Life Design Counseling: A study on client's operations for meaning construction

This study evaluates the adequacy of the micro-theory of client operations to explain meaning construction in Life Design Counseling. Four adolescents were interviewed on their second counseling session. Their recollections were stimulated through the replay of counseling videotapes and the resulting transcribed interviews were qualitatively analyzed. Results confirmed a sequence of client operations evolving from the symbolic representation of experience and reflexive self-examination towards making new realizations and revisioning self. Moreover, clients reported negative and positive session moments evidencing that clients’ attention and activity during the session was not restricted to meaning construction operations. Practical implications for life design counseling are derived from the results and discussed.

Self determination, embodied languages and landscapes in women's video art.

This paper addresses how, since the 1960s to the present, part of women's video art has broken the traditional representation of women’s body and proposed new forms of recording women's images, explicit or symbolic, using body part close-ups, and not sparing any efforts to ensure the prevention of the cataloguing of women’s bodies according to normative categories, such as gender, race and age, and in this way challenging the Western representation codes that objectify women. The methodology employed had as its primary purpose the examination of the association existing between the micro-sociological level of body gestures and performances in women's videos and the macro-sociological level of social forces such as the dimensions of gender and sexuality. This study concluded that narratives of identity and self-determination are present in women's video pieces contributing to women's empowerment through visual discourses that could possibly point to the production of new signs and symbols, new values and models, but also for the formation of new types of social roles and even a new type of interpersonal relationships.

Waiting Time Screening in Diagnostic Medical Imaging - A Case-Based View

Due to the high standards expected from diagnostic medical imaging, the analysis of information regarding waiting lists via different information systems is of utmost importance. Such analysis, on the one hand, may improve the diagnostic quality and, on the other hand, may lead to the reduction of waiting times, with the concomitant increase of the quality of services and the reduction of the inherent financial costs. Hence, the purpose of this study is to assess the waiting time in the delivery of diagnostic medical imaging services, like computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging. Thereby, this work is focused on the development of a decision support system to assess waiting times in diagnostic medical imaging with recourse to operational data of selected attributes extracted from distinct information systems. The computational framework is built on top of a Logic Programming Case-base Reasoning approach to Knowledge Representation and Reasoning that caters for the handling of in-complete, unknown, or even self-contradictory information.