Occupational therapists' interests and attitudes toward animal assisted therapy as a treatment modality

One hundred seventy-nine occupational therapists (OTs) responded to a survey regarding their interests and attitudes toward animal assisted therapy as a treatment modality. It was found that most of the practitioners would be interested in learning more about animal assisted therapy and most felt it is a valid treatment modality to be used by occupational therapists. Furthermore, the most common answer to the question "why would you not be interested in participating in an AAT program," was "I feel I don't know enough about it". It was also found that therapists' most commonly selected patient goals for AAT were in the realm of mental health, whereas the least mentioned goals were more physically based goals. Further, a recommendation was made to educate OTs regarding the uses and benefits of AAT through more research, continuing education programs on AAT, publications in professional journals, and media awareness.

Practices and outcomes of self-treatment with helminths based on physicians' observations.

The successful use of helminths as therapeutic agents to resolve inflammatory disease was first recorded 40 years ago. Subsequent work in animal models and in humans has demonstrated that the organisms might effectively treat a wide range of inflammatory diseases, including allergies, autoimmune disorders and inflammation-associated neuropsychiatric disorders. However, available information regarding the therapeutic uses and effects of helminths in humans is limited. This study probes the practices and experiences of individuals 'self-treating' with helminths through the eyes of their physicians. Five physicians monitoring more than 700 self-treating patients were interviewed. The results strongly support previous indications that helminth therapy can effectively treat a wide range of allergies, autoimmune conditions and neuropsychiatric disorders, such as major depression and anxiety disorders. Approximately 57% of the self-treating patients observed by physicians in the study had autism. Physicians reported that the majority of patients with autism and inflammation-associated co-morbidities responded favourably to therapy with either of the two most popular organisms currently used by self-treaters, Hymenolepis diminuta and Trichuris suis. However, approximately 1% of paediatric patients experienced severe gastrointestinal pains with the use of H. diminuta, although the symptoms were resolved with an anti-helminthic drug. Further, exposure to helminths apparently did not affect the impaired comprehension of social situations that is the hallmark of autism. These observations point toward potential starting points for clinical trials, and provide further support for the importance of such trials and for concerted efforts aimed at probing the potential of helminths, and perhaps other biologicals, for therapeutic use.

Digital and Social Inequalities : A Qualitative Assessment of the Impact of the Connecting Equality Program on Argentinean Youth

This paper focuses on the ties between social and digital inequalities among Argentinean youth. It uses a qualitative approach to explore different aspects of the everyday lives of adolescents, such as sociability, leisure time and family use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in order to assess the impact of the Connecting Equality Program (Programa Conectar Igualdad, PCI) on reducing digital inequalities and fostering social inclusion. What were the existing conditions of access for students and their families when the PCI was first implemented? What influence does the implementation of the PCI have on the individual, family and scholastic appropriation of ICTs? How does the use of computers and the Internet vary among youth? Has this large-scale incorporation of netbooks in schools, and especially homes and free time changed it in any way? Does the appropriation of ICTs through student participation in the PCI contribute to material and symbolic social inclusion? In order to answer these questions, we compare the processes of ICT appropriation among lower and middle class adolescents, focusing on the distinctive uses and meanings assigned to computers and the Internet by boys and girls in their daily lives. For this purpose we analyze data collected through semi-structured interviews in two schools in Greater La Plata, Argentina during 2012. The main findings show that in terms of access, skills and types of use, the implementation of the PCI has had a positive impact among lower class youth, guaranteeing access to their first computers and promoting the sharing of knowledge and digital skills with family members. Moreover, evidence of more diverse and intense use of ICTs among lower class students reveals the development of digital skills related to educational activities. Finally, in terms of sociability, having a personal netbook enables access to information and cultural goods which are very significant in generating ties and strengthening identities and social integration

Digital and Social Inequalities : A Qualitative Assessment of the Impact of the Connecting Equality Program on Argentinean Youth

