Occupational therapy assessment of self-awareness following traumatic brain injury

Impaired self-awareness is a common problem following traumatic brain injury. Without adequate self-awareness, a person's motivation to participate in rehabilitation may be limited, which in turn can have an adverse effect on his or her functional outcome. For this reason, it is important that brain injury rehabilitation professionals, including occupational therapists, both understand this phenomenon and use assessment and treatment approaches aimed at improving clients' self-awareness. This article provides an overview of self-awareness, reviewing the distinction between intellectual and online awareness. The current role of occupational therapy in the assessment of self-awareness is highlighted and the guidelines for new assessments of self-awareness suitable for use in occupational therapy are explored.

Historical and dialectical perspectives on the teaching of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musics in the Australian education system

Indigenous studies (also referred to as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies) has a double identity in the Australian education system, consisting of the education of Indigenous students and education of all students about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and histories. Through explanations of the history of the inclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musics in Australian music education, this article critiques ways in which these musics have been positioned in relation to a number of agendas. These include definitions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musics as types of Australian music, as ethnomusicological objects, as examples of postcolonial discourse, and as empowerment for Indigenous students. The site of discussion is the work of the Australian Society for Music Education, as representative of trends in Australian school-based music education, and the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide, as an example of a tertiary music program for Indigenous students.

A informalidade do mercado de trabalho : um desafio institucional permanente para a economia brasileira

A economia informal compõe o mundo do trabalho de todas as sociedades capitalistas, em menor ou em maior grau. No Brasil, historicamente observa-se que esse fenômeno tem sido sempre muito abrangente, sobretudo motivado pelo e resultante do contexto socioeconômico, jurídico e político. Devido às idiossincrasias nacionais, desde o surgimento do mercado de trabalho no país, esta situação persiste em diversos panoramas e com vários matizes, obstaculizando uma melhor performance global da economia brasileira e negando oportunidades de desenvolvimento individual e social ao longo do tempo. Sendo assim, e através do prisma da Economia Social e do Trabalho, o objetivo desta dissertação é analisar os principais fatores conjunturais e estruturais da informalidade observada no mercado nacional de trabalho no interregno 1980-2012, apresentando a dimensão desse problema e expondo suas raízes econômicas e institucionais, a fim de contribuir com novos elementos para o debate da informalidade em nível nacional. A hipótese central dessa pesquisa é de que o elevado GI no Brasil persiste essencialmente – mesmo que com diferentes especificidades históricas – ao nível das mentalidades dos diversos agentes, isto é, antes de ter-se um mercado nacional de trabalho com um alto GI, tem-se uma sociedade brasileira altamente informal. A instituição “trabalho informal” persiste como um hábito incrustado mesmo diante de mudanças de ordem socioeconômica, o que impede que grande parcela da população brasileira tenha acesso ao trabalho formalizado e decente (a là OIT). É mister que haja maior efetividade das leis e aprimoramentos institucionais acompanhados de coordenação e “vontade política”, alicerçados pela tomada de consciência crescente da sociedade civil no que se refere à importância da formalização e aos males da informalidade tanto para seus cidadãos quanto para a nação. Sugere-se como uma possível alternativa para diminuir o GI de forma mais consistente a consideração, para além dos aspectos econômicos e jurídicos, do arcabouço cultural, histórico, comportamental e dos hábitos sociais incrustados que os condicionam e os orientam. Isto porque são estes os eixos que norteiam o processo de desenvolvimento individual e social. Nesse sentido, o estudo (de caráter descritivo e analítico) é fundamentado pelas teorias sistêmicas e multidisciplinares desenvolvidas por Karl Paul Polanyi e Amartya Kumar Sen, interpretadas como artífices de uma vida digna, além de apregoarem o “reincrustamento” da economia na sociedade e, por analogia, o “desincrustamento” da informalidade institucionalmente enraizada na sociedade brasileira. Isso se dará à medida que forem expandidas as liberdades instrumentais e substantivas, em uma espécie de “causação circular cumulativa” aplicada à questão da informalidade, tendo como “efeito colateral altamente desejável” o desenvolvimento socioeconômico. As principais contribuições deste estudo emergiram justamente das concepções teóricas dos dois autores, combinadas aos nexos de convergência estabelecidos entre a economia brasileira, seus desdobramentos institucionais e a informalidade no mercado nacional de trabalho no período estudado.

