The Impact of Community Based Adventure Therapy on Stress and Coping Skills in Adults.

Stress and coping skills are among the most essential components of the mental health counseling field. The use of coping skills (e.g., meditation, physical activities, appropriate uses of leisure) has been identified as an effective strategy for stress management. Adventure therapy has emerged as a modality that can positively augment other therapeutic approaches by improving coping skills and assisting clients in managing stress. As with all therapies, a positive working alliance has been found to be important toward achieving clinical outcomes. This study explored how adventure therapy enhanced learned coping strategies for stress and improved therapeutic alliance. Outcomes from this exploratory research highlighted the potential of adventure therapy to decrease stress, increase coping skills, and build therapeutic rapport with the therapist

Social Networks in Higher Education: A Study of the Relationship of Social Structural and Proximity Factors to Teacher Credibility and Perceived Quality of Academic Life

As Berge (1998) tells us, learning is a lifelong process that is important to effective participation in cultural and economic life in a democratic society. In their research on cultural issues in distance education, Enoch and Soker (2006) note one of the major concerns of modern societies today is to ensure increased access to higher education, and to include members of formerly under-represented social groups and categories, such as ethnic and racial minorities, women and people who live in distant rural or disadvantaged areas or who have to combine their studies with full-time or part-time jobs. Building on the work of Enoch and Soker, this paper looks at race, gender, age, course lcoation and job status and their relationship to teacher credibility and perceived quality of academic life. The data for this study was provided by students attending a community college located in a metropolitan area of the Midwest

Geology and Energy Resources of the Arkoma Basin, Oklahoma and Arkansas

The Arkoma basin is a structurally defined basin that underlies an area of about 13,000 sq. mi. It extends from Little Rock, Arkansas, to Atoka, Oklahoma. The rocks in the basin grade upward from dolomite, some limestone, sandstone (Upper Cambrian to Upper Devonian) to shale and limestone (Upper Devonian to Lower Pennsylvanian) to shale, limestone, and sandstone (Lower Pennsylvanian) to shale and sandstone (Middle Pennsylvanian). The sediments that formed rocks in the lower part of the Atoka formation on the south side of the basin were deposited in a deep-water environment. All other sediments in the basin were deposited in shallow-water, littoral, or deltaic environments. Growth faults were restricted to the south side of the basin during Late Mississippian and Morrowan time but became common throughout the basin during Atokan time. During the Ouachita orogeny, the rocks were folded into east-west trending synclines and anticlines, and the anticlines along the southern part of the basin were ruptured by thrust faults. A small amount of oil has been produced from reservoirs of Ordovician, Silurian, and Pennsylvanian age in the extreme southwestern part of the basin. Approximately 4.9 trillion cu. ft. of natural gas have been produced from Ordovician to Pennsylvanian reservoirs. About 280 million short tons of coal have been produced from rocks of Atokan and Des Moinesian age

Connecting Organizational Learning Strategies to Organizational Resilience

Purpose: The objective of this study is to analyze the conceptual and domain overlap of organizational learning and organizational resilience; specifically, the adaptation or renewal domain in organizational resilience. From the findings, strategies to foster collective learning leading to organizational resilience are identified and outlined

A Coffee Shop Attributes\u27 Impact on Work Behavior: Perceptions of Regular Working Patrons

Coffee shops are a global phenomenon. They need to be understood as multifunctional spaces and complex social environments. A single coffee shop can serve diverse customers while offering socio-physical attributes that encourage remarkable ranges of parallel activities such as social gatherings, focused intellectual work, and creative endeavors. Coffee has reportedly been perceived as fueling the creative processes of many young professionals, creative entrepreneurs, and students (Attaianese, 2018). Fast-evolving communication technologies and the recent pandemic have accelerated existing questions and changed conventional conceptions about where one can do focused work, what qualifies as a place of work, and how workspaces should look and feel to help professionals and students be productive. Next to coworking spaces that have recently become prominent alternatives to traditional office environments, coffee shops started to house more working individuals than ever before (Yang et al., 2019). This case study was designed to understand which aspects of a coffee shop environment in a U.S. Midwest college town were important to patrons’ decisions to regularly spend extended time working there. My engagement as the participant observer was prolonged. I spent thirty-three hours over six weeks creating behavioral maps, tracing patrons’ locations and activities, and writing fieldnotes before conducting semi-structured interviews (Leech, 2002) with eight purposefully chosen ‘campers’ (Waxman, 2006). In a two-phase coding process, the data were coded for aspects that emerged from the data and concepts retrieved from the existing Dinescape (Ryu, 2005), Place Attachment (Waxman, 2006), and Servicescape models (Bitner, 1992) before studying prominent code co-occurrences to determine the overlapping patterns. The emerging themes were (1) working patrons preferred the atmosphere’s warm and familiar nature in comparison to the atmosphere their offices offered. (2) Working patrons enjoyed the lively acoustic environment as they believed it fueled their productivity. Campers reported appreciating (3) the combination of daylight and artificial diffused overhead lighting and (4) the casual and comfortable seating options. Perhaps most importantly (5) patrons, who primarily worked at the coffee shop, valued existing opportunities to socialize with fellow patrons and baristas as a secondary activity. Office spaces designed to mimic the described desirable aspects of the coffee shop work environment at the core of this study might help raise the recently considerably diminished interest of office employees attending their place of work in person. In conclusion, the researcher argues that the prominent aspects of coffee shop environments can and should inform current and future workspace design. To further grow our understanding of the popularity of coffee shops as spaces to work future research could address questions such as: What social affordances do coffee shops offer to their regular patrons that their spaces of work do not? Do coffee shops promote a sense of belonging in their working patrons and if so, how may this differ from patrons not there to work? Should coffee shops be designed around campers (Waxman, 2006) needs, or is the diverse range of users\u27 and patrons’ behaviors present an important part of the appeal to working patrons