This paper focuses on the ties between social and digital inequalities among Argentinean youth. It uses a qualitative approach to explore different aspects of the everyday lives of adolescents, such as sociability, leisure time and family use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in order to assess the impact of the Connecting Equality Program (Programa Conectar Igualdad, PCI) on reducing digital inequalities and fostering social inclusion. What were the existing conditions of access for students and their families when the PCI was first implemented? What influence does the implementation of the PCI have on the individual, family and scholastic appropriation of ICTs? How does the use of computers and the Internet vary among youth? Has this large-scale incorporation of netbooks in schools, and especially homes and free time changed it in any way? Does the appropriation of ICTs through student participation in the PCI contribute to material and symbolic social inclusion? In order to answer these questions, we compare the processes of ICT appropriation among lower and middle class adolescents, focusing on the distinctive uses and meanings assigned to computers and the Internet by boys and girls in their daily lives. For this purpose we analyze data collected through semi-structured interviews in two schools in Greater La Plata, Argentina during 2012. The main findings show that in terms of access, skills and types of use, the implementation of the PCI has had a positive impact among lower class youth, guaranteeing access to their first computers and promoting the sharing of knowledge and digital skills with family members. Moreover, evidence of more diverse and intense use of ICTs among lower class students reveals the development of digital skills related to educational activities. Finally, in terms of sociability, having a personal netbook enables access to information and cultural goods which are very significant in generating ties and strengthening identities and social integration

Digital and Social Inequalities : A Qualitative Assessment of the Impact of the Connecting Equality Program on Argentinean Youth

This paper focuses on the ties between social and digital inequalities among Argentinean youth. It uses a qualitative approach to explore different aspects of the everyday lives of adolescents, such as sociability, leisure time and family use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in order to assess the impact of the Connecting Equality Program (Programa Conectar Igualdad, PCI) on reducing digital inequalities and fostering social inclusion. What were the existing conditions of access for students and their families when the PCI was first implemented? What influence does the implementation of the PCI have on the individual, family and scholastic appropriation of ICTs? How does the use of computers and the Internet vary among youth? Has this large-scale incorporation of netbooks in schools, and especially homes and free time changed it in any way? Does the appropriation of ICTs through student participation in the PCI contribute to material and symbolic social inclusion? In order to answer these questions, we compare the processes of ICT appropriation among lower and middle class adolescents, focusing on the distinctive uses and meanings assigned to computers and the Internet by boys and girls in their daily lives. For this purpose we analyze data collected through semi-structured interviews in two schools in Greater La Plata, Argentina during 2012. The main findings show that in terms of access, skills and types of use, the implementation of the PCI has had a positive impact among lower class youth, guaranteeing access to their first computers and promoting the sharing of knowledge and digital skills with family members. Moreover, evidence of more diverse and intense use of ICTs among lower class students reveals the development of digital skills related to educational activities. Finally, in terms of sociability, having a personal netbook enables access to information and cultural goods which are very significant in generating ties and strengthening identities and social integration

Revealing Cultural Ecosystem Services through Instagram Images : The Potential of Social Media Volunteered Geographic Information for Urban Green Infrastructure Planning and Governance

With the prevalence of smartphones, new ways of engaging citizens and stakeholders in urban planning and govern-ance are emerging. The technologies in smartphones allow citizens to act as sensors of their environment, producing and sharing rich spatial data useful for new types of collaborative governance set-ups. Data derived from Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can support accessible, transparent, democratic, inclusive, and locally-based governance situations of interest to planners, citizens, politicians, and scientists. However, there are still uncertainties about how to actually conduct this in practice. This study explores how social media VGI can be used to document spatial tendencies regarding citizens’ uses and perceptions of urban nature with relevance for urban green space governance. Via the hashtag #sharingcph, created by the City of Copenhagen in 2014, VGI data consisting of geo-referenced images were collected from Instagram, categorised according to their content and analysed according to their spatial distribution patterns. The results show specific spatial distributions of the images and main hotspots. Many possibilities and much potential of using VGI for generating, sharing, visualising and communicating knowledge about citizens’ spatial uses and preferences exist, but as a tool to support scientific and democratic interaction, VGI data is challenged by practical, technical and ethical concerns. More research is needed in order to better understand the usefulness and application of this rich data source to governance.