Prevalence of periodontal disease in dogs and owners' level of awareness - a prospective clinical trial

Periodontal disease (PD) is widely known among veterinarians for its high prevalence and serious consequences to the dogs. The objective of this study was to assess the occurrence of PD in dogs that live in the micro-region of Viçosa, treated at the Veterinary Hospital of the Federal University of Viçosa (HVT - Hospital Veterinário da Universidade Federal de Viçosa), as well as to assess how aware of this disease dog owners are. In order to do so, all dogs treated at the HVT from March 10th, 2009 to November 30th, 2009, on alternate days, had their oral cavities examined. Medical history data, such as age, type of food, main complaint and owner consent, halitosis, presence of dental calculus, inflammation and gingival recession and tooth loss, were collected. A prevalence of 88.67% was found for PD in dogs referred to the HVT, and 2.67% were referred due to this disease. Of all the owners who participated in the study, 43.83% knew about periodontal disease and of these 17.46% made use of some type of prevention or treatment. Therefore, periodontal disease is highly prevalent and the owners are not aware of the disease. Thus, a dog owner clarification program on periodontal disease is needed in the area where HVT-UFV operates.

Historical and conceptual landscape of the character

This paper was developed with the intention of broadly demonstrating the complexity of the area known recently as character development, as a creative process methods and implementation. It searches the understanding of the character itself, its place in the narrative and its reception by the reader or target audience. It is a multidisciplinary tool that faces a multitude of challenges from an increasingly demanding public and with specific goals in mind, and yet it also gives us valuable insight over how we interact with one another and the world around us, teaching us how to transfer such knowledge into fiction promoting empathic bonds between the reader and the characters. The human tendency to create is limitless and as old as mankind itself, we create, recreate and reinterpret and then populate such tales with believable characters from who we learn, and experience events and tales that shape our very lives.

Historical Inevitability

What interests me more here is the so-called Historical Inevitability. It is a concept intimately linked with Human Choice and Freedom. There is a long history of debate around it among the western thinkers. The protestant thinkers, and particularly its Calvinist brand laid much emphasis upon predestination. The modern thinkers, freed from the theological trappings, questioned the Church imposed limitations to the capacity of human reasoning. The progress of science and technologies supported by it through the Industrial Revolution and thereafter seemed to endorse this new self-confidence. However, the miseries brought upon mankind by regional and world wars fuelled by the same technologies have made mankind wary of its faith upon scientific progress. The promises of modernization have left the greater part of mankind without its benefits, and even the rest of mankind is unsure of living in a safe and uncontaminated environment.

Possible consequences of increasing life expectancy in Brazil: the perspective of a European historical demographer

