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Let Alone (let + alone)
Selected AbstractsConceptual background, development, and preliminary data from the unified protocol for transdiagnostic treatment of emotional disorders,DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY, Issue 10 2010Zofia A. Wilamowska M.A. Abstract Anxiety and mood disorders are common, chronic, costly, and characterized by high comorbidity. The development of cognitive behavioral approaches to treating anxiety and mood disorders has left us with highly efficacious treatments that are increasingly widely accepted. The proliferation of treatment manuals targeting single disorders, sometimes with trivial differences among them, leaves the mental health professional with no clear way to choose one manual over another and little chance of ever becoming familiar with most of them, let alone trained to competence in their delivery. Deepening understanding of the nature of emotional disorders reveals that commonalities in etiology and latent structures among these disorders supersedes differences. Based on empirical evidence from the domains of learning, emotional development and regulation, and cognitive science, we have distilled a set of psychological procedures that comprise a unified intervention for emotional disorders. The Unified Protocol (UP) is a transdiagnostic, emotion-focused cognitive behavioral treatment, which emphasizes the adaptive, functional nature of emotions, and seeks to identify and correct maladaptive attempts to regulate emotional experiences, thereby facilitating appropriate processing and extinction of excessive emotional responding to both internal (somatic) and external cues. The treatment components of the UP are briefly outlined. Theory and rationale supporting this new approach are described along with some preliminary evidence supporting its efficacy. Implications for the treatment of emotional disorders using the UP are discussed. Depression and Anxiety, 2010. © 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Feedforward networks in financial predictions: the future that modifies the presentEXPERT SYSTEMS, Issue 3 2000Massimo Budcema The main goal of this paper is to show how relatively minor modifications of well-known algorithms (in particular, back propagation) can dramatically increase the performance of an artificial neural network (ANN) for time series prediction. We denote our proposed sets of modifications as the 'self-momentum', 'Freud' and 'Jung' rules. In our opinion, they provide an example of an alternative approach to the design of learning strategies for ANNs, one that focuses on basic mathematical conceptualization rather than on formalism and demonstration. The complexity of actual prediction problems makes it necessary to experiment with modelling possibilities whose inherent mathematical properties are often not well understood yet. The problem of time series prediction in stock markets is a case in point. It is well known that asset price dynamics in financial markets are difficult to trace, let alone to predict with an operationally interesting degree of accuracy. We therefore take financial prediction as a meaningful test bed for the validation of our techniques. We discuss in some detail both the theoretical underpinnings of the technique and our case study about financial prediction, finding encouraging evidence that supports the theoretical and operational viability of our new ANN specifications. Ours is clearly only a preliminary step. Further developments of ANN architectures with more and more sophisticated 'learning to learn' characteristics are now under study and test. [source] Staying with People Who Slap Us Around: Gender, Juggling Responsibilities and Violence in Paid (and Unpaid) Care WorkGENDER, WORK & ORGANISATION, Issue 2 2006Donna BainesArticle first published online: 13 FEB 200 Little is actually known about women's occupational health, let alone how men and women may experience similar jobs and health risks differently. Drawing on data from a larger study of social service workers, this article examines four areas where gender is pivotal to the new ways of organizing caring labour, including the expansion of unpaid work and the use of personal resources to subsidize agency resources; gender-neutral violence; gender-specific violence and the juggling of home and work responsibilities. Collective assumptions and expectations about how men and women should perform care work result in men's partial insulation from the more intense forms of exploitation, stress and violence. This article looks at health risks, not merely as compensable occupational health concerns, but as avoidable products of forms of work organization that draw on notions of the endlessly stretchable capacity of women to provide care work in any context, including a context of violence. Indeed, the logic of women's elastic caring appear crucial to the survival of some agencies and the gender order in these workplaces. [source] "SCENOPHOBIA", GEOGRAPHY AND THE AESTHETIC POLITICS OF LANDSCAPEGEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2007Karl Benediktsson ABSTRACT. Recent critiques of the nature,culture dualism, influenced by diverse theoretical stances, have effectively destabilized the "naturalness" of nature and highlighted its pervasive and intricate sociality. Yet the practical, ethical and political effects of this theoretical turn are open to question. In particular, the emphasis on the sociality of nature has not led to reinvigorated environmental or landscape politics. Meanwhile, the need for such politics has if anything increased, as evident when ongoing and, arguably, accelerating landscape transformations are taken into account. These concerns are illustrated in the paper with an example from Iceland. In its uninhabited central highland, serious battles are now being fought over landscape values. Capital and state have joined forces in an investment-driven scramble for hydropower and