Religion and Spirituality as a Coping Mechanism for Racial Microaggressions: A Literature Review

Racial discrimination is still very prevalent in the United States. People of color continue to face racism despite efforts to eradicate it. Sometimes it comes in a more subtle form known as a microaggression which can be an everyday occurrence for many people (Lewis & Neville, 2015). This is a unique stressor in that it targets an aspect of an individual that cannot be changed, and it requires the individual to decide to either confront their offender or handle it in a different manner. The goal of this paper is to perform a literature review to investigate if African Americans use religion and/or spirituality to cope with everyday microaggressions. For a study to be reviewed it had to include African Americans, discuss racial discrimination, and discuss religion and/or spirituality as a coping mechanism. The exclusionary factors were as follows: participants were under the age of 18 and the article did not include a study with participants. It is predicted that African Americans rely on their religion and/or spirituality to help cope with racial microaggressions. Keywords: religion, spirituality, racial discrimination, copin

Assessment of Fall Protocol Use on a Medical-Telemetry Unit

Purpose: This quality improvement project serves to implement a fall prevention plan to decrease patient falls on the medical-telemetry unit of a large metropolitan hospital. Background: Patient falls are a persistent nationwide problem in the acute care setting. Between 700,000 and 1,000,000 falls occur in hospital every year and approximately 30-35% of these falls result in injury and 11,000 falls result in death (Health Research & Educational Trust, 2016). Falls always cause harm to the patient, whether it is emotional or physical; but, falls can also cause harm to the providers, family, and organization. Patient injury, additional hospital expenses, and non-reimbursement from insurance companies accrue costs with the organization. In addition, harm to the patient would cause negative patient outcomes that would affect the reputation and patient satisfaction scores of the hospital. The large metropolitan hospital has an increase in patient falls from fiscal year 2016 to 2017. The medical-telemetry unit’s current fall prevention protocol needs to be addressed so that an effective, evidence-based practice intervention could be implemented to decrease patient falls and improve patient outcomes

APPAREL SIZING AND FIT FOR GIRLS: VARIATION OF SELECT COMPANIES, AND PARENT OPINIONS

The act of shopping for girl\u27s clothes is a delight of most parents. It ignites the pleasure of being a parent. However, many parents and their girls have experienced the frustration of inconsistent sizing and fit of their girl\u27s clothes across brands. The purpose of this study was to understand the sizing and fit problems of girls ages 7-12 and to evaluate how brands utilize the current sizing standards. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from a population of 150 (N=150) female parents. A survey was administered to help gain a better understanding and assess parent opinion of sizing and fitting problems for girls age 7-12 when shopping for jeans. Laboratory measurement was taken from 12 jeans samples brands category. This study compares and contrasts the sizing and fit of the four popular brands of girl\u27s jeans boot cut groups: Children\u27s Place, Gap, Levi\u27s, and Old Navy. The study also evaluates the published ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) standard of the body dimensions of girls wearing the size 12 and compares the measurements to the online size chart. In addition, an examination and the evaluation of the study were to measure the physical jeans in various locations to assess if it conforms to the ASTM standard (ASTM chart) and to discover any variations of the same size 12 jeans to determine any fit and sizing issues

The vegetation of Paulshoek, Namaqualand : phytosociology and landuse impacts

Bibliography: leaves 110-130.The succulent karoo biome is acclaimed internationally for its high biodiversity and endemism. At the same time the area is perceived to be under threat from extensive livestock production. Extensive research has been under taken in the last twenty years to describe and understand the underlying mechanisms that influence vegetation composition and distribution in this biome. A detailed summary of the main phytosociological studies completed in the succulent karoo biome is included. This includes Adamson's classic 1938 description of the vegetation of the Kamiesberg. A further six studies are described which provide a platform for the phytosociological analysis carried out in this thesis. A context for this thesis is provided by a brief synthesis of the vegetation of the succulent karoo biome including aspects concerned with the climate, plant diversity and history of land use practices in the region. This study was undertaken primarily, however, to classify and describe the vegetation of Paulshoek, a small village comprising 20 000 ha in the communal area of Leliefontein, Central Namaqualand. The Braun-Blanquet vegetation classification approach was used and modelled satellite imagery was applied to classify the perennial vegetation of Paulshoek. The vegetation data was also subjected to canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) to determine the associated environment variables. Furthermore, this study also aimed to determine the impact of different management strategies on the diversity (species richness, similarity, evenness and dominance/diversity), composition and structure of uplands and lowlands vegetation. Data was subjected to TWINSPAN analysis, CCA, diversity, similarity and evenness investigations. Furthermore, the data set was subjected to Kruskal Wallis one way ANOVA, multiple comparisons with t distribution test and Mann-Whitney statistical tests to determine significant differences between vegetation types and landuse treatments

A Variational Perspective on Accelerated Methods in Optimization

Accelerated gradient methods play a central role in optimization, achieving optimal rates in many settings. While many generalizations and extensions of Nesterov's original acceleration method have been proposed, it is not yet clear what is the natural scope of the acceleration concept. In this paper, we study accelerated methods from a continuous-time perspective. We show that there is a Lagrangian functional that we call the \emph{Bregman Lagrangian} which generates a large class of accelerated methods in continuous time, including (but not limited to) accelerated gradient descent, its non-Euclidean extension, and accelerated higher-order gradient methods. We show that the continuous-time limit of all of these methods correspond to traveling the same curve in spacetime at different speeds. From this perspective, Nesterov's technique and many of its generalizations can be viewed as a systematic way to go from the continuous-time curves generated by the Bregman Lagrangian to a family of discrete-time accelerated algorithms.Comment: 38 pages. Subsumes an earlier working draft arXiv:1509.0361

Sufficient conditions for non-asymptotic convergence of Riemannian optimisation methods

Motivated by energy based analyses for descent methods in the Euclidean setting, we investigate a generalisation of such analyses for descent methods over Riemannian manifolds. In doing so, we find that it is possible to derive curvature-free guarantees for such descent methods. This also enables us to give the first known guarantees for a Riemannian cubic-regularised Newton algorithm over $g$-convex functions, which extends the guarantees by Agarwal et al [2021] for an adaptive Riemannian cubic-regularised Newton algorithm over general non-convex functions. This analysis leads us to study acceleration of Riemannian gradient descent in the $g$-convex setting, and we improve on an existing result by Alimisis et al [2021], albeit with a curvature-dependent rate. Finally, extending the analysis by Ahn and Sra [2020], we attempt to provide some sufficient conditions for the acceleration of Riemannian descent methods in the strongly geodesically convex setting.Comment: Paper accepted at the OPT-ML Workshop, NeurIPS 202