Deafness-Related Materials: Collection Development and Information Retrieval

published or submitted for publicatio

A Qualitative Study on the Effects of Mesh Guideline Modification for Unstructured Mesh Generation of the NASA High Lift Common Research Model (HL-CRM)

As part of the 1st Geometry and Mesh Generation Workshop, unstructured tetrahedral and unstructured hybrid Computational Fluid Dynamics meshes were generated according to the meshing guidelines supplied by the 3rd High Lift Prediction Workshop. During this process, it was noted that application of some meshing guidelines became a bottleneck in the process and negatively impacted the quality of the meshes. A study is performed to compare the FUN3D simulation from the baseline medium-resolution workshop unstructured mesh with those on meshes resulting from guideline variations to the baseline. Recommendations on the elimination or reduction of meshing guidelines for high lift aerodynamic cases like the High Lift Common Research Model are based on the resulting data

Do simple "groundrules" reduce preschoolers\u27 suggestibility about experienced and nonexperienced events?

This study examined whether providing preschool children with simple groundrules (the importance of being complete, saying &bdquo;I don‟t know‟, correcting the interviewer and not guessing) would reduce false details in their recall of a staged event. Forty-nine preschool children participated in an event that consisted of two activities. One or two days later they were given a biasing interview that included false suggestions about one of the experienced activities as well as a non-experienced activity. For the other activity, no suggestions were made. Eight, 15, and 22 days after the event, the children were required to recall all three activities in their own words. Immediately prior to their recall, half of the children were provided with the groundrules while the remaining children were not. The children in the control group also participated in a fifth interview in which they received the groundrule instructions. The results revealed that the provision of the groundrules had negligible impact on the accuracy of information provided irrespective of the context or order of the interview or the activity being recalled. The implications of these results are discussed and suggestions for future research are offered.<br /

Sense and sensitivity: family law, family violence, and confidentiality

Executive summary Women’s Legal Service NSW (‘WLS NSW’) is a community legal centre providing free legal services across NSW to women who are disadvantaged by their cultural, social and economic circumstances. The majority of the women that WLS NSW works with have experienced domestic and family violence and for more than twenty years WLS NSW has advocated for the protection of sensitive records of victims of violence in criminal, civil and family law jurisdictions. This paper examines the current climate of increased focus on information sharing, particularly in the context of family law and family violence, and the impact of disclosure of sensitive material on the safety of victims and their children and on the integrity of therapeutic relationships. In some cases information sharing will lead to more timely and safer outcomes, however an increase in information will not address systemic issues such as delay or inexperience in matters involving family violence. The unintended consequences, including providing perpetrators with additional means to cause harm to victims or to abuse litigation processes and further disrupt the mother and child relationship, are relevant. Ideally less intrusive options will be exhausted before seeking access to therapeutic records. In examining the explicit statutory protections for family dispute resolution and family counselling records a consistent approach to determining access to sensitive material in family law regardless of the source of the therapeutic records appears preferable. The family law system must take a broader responsibility for victim parents by preserving the confidentiality of therapeutic relationships to allow the best possible opportunity for victims to recover without further incursions on their capacity to care for their children. Proposals include: Utilise victim centric practices, which encourage obtaining informed consent before sharing information and improved responsiveness to disclosures. Provide guidance on improving the quality of primary evidence about family violence, including the impact on parenting capacity, to reduce reliance on third party records. Develop guidelines and training for the judiciary and family law professionals about the potential impact of access to therapeutic records. Adopt a least intrusive approach when issuing subpoenas for therapeutic records, including a rebuttable presumption that disclosure always creates potential for a detrimental impact on the therapeutic relationship

