The treatment of pain

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The Mediating Effect of Color-blind Racial Ideology on the Relationship Between Multicultural Counseling Competence And Empathy

Multicultural counseling competence is the extent to which a therapist can effectively work with clients from cultural groups which differ from their own, and is expressed through skills, knowledge, and awareness (Sue, 1998; Sue, Bernier, Durran, Feinberg, Pedersen, Smith, & Vasquez-Nuttall, 1982; Sue, Arredondo, & McDavis, 1992). Color-blind racial ideology is the belief that either emphasizes sameness among all individuals, known as color-evasion color-blind racial attitudes, or emphasizes that all individuals have the same opportunity for success, known as power-evasion colorblind racial attitudes (Carr, 1997; Neville, Lilly, Duran, Lee, & Browne, 2000; Neville, Awad, Brooks, Flores, & Bluemel, 2013). A significant positive relationship has been found between therapist multicultural counseling competence and color-blind racial attitudes (Johnson & Williams, 2015). Additionally, lower levels of multicultural counseling competence are predictive of poorer ratings of empathy, while higher levels of color-blind racial attitudes are predictive of poorer ratings of empathy (e.g., Burkard & Knox, 2004; Fuertes & Brobst, 2002). This study examined if therapist color-blind racial attitudes mediate the relationship between therapist-reported multicultural counseling competence and therapist-rated empathy. Participants were licensed practitioners and masters and doctoral-level trainees under supervision. Participants completed a measure assessing v multicultural counseling competence, two measures assessing color-blind racial attitudes, and a measure assessing ratings of empathy. Results found partial mediation of colorevasion color-blindness on the relationship between multicultural awareness and empathy expressed toward an African-American male client. There was no mediated effect when respondents rated their general empathy. Results and future directions are also discussed

The inefficiency of re-weighted sampling and the curse of system size in high order path integration

Computing averages over a target probability density by statistical re-weighting of a set of samples with a different distribution is a strategy which is commonly adopted in fields as diverse as atomistic simulation and finance. Here we present a very general analysis of the accuracy and efficiency of this approach, highlighting some of its weaknesses. We then give an example of how our results can be used, specifically to assess the feasibility of high-order path integral methods. We demonstrate that the most promising of these techniques -- which is based on re-weighted sampling -- is bound to fail as the size of the system is increased, because of the exponential growth of the statistical uncertainty in the re-weighted average

Problems of Moving People without Pollution

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Teachers’ Perceptions of Evaluation Feedback Conferences: A Mixed Methods Study

Teacher performance evaluations can serve two purposes: summative/accountability and formative/professional development. The current perception in the field is that performance evaluation systems predominantly focus on fulfilling a summative agenda over formative, which blurs the lines between the two purposes of evaluation (Popham, 2013). As a result, how evaluators and teachers react to evaluation ratings creates a disconnection between the summative and formative purposes and creates critical tensions between personnel being evaluated and evaluation systems. When this tension is felt, teachers and some evaluators feel that evaluation ratings cannot be used effectively for either purpose.A way to lessen the tension would be for evaluators and teachers to focus on the part of the evaluation process within their control, the evaluation-feedback conferences. During feed-back conferences, the evaluator and teacher discuss observations of the teacher’s practice. This discussion, in theory, should be formative and summative for helping teachers at “improving instruction, … assisting teachers to achieve their full potential, and improv[e] school culture and climate” (Willis & Ingle, 2015, p.71), and having teachers account for their own teaching decisions and the impact of their decisions on student learning (Peterson, 2004). The issue between which purposes feedback conferences serve raises questions about the impact of evaluation conferences over-all. A body of research literature focuses on educational performance appraisal and observation process/protocols, but most of this literature focuses on how administrators should conduct classroom observations, approach evaluation conferences, and assign evaluative ratings. There is a paucity of studies that consider or explore teachers’ experiences with how evaluators provide specific feedback from observations of practice, and how that feedback affects their practice. There is a small body of literature that uses feedback theory to explain teachers’ reactions to feedback, but that literature still shows a gap in understanding how teachers perceive the approaches evaluators use within the evaluation context when providing feedback on observations. The purpose of this study is to describe teachers’ experiences with evaluation feedback conferences and their perceptions of the impact those experiences have on their practice using a mixed-methods design. Analysis from qualitative data from interviews included in a Research Apprentice Project, quantitative data from an online survey on the dimensions of evaluation feedback conferences, and hybrid data (objective quantitative-subjective qualitative) from focus groups, all representing public school teachers who had an observation feedback conference with an evaluator, revealed teachers have complex, yet similar, perceptions of the evaluation conference experience. The data from this study has provided theoretical and practical considerations on how to conduct feedback conferences as part of an over-all evaluation system for teachers and evaluators that will have an impact teaching and learning, while also revealing the need for further research with a larger sample of teachers on the current directions evaluation feedback conferences across and between school organizations and districts in New York State

