A clinical trial of the Examen and mindfulness within a secular substance use disorder treatment program

The Examen is a 500-year-old Jesuit introspective prayer and reflection. Recent research has indicated that it has utility in psychotherapy. This study implemented the Examen as a secular cognitive–behavioral tool in the first longitudinal clinical trial of the intervention with an addiction treatment population, comparing it directly to a treatment-as-usual mindfulness intervention. The study found that Examen and mindfulness are equivalent in outcomes on depression, anxiety, stress, and substance craving. Further research should continue to investigate the Examen as an alternative to mindfulness for religious and secular populations and the factors responsible for the success of these practices

Health Behavior Change: Proven Strategies for a Longer and Healthier Life (First Edition)

Behavior is hard to change, especially when habits are well-ingrained into our daily lives and lifestyle. Yet, many people are desperate to change their behaviors, especially when it comes to health-related habits that can contribute to significant health problems.Health Behavior Change: Proven Strategies for a Longer and Healthier Life presents readers with a wide variety of evidence-based best practices in cognitive behavioral therapy that can help individuals change their health behaviors for good. The simple and straightforward workbook features a collection of questions and exercises that inspire thoughtful reflection and action. Dedicated sections of the workbook tackle individual behaviors—including diet, exercise, alcohol, smoking, sleep, and more—allowing readers to focus on topics that are of interest to them. Principles and tools for health behavior change are outlined in each chapter, providing readers with the tools they need to initiate long-term behavioral transformation.Based on Thomas G. Plante’s experiences teaching health psychology to college students for over 30 years and treating clinical patients struggling with health behavior efforts for over 40 years, Health Behavior Change is an ideal resource for anyone interested in improving their health and well-being through evidence-based best practices. The workbook is also a useful tool for clinicians treating patients who wish to make behavioral-based health changes in their lives.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1586/thumbnail.jp

Living Ethically in an Unethical World: Doing the Right Thing (Second Edition)

Living Ethically in an Unethical World: Doing the Right Thing provides readers with an easy-to-read and understand set of principles and tools that anyone can use to help them make good ethical decisions. The book was initially published in 2004, and this new edition has been fully updated to reflect the increasingly complex society we currently live in and the myriad decisions we’re faced with every day.Part I of the book presents the rationale for using an ethics-based approach to decision-making. The chapters explore a variety of approaches to ethics, five steps to making ethical decisions, and what doing the right thing entails. In Part II, readers discover five ethical principles to live by: respect, responsibility, integrity, competence, and compassion. Part III focuses on sustaining the principles set forth in the text by developing ethical muscle and applying ethical decision-making to ongoing life challenges. Each chapter concludes with Test Yourself sections, designed to help readers apply what they’ve learned to make tough ethical decisions in hypothetical situations.Developed to help readers engage in ethical thought and lead lives of which they can be proud, Living Ethically in an Unethical World is an ideal text for anyone with interest in ethics-based reflection and action.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1587/thumbnail.jp

Living Better with Spirituality Based Strategies that Work: Workbook for Spiritually Informed Therapy (First Edition)

Living Better with Spirituality Based Strategies that Work: Workbook for Spiritually Informed Therapy is designed to serve as a practical workbook or companion book to Spiritually Informed Therapy that can be used by therapists with their clients, faculty with their students, or with the general public to put key evidence-based principles into actual practice. The workbook features numerous exercises and practical strategies that can help readers examine and implement core tenets from Jesuit spirituality into their everyday and contemporary life.The core tenets from Jesuit spirituality introduced throughout the book include seeing God (or the sacred) in all things, treating the whole person, using a pathway for decision-making focusing on discernment, ending the day with a five-step reflection, managing conflicts with accommodation, humility, the expectation for goodness, and more. The text features real-world case studies that demonstrate how Jesuit spirituality has helped individuals work through their challenges and discover greater overall wellness.Living Better with Spirituality Based Strategies that Work is an innovative workbook that can be paired with Thomas G. Plante’s textbook, Spiritually Informed Therapy, or can be used independently by individuals interested in learning how faith-based principles can enrich their life and experiences.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1588/thumbnail.jp

Ground Truths: Community-Engaged Research for Environmental Justice

Ground Truths shows how community-engaged research contributes to environmental justice for Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income communities by centering local knowledge, building truth from the ground up, producing data that can influence decisions, and transforming researchers’ relationships to communities for equity and mutual benefit. The book outlines the main steps in conducting community-engaged research, evaluates the major research methods used, and addresses institutional barriers to this kind of scholarship in academia. A critical synthesis of research in many fields, Ground Truths provides an original framework for aligning community-engaged research and environmental justice, and applies the framework in chapters on public health, urban planning, conservation, law and policy, community economic development, and food justice and sovereignty.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1590/thumbnail.jp

