English in Counseling Psychology

"English in Counseling Psychology," authored by Dr. Tahereh Movahhedi and Dr. Seyed Ali Sadegh Zadeh, is a comprehensive educational resource designed to enhance the English proficiency of students and professionals in the field of counseling psychology. This book bridges the gap between language learning and specialized knowledge, providing readers with the essential vocabulary, key concepts, and practical communication skills needed for effective professional practice. Each chapter covers core areas of counseling psychology, including therapeutic approaches, client-centered communication, neuroscience in mental health, trauma-informed care, and the integration of artificial intelligence in counseling. Through clear explanations, real-world examples, vocabulary exercises, and reflective questions, learners can build both their linguistic competence and professional expertise. Emphasizing ethical practices, cultural sensitivity, and evidence-based approaches, the book serves as a valuable guide for students, educators, and practitioners aiming to navigate the interdisciplinary landscape of counseling psychology with confidence and clarity

Music Technology meets University 3.0: Music Education in the Era of Co-Creation

This chapter will bring together some key thematic discourses from the last 10 years of higher education policy and creative industry strategy and explore these in the context of the field of music technology. These discourses are often driven by ideological underpinnings to do with our perception of who owns knowledge, who has access to it and how we transmit it in our learning environments. This, in turn, influences the creative potential of the next generation of talent and, with that, the creative sector’s potential to innovate. The chapter uses two concepts as clarifying lenses, making visible some fundamental shifts happening already all around us. One lens uses the conceptualisation of Luigi Sacco’s Culture 1.0 to 3.0 and attends to the sector, and the other lens uses a conceptual framework of my own, that of University 1.0 – 3.0. Within our academic communities of practices, we sometimes forget how much we are influenced, nudged, and afforded to shape our activities according to larger policy contexts; these lenses may provide some clarifying perspectives to consider where we invest our efforts to shape the future of music technology education in our universities

Our Long Poem of Walking (The Six Towns)

A poem 'found' in an essay written to explore the experience of walking each and between the six towns which constitute the city of Stoke on Trent. The selection of poetic phrases, images and linguistic sounds is itself an expression of 'walking through' the essay and finding new paths, new trajectories, the footsteps

Big Wednesday: Lamenting Lost Youth in the New Hollywood

This book provides an examination of Big Wednesday as an unconventional film that employs a mythic sensibility in its representation of the loss of youth and young manhood. Critically and commercially unsuccessful on its original release, the coming-of-age, surf drama Big Wednesday (1978), has undergone a significant reappraisal. It is now considered not only an important contribution to youth cinema, but also the most important film that John Milius ever made. Over six chapters, the book considers questions of authorship, commerce, genre, stardom, and myth, and explores how these ideas intersect with the film’s status as a significant youth movie and collectively how these ideas have contributed to its recent critical rehabilitation. In doing so, the book also provides a much-needed reassessment of an important and overlooked entry in the New Hollywood canon. Exploring Big Wednesday’s subsequent resonance and relevance, this unique study will appeal to students and scholars in film studies, popular culture studies, youth studies, sociology and media studies

Performance text

A performance text developed and written by Dr. Rebecca Woodford-Smith as part of the on going Dream Regime collaboration with Japanese Theatre company Gekidan Kaitaisha. The text was performed during the production 'Dream Regime' by Gekidan Kaitaisha, 2-3rd November 2024 at Hachioji Dock, Tokyo, Japan

Sitting, seeing and getting lost: the sensory aesthetics of Latvia’s women’s prison

This chapter delves into what imprisonment feels like in the global east, with a particular focus on the first encounter with the prison as an institution of confinement. The central claim of this chapter is that by focusing on women’s sensory experience of imprisonment at the start of their sentence, a better understanding can be gathered about carceral power, which in the global east is a relational and symbolic one rather than a physical manifestation in space. The spatial and cultural ‘carceral collectivism’ facilitates an intimacy in the sensorial spectrum of surveillance that essentially provides both control and support functions

A novel data augmentation approach for influenza a subtype prediction based on HA proteins

Influenza, a pervasive viral respiratory illness, remains a significant global health concern. The influenza A virus, capable of causing pandemics, necessitates timely identification of specific subtypes for effective prevention and control, as highlighted by the World Health Organization. The genetic diversity of influenza A virus, especially in the hemagglutinin protein, presents challenges for accurate subtype prediction. This study introduces PreIS as a novel pipeline utilizing advanced protein language models and supervised data augmentation to discern subtle differences in hemagglutinin protein sequences. PreIS demonstrates two key contributions: leveraging pretrained protein language models for influenza subtype classification and utilizing supervised data augmentation to generate additional training data without extensive annotations. The effectiveness of the pipeline has been rigorously assessed through extensive experiments, demonstrating a superior performance with an impressive accuracy of 94.54% compared to the current state-of-the-art model, the MC-NN model, which achieves an accuracy of 89.6%. PreIS also exhibits proficiency in handling unknown subtypes, emphasizing the importance of early detection. Pioneering the classification of HxNy subtypes solely based on the hemagglutinin protein chain, this research sets a benchmark for future studies. These findings promise more precise and timely influenza subtype prediction, enhancing public health preparedness against influenza outbreaks and pandemics. The data and code underlying this article are available in https://github.com/CBRC-lab/PreIS

