Grown Unschoolers’ Evaluations of Their Unschooling Experiences: Report I on a Survey of 75 Unschooled Adults

Seventy-five adults, who had been unschooled for at least the years that would have been their last two years of high school, responded to a survey about their experiences. Their responses indicated that their parents generally played supportive, not directive roles in their education and played bigger supportive roles for those who started their unschooling early than for those who started later. The great majority of respondents reported that they were very happy with their unschooling. Nearly all of them valued the freedom it gave them to pursue their own interests in their own ways, and many reported that unschooling promoted their capacities for self-motivation, self-direction, personal responsibility and continued learning. A minority said they experienced a learning deficit as a result of unschooling, and most of those said they easily made up that deficit when they needed to. Most said they had satisfying social lives as unschoolers, and many commented on the special value of having friends of a wide range of ages. Only three respondents said they were unhappy with their unschooling, and those three all said that they were socially isolated, in dysfunctional families with mothers who were psychologically depressed and fathers who were uninvolved

Mill’s Moral Standard

A book chapter (about 7,000 words, plus references) on the interpretation of Mill’s criterion of right and wrong, with particular attention to act utilitarianism, rule utilitarianism, and sanction utilitarianism. Along the way, major topics include Mill’s thoughts on liberalism, supererogation, the connection between wrongness and punishment, and breaking rules when doing so will produce more happiness than complying with them will

Identification of Trypanocidal Activity for Known Clinical Compounds Using a New <i>Trypanosoma cruzi</i> Hit-Discovery Screening Cascade

<div><p>Chagas disease is a significant health problem in Latin America and the available treatments have significant issues in terms of toxicity and efficacy. There is thus an urgent need to develop new treatments either via a repurposing strategy or through the development of new chemical entities. A key first step is the identification of compounds with anti-<i>Trypanosoma cruzi</i> activity from compound libraries. Here we describe a hit discovery screening cascade designed to specifically identify hits that have the appropriate anti-parasitic properties to warrant further development. The cascade consists of a primary imaging-based assay followed by newly developed and appropriately scaled secondary assays to predict the cidality and rate-of-kill of the compounds. Finally, we incorporated a cytochrome P450 CYP51 biochemical assay to remove compounds that owe their phenotypic response to inhibition of this enzyme. We report the use of the cascade in profiling two small libraries containing clinically tested compounds and identify Clemastine, Azelastine, Ifenprodil, Ziprasidone and Clofibrate as molecules having appropriate profiles. Analysis of clinical derived pharmacokinetic and toxicity data indicates that none of these are appropriate for repurposing but they may represent suitable start points for further optimisation for the treatment of Chagas disease.</p></div

Development and psychometric evaluation of an observational coding system measuring person-centred care in spouses of people with dementia

YesBackground: The notion of person-centered care has been important in investigating relationships between people with dementia and paid carers, and measures are available to assess this. It has been suggested that person-centered care may be a useful construct to apply to understand family-care relationships. However, no measures of person-centered care in this context exist. The study aimed to develop an observational measure of person-centered care for this purpose. Method: First, a coding system incorporating a range of behaviors that could be considered person-centered or non-person-centered was constructed. Examples included a code relating to whether the person with dementia was involved in planning a task, and a code relating to how the spouse responded to confusion/distress. Second, 11 couples, where one partner had a dementia, were recruited and videotaped cooperating on an everyday task. The system was applied to the care-giving spouse's behaviors, labeling examples of behavior as person-centered or non-person-centered. The final step involved assessing the inter-rater reliability of the system. Results: The system captured nine categories of behavior, which were each divided into person-centered and non-person-centered types. The system had good reliability (Cohen's κ coefficients were: 0.65 for category and whether behaviors needed to be placed in a category; 0.81 for category excluding the decision about whether behaviors needed to be placed in a category; and 0.79 in relation to whether behaviors were person-centered or non-person-centered.) Conclusions: Although the small sample size limits the implications of the results, the system is a promising quantitative measure of spousal person-centered care

‘Imposter participants’ in online qualitative research, a new and increasing threat to data integrity?