geothermal resources to facilitate heavy industry, irrevocably transforming landscapes in the process. Dissonant voices arguing for caution and conservation have been sidelined or silenced by the power(ful) alliance. The author argues for renewed attention to the aesthetic, including the visual, if responsible politics of landscape are to be achieved. Aesthetic appreciation is an important part of the everyday experiences of most people. Yet, enthusiastic as they have been in deconstructing conventional narratives of nature, geographers have been rather timid when it comes to analysing aesthetic values of landscape and their significance, let alone in suggesting progressive landscape politics. A political geography of landscape is needed which takes aesthetics seriously, and which acknowledges the merit of engagement and enchantment. [source] One cell, one antibody: prelude and aftermathIMMUNOLOGICAL REVIEWS, Issue 1 2002G. J. V. Nossal Summary: This essay seeks to summarize one scientist's pilgrim's progress through the world of antibody formation, attempting to capture the flavor of problems as encountered within their times. It seeks to portray a world where the direct template hypothesis ruled the day, where the function of lymphocytes was unknown, let alone the difference between T and B cells, and where antibody genes were but a dream. Struggles to establish the credentials of the clonal selection hypothesis are presented in some detail, as are the implications which followed the ,one cell , one antibody' discovery. The other two main preoccupations of the author are presented more briefly, namely the essential features of the germinal center and the cellular basis of immunological tolerance within the B lymphocyte compartment. Naturally, the experiments become more sophisticated as both knowledge and technology mature. A continuing thread within the unfolding story is that one must not shy away from developing new techniques when problems demand them. [source] Rethinking social work ethics: what is the real question?INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WELFARE, Issue 2 2010Against difference, Responding to Stephen Webb's, diversity in social work' Jose J. Rethinking social work ethics: what is the real question? Responding to Stephen Webb's ,Against difference and diversity in social work' Int J Soc Welfare 2010: 19: 246,252 © 2009 The Author(s), Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. In his recent article, Stephen Webb argued that the real question for social work ethics concerns ,recognising the Same and of restoring the principles of equality and social justice'. This argument also included raising questions about what should be considered an appropriate philosophical basis for progressive social work ethics. In his view, social work's emancipatory potential has been blunted by overstated and philosophically ill-informed human rights claims about difference and diversity. He suggested that French philosopher Alain Badiou offers social workers a ,set of conceptual devices for rethinking social work ethics'. I argue that pressing his points into Badiou's philosophical mould is unlikely to lead to a progressive social work practice, let alone solve the issues identified by Webb. Badiou's philosophical pronouncements about ethics are of questionable value and offer little or no assistance to social workers seeking to establish an ethical grounding for their professional practice. [source] Insights from the asebia mouse: a molecular sebaceous gland defect leading to cicatricial alopeciaJOURNAL OF CUTANEOUS PATHOLOGY, Issue 9 2001K. S. Stenn The primary cicatricial alopecias have proven to be challenging for the clinician, dermatopathologist and the researcher , let alone the patient. If we are to improve our diagnostic and therapeutic tools for these very difficult disorders, we will need greater insight into their etiology. Recent work with the mouse mutant, asebia, provides a model for cicatricial alopecia. In this model the pathology , perifollicular inflammation, sebaceous gland "destruction", hair shaft granuloma, and cicatricial follicle drop-out , results from the mutation of one very important sebaceous gland gene. In the absence of this gene, the sebaceous gland is hypoplastic and normal sebum production is minimal to absent. In this paper the relevance of this mutant to human alopecias is discussed and the point emphasized that the pathogenesis of some forms of human cicatricial alopecia could involve the sebaceous gland. [source] Hospital quality measurement, Perplexing for professionals, let alone for patientsJOURNAL OF HOSPITAL MEDICINE, Issue 3 2007Kevin J. O'Leary MD [source] Oxidative stress and neurodegeneration: where are we now?JOURNAL OF NEUROCHEMISTRY, Issue 6 2006Barry Halliwell Abstract The brain and nervous system are prone to oxidative stress, and are inadequately equipped with antioxidant defense systems to prevent ,ongoing' oxidative damage, let alone the extra oxidative damage imposed by the neurodegenerative diseases. Indeed, increased oxidative damage, mitochondrial dysfunction, accumulation of oxidized aggregated proteins, inflammation, and defects in protein clearance constitute complex intertwined pathologies that conspire to kill neurons. After a long lag period, therapeutic and other interventions based on a knowledge of redox biology are on the horizon for at least some of the neurodegenerative diseases. [source] Asymptotic and spectral analysis of non-selfadjoint operators generated by a filament model with a critical value of a boundary parameterMATHEMATICAL METHODS IN THE APPLIED SCIENCES, Issue 3 2003Marianna A. Shubov Abstract We consider a class of non-selfadjoint operators generated by the equation and the boundary conditions, which govern small vibrations of an ideal filament with non-conservative boundary conditions at one end and a heavy load at the other end. The filament has a non-constant density and is subject to a viscous damping with a non-constant