollege.edu/2014/10/research-project-brings-ancient-site-to-life-with-3d-imaging/ |
Do you sleep in the afternoon? According to research, we should sleep every time we have the urge. Sleeping for just 10–15 minutes during the day can have a tremendously positive impact on our health.
The benefits of napping are greater than you can imagine. As time goes by, our lives become more and more stressful. And sleep disturbances are a natural consequence of our busy schedules. We try to balance thousands of things at once—work, family, children, friends, homework, and so on.
When the fatigue becomes too much, it’s hard to resist sleeping during the day. But what are the positives and negatives of doing so?
Why Do I Need a Nap Everyday?
Every moment we can steal a little leisure time is good for catching up on sleep and restoring some of our energy. But even though sleep usually helps us, it can hurt us as well.
The reason for this relates to the nature of the sleep. The sleep cycle consists of several stages, which are repeated several times a night. Whether we wake up rested or not depends precisely on which stage of sleep we wake up in.
There are even several napping benefits for people who have no sleep problems at all. A quick rest of about 20 minutes is a great way to recover energy. Within this short time, our body manages to enter only the lightest phase of sleep, from which we have no problem waking up. What’s more, we won’t encounter the usual sense of fatigue that follows a long afternoon nap.
Another option is a midday nap that lasts for around 90 minutes. It restores a good deal of our strength because this is about how long it takes to go through a full cycle of sleep. In particular, this could be beneficial both for children and pregnant women.
Even if you don’t have trouble sleeping at night, naps that last longer than 20 minutes will make you feel tired. You should, however, avoid taking afternoon naps if you suffer from insomnia, or are often woken up at night because of sleep apnea or another sleep problem. Essentially, you won’t see any nap benefits if you suffer from another sleep disturbance. Basically, when you don’t rest at all or don’t get the hours you need, then sleeping during the day will only lead to another night of partial sleep.
There are other reasons to worry about sleeping during the day. For example, constant fatigue can be a sign of illness: depression, diabetes, thyroid problems, other hormonal disorders, or a disrupted metabolism. The connection between napping and depression was proven long ago. Whether you’re under stress or not, if you have sleep problems that last longer than a week, contact a doctor. When your body functions correctly, it’s like a machine, and sleep is the key to proper maintenance.
Exhaustion from a tense daily routine and other necessary engagements can hit us at any moment. When the afternoon arrives, many people feel an overwhelming desire to lie down, close their eyes, and let their thoughts shut down for a while. This is the best time to nap.
An afternoon nap is usually beneficial for your health. To highlight this, we’ve compiled 15 convincing reasons to support why napping is a good habit, so you should sleep during the day when you have the time. As for your little ones, it’s a must. Even kids aged 5–6 years old who don’t want to sleep like “babies” shouldn’t miss their daily nap if you want them to get all the best health benefits of napping.
The Biggest Benefits of Napping
We should always listen to our body’s signals, and if it needs sleep, it’s okay to take a quick “siesta.” Here are the reasons napping can be good for you:
1. Napping improves cognitive functions.
Sleep impacts how effectively we learn and our ability to retain information, so it’s no wonder that an afternoon nap helps with the same. It’s proven that sleeping for between 60 and 90 minutes stimulates mental activity for the next 24 hours.
During sleep, what you’ve learned in the day repeats several times until it’s built up in your memory, and some neural connections are strengthened. The benefits of napping for college students also include better learning capabilities, improved mental activity, and greater creativity. The mind loves sleeping.
2. Naps enhance your work capacity.
A NASA study has shown that a short nap increases a person’s work capacity by 100%. Other studies have found that an afternoon nap is more effective than 200 mg of caffeine or a quick workout.
3. Napping helps maintain heart health.
People who regularly take brief naps—three times a week for 30 minutes—significantly reduce their risk of a future heart problem. The scientific benefits of napping show a significant decline in the risk of developing ischemic (coronary) heart disease among the countries that have a regular “siesta” as part of the culture.