Disabled Gods: A Critical Disability Studies Analysis of Ancient Greek Myths

There has been a popularization in society of the Right hemisphere of the brain being responsible for creativity, and the Left hemisphere being responsible for logical and analytical thinking. However, it is not fully understood whether there is an underlying, neuroscientific basis to these claims or if such claims can be rendered factual. Recent studies have been conducted, revealing that right brained leaders emphasize in innovation and managing whereas left brained leaders focus on continuous improvement and planning (Kumar & Sharma 2016). The right and left hemispheres do possess interconnectedness, however as this study has shown, individuals tend to possess dominance on either hemisphere of their brain, which can then be associated with thinking styles and leadership; traits relating to the overall success of an individual, their life satisfaction, happiness, subjective well-being, and personality. Other studies have shown that there is a correlation between hemispheric dominance and the emotional intelligence in college students, which was correlated to a student’s academic success according to their score in emotional intelligence (Margaret & Lavanya 2017). From these two studies, other variables that are related to emotional intelligence, leadership, and thinking styles can be studied. Such variables include: individual personality, subjective happiness, subjective well-being, life satisfaction, and objective life success. This study hopes to determine the relation between hemispheric dominance and the mentioned variables in college students in the hopes of categorizing each participant, based on their responses, to being more left hemisphere or right hemisphere dominant, and identifying the implications of dominance as they relate to these variables

Investigation of the Rupture Initiation and Mechanical Performance of Alumina Port Covers for Integrated Rocket Ramjet Systems

Hypersonic flight is widely considered essential to ensure a competitive defensive capability in the United States. In hypersonic air breathing propulsion, cruise vehicles are a priority research and development area given the ease to which they can be implemented with existing DoD infrastructure. Advancements in ramjet engine systems, including integrated rocket ramjets, play a considerable role in military and space access hypersonic vehicle designs. By design, ramjets cannot produce static thrust. They first need to be brought to operational speeds with the help of a rocket booster. An integrated rocket ramjet (IRR) combines the booster phase and the ramjet phase in one single propulsion chain, further enhancing the systems efficiency. The key factor in IRR flight success is the separation of these two phases achieved by the use of a port cover, which will be discussed in detail throughout this paper. In support of the continued maturation of IRR technologies, the University of Tennessee Space Institute has collaborated with Air Force Research Labs, NASA Langley Research Center and the Defense Science and Technology Labs to investigate the viability of alumina port covers through a numerical and experimental campaign. Verified by finite element stress analysis, UTSI tested alumina port covers with a 45-degree dome angle and 6mm thickness that were fabricated and purchased from three external vendors. Flight conditions were simulated using a high-pressure chamber and a mechanical fracturing mechanism was used to initiate fracture on the pressurized port covers. High-speed cameras and retroreflective shadowgraphy techniques were used to obtain initial crack propagation patterns and average fragment velocity. The fragments were collected post-rupture and measured to estimate an average fragment size. It is imperative the fragment size is small enough to ensure no damage will occur to the internal structure of the flight vehicle during exit. Ultimately, the goal of this research is to determine if alumina port covers are suitable for vehicle use

Urban Illusions

Urban Illusions is an immersive and interactive documentary experience that curates moments of reality in virtual environments to educate and expose viewers to a string of social and political issues that have been exposed in Baton Rouge. These moments also reflect a transformative time across the United States. The research and exhibition experiments with 360-degree videos and virtual reality to document issues occurring from racial tension stemming from prejudicial police violence and residual segregation that is still present in Baton Rouge. The intent of this work is to establish a methodology benefiting from modern technology in order to document real life through virtual space to inform the viewer about social problems in the everyday experience of disadvantaged groups across America. The methodology framework used for Urban Illusions has the potential to be utilized by other digital artists and collaborators to engage and educate the viewers about a multitude of contemporary concepts