damping coefficient. The boundary conditions contain two arbitrary complex parameters. In our previous paper (Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences 2001; 24(15) : 1139,1169), we have derived the asymptotic approximations for the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the aforementioned non-selfadjoint operators when the boundary parameters were arbitrary complex numbers except for one specific value of one of the parameters. We call this value the critical value of the boundary parameter. It has been shown (in Mathematical Methods in the Applied Sciences 2001; 24(15) : 1139,1169) that the entire set of the eigenvalues is located in a strip parallel to the real axis. The latter property is crucial for the proof of the fact that the set of the root vectors of the operator forms a Riesz basis in the state space of the system. In the present paper, we derive the asymptotics of the spectrum exactly in the case of the critical value of the boundary parameter. We show that in this case, the asymptotics of the eigenvalues is totally different, i.e. both the imaginary and real parts of eigenvalues tend to ,as the number of an eigenvalue increases. We will show in our next paper, that as an indirect consequence of such a behaviour of the eigenvalues, the set of the root vectors of the corresponding operator is not uniformly minimal (let alone the Riesz basis property). Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Sustaining appearances: sustainable development and the fisheries of Lake VictoriaNATURAL RESOURCES FORUM, Issue 3 2001Kevin Crean Abstract The fisheries of Lake Victoria have undergone a major transformation over the last three decades. The character of the lake has been subject to the influence of many powerful factors including: substantial increases in fishing effort; growing integration into the global fish market; acceleration of anthropogenic activities in the catchment area; demographic change; the influence of adverse shifts in the climate; and introduction of exotic plant and animal species. The task of managing the lake's resources, therefore, has never been more daunting. This article argues that, in most cases, the authorities charged with achieving the goal of sustainable development for the fishery, have failed to address the symptoms,let alone the origins,of the current unsustainable tendencies embedded in the social, economic and political fabric of Lake Victoria's riparian States. It is these factors that directly impinge upon the success of management initiatives for the lake. The article argues that if sustainable development is to be achieved, then stakeholders must act in concert, eliminate unsustainable practices and reprogramme development plans to focus on realistic goals. A possible way forward will be to develop a participatory management system. [source] TRP channels as therapeutic targets: hot property, or time to cool down?NEUROGASTROENTEROLOGY & MOTILITY, Issue 8 2006G. A. Hicks Abstract,Transient receptor potential (TRP) channels are involved in a wide range of processes ranging from osmoregulation, thermal, chemical and sensory signalling, and potentially in the pathophysiology associated with several diseases. Patents for TRPV1 antagonists alone span diseases ranging across chronic pain, neuropathies, headache, bladder disorders, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastro-oesophageal reflux disease (GORD), and cough amongst others. Most research is currently focused around those TRP channels involved in sensory processes, with the neurogastroenterology and motility field playing a major role, for example, through recent discoveries of differential roles for TRPV receptor subtypes in chemosensitivity and mechanosensitivity of visceral afferents. At this time, however, the understanding of the role of even TRPV1, let alone most of the other TRP channels in disease pathophysiology is only just beginning, and although enthusiasm around the therapeutic potential for modulators of these channels is understandable, based largely upon the experience of the effects of natural ligands, such as capsaicin, the sheer size and complexity of the TRP family as a whole must serve as a warning against expecting too much too soon from drug discovery efforts. [source] Alone in the World: The Existential Socrates in the Apology and CritoPOLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2007Emanuele Saccarelli The story of Socrates' life, and in particular the circumstances of his death, has been a nearly obligatory referent for the development of Western political thought. Contemporary political theorists such as Hannah Arendt and, more recently, Gerald Mara and Dana Villa have presented Socrates as a model of political engagement for our times. Against the background of these accounts, I develop an existential interpretation of Socrates as he appears in the Apology and Crito, focusing on the singular, private, experiential and incommunicable character of Socrates' truth. In doing so, I discuss some important and contentious issues in Socratic studies, such as his disavowal of knowledge, his allegiance to the Athenian polis and the apparent tension between his defiance during the trial and his willingness to submit to the resulting death sentence. My interpretation reveals a Socrates that we should not strive to understand, let alone emulate politically, particularly if we wish to respect his own sensibilities. [source] Equality: From Marxism to Liberalism (and Back Again)POLITICAL STUDIES REVIEW, Issue 3 2003Christine Sypnowich G. A. Cohen casts doubt on the extent to which Marxism can contribute to a theory of equality. This essay affirms Cohen's critique. The historical materialist approach to social change, the privileged role ascribed to the proletariat, and Marx's assumption that scarcity can be abolished: these three themes account for the impatience of classical Marxists with moral commitments and normative argument, an impatience which now seems