Those over sixty years of age accounted for 6.6% of the total population of Brazil in 1985, in the Federal Republic of Germany this proportion was 20.3% in 1984. As early as 1950 it had been 14.5%. This proportion will not even be reached in Brazil in the year 2000 when persons aged sixty years and older are only projected to make up 8.8% of the total population. Similarly, in 1982/84 life expectancy at birth in the Federal Republic was 70.8 years for men and 77.5 for women; in Brazil the figures for 1980/85 were, by contrast, "only" 61.0 and 66.0. Against this background it is easy to understand why the discussion concerning an ageing society with its many related medical, economic, individual and social problems has been so slow in coming into its own in Brazil. As important as a more intensive consideration of these aspects may be in Brazil at present, they are, nevertheless, only one side of the story. For a European historical demographer with a long-term perspective of three of four hundred years, the other side of the story is just as important. The life expectancy which is almost ten years lower in Brazil is not a result of the fact that no one in Brazil lives to old age. In 1981 people sixty-five years and older accounted for 34.4% of all deaths! At the same time infants accounted for only 22.1% of total mortality. They are responsible, along with the "premature" deaths among youths and adults, for the low, "average" life expectancy figure. In Europe, by contrast, these "premature" deaths no longer play much of a role. In 1982/84 more than half of the women (52.8%) in the Federal Republic of Germany lived to see their eightieth birthdays and almost half of the men (47.3%) lived to see their seventy-fifth. Our biological existence is guaranteed to an extent today that would have been unthinkable a few generations ago. Then, the classic troika of "plague, hunger and war" threatened our forefathers all the time and everywhere. The radical transition from the formerly uncertain to a present-day certain lifetime, which is the result of the repression of "plague, hunger and war", led to unexpected consequences for our living together. Our forefathers were forced to live in closely knit Gemeinschaften in the interest of physical survival and to subordinate their egoistic goals to a common value, but now these pressures have, for the most part, fallen away. Correspondingly, this much more certain EGO has taken center stage. An ever greater number of us chooses to live life as single beings: the number of marriages is lower every year; the number of divorces is on the increase; in Berlin (West) more than half (sic! 52.3%) of all households are already composed on only one person. For the last dozen years the annual number of births in the Federal Republic has been insufficient to ensure population replacement. Not a population explosion but rather the opposite, a population implosion, is our problem. Human beings do not appear to be "social animals", as was axiomatically assumed for so long. They were only forced to behave as such for as long as "plague, hunger and war" forced them to do so. When these life endangering conditions no longer exist and life becomes certain even without their being integrated into a Gemeinschaft then humans suddenly show themselves more and more to be independent single beings. It is not the percentage of the population that is over sixty or sixty-five that is decisive in this context but rather how certain adults perceive their biological lives to be, since they are the ones who organize their lives, who build communities or who are ever more often willing only to enter into means-to-an-end personal unions without lasting or close ties and mutual responsibilities. There are many signs which seem to point to a development in this direction in Brazil as well. More and more adults in Brazil are caught up in the deep-seated transition from an uncertain to a certain lifetime. A third of them die after having reached their sixty-fifth birthday. It therefore seems to me to be high time that one began to give more consideration to the other side of the story in Brazil as well. And who is more suited intensively to consider the long-term perspectives than those engaged in the public health sector in whose competence, after all, such aspects, as "life certainty", "life expectancy" and "age at death" belong?

Dengue in the South-eastern region of Brazil: historical analysis and epidemiology

The aim of the study is an historical analysis of the work undertaken by the Public Health organizations dedicated to the combat of the Aedes aegypti, as well as an epidemiolocal study of persons with unexplained fever, with a view to evaluating the ocurrence of dengue within the population. The Mac-Elisa, Gac-Elisa, hemaglutination inhibition, isolation and typage tests were used. Organophosphate intoxication in agricultural workers was also assessed by measuring concentrations of serie cholinesterase. A sera samples of 2,094 were collected in 23 towns, and the type 1 dengue virus was detected in 17 towns and autochthony was confirmed in 12 of them. The cholinesterase was measured in 2,391 sera samples of which 53 cases had abnormal levels. Poisoning was confirmed in 3 cases. Results reveal an epidemic the gravity of which was not officially know. The relationshipe between levels of IgM and IgG antibodies indicates the outbreak tendency. The widespread distribution of the vector is troubling because of the possibility of the urbanization of wild yellow fever, whereas the absence of A. aegypti in 2 towns with autochthony suggests the existence of another vector. Since there is no vaccine against dengue, the combat of the vector is the most efficient measure for preventing outbreaks. The eradication of the vector depends on government decisions which depend, for their execution, on the organization of the Health System and the propagation of information concerning the prevention of the disease using all possible means because short and long term results depend on the education and the active participation of the entire population.