The effect of cervical spine adjustments on low back pain in the workforce of the corporate environment

This unblinded, controlled pilot study was undertaken to determine if cervical spine adjustments had an effect on improving the low back pain in the workforce of the corporate environment. Subjects were treated at the Technikon Witwatersrand chiropractic day clinic in Johannesburg, South Africa. Thirty corporate employees suffering from low back pain were selected for this study. Subjects were recruited using posters put up at the Technikon Witwatersrand campus and at companies in and around Johannesburg. The patients were divided into three groups of ten. One group received chiropractic adjustments of the cervical spine. The second group received chiropractic adjustments of the lumbar spine and sacroiliac joints. The third group received a combination of chiropractic adjustments of the cervical spine, lumbar spine and sacroiliac joints. Patients were treated nine times over a four-week period. Objective data was recorded using a Digital Inclinometer to measure lumbar spine range of motion. Subjective data was obtained by participants recording their progress on the Oswestry Back Disability Index and Visual Analogue Pain Scale. The results showed that there was a statistically significant improvement in the pain and disability experienced by the patients in all three groups for the subjective measurements. There was however no statistically significant increase in range of motion in the lumbar spine for all three groups according to the objective measurements. This study concluded that cervical spine adjustments had a positive effect on improving the low back pain and disability experienced by the workforce in the corporate environment.Dr. Barrett Losco Dr. Pauline Moolma

Lynching Black Voices: A Critique of Predominantly White Universities

Predominantly White institutions (PWIs) of higher education exacerbate racial discrimination of both Black students and faculty while maintaining the status quo of White supremacy. Furthermore, Black students that gain entrance to PWIs are silenced due to a White-centered pedagogy and the resulting absence of blackness that exists at these institutions. This paper is driven by the goal to analyze the systems in place that encourage Black students to lose integral parts of their identities when they become students at PWIs. This is done by analyzing the ways in which racial discrimination impacts and ultimately silences Black students. This begins by clarifying how Black students have historically been and continue to be excluded from predominantly White universities. Then there is an examination of how the absence of blackness, through the exclusion of Black faculty and authors, and therefore Black identities, contributes to the exclusion of Black students. The final section addresses how the White-centered pedagogy preferred by predominantly White universities relies upon Standard English, which further silences Black students. The paper then concludes with suggestions on how to go forward in education while empowering Black students, while applying and mirroring my own experiences to those of Black students across campuses worldwide

Brain oscillations in cognitive control: a cross-sectional study with a spatial Stroop task

An important aspect of cognitive control is the ability to overcome interference, by boosting the processing of task-relevant information while suppressing the irrelevant information. This ability is affected by the progressive cognitive decline observed in aging. The aims of this study were to shed light on the neural spectral dynamics involved in interference control and to investigate age-dependent differences in these dynamics. For these reasons two samples of participants of different ages (23 younger and 20 older adults, age range=[18 35] and [66 82], respectively) were recruited and administered a spatial Stroop task while recording electroencephalographic activity. Scalp- and source-based time-frequency analyses revealed a main role of theta and beta frequencies in interference control. Specifically, for the theta band, we found age-dependent differences both for early event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) Stroop effects at the source level \u2013 which involved dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices \u2013 and for related brain-behaviour correlations. This ERSP Stroop effect in theta was greatly reduced in magnitude in the older group and, differently from what observed in younger participants, it was not correlated with behavioural performance. These results suggest an age-dependent impairment of the theta-related mechanism signalling the need of cognitive control, in line with existing findings. We also found age-related differences in ERSP and source spectral activity involving beta frequencies. Indeed, younger participants showed a specific ERSP Stroop effect in beta \u2013 with the main involvement of left prefrontal cortex \u2013 whereas the pattern of older participants was delayed in time and spread bilaterally over the scalp. This study shows clear age-related differences in the neural spectral correlates of cognitive control. These findings open new questions about the causal involvement of specific oscillations in different cognitive processes and may inspire future interventions against age-related cognitive decline

Young children learning and understanding number and mathematical reasoning using BSL