utopian. Marx was wrong about how social change comes about, and that error made it very difficult for the goal of equality to be formulated, let alone realised. ,The egalitarian turn' in liberalism suggests that it is liberal political theory, not Marxism, which can inform debates about equality. The insistence on neutrality about the good in much left-liberal argument, however, has forestalled consideration of the kinds of lives to which human beings should aspire, something that must be considered if we are enable individuals to live well, as Marx understood with his critique of alienation. This paper argues that questions of human flourishing are essential to questions of equality, and that Marx's perfectionist vision of the equal society ought to be retrieved. [source] Coupling 3D and 1D fluid-structure interaction models for blood flow simulationsPROCEEDINGS IN APPLIED MATHEMATICS & MECHANICS, Issue 1 2006L. Formaggia Three-dimensional (3D) simulations of blood flow in medium to large vessels are now a common practice. These models consist of the 3D Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible Newtonian fluids coupled with a model for the vessel wall structure. However, it is still computationally unaffordable to simulate very large sections, let alone the whole, of the human circulatory system with fully 3D fluid-structure interaction models. Thus truncated 3D regions have to be considered. Reduced models, one-dimensional (1D) or zero-dimensional (0D), can be used to approximate the remaining parts of the cardiovascular system at a low computational cost. These models have a lower level of accuracy, since they describe the evolution of averaged quantities, nevertheless they provide useful information which can be fed to the more complex model. More precisely, the 1D models describe the wave propagation nature of blood flow and coupled with the 3D models can act also as absorbing boundary conditions. We consider in this work the coupling of a 3D fluid-structure interaction model with a 1D hyperbolic model. We study the stability of the coupling and present some numerical results. (© 2006 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim) [source] Connecting humor, health, and masculinities at prostate cancer support groupsPSYCHO-ONCOLOGY, Issue 9 2009John L. Oliffe Abstract Objective: Many commentaries about men's health practices and masculinities indicate that men do not typically engage with self-health or acknowledge illness, let alone openly discuss their health concerns with other men. Prostate cancer support groups (PCSGs) appear to run contrary to such ideals, yet the factors that influence men's attendance and engagement at group meetings are poorly understood. As part of a larger PCSG study, we noticed that humor was central to many group interactions and this prompted us to examine the connections between humor, health, and masculinities. Methods: A qualitative ethnographic design was used to direct fieldwork and conduct participant observations at the meetings of 16 PCSGs in British Columbia, Canada. Individual semi-structured interviews were completed with 54 men who attended PCSGs to better understand their perceptions about the use of humor at group meetings. Results: Four themes, disarming stoicism, marking the boundaries, rekindling and reformulating men's sexuality, and when humor goes south were drawn from the analyses. Overall, humor was used to promote inclusiveness, mark the boundaries for providing and receiving mutual help, and develop masculine group norms around men's sexuality. Although there were many benefits to humor there were also some instances when well-intended banter caused discomfort for attendees. Conclusions: The importance of group leadership was central to preserving the benefits of humor, and the specificities of how humor is used at PCSGs may provide direction for clinical practice and the design of future community-based men's health promotion programs. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Twenty,first century United States governance: statecraft as reform craft and the peculiar governing paradox it perpetuatesPUBLIC ADMINISTRATION, Issue 1 2003Richard J. Stillman The United States is commonly referred to as the last global superpower, exercising unrivalled political, economic, military and social influence. Yet, paradoxically, unlike any other nation, Americans were , and remain , radically antistatist. Until roughly the twentieth century the United States did not want, need, nor create a powerful administrative state to govern itself, let alone others abroad. This essay explores that peculiar paradox, namely how Americans govern as the last global superpower today, yet retain an inherently fierce hostility to government. The thesis that is developed argues that it is a deep,rooted reformist faith which ultimately shapes US statecraft as a unique style of reformcraft, with both benign and not,sobenign consequences. [source] Madonna Bellina, ,astounding' Jewish musician in mid-sixteenth-century VeniceRENAISSANCE STUDIES, Issue 1 2008Don Harrán Jewish female musicians were a rarity in the sixteenth century, let alone later times. All the more interest attaches to the description of Madonna Bellina, in an ardent ,love letter' that the renowned Venetian playwright and satirist Andrea Calmo wrote to her (in Venetian) around 1550, as a Jewess who ,astounded her listeners' (meraveiar i auditori) by her singing and playing. As the only known document about her, the letter deserves closer investigation to establish as much as one can of her person (age, appearance, character) and musical talents; to gauge the attitude of its author toward singing or playing Jewesses and, more generally, toward Judaism; and to probe the question whether Madonna Bellina was real or a figment of his imagination. The study concludes with an appendix, in which Calmo's letter to Bellina is transcribed in the original and translated. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||