Studies at Harvard University explain why people who regularly sleep in the afternoon are more protected from cardiovascular disease. This pleasant habit compensates for daily fatigue and the load it places on the heart and vessels. If you’re looking for this kind of preventative effect, you won’t need to ask, Are naps good for you? They definitely are. However, try to have a nap at least three times a week for 30 minutes each to achieve the full health benefits.
4. Napping improves memory.
Scientists say a brief snooze that lasts between 20 and 30 minutes can greatly increase the brain’s capacity to remember and store information. Enhancing memory is one of the best benefits of naps for college students.
5. A short nap can improve your creativity.
Sleeping in the afternoon can help you cope with a creative crisis. Being hampered by the sense of a creative block is stressful. Luckily, the brain likes to sleep, which is how it restores itself. So if you need a creative push, just nap for half an hour! It’s more effective than a cup of coffee, not to mention the other health benefits of a siesta.
6. Napping reduces stress and anxiety.
Fatigue and mentally overloading cause stress that makes us even more tired. A greater quantity of quality sleep relieves stress and reduces anxiety, and it helps us recharge. It can help you calm down and eliminate the sense of irritation and pressure.
In fact, scientists have found that a short snooze for 30–45 minutes during the day can reduce the stress hormones in our body and calm us, especially after a stressful event. Reducing stress is one of the essential benefits of napping at work.
7. Regular naps score a victory over a big appetite.
Sweet snacks and energy drinks seem like a quick way to refuel when we feel exhausted. Unfortunately, the benefits are actually uncertain, and there are also notable negatives behind this habit. Conversely, while napping, your energy is restored, and you don’t think of food while you sleep. Even 10–15 minutes of relaxation with your eyes closed can free you from the desire to snack. According to science, this is one of the most critical power nap benefits.
8. Sleeping during the day improves physical performance.
Studies have shown that athletes who sleep for a short time during the day perform better, improving their motor skills, speed, reaction time, and strength. Whether you’re a professional athlete or not, a 10-minute nap during the day will undoubtedly improve your performance in whatever physical activity you engage in, improve your reactions, and make you more alert. The only thing you have to keep in mind is that you’ll have to overcome the initial sleep inertia after you wake up.
9. Napping can improve your resolve and will.
When you’re tired, your resolve declines sharply to the point where it’s sometimes impossible to finish your daily tasks. For this reason, a short afternoon nap improves mood, reduces stress, and restores focus.
10. Naps can help you look better.
Sleeping during the day is associated with the regeneration of skin cells, making you person look younger, healthier, and more beautiful. So don’t skip your nap today!
11. Napping increases sexual desire.
The benefits of an afternoon nap include enhanced sexual desire, especially for women. The mutual relationship between sleep, sexual desire, and arousal has been known for decades. Scientific findings indicate that insufficient sleep decreases sexual arousal and desire in women.
12. A short afternoon nap can improve your mood.
Serotonin, a neurotransmitter, regulates sleep, appetite, and mood and creates a sense of satisfaction. Under stressful conditions, however, more serotonin is used while less is synthesized. As a result, people become irritable, depressed, worried, and disconcerted. Even if you can’t afford taking 2-hour naps everyday, whenever you do take a nap, more serotonin is released, and all these processes could be avoided.
13. Regular napping generally improves health.
Lack of sleep leads to increased levels of the hormone cortisol in the body. This is the stress hormone that increases glucose intolerance and fat accumulation around the abdomen, weakens the muscular and immune systems, worsens the learning and memory processes, and reduces levels of the growth hormone and testosterone.
Nap facts show that during sleep, the growth hormone is released, which prevents these effects. As a result, napping improves the immune system and sexual function, reduces stress and anxiety, and helps you restore muscle mass and lose weight.
Nevertheless, a quick nap during the day helps people with obesity lose weight by stimulating the metabolism and speeding up the secretion of biochemical substances that help break down fat.
14. Napping will reduce your need for caffeinated products.
It’s been shown that an afternoon nap can reduce the desire for harmful substances such as caffeine and nicotine. Many people complain that they don’t sleep deeply or for enough time at night, but they choose to replace an afternoon nap with caffeine. This could be one of the most positive benefits of napping for students, especially since they often overuse caffeine-rich drinks.
