From Ancestral Knowledge to Clinical Practice: The Case of \u3cem\u3eAgonias\u3c/em\u3e and Portuguese Clinicians in America

Cultures have varying notions about symptom expression and the treatment of mental health issues. Consequently, clients and psychotherapists may or may not share a similar worldview. In the psychotherapy literature there has been increased attention to these complex processes. This survey descriptive study aims to understand how therapists working with culturally diverse clients incorporate sensitivity to cultural differences. Fifteen culturally sensitive mental health care providers working with the Portuguese immigrant community were interviewed about their practices. Specifically, we investigated their understanding of the symptoms, causes and cures for agonias, a culture specific phenomenon. It was found that even though the providers are all Portuguese themselves, the meaning that they ascribed to agonias (anxiety and/or depression) was very different than the meaning ascribed to agonias by community members. The community member’s meanings ranged from indigestion to being on the brink of death. A cluster analysis revealed that clinicians who stated that agonias is anxiety, conducted cognitive behavioral therapy or psychopharmacology, and those that stated agonias had a depressive component tended to use family therapy or psychoanalysis

Sequential Circuit Design for Embedded Cryptographic Applications Resilient to Adversarial Faults

In the relatively young field of fault-tolerant cryptography, the main research effort has focused exclusively on the protection of the data path of cryptographic circuits. To date, however, we have not found any work that aims at protecting the control logic of these circuits against fault attacks, which thus remains the proverbial Achilles’ heel. Motivated by a hypothetical yet realistic fault analysis attack that, in principle, could be mounted against any modular exponentiation engine, even one with appropriate data path protection, we set out to close this remaining gap. In this paper, we present guidelines for the design of multifault-resilient sequential control logic based on standard Error-Detecting Codes (EDCs) with large minimum distance. We introduce a metric that measures the effectiveness of the error detection technique in terms of the effort the attacker has to make in relation to the area overhead spent in implementing the EDC. Our comparison shows that the proposed EDC-based technique provides superior performance when compared against regular N-modular redundancy techniques. Furthermore, our technique scales well and does not affect the critical path delay

Toward a Strategic Human Resource Management Model of High Reliability Organization Performance

In this article, we extend strategic human resource management (SHRM) thinking to theory and research on high reliability organizations (HROs) using a behavioral approach. After considering the viability of reliability as an organizational performance indicator, we identify a set of eight reliability-oriented employee behaviors (ROEBs) likely to foster organizational reliability and suggest that they are especially valuable to reliability seeking organizations that operate under “trying conditions”. We then develop a reliability-enhancing human resource strategy (REHRS) likely to facilitate the manifestation of these ROEBs. We conclude that the behavioral approach offers SHRM scholars an opportunity to explain how people contribute to specific organizational goals in specific contexts and, in turn, to identify human resource strategies that extend the general high performance human resource strategy (HPHRS) in new and important ways

Applying the Full Protection and Security Standard of International Investment Law to Digital Assets

This article considers the possibility that digital assets of foreign investors such as websites and computer systems could be protected by the full protection and security (‘FPS’) standard common to many bilateral investment treaties. Such assets can properly be described as investments and the flexible nature of the FPS standard observed in recent arbitration practice could be extended to cover civil disturbances such as 'cyber attacks' against companies. The article considers host state liability with respect to the prevention of harm to digital assets as well as failure to enforce laws that prohibit it. The lack of governmental control over websites suggests that it would be difficult to ascribe state liability under an FPS clause, except possibly in situations of large scale internet infrastructure collapse. A duty to prosecute attacks against digital assets, while common to many jurisdictions and seen in international instruments, is inappropriate as an investment treaty claim because of difficulties in compensation. The FPS standard further appears to incorporate a degree of contextual proportionality linked to the host state’s resources and this may prevent successful claims against Developing States where many cyber attacks occur

The adverse effects of the sun on the skin : a review

Solar radiation causes a variety of biologic effects in the skin which are predominantly harmful. The only recognised beneficial effect is that of endogenous photosynthesis of vitamin D from its precursors in the skin, the importance of which is greatly diminished by a well balanced diet. Acute excessive exposure to ultraviolet radiation (UVR) causes sunburn, whereas chronic overexposure is responsible for the process of photo ageing and skin cancer. This sun related degenerative process and neoplastic transformation may be effectively minimised by an increased public awareness of the harmful effect of the sun.peer-reviewe

Personalized medicine—a modern approach for the diagnosis and management of hypertension

The main goal of treating hypertension is to reduce blood pressure to physiological levels and thereby prevent risk of cardiovascular disease and hypertension-associated target organ damage. Despite reductions in major risk factors and the availability of a plethora of effective antihypertensive drugs, the control of blood pressure to target values is still poor due to multiple factors including apparent drug resistance and lack of adherence. An explanation for this problem is related to the current reductionist and ‘trial-and-error’ approach in the management of hypertension, as we may oversimplify the complex nature of the disease and not pay enough attention to the heterogeneity of the pathophysiology and clinical presentation of the disorder. Taking into account specific risk factors, genetic phenotype, pharmacokinetic characteristics, and other particular features unique to each patient, would allow a personalized approach to managing the disease. Personalized medicine therefore represents the tailoring of medical approach and treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient and is expected to become the paradigm of future healthcare. The advancement of systems biology research and the rapid development of high-throughput technologies, as well as the characterization of different –omics, have contributed to a shift in modern biological and medical research from traditional hypothesis-driven designs toward data-driven studies and have facilitated the evolution of personalized or precision medicine for chronic diseases such as hypertension

Causal attributions, lifestyle change and coronary heart disease: illness beliefs of patients of South Asian and European origin living in the UK

OBJECTIVE We examined and compared the illness beliefs of South Asian and European patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) about causal attributions and lifestyle change. METHODS This was a qualitative study that used framework analysis to examine in-depth interviews. SAMPLE The study comprised 65 subjects (20 Pakistani-Muslim, 13 Indian-Hindu, 12 Indian-Sikh, and 20 Europeans) admitted to one of three UK sites within the previous year with unstable angina or myocardial infarction, or to undergo coronary artery bypass surgery. RESULTS Beliefs about CHD cause varied considerably. Pakistani-Muslim participants were the least likely to report that they knew what had caused their CHD. Stress and lifestyle factors were the most frequently cited causes for CHD irrespective of ethnic grouping, although family history was frequently cited by older European participants. South Asian patients were more likely to stop smoking than their European counterparts but less likely to use audiotape stress-relaxation techniques. South Asian patients found it particularly difficult to make dietary changes. Some female South Asians developed innovative indoor exercise regimens to overcome obstacles to regular exercise. CONCLUSION Misconceptions about the cause of CHD and a lack of understanding about appropriate lifestyle changes were evident across ethnic groups in this study. The provision of information and advice relating to cardiac rehabilitation must be better tailored to the context of the specific needs, beliefs, and circumstances of patients with CHD, regardless of their ethnicity

Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A Peer-Reviewed Monograph

Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.Comment: 52 pages, 6 Figures, over 40 references, reviewed by a reade