Deaf children whose preferred language is BSL are being taught mathematics and assessed in English (a second language for them). If deaf children are underachieving in mathematics, it is likely related to the fact that they are (often) not taught mathematics in their native/preferred language, BSL, or assessed in their native/preferred language. These children are either taught through spoken English, 'signs supporting English' (spoken English with the use of gestures and sign vocabulary borrowed from BSL but impoverished grammatically), or impoverished BSL. Some of these children are fortunate to be taught by teachers fluent in BSL, by Deaf native users of the language or fluent 2L BSL users. The majority of these children have parents who did not have knowledge of BSL when they were born and who often do not develop fluent BSL after their children are recognised as deaf. These children who are biologically suited to visual language development often acquire BSL through impoverished parental input, through contact with other children, from teachers (impoverished for some) BSL. Some of these children will be fortunate in having Deaf, native BSL user contact pre-school and through formal schooling. 40 years of research have shown sign languages of the world to be linguistically comparable to spoken languages: they are true languages. My hypothesis is that the children’s knowledge of BSL does support the development of the kinds of abstract reasoning involved in learning mathematics but that this is often not recognised or valued. This research focuses on children's use of BSL for counting and mathematical reasoning. I do this by looking at the literature and research on this area and use a recently developed BSL translation of a primary school assessment of mathematics. G. Tate, J. Collins and P. Tymms (2003). The approach of this study of learning mathematics by the use of BSL is from a linguistics perspective. Using randomly selected examples from previously translated (written English to BSL) assessment questions, this research explores the issues involved in translating such questions, and takes a detailed look at the linguistic features of BSL in relation to mathematics concepts. The dominant educational perspective for the education of deaf children is that success in the learning of mathematics (or other 'academic' subjects) is one which is valid only from its understanding through the use of English. Understanding achieved through the use of BSL is largely ignored or devalued. Children in the charge of these teachers and from research perspectives are often seen as having problems learning mathematics because of difficulties associated with using English. For example, Barham and Bishop (1991) list structures in English that have been found to create difficulties in learning mathematical ways of thinking. They list these as; conditionals, comparatives, negatives, inferentials, 'low information pronouns' and 'lengthy passages.' (Barham and Bishop p181). This exhibits an attitude of ignorance at the very least towards signed language. The whole approach of these and other authors is to take a blinkered look at learning through English as having difficulties because of deafness. Rarely if ever is learning through using sign language considered as valuable (invaluable) in its own right. '... the child is introduced to new and potentially confusing words, e.g. 'multiply' and rectangle.', Often there is confusion between words which might sound similar, especially to a child who is employing lip-reading, e.g. 'ten' and 'tenths,' 'sixty' and 'sixteen.' (ibid р 181) More recent research by Nunes and Moreno (1998) shows some evidence of how young BSL users can develop ways of thinking mathematically through the use of BSL but still conclude that,'...the nowadays common belief that the use of BSL in the home has compensatory effects on children's learning cannot be accepted without further investigation; (p253). Nunes and Moreno do, however, show that children using BSL do develop mathematical ways of thinking at a similar rate to children whose first language is spoken English even though they may be well behind as a group. Their focus is on cognition rather than language. The assessments they used were given in either English or translations into BSL or English with the use of gestures (which they term 'Sign Supported English'). But the actual use of BSL from a linguistic perspective is not questioned or a focus of the research. There is no record of what is signed to refer to, as there are records of English. BSL does not have a commonly used written form. They do not look into the way BSL grammatical constructions are linked to mathematical reasoning. They do not look into the way gestures used with spoken English may only aid communication in English. They have no interest in developing an understanding of BSL: the way numbers are signed, the way base ten counting can be achieved comprehensively, the way the spatial grammar of location and direction leads to the development of reasoning which includes addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I present a description of assessment questions in BSL in linguistic terms and discuss the grammatical structures in terms of their connections to mathematical ways of thinking (for example, as they relate to addition and multiplication and shapes) and therefore how fluency in and linguistic knowledge of BSL is desirable for teaching children whose preferred language is signed

Discussion of the selection and use of teaching aids and standard materials in the lower school at Perkins School for the Blind

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Waiting, Part One of a Sarajevo Novel: The Figure of the Siege and the Refugee in a Selection of Twentieth-Century Siege-Exile Literature

The Painter of Bridges is a hybrid siege-exile novel about a landscape painter, Zora Buka, who loses her life’s work in a fire during the siege of Sarajevo. Part One, presented in the creative paper, is set in Sarajevo and depicts Zora’s experience of the first ten months of the siege. Part Two is set in England: Zora recollects her escape from Sarajevo, and waits for her asylum claim to be accepted. The novel is therefore concerned with portraying the exceptional states of life under siege and of being a refugee. The critical paper shares these concerns and follows the movement of the novel from siege to exile. Beginning with a discussion of the siege in post-war literature, the critical section then looks at the double figure of the siege in Camus’s The Plague, before turning to themes of siege and exile in Susan Sontag’s 1993 Sarajevo production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It finally examines Slavenka Drakulić’s representation of the refugee in her Bosnian war novel, As If I Am Not There. The critical paper thus offers close readings of two war novels and a wartime theatrical production. These texts are seen as ‘works of exception’ which illuminate the liminal spaces that Giorgio Agamben terms ‘zones of indistinction’. The readings of The Plague and Waiting for Godot draw on Agamben's theory of modern life to analyse their depictions of the refugee and the state of exception. Postcolonial questions about the representation of others, meanwhile, are addressed in the second reading of The Plague, where, going against much postcolonial criticism, it is argued a hidden allegory of anticolonial uprising is at work, and again in As If I Am Not There, where the uprooted, violated protagonist is found to have an ethically and artistically flawed doubled consciousness

Distributed Sensing and Stimulation Systems Towards Sense of Touch Restoration in Prosthetics