Letter to the Editor: Health Expectation

Materials disposition plutonium acceptance specifications for the immobilization project

The Department of Energy (DOE) has declared approximately 38.2 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium to be excess to the needs of national security, 14.3 tonnes of fuel- and reactor-grade plutonium excess to DOE needs, and anticipates an additional 7 tonnes to be declared excess to national security needs. Of this 59.5 tonnes, DOE anticipates that ~ 7.5 tonnes will be dispositioned as spent fuel at the Geologic Repository and ~ 2 tonnes will be declared below the safeguards termination limit and be discarded as TRU waste at WIPP. The remaining 50 tonnes of excess plutonium exists in many forms and locations around the country, and is under the control of several DOE Offices. The Materials Disposition Program (MD) will be receiving materials packaged by these other Programs to disposition in a manor that meets the �spent fuel standard.� For disposition by immobilization, the planned facilities will have only limited capabilities to remove impurities prior to blending the plutonium feedstocks to prepare feed for the plutonium immobilization ceramic formation process, Technical specifications are described here that allow potential feedstocks to be categorized as either acceptable for transfer into the MD Immobilization Process, or unacceptable without additional processing prior to transfer to MD. Understanding the requirements should allow cost benefit analyses to be performed to determine if a specific material should be processed sufficiently shipment to WIPP. Preliminary analyses suggest that about 45 tonnes of this material have impurity concentrations much lower than the immobilization acceptance specifications. In addition, approximately another 3 tonnes can easily be blended with the higher purity feeds to meet the immobilization specifications. Another 1 tonne or so can be processed in the immobilization plutonium conversion area to yield materials that can be blended to provide acceptable feed for immobilization. The remaining 3 tonnes must be excluded in their present form. However, approximately 2 tonnes of this remaining material could be processed in existing DOE facilities to make them acceptable to the immobilization process. This leaves about a tonne that probably should be declared waste and shipped to WIPP. These specifications are written primarily for large lots of material, for example, 100 kg or more of plutonium in the lot. Small lots of material, such as is common for Central Scrap Management Office (CSMO) materials, will have to be handled on a case by case basis

Antilymphoid antibody preconditioning and tacrolimus monotherapy for pediatric kidney transplantation

Objective: Heavy post-transplant immunosuppression may contribute to long-term immunosuppression dependence by subverting tolerogenic mechanisms; thus, we sought to determine if this undesirable consequence could be mitigated by pretransplant lymphoid depletion and minimalistic post-transplant monotherapy. Study design: Lymphoid depletion in 17 unselected pediatric recipients of live (n = 14) or deceased donor kidneys (n = 3) was accomplished with antithymocyte globulin (ATG) (n = 8) or alemtuzumab (n = 9). Tacrolimus was begun post-transplantation with subsequent lengthening of intervals between doses (spaced weaning). Maintenance immunosuppression, morbidity, graft function, and patient/graft survival were collated. Results: Steroids were added temporarily to treat rejection in two patients (both ATG subgroup) or to treat hemolytic anemia in two others. After 16 to 31 months (mean 22), patient and graft survival was 100% and 94%, respectively. The only graft loss was in a nonweaned noncompliant recipient. In the other 16, serum creatinine was 0.85 ± 0.35 mg/dL and creatinine clearance was 90.8 ± 22.1 mL/1.73 m2. All 16 patients are on monotherapy (15 tacrolimus, one sirolimus), and 14 receive every other day or 3 times per week doses. There were no wound or other infections. Two patients developed insulin-dependent diabetes. Conclusion: The strategy of lymphoid depletion and minimum post-transplant immunosuppression appears safe and effective for pediatric kidney recipients. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

A Time Purified Separated Antiproton Beam At The AGS

Physic

Liberal Warfare: A Crusade Twice Removed

Since the 1990s, liberal warfare has attracted a good deal of debate and commentary, virtually all of which has been framed in the secular language of rights, sovereignty, power, and legitimacy. This article, in contrast, makes religion its central analytic category. Treating liberalism as a political religion, it argues that, insofar as liberal wars are fought primarily to uphold “universal” Western values, their motivation has something in common with medieval crusades. But, because that universalist ideal is vitiated by the self-interest of states, liberal wars in fact bear closer resemblance to anachronistic attempts to revive the crusading ideal in the late Middle Ages. Thus, they represent a distant, secularized echo of a pale imitation of the Crusades—or “a crusade twice removed.

Embodied Knowledge: Writing Researchers’ Bodies Into Qualitative Health Research

After more than a decade of postpositivist health care research and an increase in narrative writing practices, social scientific, qualitative health research remains largely disembodied. The erasure of researchers’ bodies from conventional accounts of research obscures the complexities of knowledge production and yields deceptively tidy accounts of research. Qualitative health research could benefit significantly from embodied writing that explores the discursive relationship between the body and the self and the semantic challenges of writing the body by incorporating bodily details and experiences into research accounts. Researchers can represent their bodies by incorporating autoethnographic narratives, drawing on all of their senses, interrogating the connections between their bodily signifiers and research processes, and experimenting with the semantics of self and body. The author illustrates opportunities for embodiment with excerpts from an ethnography of a geriatric oncology team and explores implications of embodied writing for the practice of qualitative health research