What Does Value Matter? The Interest-Relational Theory of the Semantics and Metaphysics of Value

Value and reasons for action are often cited by rationalists and moral realists as providing a desire-independent foundation for normativity. Those maintaining instead that normativity is dependent upon motivation often deny that anything called '"value" or "reasons" exists. According to the interest-relational theory, something has value relative to some perspective of desire just in case it satisfies those desires, and a consideration is a reason for some action just in case it indicates that something of value will be accomplished by that action. Value judgements therefore describe real properties of objects and actions, but have no normative significance independent of desires. It is argued that only the interest-relational theory can account for the practical significance of value and reasons for action. Against the Kantian hypothesis of prescriptive rational norms, I attack the alleged instrumental norm or hypothetical imperative, showing that the normative force for taking the means to our ends is explicable in terms of our desire for the end, and not as a command of reason. This analysis also provides a solution to the puzzle concerning the connection between value judgement and motivation. While it is possible to hold value judgements without motivation, the connection is more than accidental. This is because value judgements are usually but not always made from the perspective of desires that actually motivate the speaker. In the normal case judgement entails motivation. But often we conversationally borrow external perspectives of desire, and subsequent judgements do not entail motivation. This analysis drives a critique of a common practice as a misuse of normative language. The "absolutist" attempts to use and, as philosopher, analyze normative language in such a way as to justify the imposition of certain interests over others. But these uses and analyses are incoherent - in denying relativity to particular desires they conflict with the actual meaning of these utterances, which is always indexed to some particular set of desires.

Humankindness: Illness, Animality, and the Limits of the Human in the Victorian Novel

This project posits a link between representations of animals or animality and representations of illness in the Victorian novel, and examines the narrative uses and ideological consequences of such representations. Figurations of animality and illness in Victorian fiction have been examined extensively as distinct phenomena, but examining their connection allows for a more complex view of the role of sympathy in the Victorian novel. The commonplace in novel criticism is that Victorian authors, whether effectively or not, constructed their novels with a view to the expansion of sympathy. This dissertation intervenes in the discussion of the Victorian novel as a vehicle for sympathy by positing that texts and scenes in which representations of illness and animality are conjoined reveal where the novel draws the boundaries of the human, and the often surprising limits it sets on sympathetic feeling. In such moments, textual cues train or direct readerly sympathies in ways that suggest a particular definition of the human, but that direction of sympathy is not always towards an enlarged sympathy, or an enlarged definition of the human. There is an equally (and increasingly) powerful antipathetic impulse in many of these texts, which estranges readerly sympathy from putatively deviant, degenerate, or dangerous groups. These two opposing impulses—the sympathetic and the antipathetic—often coexist in the same novel or even the same scene, creating an ideological and affective friction, and both draw on the same tropes of illness and animality. Examining the intersection of these different discourses—sympathy, illness, and animality-- in these novels reveals the way that major Victorian debates about human nature, evolution and degeneration, and moral responsibility shaped the novels of the era as vehicles for both antipathy and sympathy. Focusing on the novels of the Brontës and Thomas Hardy, this dissertation examines in depth the interconnected ways that representations of animals and animality and representations of illness function in the Victorian novel, as they allow authors to explore or redefine the boundary between the human and the non-human, the boundary between sympathy and antipathy, and the limits of sympathy itself.

Climate, Land Use and Hydrologic Sensitivities of Stormwater Quantity and Quality in Complex Coastal Urban Watersheds

The study analyzed hydro-climatic and land use sensitivities of stormwater runoff and quality in the complex coastal urban watershed of Miami River Basin, Florida by developing a Storm Water Management Model (EPA SWMM 5). Regression-based empirical models were also developed to explain stream water quality in relation to internal (land uses and hydrology) and external (upstream contribution, seawater) sources and drivers in six highly urbanized canal basins of Southeast Florida. Stormwater runoff and quality were most sensitive to rainfall, imperviousness, and conversion of open lands/parks to residential, commercial and industrial areas. In-stream dissolved oxygen and total phosphorus in the watersheds were dictated by internal stressors while external stressors were dominant for total nitrogen and specific conductance. The research findings and tools will be useful for proactive monitoring and management of storm runoff and urban stream water quality under the changing climate and environment in South Florida and around the world.

Advertising education in Australia: Looking back to the future

In Australia, advertising is a $13 billion industry which needs a supply of suitably skilled employees. Over the years, advertising education has developed from vocational based courses to degree courses across the country. This paper uses diffusion theory and various secondary sources and interviews to observe the development of advertising education in Australia from its early past, to its current day tertiary offerings, to discussing the issues that are arising in the near future. Six critical issues are identified, along with observations about the challenges and opportunities within Australia advertising education. By looking back to the future, it is hoped that this historical review provides lessons for other countries of similar educational structure or background, or even other marketing communication disciplines on a similar evolutionary path.