Empirical Studies of Novices Learning Programming

This thesis is concerned with the problems that novices have in learning to program: in particular it is concerned with the difficulties experienced by novices learning at a distance, using instructional materials which have been designed especially for novices. One of the major problems for novices is how to link the new information which they encounter with their existing knowledge. Du Boulay, O'Shea and Monk (1981) suggest helping novices to bridge the gap between their existing knowledge and new information by teaching via a conceptual model, which serves to explain the new information in familiar terms.In this thesis the difficulties which novices have when learning to program with the help of a conceptual model were investigated. The curricula and conceptual models of four different programming languages are examined, all of which were designed to teach novices. Du Boulay, O'Shea and Monk (1981) have suggested criteria for analysing conceptual models. It is argued that these criteria, however, do not address the presentation of the conceptual model, and so are insufficient to evaluate them. An additional form of analysis was proposed and used, in addition to the criteria offered by Du Boulay et al. This is a way of describing the conceptual model which distinguishes three views of the conceptual model: state, procedure and function, and which highlights the different aspects which are important for the novice learner by identifying the different kinds of knowledge which are necessary to understand the conceptual model. This analysis of the conceptual models showed that the environments are not as exemplary as the du Boulay et al's criteria suggest, and indicated that three of the environments, SOLO, PT501 and DESMOND, lack a functional representation, and that the fourth, Open Logo, has other different problems.An empirical study was carried out to study the transfer effects of learning two of the languages, a high level and a low level language, sequentially. There was no evidence for such transfer effects. The difficulties novices have in learning the four different languages were also investigated. These studies show that even though the novices were studying environments designed for novices learning at a distance, they did not develop good levels of competence, and the problems they had fall into two main categories: programming and pedagogical.Although the different languages had different aims and curricula, novices had some problems which were common to all or most of the languages. These included understanding flow of control, developing and using programming plans, developing accurate mental models, and in the high level languages, understanding recursion. It is argued that some of these problems are related to the conceptual models. In particular, the difficulties novices had in developing and using plan knowledge, which is one of their main problems, can be explained by the lack of an appropriate functional description in the languages.The subjects' pedagogical problems arose from the relationship between the style and structure of the curriculum, its content, and the subjects themselves. In all the four texts the teaching material is very carefully structured and it is suggested that this may encourage the learner to adopt an over-dependent attitude towards the text, and in some cases, to work at an inappropriate syntactic level.The relationship between the distance learning situation and the novice programmer is discussed, and recommendations are made for improving the curricula used for teaching novices programming

Improving Telehealth Knowledge and Comfort in an Older Adult Population

Background: Telehealth usage is increasing a means of providing healthcare in a more efficient and cost-effective way. Older adults have been left behind from the telehealth movement and this can negatively impact their access to the healthcare system. Purpose: An educational workshop was offered in a local older adult community with the goal of increasing their knowledge, literacy, motivation, and usage of telehealth. Methods: The participants completed a pre-assessment survey to determine their baseline knowledge, experience, and perceptions about telehealth. They then participated in an educational workshop, which consisted of a 45-minute presentation given via Zoom with a 15-minute open discussion at the end. A post-presentation survey to determine if the workshop was successful in improving their telehealth knowledge, the likeliness of future usage, and feelings of support. The surveys were distributed using SurveyMonkey and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data results. Results: Six participants completed the surveys, but two did not complete the surveys. All improved in general telehealth knowledge and 50% agreed that they were more likely to use telehealth and 75% agreed that they felt telehealth could be beneficial for improving their health. Only 33.33% of participants reported interest in learning more about telehealth. Conclusions: Older adults can benefit from telehealth education, as evidenced by this project which showed improvement in telehealth knowledge and an increase in the likeliness of telehealth use. Circumstances like the COVID-19 pandemic have made telehealth a big part of the healthcare system, so it is important for the older adult population to be knowledgeable and able to participate. Keywords: telehealth, older adult, telemedicine, elderly, usage, willingness, educatio

The Moral Hazard of the Estate Tax

The current debate about wealth transfer taxation has its themes of morality as well. Opponents have labeled the tax as “immoral.” Taxation is about morality. It is both useful and necessary to consider moral arguments in the debate about the estate tax. In an area largely consigned to economists and philosophers, it is beneficial to broaden perspectives. One could expand the range of academic disciplines considered-to history, psychology, and sociology, for example. One should also take into account the narratives of those affected by the issue. This essay can only probe into this question, beginning with Andrew Carnegie and the similar sentiments of his contemporaries. My project is to consider such moral arguments more seriously than many estate tax opponents have. The lens of moral hazard provides a way in which to more critically analyze various moral arguments about the estate tax. In the end, the estate tax provides a particularly vivid example of the ways in which taxation touches on questions of identity, individuality and one\u27s relationship to family, to society and to the state

Sanctified Trial:The Diary of Eliza Rhea Anderson Fain, a Confederate Woman in East Tennessee

Unfailing faith Christian introspection during turbulent times John Fain presents to us in Sanctified Trial, the record of 57 years of the life of Eliza Rhea Anderson Fain, one of his distant relatives. The original diary comprised over 3,750 pages, of which the editor has...