15. Napping could help soothe a migraine.
Interestingly, a short rest during a migraine attack can alleviate its symptoms. Since the symptoms can vary from mild to severe, a simple approach is best for helping patients survive an episode.
Tips for a Better Quality Nap
Scientists say that regularly sleeping in the early afternoon may significantly contribute to both physical health, refresh the mind, and improve concentration. Therefore, to harness all the known napping benefits, here are some suggestions:
- Use an alarm to make sure you wake up. Experiment with different durations of sleep (5–45 minutes) and decide which sleep period works best for you.
- Use a blanket because the body loses some of its heat when it’s at rest.
- Keep your head raised, preferably on a sofa cushion or on several pillows if you want to increase the psychological benefits of napping.
- Try to sleep in a cool and somewhat dim space. Full darkness and warmth in the room will help you fall asleep deeply, so it actually isn’t best for an afternoon nap. It’s important for the body to distinguish between day and night sleep. The rest you get during the day shouldn’t be as deep as it is at night.
- It’s best to take your nap in the afternoon, preferably after a meal. If you fall asleep before noon, you may have difficulty falling asleep, and if you nap too late, you’re likely to wake up after you go to bed for the night. If you’re asking yourself, How long should I nap? remember, the shorter, the better.
- An interesting suggestion: Place a pencil between your fingers. When you fall asleep, your fingers will relax, and the pencil will fall to the floor, which will wake you up. This could be a good alternative if you don’t have an alarm.
The next time you feel sleepy or tired, don’t think of napping as a bad thing. There are no real negative effects of napping. Moreover, there are plenty of benefits of sleep, overall. Many famous and successful people have taken advantage of an afternoon nap to increase their productivity during the day, including Napoleon, Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, Eleanor Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Winston Churchill. So don’t forget to listen to what your body has to say. If you feel tired, take a nap.
FAQs
What’s the perfect nap time?
Do you often feel exhausted in the middle of the afternoon? You aren’t alone. Many people experience a sense of drowsiness and have significantly less energy starting around 3:00 p.m. A short daytime nap before 4:00 p.m. that lasts between 20 and 90 minutes improves your cognitive functions, helps with weight loss, and even improves sexual function and mood.
Why are naps healthy?
Naps reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, arrhythmia, high blood pressure, and other dangerous cardiovascular diseases while improving your mood by stimulating serotonin secretion. Additionally, they improve your fine motor skills and balance, which is important if you work with machines or work in a field that requires physical accuracy.
Napping helps with your thought processes, improving your judgment so you can make the right decisions. It increases productivity and creative thinking. What’s more, better vigilance and brain productivity can practically double your workplace productivity.
Is it normal to need a nap every day?
Napping makes you feel good. The overall benefits of taking a nap are similar to those that come after drinking caffeine—but it doesn’t come with any of caffeine’s side effects.
The best thing you can do is sleep when you have the opportunity. A short rest will improve your awareness for the rest of the day. In addition, a nap has many other health benefits.
Is napping good for weight loss?
Napping improves the absorption of carbohydrates, reduces the risk of diabetes, and thereby facilitates weight loss. Additionally, napping triggers the natural hormones that block stress-causing substances. All of these together help your metabolism perform at its peak.
Conclusion
Just remember, sleep isn’t a waste of time—it’s a vital necessity, like water and food. Back when we were kids, we always slept in the afternoon. And now our bodies miss it, since the benefits of napping have always been powerful. A short nap to break up our busy day could be a precious recreational experience that has scientifically proven therapeutic and healthful effects. | https://disturbmenot.co/benefits-of-napping/ |
This three-day course will equip you with the practical experience required for gathering intelligence from darknet and encrypted online communication platforms, as well as compiling the data and analyzing it in a way which will support your operation.
Law Enforcement Education
We regularly offer executive education sessions for law enforcement ranging in length from seminars to multi-day trainings based on our research and emerging trends within the field of cybersecurity.
Mentorship Program
We have launched a mentorship program which matches undergraduate and graduate students interested in careers in cybersecurity with local professionals and organizations that can provide internships, career guidance and real-world experience in the field of cybersecurity. | https://ebcs.gsu.edu/training/ |
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Alison Bull
Work Department
Family.