Computer vision onboard UAVs for civilian tasks

Computer vision is much more than a technique to sense and recover environmental information from an UAV. It should play a main role regarding UAVs’ functionality because of the big amount of information that can be extracted, its possible uses and applications, and its natural connection to human driven tasks, taking into account that vision is our main interface to world understanding. Our current research’s focus lays on the development of techniques that allow UAVs to maneuver in spaces using visual information as their main input source. This task involves the creation of techniques that allow an UAV to maneuver towards features of interest whenever a GPS signal is not reliable or sufficient, e.g. when signal dropouts occur (which usually happens in urban areas, when flying through terrestrial urban canyons or when operating on remote planetary bodies), or when tracking or inspecting visual targets—including moving ones—without knowing their exact UMT coordinates. This paper also investigates visual serving control techniques that use velocity and position of suitable image features to compute the references for flight control. This paper aims to give a global view of the main aspects related to the research field of computer vision for UAVs, clustered in four main active research lines: visual serving and control, stereo-based visual navigation, image processing algorithms for detection and tracking, and visual SLAM. Finally, the results of applying these techniques in several applications are presented and discussed: this study will encompass power line inspection, mobile target tracking, stereo distance estimation, mapping and positioning.

An innovative modelling approach to assess stormwater pollutant loads from the Port of Brisbane, Australia

Port land uses are subjected to unique anthropogenic activities compared to typical urban land uses. This uniqueness results in distinctive stormwater quality characteristics. Such distinction in stormwater quality has made conventional approaches used for pollutant load estimations inaccurate. This is also the case for the Port of Brisbane (PoB). The study discussed in the paper was conducted to estimate the pollutant contributions from Port specific land uses at PoB. For estimation, software modules embedded in Mike URBAN were used. An innovative approach was adopted in modelling where the conventional model calibration step was not needed to be performed to generate suitable site specific parameters. Instead, equations and site specific parameters that replicate pollutant build-up and wash-off were generated from an extensive field investigation. Models were simulated incorporating site specific parameters from six different Port specific land uses and rainfall events from three representative years. Outcomes of the modelling exercise were used to identify the distinct pollutant contributions from different Port land uses.

Development of a sewerage infrastructure buffer assessment tool for local authorities

Urban expansion continues to encroach on existing or newly implemented sewerage infrastructure. In this context, legislation and guidelines, both national and international, provide limited direction to the amenity allocation of appropriate buffering distances for land use planners and infrastructure providers. A review of published literature suggests the dominant influences include topography, wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, existing land uses and vegetation profiles. A statistical criteria review of these factors against six years of sewerage odour complaint data was undertaken to ascertain their influence and a complaint severity hierarchy was established. These hierarchical results suggested the main criteria were: topographical location, elevation relative to the odour source and wind speed. Establishing a justifiable criterion for buffer zone allocations will assist in analytically determining a basis for buffer separations and will assist planners and infrastructure designers in assessing lower impact sewerage infrastructure locations.

Investigating literacy years 4-9 : a pilot. Final report.

Investigating Literacy Years 4-9: A pilot acknowledges that the literacy required of students in the middle years of schooling changes as they begin to read and write to learn across the subject areas using various resources and media. Teachers begin to look for evidence of understanding of concepts, content details, appropriate genre uses and the capacity to work with extended and complex texts. Yet, in comparison to the early years, there has been relatively little research conducted during this period of schooling, especially Years 4-7 of primary schooling (Comber et al, 2002). However, evidence suggests that gaps between those who perform highly and those who perform poorly on standardised measures of literacy increase rather than decrease, and these gaps relate to social background. Hence there is a need to investigate how different school communities with diverse student populations design rich curriculum at these stages of schooling and explicitly teach young people to handle new and changing literacy demands.

The use of dashboards in performance management : evidence from sales managers

The purpose of this paper is to identify and empirically examine the key features, purposes, uses, and benefits of performance dashboards. We find that only about a quarter of the sales managers surveyed1 in Finland used a dashboard, which was lower than previously reported. Dashboards were used for four distinct purposes: (i) monitoring, (ii) problem solving, (iii) rationalizing, and (iv) communication and consistency. There was a high correlation between the different uses of dashboards and user productivity indicating that dashboards were perceived as effective tools in performance management, not just for monitoring one‟s own performance but for other purposes including communication. The quality of the data in dashboards did not seem to be a concern (except for completeness) but it was a critical driver regarding its use. This is the first empirical study on performance dashboards in terms of adoption rates, key features, and benefits. The study highlights the research potential and benefits of dashboards, which could be valuable for future researchers and practitioners.