An investigation of the efficacy of group counseling with emotionally disturbed middle school students

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of group counseling on the self-concept of emotionally disturbed students in a public middle school. This study examined the efficacy of non-directive group counseling and structured group counseling and compared the two approaches.;Method. Thirty middle school students diagnosed as emotionally disturbed and enrolled in self-contained special education classes at four different schools were subjects in the study. Two classes were assigned to receive non-directive group counseling and the other two classes received structured group counseling. Both groups received their respective group counseling for ten weeks. Pre and posttesting was accomplished with the Tennessee Self Concept, the Behavior Evaluation Scale, and the projective technique; the Human Figure Drawing. It was hypothesized that by virtue of group counseling there would be significant improvement in self-concept as measured by (1) the Total Positive Scale of the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, and (2) significant improvement in classroom behavior as measured by the Behavior Quotient of the Behavior Evaluation Scale. Furthermore it was hypothesized that the students who participated in structured group counseling would show significantly greater improvement on the Total Positive Scale, and the Behavior Quotient Scale, and manifest significantly fewer emotional indicators on Human Figure Drawings than students who participated in non-directive group counseling.;Finds and Conclusions. The results were not statistically significant for any of the hypotheses. However, there were positive trends indicated by the direction of posttest means. This suggested that group counseling in general and structured group counseling in particular may have some potential to effect changes with emotionally disturbed students. Moreover, qualitative data seemed to support this indicating that future research along these lines may need to consider elements such as the emotionally disturbed population, instruments, and data gathering strategies

Family Business Interests under the Matrimonial Property and Companies Legislation An Introduction

This article is a preliminary investigation of family business interests under the Matrimonial Property Act 1976 ('MPA') and the Companies Act 1993 ('CA'). This article introduces the reader to the interrelationship of the matrimonial property regime and the legislative regulation of business entities, focusing on the implications of the MPA for the choice of entity, source of finance, division of shares, and allocation of management responsibility. Two principal lessons emerge from the authors' analysis: first, as applied to family ventures, the business entities legislation provides extensive flexibility with its ample allowance for contractual autonomy; and secondly, the matrimonial property regime is unsuitable for family structures involving a business operation. The authors conclude that the current regime for unmarried separate property, accessible by a MPA agreement under s 21, operates in a far more predictable manner and better suits the interests of many spouses.&nbsp

It\u2019s a Matter of Mind! Cognitive Functioning Predicts the Athletic Performance in Ultra- Marathon Runners

The present study was aimed at exploring the influence of cognitive processes on performance in ultra-marathon runners, providing an overview of the cognitive aspects that characterize outstanding runners. Thirty runners were administered a battery of computerized tests right before their participation in an ultra-marathon. Then, they were split according to the race rank into two groups (i.e., faster runners and slower runners) and their cognitive performance was compared. Faster runners outperformed slower runners in trials requiring motor inhibition and were more effective at performing two tasks together, successfully suppressing the activation of the information for one of the tasks when was not relevant. Furthermore, slower runners took longer to remember to execute pre-defined actions associated with emotional stimuli when such stimuli were presented. These findings suggest that cognitive factors play a key role in running an ultra-marathon. Indeed, if compared with slower runners, faster runners seem to have a better inhibitory control, showing superior ability not only to inhibit motor response but also to suppress processing of irrelevant information. Their cognitive performance also appears to be less influenced by emotional stimuli. This research opens new directions towards understanding which kinds of cognitive and emotional factors can discriminate talented runners from less outstanding runners

Stable diquark matter ?

Two-quark correlations ({\it diquarks}) may play an important role in hadronic physics, particularly near the deconfinement point. This opens the possibility of a net energy gain by means of a (non-perturbative) quark pairing effect, perheps up to stabilize diquark droplets. We address in this work the possibility of a self-bound, stable state of bulk diquark matter.Comment: 10p. PlainTeX, 2 Figures available upon request. IAG-USP Report No 3

THE HISTORIC REVIEW OF THE BEGINNING OF CROATIAN\u27S VETERINARY MEDICINE TEXTS ON ANIMAL PARTURITION

In this paper the historic review of the beginning of the veterinary literature dealing with domestic animal parturition will be presented. It is belived that the first intervention in healing an animal started with domestication. It has been known that the nomad shepard tribes who made their living by stock- breeding used to help animals during parturition. People have been graduallly improving that skill from the prehistoric period onwards up to the period of the establisment of modern, scientific human and veterinary medicine. The first veterinary literature in Croatia appeared in the I6th century whereas the first more significant veterinary texts were written in the l8 th century by Enlighteners to whom the credit goes for starting the croatian veterinary literature. However, the scientific texts dealing with veterinary medicine and the first original veterinary medicine textbooks in croatian language, appear only in the I9 th century. First veterinary medicine papers on parturition of domestic animal appeared in the mid 20th century. The problem areas dealth with in those texts remaind the same in scientific and practical achievements in veterinary medicine in 20th and 2lth century

