Latino Acculturative Stress Implications, Psychotherapeutic Processes, and Group Therapy

The Latino population is the fastest growing ethnic minority group in the United States. Yet, Latinos do not receive adequate mental health treatment due to the lack of cultural sensitivity regarding the necessity of bilingual and bicultural staff and culturally modified therapies. The difficulties associated with Latinos wrestling to preserve their native culture while also adjusting to the new dominant U.S. culture may cause them to experience acculturative stress. This specific distress may lead Latinos to implement maladaptive coping strategies that could influence Latino risk factors regarding unemployment, poverty, alcohol and drug abuse, aggressive behavior, mental health issues, and suicide rates. After reviewing the research focused on Latinos, Motivational Interviewing, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and Interpersonal Therapy were three major orientations aimed at individual therapy with Latinos while Cognitive Behavioral Group Therapy and psychoeducational groups dominated group therapy literature with Latinos. This review concluded the importance of incorporating cultural values and addressing socio-psychological stressors in therapy in order to produce significant treatment efficacy. Nonetheless, the rapidly increasing Latino population and genuine lack of cultural awareness requires continued research on culturally modifying other treatment modalities, multicultural competency for mental health professionals, and graduate program incorporation of a language component to stimulate interest with this needy population

IMPLICATIONS OF TEMPERATURE-ACTIVATED POLYMER SEED COATING FOR CROP PRODUCTION IN THE NORTHERN CORN BELT

The value of an innovative new seed technology is evaluated in a discrete stochastic programming framework for a representative farm in the northern Corn Belt. Temperature-activated polymer coated seed has the potential to increase net returns by reducing yield loss due to delayed planting and by increasing the use of longer season varieties. A biophysical simulation model was used to estimate the impact of polymer coated seed on corn and soybean yields and on field day availability for five planting periods, two crop varieties and two tillage systems on two different soils under varying weather conditions. Results show that polymer coated seed increases net returns in corn by $2.50-$3.65 per acre and in soybeans by $4.50-$9.70 per acre.mathematical programming, biophysical simulation, corn, soybean, Crop Production/Industries,

The 10 micron spectral structure in comets

The 10 micron spectra of comets Halley (1982i), Wilson (1986l), Kohoutek (1973f) and Bradfield (1987s) are presented and compared. The silicate emission profiles of Halley and Bradfield are seen to be remarkably similar in that both contain a sharp break in the spectrum at 11.3 microns. Comet Bradfield does not show the same double peak structure seen in olivine and reported in Comet Halley be Campins and Ryan (1988) and Bregman, et al. (1987). The authors interpret the 11.3 micron signature as being due to olivine-type dust grains with at least some degree of crystallinity. Olivine alone is not enough to reproduce the shape of the 10 micron structure. However, in view of the authors' past success in fitting interstellar dust features with the emissivity profile obtained from amorphous grains produced by laser-vaporizing olivine, this is a very appealing identification. They note that there are significant variations in olivine spectra due to compositional differences, grain size distribution and related grain temperature variations to make the olivine identification tentative. They further tentatively identify the 9.8 micron feature in Halley as being due to either amorphorous olivine or a phyllosilicate (layer lattice). Neither the spectra of Halley, Kohoutek, nor Bradfield exhibited the 12.2 micron feature seen in Comet Wilson, which may prove diagnostic of the composition or thermal history differences between these comets. IR spectra of various mineral samples are discussed in terms of their match to cometary spectra

Glacial cycles promote greater dispersal, which can help explain larger clutch sizes, in north temperate birds

Earth’s glacial history and patterns in the life history traits of the planet’s avifauna suggest the following interpretations of how recent geological history has affected these key characteristics of the biota: 1) Increased colonizing ability has been an important advantage of increased dispersal, and life history strategies are better categorized by dispersive colonizing ability than by their intrinsic growth rates; 2) Birds of the North Temperate Zone show a greater tendency to disperse, and they disperse farther, than tropical or south temperate birds; 3) Habitat changes associated with glacial advance and retreat selected for high dispersal ability, particularly in the North; and 4) Selection for greater dispersal throughout the unstable Pleistocene has also resulted in other well-recognized life history contrasts, especially larger clutch sizes in birds of North Temperate areas

Pure phase-encoded MRI and classification of solids

Here, the authors combine a pure phase-encoded magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method with a new tissue-classification technique to make geometric models of a human tooth. They demonstrate the feasibility of three-dimensional imaging of solids using a conventional 11.7-T NMR spectrometer. In solid-state imaging, confounding line-broadening effects are typically eliminated using coherent averaging methods. Instead, the authors circumvent them by detecting the proton signal at a fixed phase-encode time following the radio-frequency excitation. By a judicious choice of the phase-encode time in the MRI protocol, the authors differentiate enamel and dentine sufficiently to successfully apply a new classification algorithm. This tissue-classification algorithm identifies the distribution of different material types, such as enamel and dentine, in volumetric data. In this algorithm, the authors treat a voxel as a volume, not as a single point, and assume that each voxel may contain more than one material. They use the distribution of MR image intensities within each voxel-sized volume to estimate the relative proportion of each material using a probabilistic approach. This combined approach, involving MRI and data classification, is directly applicable to bone imaging and hard-tissue contrast-based modeling of biological solids