NeuroGen: EEG and Near-Infrared Light Stimulation Control System

Light stimulation or transcranial photobiomodulation (tPBM) therapy has been shown to be effective when treating patients suffering neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. While there is currently no cure, light stimulation can help alleviate symptoms for those patient’s suffering from these diseases. With this in mind, the senior design team from last year began a prototype hybrid electroencephalography (EEG) and tPBM device. They implemented a specific wavelength of 810 nanometer (nm) near-infrared (NIR) light emitting diodes (LEDs), with a 16 channel EEG headset from OpenBCI. The device was intended to serve as a potential research tool, with a closed loop system between the EEG and light stimulation system; this means, changing the light stimulation therapy based on the patient’s EEG measurements. The goal of this year’s senior design team was to expand and improve the hybrid EEG and tPBM head-device. Last year’s senior design team was able to implement the EEG and LEDs in the same system, however, they were unable to finish closing the loop between the two subsystems. Also, last year’s group was only able to work with 810 nm LEDs, but this year we were lucky enough to receive 1070 nm LEDs from the Quiet Mind Foundation. These LEDs are shown to be more effective in stimulation than that of the 810 nm; this is due to the fact that the 1070 nm wavelength is better absorbed by tissue than the 810 nm, and can penetrate deeper from a further range. There is also evidence that light sensitive ion channels in neurons are tuned to 1070 nm and not 810. However, 1070 nm LEDs are considerably more expensive than the 810 nm, as well as difficult to access. These trade-offs were important to consider when designing our device, as we wanted to reach specific benefits and functional criteria. We worked together as an interdisciplinary team, both bioengineers and electrical, in order to progress towards a fully closed loop system, enhance the user interface, and implement these newly received diodes

A Hardware Platform for Wireless Beehive Monitoring

Traditional beehive monitoring systems suffer from many challenges. These monitoring devices are expensive to set up, difficult to implement, and lack cross compatibility with each other. Preexisting beehive monitoring solutions face all of these shortcomings. Our beehive monitoring platform aims to overcome these issues by using inexpensive, off-theshelf, open-source hardware paired with a computer vision machine learning model to accurately monitor the ingress and egress of bees into and out of the hive. This data is presented to the beekeeper in a simple GUI which allows them to track hive activity over time, and by extension, the overall health of the hive. All of the code in this project is open-source while still maintaining a professional look. This enables users to customize it to their needs. However, even if the user has no prior coding experience the proposed solution is easy to setup and run. The final product should alleviate many challenges that other beehive monitoring systems face and should hopefully create a disruption in the beehive monitoring market that would inspire other companies to utilize more cost efficient hardware and open-source software

Marx, Revolution, and Social Democracy

Many people think Marx a totalitarian and Soviet Marxism the predictable outcome of his thought. If one shows them the texts-proves to them that Marx was a radical democrat--they often flip and think him utopian. Totalitarian or utopian--for many those seem to be the alternatives. How might one combat this completely mistaken image?To establish the connection between Marx and social democracy, philosopher Philip J. Kain argues four main points. First, economy if markets are controlled to eliminate alienation, socialist society for Marx is compatible with a market. Second, markets can be controlled democratically. Third, Marx had a theory of revolution compatible with a democratic electoral movement engaged in by a social democratic party. And fourth, from the late 1860s on, Marx and Engels worked with the German Social Democratic Party of Liebknecht, Bebel, Bernstein, and Kautsky--which eventually became the largest party in Germany and the largest socialist party in the world.If social democracy is a true expression of Marxism, then Marx cannot be called a totalitarian. There is nothing remotely totalitarian about social democracy. Nor is it utopian. It exists all over Western Europe. Moreover, social democratic parties have always opposed the undemocratic tactics of Soviet Marxism. Drawing on these four points, Kain argues against the depiction of Marx as either utopian or totalitarian, and instead makes a case for Marx as a social democrat, whose strongest legacy is found in Western Europe.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1579/thumbnail.jp

Low Power TinyML For Image Recognition

TinyML is a rapidly developing field of machine learning that focuses on deploying complex neural networks on to edge devices such as microcontrollers and phones. The goal of this project is to train and deploy an image classification neural network on top of a Raspberry Pi Pico4ML that can be used in an application to assist the visually impaired. In this project, we will use the TensorflowLite for Microcontrollers platform in order to train and convert a convolutional neural network from Keras into a lightweight tflite model that can be deployed to the Pico4ML. Our tasks include training the image classification model on the Cifar10 dataset, modifying the model to run on a smaller subset, and changing the clock speed in order to optimize performance. Our goal is to optimize power consumption and inference speed while maintaining an accuracy that could be deemed safe. By optimizing these aspects of our model, we can create an efficient and meaningful application for the visually impaired

Pedestrian Bridge for Discovery & Innovation

A new pedestrian bridge was designed adjacent to the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose spanning across the Guadalupe River in the Downtown San Jose area. This design includes structural, geotechnical, and construction components. The architectural aspects of the bridge include two intertwined mass timber arches, galvanized steel cables, and a deck consisting of wide flange I-beams and a proprietary structural glass deck system. These features allow the bridge to seamlessly integrate into the surrounding environment as well as expose structural components of a pedestrian bridge that would otherwise be covered by a traditional bridge deck. All disciplinary components of the bridge were constructed for all relevant California building and design codes. Some assumptions for non-typical structural design components were made in order to ensure a conservative and safe design, and as such design strength values may exceed the minimum requirements outlined by the relevant design provisions. This bridge design provides both; a symbolic connection between the youth of San Jose and its larger community, as well as a corridor between private development and the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose. The bridge design promotes engagement in civil, environmental, and sustainable engineering amongst middle and high school aged students therefore increasing participation in engineering in upper-level education. The Pedestrian Bridge for Discovery & Innovation is a landmark structure that will improve the existing site, educate the local community, and add to the character of Downtown San Jose