747 research outputs found
Out of the wind: the African independent churches and youth urbanization in metropolitan Natal
Commissioned by the Co-operative Programme on Youth, Human Sciences Research Council, undertaken by the Rural-Studies Unit of the CSDS, University of Natal and the New Religious Movements and Independent Churches Centre, University of Zululand
Counselling in primary care : a systematic review of the evidence
Primary objective: To undertake a systematic review which aimed to locate, appraise and synthesise evidence to obtain a reliable overview of the clinical effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and user perspectives regarding counselling in primary care.
Main results: Evidence from 26 studies was presented as a narrative synthesis and demonstrated that counselling is effective in the short term, is as effective as CBT with typical heterogeneous primary care populations and more effective than routine primary care for the treatment of non-specific generic psychological problems, anxiety and depression. Counselling may reduce levels of referrals to psychiatric services, but does not appear to reduce medication, the number of GP consultations or overall
costs. Patients are highly satisfied with the counselling they have received in primary care and prefer counselling to medication for depression.
Conclusions and implications for future research: This review demonstrates the value of counselling as a valid
choice for primary care patients and as a broadly effective therapeutic intervention for a wide range of generic psychological conditions presenting in the primary care setting. More rigorous clinical and cost-effectiveness trials are needed together with surveys of more typical users of primary care services
Friends or Foes? Emerging Impacts of Biological Toxins
Toxins are substances produced from biological sources (e.g., animal, plants, microorganisms) that have deleterious effects on a living organism. Despite the obvious health concerns of being exposed to toxins, they are having substantial positive impacts in a number of industrial sectors. Several toxin-derived products are approved for clinical, veterinary, or agrochemical uses. This review sets out the case for toxins as ‘friends’ that are providing the basis of novel medicines, insecticides, and even nucleic acid sequencing technologies. We also discuss emerging toxins (‘foes’) that are becoming increasingly prevalent in a range of contexts through climate change and the globalisation of food supply chains and that ultimately pose a risk to health
Andreev Reflections in Micrometer-Scale Normal-Insulator-Superconductor Tunnel Junctions
Understanding the subgap behavior of Normal-Insulator-Superconductor (NIS)
tunnel junctions is important in order to be able to accurately model the
thermal properties of the junctions. Hekking and Nazarov developed a theory in
which NIS subgap current in thin-film structures can be modeled by multiple
Andreev reflections. In their theory, the current due to Andreev reflections
depends on the junction area and the junction resistance area product. We have
measured the current due to Andreev reflections in NIS tunnel junctions for
various junction sizes and junction resistance area products and found that the
multiple reflection theory is in agreement with our data
Negotiating the inhuman: Bakhtin, materiality and the instrumentalization of climate change
The article argues that the work of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin presents a starting point for thinking about the instrumentalization of climate change. Bakhtin’s conceptualization of human–world relationships, encapsulated in the concept of ‘cosmic terror’, places a strong focus on our perception of the ‘inhuman’. Suggesting a link between the perceived alienness and instability of the world and in the exploitation of the resulting fear of change by political and religious forces, Bakhtin asserts that the latter can only be resisted if our desire for a false stability in the world is overcome. The key to this overcoming of fear, for him, lies in recognizing and confronting the worldly relations of the human body. This consciousness represents the beginning of one’s ‘deautomatization’ from following established patterns of reactions to predicted or real changes. In the vein of several theorists and artists of his time who explored similar ‘deautomatization’ strategies – examples include Shklovsky’s ‘ostranenie’, Brecht’s ‘Verfremdung’, Artaud’s emotional ‘cruelty’ and Bataille’s ‘base materialism’ – Bakhtin proposes a more playful and widely accessible experimentation to deconstruct our ‘habitual picture of the world’. Experimentation is envisioned to take place across the material and the textual to increase possibilities for action. Through engaging with Bakhtin’s ideas, this article seeks to draw attention to relations between the imagination of the world and political agency, and the need to include these relations in our own experiments with creating climate change awareness
On the all-order perturbative finiteness of the deformed N=4 SYM theory
We prove that the chiral propagator of the deformed N=4 SYM theory can be
made finite to all orders in perturbation theory for any complex value of the
deformation parameter. For any such value the set of finite deformed theories
can be parametrized by a whole complex function of the coupling constant g. We
reveal a new protection mechanism for chiral operators of dimension three.
These are obtained by differentiating the Lagrangian with respect to the
independent coupling constants. A particular combination of them is a CPO
involving only chiral matter. Its all-order form is derived directly from the
finiteness condition. The procedure is confirmed perturbatively through order
g^6.Comment: LaTeX, 28 pages, 5 figure
1S0 Proton and Neutron Superfluidity in beta-stable Neutron Star Matter
We investigate the effect of a microscopic three-body force on the proton and
neutron superfluidity in the channel in -stable neutron star
matter. It is found that the three-body force has only a small effect on the
neutron pairing gap, but it suppresses strongly the proton
superfluidity in -stable neutron star matter.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure
Systematic study of the effect of short range correlations on the form factors and densities of s-p and s-d shell nuclei
Analytical expressions of the one- and two-body terms in the cluster
expansion of the charge form factors and densities of the s-p and s-d shell
nuclei with N=Z are derived. They depend on the harmonic oscillator parameter b
and the parameter which originates from the Jastrow correlation
function. These expressions are used for the systematic study of the effect of
short range correlations on the form factors and densities and of the mass
dependence of the parameters b and . These parameters have been
determined by fit to the experimental charge form factors. The inclusion of the
correlations reproduces the experimental charge form factors at the high
momentum transfers (). It is found that while the parameter
is almost constant for the closed shell nuclei, He, O and
Ca, its values are larger (less correlated systems) for the open shell
nuclei, indicating a shell effect in the closed shell nuclei.Comment: Latex, 21 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl
A ballistic motion disrupted by quantum reflections
I study a Lindblad dynamics modeling a quantum test particle in a Dirac comb
that collides with particles from a background gas. The main result is a
homogenization theorem in an adiabatic limiting regime involving large initial
momentum for the test particle. Over the time interval considered, the particle
would exhibit essentially ballistic motion if either the singular periodic
potential or the kicks from the gas were removed. However, the particle behaves
diffusively when both sources of forcing are present. The conversion of the
motion from ballistic to diffusive is generated by occasional quantum
reflections that result when the test particle's momentum is driven through a
collision near to an element of the half-spaced reciprocal lattice of the Dirac
comb.Comment: 54 pages. I rewrote the introduction and simplified some of the
presentatio
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