Randomized controlled trial of a home-based action observation intervention to improve walking in Parkinson disease

Published in final edited form as: Arch Phys Med Rehabil. 2016 May ; 97(5): 665–673. doi:10.1016/j.apmr.2015.12.029.OBJECTIVE: To examine the feasibility and efficacy of a home-based gait observation intervention for improving walking in Parkinson disease (PD). DESIGN: Participants were randomly assigned to an intervention or control condition. A baseline walking assessment, a training period at home, and a posttraining assessment were conducted. SETTING: The laboratory and participants' home and community environments. PARTICIPANTS: Nondemented individuals with PD (N=23) experiencing walking difficulty. INTERVENTION: In the gait observation (intervention) condition, participants viewed videos of healthy and parkinsonian gait. In the landscape observation (control) condition, participants viewed videos of moving water. These tasks were completed daily for 8 days. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Spatiotemporal walking variables were assessed using accelerometers in the laboratory (baseline and posttraining assessments) and continuously at home during the training period. Variables included daily activity, walking speed, stride length, stride frequency, leg swing time, and gait asymmetry. Questionnaires including the 39-item Parkinson Disease Questionnaire (PDQ-39) were administered to determine self-reported change in walking, as well as feasibility. RESULTS: At posttraining assessment, only the gait observation group reported significantly improved mobility (PDQ-39). No improvements were seen in accelerometer-derived walking data. Participants found the at-home training tasks and accelerometer feasible to use. CONCLUSIONS: Participants found procedures feasible and reported improved mobility, suggesting that observational training holds promise in the rehabilitation of walking in PD. Observational training alone, however, may not be sufficient to enhance walking in PD. A more challenging and adaptive task, and the use of explicit perceptual learning and practice of actions, may be required to effect change

TreeSim: An object-oriented individual tree simulator and 3D visualization tool in Python

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)TreeSim is an open-source, user-extendable framework that offers new opportunities for users to model, simulate, visualize, and animate the dynamics of forest. It provides a general environment for modellers to implement and evaluate forest growth models. In this paper, we introduce the object-oriented architecture for our proposed simulator and examine its performance to model and simulate forest growth, management, and dynamics. The simulator uses various models to predict the dynamics and attributes of forest (e.g., regeneration, increment, mortality, biodiversity, biomass, carbon, dead wood). Finally, TreeSim can be integrated into a simulation–optimization framework for decision-making supportpublishedVersio

The public valuation of religion in global health governance: spiritual health and the faith factor

This article explores how the role of religion is evaluated in global health institutions, focusing on policy debates in the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank. Drawing on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s pragmatist approach to justification, I suggest that religious values are creative and worldly performances. The public value of religion is established through a two-pronged justification process, combining generalizing arguments with particularizing empirical tests. To substantiate the claim that abstraction alone does not suffice to create religious values in global public health, I compare the futile attempts of the 1980s to add ‘spiritual health’ to the WHO’s mandate with the more recent creation of a ‘faith factor’ in public health. While the vague reference to some ‘Factor X’ inhibited the acceptance of spiritual health in the first case, in the second case, ‘compassion’ became a measurable and recognized religious value

Hunting in times of change: Uncovering indigenous strategies in the Colombian amazon using a role-playing game

Despite growing industrialization, the shift to a cash economy and natural resource overexploitation, indigenous people of the Amazon region hunt and trade wildlife in order to meet their livelihood requirements. Individual strategies, shaped by the hunters' values and expectations, are changing in response to the region's economic development, but they still face the contrasting challenges of poverty and overhunting. For conservation initiatives to be implemented effectively, it is crucial to take into account people's strategies with their underlying drivers and their adaptive capabilities within a transforming socio-economic environment. To uncover hunting strategies in the Colombian Amazon and their evolution under the current transition, we co-designed a role-playing game together with the local stakeholders. The game revolves around the tension between ecological sustainability and food security—hunters' current main concern. It simulates the mosaic of activities that indigenous people perform in the wet and dry season, while also allowing for specific hunting strategies. Socio-economic conditions change while the game unfolds, opening up to emerging alternative potential scenarios suggested by the stakeholders themselves. Do hunters give up hunting when given the opportunity of an alternative income and protein source? Do institutional changes affect their livelihoods? We played the game between October and December 2016 with 39 players—all of them hunters—from 9 different communities within the Ticoya reserve. Our results show that providing alternatives would decrease overall hunting effort, but impacts are not spatially homogenous. Legalizing trade could lead to overhunting except when market rules and competition come into place. When it comes to coupled human-nature systems, the best way forward to produce socially just and resilient conservation strategies might be to trigger an adaptive process of experiential learning and scenario exploration. The use of games as “boundary objects” can guide stakeholders through the process, eliciting the plurality of their strategies, their drivers and how outside change affects them

(De)Securitisation Theory and Regional Peace: Some Theoretical Reflections and a Case Study on the Way to Stable Peace

Critically taking on the premises of securitisation theory, this paper seeks to establish a dialogue between the theory of (de)securitisation and the theories of stable peace. In order to do this, I study the connection between the processes of (domestic) desecuritisation of regional relations, and stabilisation and consolidation of (regional) peace. I argue that these two seemingly distinct developments in fact constitute two aspects of a single parallel process. The paper focuses on regions that were once zones of negative peace, yet in which states underwent processes of desecuritisation, and succeeded in improving the quality of regional peace. This highlights the existence of different types—qualities—of peace as well as several stages of the process of positive peace construction. I claim that the sequence security?desecuritisation?asecurity constitutes the domestic transformation of intersubjective perceptions of threat, whose external complementation is often the sequence fragile/unstable peace?cold peace?positive peace (stable peace and pluralistic security community), which refers to a bilateral or regional relationship. However, I notice that this correlation, though likely, is not necessary. I identify two stages in this ‘desecuritisation/peace’ process. The first phase is about regional peace stabilisation and the first few steps towards domestic desecuritisation. The second phase involves peace consolidation, expansion of mutual desecuritisation, and growth of mutual trust. Explanations of the mechanisms triggering the process of desecuritisation/stabilisation of regional peace, and those of the expansion of the solidity of this peace are, I argue, of a different nature. The paper explains how the resort to realist International Relations (IR) theory hypotheses and to social constructivist hypotheses helps us to understand the development of these two phases. It also highlights the role of mutual trust in determining the type of peace of a dyad or region. The paper uses the case of Argentina and Brazil to illustrate these theoretical claims.security/external; international relations

Analogical Reasoning Techniques in Intelligent Counterterrorism Systems

The paper develops a set of ideas and techniques supporting analogical reasoning throughout the life-cycle of terrorist acts. Implementation of these ideas and techniques can enhance the intellectual level of computer-based systems for a wide range of personnel dealing with various aspects of the problem of terrorism and its effects. The method combines techniques of structure-sensitive distributed representations in the framework of Associative-Projective Neural Networks, and knowledge obtained through the progress in analogical reasoning, in particular the Structure Mapping Theory. The impact of these analogical reasoning tools on the efforts to minimize the effects of terrorist acts on civilian population is expected by facilitating knowledge acquisition and formation of terrorism-related knowledge bases, as well as supporting the processes of analysis, decision making, and reasoning with those knowledge bases for users at various levels of expertise before, during, and after terrorist acts