Optimizing Bank Stability Through MSME Loan Securitization: A Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics Approach

This study aims to enhance bank stability in the context of MSME loan securitization through the application of advanced decision analytics. Utilizing predictive modelling techniques, including Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and Neural Networks, the research identifies key financial ratios and macroeconomic indicators that influence bank stability, as measured by the Z-Score. Additionally, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) was employed to optimize capital and liquidity ratios, revealing optimal values of 0.20 and 0.60, respectively, for maximizing stability. The study contributes to decision analytics by integrating predictive modelling, optimization, and prescriptive methods, providing a robust framework for financial institutions to improve risk management and decision-making. The findings demonstrate the superiority of machine learning models over traditional methods and highlight the critical role of financial ratios in sustaining bank stability. Future research should extend these models to broader datasets and dynamic financial environments to further enhance their predictive power and applicability

Games Design Frameworks: A Novel Approach for Games Design Pedagogy

The discipline of Games Design has surged in popularity in higher education as a route to industry for aspiring game developers. Notably, at the time of writing 138 UK Universities are now offering game design degrees, and many further education institutions. This growth is not only in volume but also in the diversity of students who enrol in these courses. Young learners, coming from various backgrounds and with differing levels of professional and academic experience, are drawn to games as a field of study. Games disciplines (such as Games Art, Design, and Programming) are often seen as more accessible than their comparative parent disciplines (such as Computer Science). This diversity presents both an opportunity and a challenge for educators: to develop teaching methodologies that not only cater to a wide range of experiences but also effectively prepare students for the creative and technical demands of the games industry. This paper introduces a pioneering design concept utilized in the pedagogy of game design, namely the use of game frameworks. A framework is a structure built in a video games engine, containing a pre-made, playable game experience, which students are taught to build upon and modify. Frameworks abstract and modularise fundamental, complex elements of the game creation process, allowing new learners to quickly become engaged with the iterative process of designing gameplay. It also allows educators to focus on a specific area of interest. For example, a student can focus just on the UI elements of the game for a whole module of study, without needing to have built the entire game first. This allows students to focus on the elements being taught, without introducing a significant amount of non-assessed content just to enable to learning. This position paper discusses our application of this approach, including the process of framework design, supportive assessment, successes and challenges

An investigation into the contributing factors to survival of COVID-19 induced ARDS patients supported by veno-venous ECMO.

This study aimed to identify characteristics associated with survival and prognosis during/post Veno-Venous Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (VV-ECMO) therapy, a modality of treatment suggested by the World Health Organisation (WHO), in patients with COVID-19 induced Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). Also, we aimed to identify pre and peri-measures that have an influence on and affect the survival times of this cohort and to see how changes in these variables influenced the risk of not surviving ECMO treatment. A retrospective observational study on 93 consecutive patients with confirmed COVID-19 induced acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) supported by Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO) was carried out. 49/93 (52.7%) patients survived to hospital discharge. All proposed objectives were met to provide a valuable insight into the efficacy of ECMO for this specific cohort. Non-survivors, in comparison to survivors, were found to have significantly (p<0.05) higher: Pre-ECMO International normalized ratios (INR), carbon dioxide partial pressure (pCO2), Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) scores, blood urea levels and peri-ECMO fresh frozen plasma (FFP) and platelet transfusion volumes. Also, lower pre-ECMO peak inspiratory pressures (PIP), mean blood pressure, saturation of arterial oxygen (SaO2), blood bicarbonate levels (HCO3), blood pH and fewer trials off ECMO with shorter combined trial off times. Patients that did not survive were more likely to have renal impairment and have received peri-ECMO haemofiltration. Poor prognosis was significantly associated with receiving pre-ECMO nitric oxide, renal impairment, AKI staging score of 2 or 3, peri-ECMO haemofiltration, receiving transfusions of albumin, red blood cells (RBC), Fresh Frozen Plasma (FFP), platelets, cryoprecipitate and the ABO blood group B, pre-ECMO high CO2, blood lactate, and lower blood pH. It was seen that commonly used mortality scores may not be of use in a COVID-19 cohort of ECMO patients. These findings indicated that the initiation of ECMO needs to be implemented prior to metabolic derangements, renal and fulminant respiratory failure. By utilising the findings of this study, one can make best use of finite resources to provide the greatest utility at a time of excessive demand. As well as filling a known knowledge gap in the use of VV-ECMO for COVID-19 induced ARDS patients, it also highlights further requirements to investigate the use of ECMO in the ARDS setting