Death by Injustice: Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Laws, Christian Fundamentalism, and the Politics of Global Power

Across Africa, the persecution of gay people is gaining momentum. Gay people have been denied health care, detained, tortured, and killed. In 2009, the Ugandan parliament drafted The Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which has accrued significant attention, mostly negative, from the international community. However, it seems that any attention, positive or negative, only serves to fan the flames from which the laws were created. Anti-homosexuality laws, both formal and informal, have existed for decades within Uganda, but the current laws being drafted are by far the most formal and comprehensive. This paper will examine the political and religious context in which Uganda’s anti-homosexuality laws were created and discuss some of the present and potential implications of the bill

Stories Over Miles: Religious and Political Coping Among Tibetan Former Political Prisoners

Tibetan former political prisoners suffer before, during, and after imprisonment; however, their distinct coping mechanisms, in this case, specifically Buddhist coping and political coping mechanisms, allow them to overcome suffering. By examining Tibetan culture and contemporary history and concepts of suffering and coping specific to Tibetan former political prisoners, this thesis will answer the question: to what extent do Buddhism and politics effectively aid coping in the lives of Tibetan former political prisoners exiled in McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, India

Pavlov Patient Database

This project is implementing and deploying a functional patient database with customizable treatment plans and progress notes for Choices!, a counseling service center. To build this application and support the various requirements, several frameworks were considered for this project including Django, Flask, and Ruby on Rails. The Ruby on Rails suite was selected for reasons of existing familiarity for the team. Existing libraries within Rails allow for a choice of several database engines; MySQL, Postgresql, MongoDB, and NoSQL were considered. MySQL was adopted as a result of the extensive documentation and for continuity with the previous solution. Front-end requirements were met with a combination of HTML and Javascript, linked to a Bootstrap 5 framework in order to streamline user accessibility. A key quality desired by the customer was ease-of-use, to encourage higher efficiency and easy adoption by the stakeholders. In the process of development, secure data handling also emerged as a further and highly-desired attribute

The challenge pathway: a mixed methods evaluation of an innovative care model for the palliative and end-of-life care of people with dementia (innovative practice)

An innovative service for the palliative and end-of-life care of people with dementia was introduced at a UK hospice. This evaluation involved analysis of audit data, semi-structured interviews with project staff (n=3) and surveys of family carers (n=15) and professionals (n=20). The service has increased access to palliative, end-of-life care and other services. Improvements were reported in the knowledge, confidence and care skills of family carers and professionals. Carers felt better supported and it was perceived that the service enabled more patients to be cared for at home or in their usual place of care

Palliative medicine education-bed race, the end of life board game in undergraduates

Background Educational board games facilitate active learning to conceptualise knowledge, and, promote collaborative learning and team work. Despite increasing interest in them, use in palliative and end of life care has been very limited to date. Method In ‘Bed race, The End of Life Game’, participants are divided into four teams who move a model hospital bed around a board to collect items (syringe driver; Do Not Attempt Resuscitation form; oral hydration gel; a ‘heart’; Just In Case medicines). To obtain items at themed ‘checkpoints’, each team needs to answer quiz questions, which require application of clinical knowledge and/or communication skills. Pregame and postgame quiz scores and feedback were collected from 12 game sessions involving 251 year 5 medical students. Results 169 (67%) of students completed pregame and postgame anonymous quiz questions and free-text feedback. Postgame quiz scores were higher for each topic, and the difference in the paired pregame and postgame questionnaires was statistically significant (p<0.05). Themes from the free-text feedback included ‘engaging and fun’; ‘relevant learning’; ‘peer learning and team work’. Conclusions Educational board games are not a new panacea for education, but the concept can be successfully applied in palliative care

Quasi Anomalous Knowledge: Searching for new physics with embedded knowledge

Discoveries of new phenomena often involve a dedicated search for a hypothetical physics signature. Recently, novel deep learning techniques have emerged for anomaly detection in the absence of a signal prior. However, by ignoring signal priors, the sensitivity of these approaches is significantly reduced. We present a new strategy dubbed Quasi Anomalous Knowledge (QUAK), whereby we introduce alternative signal priors that capture some of the salient features of new physics signatures, allowing for the recovery of sensitivity even when the alternative signal is incorrect. This approach can be applied to a broad range of physics models and neural network architectures. In this paper, we apply QUAK to anomaly detection of new physics events at the CERN Large Hadron Collider utilizing variational autoencoders with normalizing flow.Comment: 25 pages, 9 figure