Beyond Imitation, Without Limitations: A Student Music Therapist Supports the Participation and Development of Young People with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties in a School Setting

This exploratory study sought to uncover the methods and techniques a student music therapist employed to support the participation of young people with complex needs in a school setting. Individual music therapy sessions were carried out over nine months, and clinical documentation was generated throughout this period. Data sources included clinical notes, a reflective journal, and audiovisual recordings from music therapy sessions. Once a research question had been established, the existing data was reviewed retrospectively through a process of secondary analysis, and both inductive and deductive methods of analysis were employed to enable meaningful interpretations of the data to occur. A process of coding and thematically linking elements of music therapy practice allowed for a model of understanding to emerge, and findings suggest that the behaviours and strategies utilised by the student music therapist to support the young people’s participation in music therapy fell into three thematic groupings: creating a collaborative environment; following and leading; and dynamic flow. Themes are defined and the codes within elaborated upon, with case examples from the data included as appropriate to illustrate their meaning. Findings are discussed, and links are made to the literature in relevant fields. While results cannot be generalised to other settings, it is hoped that the detail and in depth analysis of practice provide a thorough and meaningful insight into the types of interaction that can occur in music therapy with young people with complex needs, and the value of specific supports to participation identified in this research

How migraine and its associated treatment impact on pregnancy outcomes:Umbrella Review with Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Migraine is common in reproductive aged women. Understanding the impact of migraine and associated treatments on pregnancy outcomes remains very important. An umbrella review of systematic reviews, with or without meta-analyses, examined the link between migraine and pregnancy outcomes. Methods: We systematically searched Medline, Embase and Cochrane to 27th October 2022. Quality appraisal was carried out using the AMSTAR2 tool. An established framework was used to determine whether included reviews were eligible for update. Results: Four studies met review criteria. Migraine was reported to be associated with increased odds ratio (OR) of pre-eclampsia, low birth weight and peripartum mental illness (pooled OR 3.54 (2.24-5.59)). Triptan-exposed women had increased odds of miscarriage compared to women without migraine (pooled OR 3.54 (2.24-5.59)). In updated meta-analyses, migraine was associated with an increased odds of pre-eclampsia and preterm birth (pooled OR 2.05 (1.47-2.84) and 1.26 (1.21-1.32) respectively).Conclusion: Migraine is associated with increased odds of pre-eclampsia, peripartum mental illness and preterm birth. Further investigation of the relationship between migraine and placental abruption, low birth weight and small for gestational age is warranted, as well as the relationship between migraine, triptans and miscarriage risk.Systematic Review Registration: Prospero CRD4202235763

Beyond imitation, without limitations : a student music therapist supports the participation and development of young people with profound and multiple learning difficulties in a school setting : an exegesis submitted to Massey University and Victoria University of Wellington in partial fulfilment for the degree of Master of Music Therapy New Zealand School of Music

This exploratory study sought to uncover the methods and techniques a student music therapist employed to support the participation of young people with complex needs in a school setting. Individual music therapy sessions were carried out over nine months, and clinical documentation was generated throughout this period. Data sources included clinical notes, a reflective journal, and audiovisual recordings from music therapy sessions. Once a research question had been established, the existing data was reviewed retrospectively through a process of secondary analysis, and both inductive and deductive methods of analysis were employed to enable meaningful interpretations of the data to occur. A process of coding and thematically linking elements of music therapy practice allowed for a model of understanding to emerge, and findings suggest that the behaviours and strategies utilised by the student music therapist to support the young people’s participation in music therapy fell into three thematic groupings: creating a collaborative environment; following and leading; and dynamic flow. Themes are defined and the codes within elaborated upon, with case examples from the data included as appropriate to illustrate their meaning. Findings are discussed, and links are made to the literature in relevant fields. While results cannot be generalised to other settings, it is hoped that the detail and in depth analysis of practice provide a thorough and meaningful insight into the types of interaction that can occur in music therapy with young people with complex needs, and the value of specific supports to participation identified in this research

Beyond Imitation, Without Limitations: A Student Music Therapist Supports the Participation and Development of Young People with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties in a School Setting

This exploratory study sought to uncover the methods and techniques a student music therapist employed to support the participation of young people with complex needs in a school setting. Individual music therapy sessions were carried out over nine months, and clinical documentation was generated throughout this period. Data sources included clinical notes, a reflective journal, and audiovisual recordings from music therapy sessions. Once a research question had been established, the existing data was reviewed retrospectively through a process of secondary analysis, and both inductive and deductive methods of analysis were employed to enable meaningful interpretations of the data to occur. A process of coding and thematically linking elements of music therapy practice allowed for a model of understanding to emerge, and findings suggest that the behaviours and strategies utilised by the student music therapist to support the young people’s participation in music therapy fell into three thematic groupings: creating a collaborative environment; following and leading; and dynamic flow. Themes are defined and the codes within elaborated upon, with case examples from the data included as appropriate to illustrate their meaning. Findings are discussed, and links are made to the literature in relevant fields. While results cannot be generalised to other settings, it is hoped that the detail and in depth analysis of practice provide a thorough and meaningful insight into the types of interaction that can occur in music therapy with young people with complex needs, and the value of specific supports to participation identified in this research

Optimum Design of Overlapping Discrete Multitone Filter Banks for . . .

In this paper, a new approach to the design of optimum transmultiplexer filter banks for overlapping discrete multitone (ODMT) multicarrier modulation is presented. ODMT has been proposed for use in high-speed data communications over twisted-pair copper wires such as digital subscriber lines (DSL), due to its ability to cope well with channel degradations and noise. In this study we propose a new design technique which minimizes overall interference. We consider the effect of the time domain overlap between successive symbo waveforms by considering each modulation filter as a series of filter components in time. We explicitly incorporate some know edge of the digita subscriber ine channe into our design technique, to account for the effects of time dispersion and frequency distortion. Numerical simulations show that the optimisation of the components in the mixed time-frequency domain leads to an increase in the signla-to-interference ratio of the order of 0.2-0.3 dB

Concept Discovery in Collaborative Recommender Systems

There are two main types of recommender systems for e-commerce applications: content-based systems and automated collaborative filtering systems. We are interested in combining the best features of both approaches. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of using the k-means clustering algorithm as a basis for automatically generating content descriptions from the user transaction data that drives the collaborative filtering process. Using the the partitions of the asset space discovered by k-means, we develop a novel recommendation strategy for recommender systems. We present some encouraging results for two real world recommender systems. We conclude by outlining our approach to automatically generating descriptions of the clusters and report on an experiment designed to test concepts generated for the SmartRadio recommender system

Ontology Discovery for the Semantic Web Using Hierarchical Clustering

According to a proposal by Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web should be extended to make a Semantic Web where human understandable content is structured in such a way as to make it machine processable. Central to this conception is the establishment of shared ontologies, which specify the fundamental objects and relations important to particular online communities