Position
Area of practice includes family mediation; collaborative law; civil/commercial mediation; family court work. Alison is also a children and financial arbitrator. Types of work include complex financial settlements on divorce, wealth protection (including pre-and post-marital agreements), all issues mediation, advice in relation to disputes about children. Important cases include numerous confidential high-value divorce and pre-marital agreement cases involving individuals based in England & Wales and overseas. Increasing number of mediation cases, involving a wide range of clients, including some high profile individuals. Particular focus on resolving disputes in a conciliatory way in the best interests of the families and children involved. Reported cases include McMinn v McMinn 2 FLR 823 and 2 FLR 839, D v D (Divorce: media presence) EWHC 946. Heads the Mills & Reeve family dispute resolution practice.
Career
Trained Burges Salmon, Bristol; qualified 1997; Burges Salmon 1997-99; Addleshaw Goddard LLP (latterly as a legal director) 1999-2008; Mills & Reeve LLP 2008 to date. Publications of note: contributor to Humphreys Family Proceedings (2005); Debt and Insolvency on Family Breakdown (2002); A Practitioner’s Guide to Joint Property (2005); Divorce and the Farm, Resolution Good Practice Guide (2009/2012); numerous articles in professional journals. Lectures on family law topics to a wide range of audiences.
Memberships
Resolution National Committee, Resolution EDI committee, HOT pod, Collaborative Law Manchester, Manchester Area Resolution, Pro-Manchester EDI committee (co-chair); Association of Women Solicitors.
Education
Tiverton School; University of Manchester (1993 LLB 2(1)); Manchester Metropolitan University (1994 LPC (Commendation)); University of Manchester (2003 Post-Graduate Diploma in Counselling Award); trained collaborative family lawyer (2007); Accredited CEDR civil/commercial mediator (2009); Resolution trained family mediator (2010); listed as Ministry of Justice provider of MIAMs; qualified to consult directly with children in mediation (2011).
Leisure
Family activities, cycling (member of Glossop Kinder Velo), running, skiing, school governor.
Lawyer Rankings
North West > Private client > Family(Leading individuals)
Mills & Reeve LLP advises high-net-worth individuals and sports professionals on all family-related matters, as well as representing clients in complex litigation and alternative dispute resolution proceedings, often involving business interests. The team also covers children proceedings, international wealth protection and specialist pension funds, as well as proprietary estoppel and TLATA claims. Practice head Alison Bull is well regarded for her extensive experience in family mediation and arbitration. Principal associate Andrew Moore often advises on financial settlements, with additional niche expertise advising on same-sex relationships and separation agreements. Principal associate Sue Brookes is noted for her expertise in cohabitation law. Consultant Nigel Shepherd and principal associate Rose-Marie Drury are also highly recommended.
London > Private client > Family: mediation(Leading individuals)
Mills & Reeve LLP throughout its national team is committed to mediation. In London it has particular strength in both complex financial cases involving corporate structures and offshore trusts as well as complicated children law cases often involving international elements. Alison Bull is an accredited family mediator who is also qualified to see children in mediation. Suzanne Kingston is a renowned mediator and is a trained collaborative lawyer, an accredited mediator, a hybrid mediator as well as an accredited arbitrator. Kingston is regularly instructed to conduct mediations by Magic Circle law firms. | https://www.legal500.com/firms/2367-mills-reeve-llp/3930-manchester-england/lawyers/259252-alison-bull/ |
On Think Tanks, Universidad del Pacífico and the Institute of Development Studies,have partnered to produce a series of Working Papers focused on the study of think tanks to give new researchers a chance to publish their ideas and reach a broader academic and practitioner audience.
The Working Paper Series will allow On Think Tanks to promote the emergence of new research on think tanks and on evidence informed policy world-wide. The studies promoted through the series respond our research agenda, which has been developed in consultation with the On Think Tanks team and community of partners.
Papers will be accepted and published in either English or Spanish.
How to participate?
- Check out our research agenda: On Think Tanks has published a research agenda to guide the choice of papers to publish. Please read it. We will give priority to these topics but others are welcome. There will also be some thematic calls launched from time to time: e.g. think tanks and science policy, think tanks in the Balkans and so on, so keep an eye to OTT’s Newsletter and social media.