Dynamical Symmetry Breaking by SU(2) Gauge Bosons

This work explores the possibility of obtaining a mass gap in Yang-Mills theories via the intrinsic gauge bosons, without invoking a separate Higgs boson or fermion-antifermion pairs. Instead, pairs of gauge bosons in the spin and isospin singlet state form a pair of composite Higgs bosons which can be viewed as the simplest possible glueball of Yang-Mills gauge theories. Quadratic and quartic gauge boson self-interactions form a potential that leads to a finite expectation value of the gauge boson amplitude. Transverse polarization ensures Lorentz invariance of the vacuum after averaging over all possible polarization vectors. But the scalar pair products exhibit a finite vacuum expectation value which breaks the gauge symmetry dynamically. Compatibility with the standard Higgs potential determines the quadratic and quartic coupling constants.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures. Versions 2,3: added Ref. [15], augmented Appendix B, clarified the text. Versions 4,5: added Eq. (35) + text (formula for g), generalized Eq. (B17) + tex

Surface Morphology of Human Airway Mucosa: Normal, Carcinoma or Cystic Fibrosis

The study presents preliminary qualitative findings of an investigation of grossly normal main and lobar bronchi at sites distant to well circumscribed tumour (n=15), adjacent to tumour (n=5) or of airways obtained during heart/lung transplantation in patients with cystic fibrosis (CF, n=3). In the normal airways the surface epithelium was on average 50 m thick, pseudostratified and rested on a roughly contoured basement membrane. A variety of cell types were identified although many were obscured by a dense covering of cilia, occasionally interrupted by foci of squamous metaplasia. Submucosal gland structure was observed in chance vertical fractures of the airway wall. Tissue adjacent to tumour showed sloughing, squamous metaplasia, pleomorphism and cell surface projections of stubby microvilli or tortuous microridges. The surface morphology of the three CF patients showed no feature unique to the condition, albeit secretions were found adherent to surface lining associated with isolated bacteria and groups of free cells (probably lymphocytes). In each of the three cases the epithelial surface was densely ciliated, interspersed with mucous (i.e., goblet) cells. Submucosal gland collecting ducts had dilated lumena

Learning from the past with experiment databases

Thousands of Machine Learning research papers contain experimental comparisons that usually have been conducted with a single focus of interest, and detailed results are usually lost after publication. Once past experiments are collected in experiment databases they allow for additional and possibly much broader investigation. In this paper, we show how to use such a repository to answer various interesting research questions about learning algorithms and to verify a number of recent studies. Alongside performing elaborate comparisons and rankings of algorithms, we also investigate the effects of algorithm parameters and data properties, and study the learning curves and bias-variance profiles of algorithms to gain deeper insights into their behavior

Wind Power in Utah

This fact sheet defines wind power, describes its economic, social, and environmental benefits to the community, and includes common wind power myths