Practitioner psychologists' understandings of bondage / discipline, dominance / submission, sadomasochism (BDSM): shared or separate from those who practise it

Research with individuals who practise consensual Bondage, Discipline, Domination, Submission, Sadism, Masochism (BDSM) has revealed a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon which serves various functions for its practitioners. Historical associations of BDSM practice with underlying psychopathology, despite empirical evidence to the contrary, may lead to misunderstanding among practitioner psychologists and potentially biased or culturally insensitive psychological treatment of BDSM-oriented individuals. This Q-methodological study investigated subjective understandings of BDSM among practitioner psychologists and whether these understandings were shared with or separate from those who practise BDSM. Forty practitioner psychologists and 40 BDSM practitioners completed a q-sorting task and brief questionnaire online. Comparable majority understandings of BDSM – as a complex phenomenon concerned mainly with power and pleasure – emerged between the psychologist and BDSM practitioner groups. Psychologists generally did not consider themselves particularly knowledgeable on the subject of BDSM, partly due to having received limited teaching and training. There is a need for raising awareness among practitioner psychologists of BDSM as a non-normative, minority sexuality

Developing a Learner's Corpus: the case of a First-Year Module in Mathematics

A learner's corpus is a body of writing for use by a student whose first language is not (in this case) English to improve his/her use of (in this case) academic scientific terminology. In this case study, a learner's corpus was developed for a first-year mathematics module for students in the biological sciences. Lecturers struggle with big classes and a fairly high failure rate which they have addressed in a variety of ways. The learner's corpus is one of an array of support mechanisms built into the teaching-learning process and aims to support the development of academic literacy in this module in particular. In the process of developing and refining this learner's corpus it was compared to Coxhead's Academic Word List to determine whether a gen-eral academic word list may not include enough terms to render tailor-made learner's corpora unnecessary. The study concludes that the most frequent terms used in this module either do not appear in the Academic Word List or have such a specialised meaning that general academic sup-port on the basis of the word list would probably not be very useful for students. Keywords: learner's corpus, academic word list, academic language support, mathematics word list, pedagogic application of corpora, case stud

Een en ander oor my ervaring in die Universiteit van Suid Afrika

Toe die Raad van die Universiteit van Suid-Afrika my teen die einde van 1944 uitgenooi het om ’n ondersoek in verband met die stelsel van eksterne studente aan die Universiteit in te stel, het ek reeds ’n redelike agtergronds kennis daarvan besit

A deep learning approach to diabetic blood glucose prediction

We consider the question of 30-minute prediction of blood glucose levels measured by continuous glucose monitoring devices, using clinical data. While most studies of this nature deal with one patient at a time, we take a certain percentage of patients in the data set as training data, and test on the remainder of the patients; i.e., the machine need not re-calibrate on the new patients in the data set. We demonstrate how deep learning can outperform shallow networks in this example. One novelty is to demonstrate how a parsimonious deep representation can be constructed using domain knowledge

Die pan-afrikanistiese vete teen Suid-Afrika

Die Pan-Afrikanisme het sy oorsprong onder die nako- melinge van die Negerslawe in die Wes-Indiese Eilande en die V.S.A. aan die begin van die huidige eeu. Aanvanklik was die hoofoogmerk die bestryding van diskrim inasie teen die Negers in Amerika en die sam esnoering van alle Negers in die wêreld in een beweging. Tydens en na die twee wêreldoorloë verskuif die sw aartepunt van die beweging na Afrika self en w ord dit die m ondstuk van die nuwe opkomende sw art nasio- nalisme wat veral gedra en gepropageer is deur ’n nuwe intellektuele elite opgelei in Europa en Amerika. Die hoof- doelstellings word van toe af die emansipasie en die eenheid van Afrika

A near-infrared study of the star forming region RCW 34

We report the results of a near-infrared imaging study of a $7.8 \times 7.8$ arcmin$^2$ region centered on the 6.7 GHz methanol maser associated with the RCW 34 star forming region using the 1.4m IRSF telescope at Sutherland. A total of 1283 objects were detected simultaneously in J, H, and K for an exposure time of 10800 seconds. The J-H, H-K two-colour diagram revealed a strong concentration of more than 700 objects with colours similar to what is expected of reddened classical T Tauri stars. The distribution of the objects on the K {\it vs} J-K colour-magnitude diagram is also suggestive that a significant fraction of the 1283 objects is lower mass pre-main sequence stars. We also present the luminosity function for the subset of about 700 pre-main sequence stars and show that it suggests ongoing star formation activity for about $10^7$ years. An examination of the spatial distribution of the pre-main sequence stars shows that the fainter (older) part of the population is more dispersed over the observed region and the brighter (younger) subset is more concentrated around the position of the O8.5V star. This suggests that the physical effects of the O8.5V star and the two early B-type stars on the remainder of the cloud out of which they formed, could have played a role in the onset of the more recent episode of star formation in RCW 34.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journa

Ashotgun marriage community health workers and government health services

In 1988 the Western Cape Regional Services Council (RSC) initiated a community health worker (CHW) project in Khayelitsha in order to extend its preventive services to people in the community and promote 'community upliftment'. An evaluation of this project was undertaken in 1991 and 1992 in order to examine the potential of this local health authority-run CHW project to be an appropriate primary health care model. Qualitative research methods were used to explore the nature of the work done by the CHWs, whether they were accepted in their communities, and whether the project functioned as part of an integrated health service infrastructure in Khayelitsha. The CHWs were found to provide the basis for a potentially effective, community-responsive service. However, several structural problems mitigated against this service. Relations between the CHWs and nurses in all the formal public health services in the area were superficial and fraught with problems. There were significant differences and conflicting policies between the RSC's CHW project and other neighbouring nongovernment CHW projects, and these posed various threats to both the RSC and the non-government projects. One of the most serious of these differences was that the RSC project had no structures or plans for community involvement in the running of the project. Before a CHW project is initiated, several critical issues need to be carefully considered and discussed with all the relevant stakeholders. Furthermore, CHWs need to be flexible, and accountable to the communities in which they work. Before employing CHWs, formal public health authorities need to consider carefully whether they are able to meet these criteria