Transmission Expansion Planning Using Cycle Flows

The common linear optimal power flow (LOPF) formulation that underlies most transmission expansion planning (TEP) formulations uses bus voltage angles as auxiliary optimization variables to describe Kirchhoff's voltage law. As well as introducing a large number of auxiliary variables, the angle-based formulation has the disadvantage that it is not well-suited to considering the connection of multiple disconnected networks, It is, however, possible to circumvent these auxiliary variables and reduce the required number of constraints by expressing Kirchhoff's voltage law directly in terms of the power flows, based on a cycle decomposition of the network graph. In computationally challenging benchmarks such as generation capacity expansion with multi-period LOPF, this equivalent reformulation was shown in previous work to reduce solving times for LOPF problems by an order of magnitude. Allowing line capacity to be co-optimized in a discrete TEP problem makes it a non-convex mixed-integer problem. This paper develops a novel cycle-based reformulation for the TEP problem with LOPF and compares it to the standard angle-based formulation. The combinatorics of the connection of multiple disconnected networks is formalized for both formulations, a topic which has not received attention in the literature. The cycle-based formulation is shown to conveniently accommodate synchronization options. Since both formulations use the big-$M$ disjunctive relaxation, useful derivations for suitable big-$M$ values are provided. The competing formulations are benchmarked on a realistic generation and transmission expansion model of the European transmission system at varying spatial and temporal resolutions. The cycle-based formulation solves up to 31 times faster for particular cases, while averaging at a speed-up of factor 4.Comment: Accepted for ACM e-Energy 2020, 11 pages, 12 Figures, 2 Table

Monitoring a PGD solver for parametric power flow problems with goal-oriented error assessment

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: [García-Blanco, R., Borzacchiello, D., Chinesta, F., and Diez, P. (2017) Monitoring a PGD solver for parametric power flow problems with goal-oriented error assessment. Int. J. Numer. Meth. Engng, 111: 529–552. doi: 10.1002/nme.5470], which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/nme.5470/full. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.The parametric analysis of electric grids requires carrying out a large number of Power Flow computations. The different parameters describe loading conditions and grid properties. In this framework, the Proper Generalized Decomposition (PGD) provides a numerical solution explicitly accounting for the parametric dependence. Once the PGD solution is available, exploring the multidimensional parametric space is computationally inexpensive. The aim of this paper is to provide tools to monitor the error associated with this significant computational gain and to guarantee the quality of the PGD solution. In this case, the PGD algorithm consists in three nested loops that correspond to 1) iterating algebraic solver, 2) number of terms in the separable greedy expansion and 3) the alternated directions for each term. In the proposed approach, the three loops are controlled by stopping criteria based on residual goal-oriented error estimates. This allows one for using only the computational resources necessary to achieve the accuracy prescribed by the end- user. The paper discusses how to compute the goal-oriented error estimates. This requires linearizing the error equation and the Quantity of Interest to derive an efficient error representation based on an adjoint problem. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated on benchmark problems.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The frequency of transforming growth factor-TGF-B gene polymorphisms in a normal southern Iranian population

Several single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the transforming growth factor-β1 gene (TGFB1) have been reported. Determination of TGFB1 SNPs allele frequencies in different ethnic groups is useful for both population genetic analyses and association studies with immunological diseases. In this study, five SNPs of TGFB1 were determined in 325 individuals from a normal southern Iranian population using polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism method. This population was in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium for these SNPs. Of the 12 constructed haplotypes, GTCGC and GCTGC were the most frequent in the normal southern Iranian population. Comparison of genotype and allele frequencies of TGFB SNPs between Iranian and other populations (meta-analysis) showed significant differences, and in this case the southern Iranian population seems genetically similar to Caucasoid populations. However, neighbour-joining tree using Nei's genetic distances based on TGF-β1 allele frequencies showed that southern Iranians are genetically far from people from the USA, Germany, UK, Denmark and the Czech Republic. In conclusion, this is the first report of the distribution of TGFB1 SNPs in an Iranian population and the results of this investigation may provide useful information for both population genetic and disease studies. © 2008 The Authors