- Submit your paper: The Working Papers will be drawn from submissions from researchers in the field, particularly individuals interested in publishing their post-graduate dissertations. There is no deadline for submissions and we will be reviewing them on an ongoing basis. To submit please:
- Email to Andrea Baertl at [email protected]; subject line: Working Paper Series: “Title of your paper”.
- Include your full name; email, address and mobile number; institutional affiliation
- Attach your paper
- Attach a 1 page summary of the paper (not an abstract but a full-summary including key findings/conclusions).
- Peer review: Papers will be peer-reviewed and chosen on a rolling basis upon submission, based on the decision of an editorial panel comprising: eter Taylor (Director of Research,Institute of Development Studies), Enrique Mendizabal (On Think Tanks), Felipe Portocarrero (Principal Researcher, Universidad del Pacífico), Marcos Gonzalez Hernando (Senior Researcher, FEPS-TASC), Andrea Baertl ( On Think Tanks, Research) and Erika Perez-León (On Think Tanks, Communications). In some cases one external reviewer ,drawn from our network, will also review the paper before publishing. You will be asked to respond to the panel´s comments.
- Publication: Each Working Paper will be published and disseminated widely through OTT’s channels as well as that of its partners. The Working Paper series will be branded as “On Think Tanks Working Paper” with the logos of both universities. We will publish digitally.
Are there any conditions?
We would like to encourage new research and new researchers. Therefore, we are targeting undergraduate and post-graduate dissertations. You may need to edit them before submitting them.
Working papers can be submitted in English or Spanish, and should be between 7,000 and 15,000 words. Please download the submission guidelines here, documents will only be accepted in this format.
What will we do with your papers?
If your paper is approved we will review it and publish it. It will then be widely disseminated through OTT’s various channels and sent directly to think tank leaders and funders. We will also publish accompanying articles to encourage a greater audience for your papers.
Published authors will also be invited to present their work at the On Think Tanks Annual Conference+ where you will have a chance to present and discuss your paper with the leading thinkers about think tanks in the world.
If your paper is not chosen for publication you may still be invited to write an article for On Think Tanks based on your paper. We will also disseminate it widely and send it to key think tank leaders and funders.
There is no deadline for submissions and we will be reviewing them on an ongoing basis. | https://onthinktanks.org/announcements/call-for-papers-for-the-on-think-tanks-working-paper-series/ |
Together with Tomas Vanheste and journalists from the Platform for Authentic Journalism, we tried to deepen our understanding of the role these think tanks play in the debate on TTIP. We asked ourselves which think tanks were involved in the discussions about the proposed free trade agreement and what function they fulfil. Our aim was to discover whether think tanks really are objective, scientific and independent organizations or whether there are other, hidden interests at play.
That resulted in the following story:
Big business orders its pro-TTIP arguments from these think tanks Think tanks present themselves as independent providers of arguments, facts, and figures in the ideologically charged debate on TTIP, the pending free trade agreement between the U.S. and the EU. But is that really the case? Together with the Platform for Authentic Journalism and fellow correspondent Dimitri Tokmetzis, I investigated where think tanks get their money and whether this influences their work.
Journalists Bas van Beek, Sophia Beunder, and Jilles Mast spent months sifting through data about the TTIP lobby and think tanks. In this piece they explain how that worked.
Why specifically these think tanks?
The first question that we faced during this research was what a think tank actually is. How do you define something like that? After all, there are thousands of think tanks around the world that have different areas of expertise, different ways of approaching their work, and different funding models.
Of course, we’re not the first to have asked this question. It’s still a hotly debated topic in academic circles. After reviewing the literature, we decided it made much more sense to look at what think tanks do instead of what they are.
The more extensive a think tank’s network, the better it can convey its views to the people that matter
Two functions stand out in particular. First, think tanks deal with content. After all, research is their business. They produce reports, provide policy recommendations, and think about social issues at an academic level. That’s why think tanks are sometimes referred to as “universities without students.” Their second function is to maintain and set up networks. The more extensive a think tank’s network, the better it can convey its views to the people that matter.