Modern prostheses aim at restoring the functional and aesthetic characteristics of the lost limb. To foster prosthesis embodiment and functionality, it is necessary to restitute both volitional control and sensory feedback. Contemporary feedback interfaces presented in research use few sensors and stimulation units to feedback at most two discrete feedback variables (e.g. grasping force and aperture), whereas the human sense of touch relies on a distributed network of mechanoreceptors providing high-fidelity spatial information. To provide this type of feedback in prosthetics, it is necessary to sense tactile information from artificial skin placed on the prosthesis and transmit tactile feedback above the amputation in order to map the interaction between the prosthesis and the environment. This thesis proposes the integration of distributed sensing systems (e-skin) to acquire tactile sensation, and non-invasive multichannel electrotactile feedback and virtual reality to deliver high-bandwidth information to the user. Its core focus addresses the development and testing of close-loop sensory feedback human-machine interface, based on the latest distributed sensing and stimulation techniques for restoring the sense of touch in prosthetics. To this end, the thesis is comprised of two introductory chapters that describe the state of art in the field, the objectives and the used methodology and contributions; as well as three studies distributed over stimulation system level and sensing system level. The first study presents the development of close-loop compensatory tracking system to evaluate the usability and effectiveness of electrotactile sensory feedback in enabling real-time close-loop control in prosthetics. It examines and compares the subject\u2019s adaptive performance and tolerance to random latencies while performing the dynamic control task (i.e. position control) and simultaneously receiving either visual feedback or electrotactile feedback for communicating the momentary tracking error. Moreover, it reported the minimum time delay needed for an abrupt impairment of users\u2019 performance. The experimental results have shown that electrotactile feedback performance is less prone to changes with longer delays. However, visual feedback drops faster than electrotactile with increased time delays. This is a good indication for the effectiveness of electrotactile feedback in enabling close- loop control in prosthetics, since some delays are inevitable. The second study describes the development of a novel non-invasive compact multichannel interface for electrotactile feedback, containing 24 pads electrode matrix, with fully programmable stimulation unit, that investigates the ability of able-bodied human subjects to localize the electrotactile stimulus delivered through the electrode matrix. Furthermore, it designed a novel dual parameter -modulation (interleaved frequency and intensity) and compared it to conventional stimulation (same frequency for all pads). In addition and for the first time, it compared the electrotactile stimulation to mechanical stimulation. More, it exposes the integration of virtual prosthesis with the developed system in order to achieve better user experience and object manipulation through mapping the acquired real-time collected tactile data and feedback it simultaneously to the user. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed interleaved coding substantially improved the spatial localization compared to same-frequency stimulation. Furthermore, it showed that same-frequency stimulation was equivalent to mechanical stimulation, whereas the performance with dual-parameter modulation was significantly better. The third study presents the realization of a novel, flexible, screen- printed e-skin based on P(VDF-TrFE) piezoelectric polymers, that would cover the fingertips and the palm of the prosthetic hand (particularly the Michelangelo hand by Ottobock) and an assistive sensorized glove for stroke patients. Moreover, it developed a new validation methodology to examine the sensors behavior while being solicited. The characterization results showed compatibility between the expected (modeled) behavior of the electrical response of each sensor to measured mechanical (normal) force at the skin surface, which in turn proved the combination of both fabrication and assembly processes was successful. This paves the way to define a practical, simplified and reproducible characterization protocol for e-skin patches In conclusion, by adopting innovative methodologies in sensing and stimulation systems, this thesis advances the overall development of close-loop sensory feedback human-machine interface used for restoration of sense of touch in prosthetics. Moreover, this research could lead to high-bandwidth high-fidelity transmission of tactile information for modern dexterous prostheses that could ameliorate the end user experience and facilitate it acceptance in the daily life

LEARNING STATISTICS THROUGH GUIDED BLOCK PLAY: A PRE-CURRICULUM IN STATISTICAL LITERACY

Learning to use data to investigate the world and make decisions has become an essential skill for all citizens. Play and curiosity are powerful motivators for learning. Inquiry – the process of asking questions and seeking answers – can engage the natural curiosity of young learners and motivate early learning. Recent research in statistics education has shown that children as young as 4 and 5 years old can learn to collect, organize, and interpret data they acquire through observation, counting, and measuring in a process of guided inquiry. Guided block play has been used for over 100 years to enable children to interact with mathematical structures paving the way for abstract understanding. Jerome Bruner conjectured that playing with a concept in concrete form prepares the mind for later abstract understanding and can begin at any age. Interaction with an embodied concept engages sensorimotor faculties and initiates neuronal activity that leads to useable knowledge grounded in experience. The frequency distribution is a core concept of statistics. Simple wooden cubes can be arranged on a ruler in the form of an embodied frequency distribution. This multiple case study explores how interaction with concrete representations of data structures in guided block play vii can engage learners in grades K-2 and lay a foundation for understanding a data set as an aggregate with emergent properties of shape, spread, and center. Activity Theory provides a flexible theoretical framework for describing the interactions and explaining the outcomes of a series of exploratory tutorial sessions. It is further conjectured that this early experience with embodied learning enjoyed in the first years of formal schooling may prevent statistics anxiety and misconceptions in later years