Bearing this in mind, we selected seven think tanks, the most important criterion being that they were actively involved in the area of TTIP. We looked at whether the think tanks were organizing events about the agreement and whether they regularly published research on it. Six of the seven think tanks in this research are some of the ones most actively involved in the area of TTIP.
In some ways, the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) is an exception because it hasn’t engaged particularly vigorously in the debate. On the other hand, it penned the most important and influential report on the agreement, which is why we decided to select them in the end.
Collecting the data
After selecting the think tanks, we began to collect data. We used KUMU to gather our data, and it turned out to be the ideal online tool for mapping out networks. KUMU uses elements and connections to generate results. The elements we used were people, businesses, think tanks, governments, other organizations (for example, non-governmental organizations and universities), publications, and events.
We then added connections, including information about the nature of the relationship – the role of “speaker,” for example, between a person and an event, or the amount of sponsorship that exists between a business and a think tank. You can access this entire database online now.
Our research focused on four things. First, we looked at funding. Where do think tanks get their money from, and how much of it comes from the business community? We then put the hundreds of corporate sponsors that we retrieved from think tanks’ sites next to a Corporate Europe Observatory list. This enabled us to see which of these businesses had already approached, or lobbied, the European Commission about their interest in TTIP. Because businesses also lobby through interest groups such as BusinessEurope, the European Services Forum, and the TransAtlantic Business Council, these organizations and their members were also incorporated in the analysis.
We devoted special attention to board members’ connections with the business community
We then looked at the board members of the think tanks, in order to map out their networks. Who are these people and what are their backgrounds? We devoted special attention to board members’ connections with the business community. Although we also introduced other kinds of connections in most cases – with universities or other think tanks for example – we examined these less rigorously. We chose this approach because the fact that a board member is the CEO of some multinational or other is in our opinion more relevant than whether they also serve on the board of the local hospital in their free time – as noble as that may be.
Third, we focused on events organized by these think tanks. Because think tanks like to flaunt their contribution to the debate, we looked at the speakers who were invited to these events. Who are these people and who do they represent? These meetings are also important for maintaining the networks of the think tanks. Meetings remain an important way of exerting influence, and these kinds of events, especially the closed ones, provide the opportunity to do so.
The fourth part of this research is about the publications put out by these think tanks. Sometimes they are weighty tomes, other times they are policy recommendations only a few pages long. The primary aim here was to show that these think tanks regularly put out publications on TTIP. We subsequently analyzed in more detail precisely what they publish.
What problems did we encounter?
The biggest problem that we encountered was the result of having initially chosen the wrong tool to map out the network. We started by using detective.io, created by a French collective that has since gone bankrupt. After a few months of encountering numerous other, smaller problems, it became clear at a certain point that this software simply couldn’t handle such a large quantities of data. So we essentially wasted many hours of work. Our advice to anyone intending to conduct this kind of data research is to take the time to choose the right tool. We certainly can recommend KUMU for similar projects.
The think tanks’ websites, which is where we ultimately gathered much of our information, posed another problem. These sites were often difficult to search, hard to scrape , or incomplete. We also had to deal with updates, which sometimes caused us to lose the source of the data we had collected. For example, the Center for Transatlantic Relations’ schedule of events for the past three years vanished at a certain point. We had to retrieve the information about events that they had organized from Facebook and Twitter. Four weeks prior to the publication of our article, the Atlantic Council think tank updated its entire list of members, right after we had entered, checked and double checked this list.
Information about think-tank sponsorship was also incomplete. In the case of the Center for Transatlantic Relations, we were eventually sent a list of sponsors, but it didn’t mention how much they had contributed. ECIPE has an agreement with its sponsors that their support will never be made public. We were unable to overcome this problem, so as a result our analysis of the money flows from the business community to think tanks is on the conservative side.
One final comment: The think tanks in question differ significantly from one another. The Atlantic Council, for example, has dozens of board members, most of whom are from the business community, while the Center for Transatlantic Relations doesn’t have a board at all. Or take CEPR: it didn’t organize a single TTIP event, whereas the German Marshall Fund organized as many as 38.
A selection of our results:
Want to use the data?
You’re more than welcome to use our data. All of the Excel files and raw data are available. We are also making all of the documents obtained through the Dutch freedom of information act available here too.
Several questions we weren’t able to ask in this project but would like to see answered include:
- How prevalent is the revolving door phenomenon in the think-tank world?
- What other publications exhibit potential traces of influence by sponsors?
- What role do think tanks play in debates about other policy issues, such as energy and defense?
Feel free to browse through the data in our KUMU visualization.
If you have any questions about the choices we made in our research, the data, or the network analysis in KUMU, please contact us at [email protected].
This research was funded in part by SOMO, TNI, and the Democracy & Media Foundation.
English translation by Mark Speer and Erica Moore.
Download the freedom of information documents here For this story, we made numerous requests to European institutions under the Dutch freedom of information act. We are making the released documents publicly available through Document Cloud (posted as received: a mixture of English and Dutch). Download the data here Our data is available in spreadsheet files, which you can access through Google Drive. If you have any questions, please contact the Platform for Authentic Journalism. | https://thecorrespondent.com/3874/How-we-looked-into-think-tanks-and-TTIP-and-feel-free-to-use-our-data/853522027644-4f371269 |
The 95-year-old Padma Bhushan awardee Dr. Sarada Menon is the first woman psychiatrist in India who founded India’s mental health NGO, Schizophrenia Research Foundation (Scarf), in Chennai in 1985.
The topic of mental health has been ignored for quite a while and is considered a taboo in India, but now this issue is on the rise with many people struggling with depression and stress in their everyday life.
Talking about this, Dr. Menon shared, “Today, the biggest health issues in India are depression and schizophrenia, while in the coming years, newer problems due to addiction to drugs, mobile phones, and electronic devices will emerge.”
According to the WHO, depression affects people of all ages, from all walks of life, in all countries and at worst it can lead to suicide.
“In women, the major culprits are hormonal imbalances, lifestyle changes, social stresses, including cultural demands, and difficulties with child rearing. On the other hand, men can also develop depression primarily due to pressure at work, financial stresses, peer pressure, and family responsibilities,” shared Dr. Sarada.
According to her, depression first needs to be detected and then requires immediate medical help. “The most important thing is to detect depression from unexpected changes in daily functioning- routine work, social responsibilities, communication, grooming, recreation, etc. The next step is to seek, medical help!”
The family members can only help the patient by, “’Approve, Appreciate, and Acknowledge’ the improvements made by the patient. Encourage yoga, meditation, and other methods that promote optimism.”
Talking about what she witnessed with people battling mental illness, she recollects, “I encountered ‘mental illness’ during the final year of my medical training in 1959. I had witnessed a number of people abandoned by their relatives, who would give the wrong address and leave. These ‘patients’ were ill-clad, naked, posturing, gesturing, talking to themselves and unaware of everything, out of touch with reality. They were irritable and violent, and we had no access to them. There was no definite treatment, apart from restraint and sedation with medicine, administered orally or parenterally. Personal care, nutrition, sleep and communication, all needed attention. Training was needed to tackle this serious problem.”
She also recalls, “a new drug for mental illness called Chlorpromazine had just entered the market. It was through this that we witnessed several positive changes in the last 50s.”
During the next few decades, several key developments in mental health services took place and training programmes were developed for the staff, psychiatrist, psychologist, psychiatric social workers, counselors, and occupational therapist.
“Moreover, specialisations for psychiatrists were being conducted. It was during this time that each hospital started to have a psychiatric out-patient ward with inpatient beds; research started being conducted on various mental health issues, and the National Mental Health Programme was intensified,” she shared.
Several hospitals, NGOs and medical practitioners are working towards tackling these issues in India, but roadblocks remain, leading to a gap between the need for treatment and its provision. She shares that there is an inadequacy of trained personnel at different levels of service requirements, and there is a difficulty in the acceptability of treatment by the patient and their families due to social stigma. There is also an inadequate interest of the government which has been treating the subject of mental health on a low priority. | http://www.indianwomenblog.org/indias-first-woman-psychiatrist-dr-sarada-menon-talks-about-our-mental-health-crisis/ |
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