Marginalising the mainstream: A signed performance of the miracle worker places deaf issues centre-stage

William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker was staged at the Brisbane Powerhouse June 2009 by Crossbow Productions. In this adaption, people with hearing impairment were privileged through the use of shadow-signing, unscripted signing and the appropriation of signing as a theatrical language in itself. 250 people living with hearing impairment attended the production, 70 had never attended a theatrical event before. During the post-performance discussions hearing audience members expressed feelings of displacement through experiencing the culture of the deaf society and not grasping some of the ideas. This paper argues that this inversion enhanced meaning making for all and illustrates a way forward to encourage the signing of more theatrical events

Facilitating a supportive learning experience: The lecturer\u27s role in addressing mental health issues of university students during COVID-19

During Covid-19, rates of mental health issues, particularly anxiety, rose significantly in university students. In the scramble to adapt to online learning, university professors were overwhelmed with material aimed at facilitating a supportive learning experience and preserving student academic performance in online contexts yet were ill-equipped to cope with the increased volume of mental health issues encountered. Many studies attest to the association between poor mental health and academic performance. It has been shown that students often report their mental health issues to university professors who are called upon to cope with these issues as best they can. This paper outlines strategies undertaken, in the context of a novel undergraduate mental health program, to address emergent mental health issues during Covid-19 student isolation. These practical, cost effective interventions can be used to successfully give voice to ongoing student mental health issues in a post-Covid world and to help professors feel equipped and empowered enough to contribute to stemming the tide of rising rates of mental illness meaningfully, appropriately and professionally

Atmospheric continuous-variable quantum communication

We present a quantum communication experiment conducted over a point-to-point free-space link of 1.6 km in urban conditions. We study atmospheric influences on the capability of the link to act as a continuous-variable (CV) quantum channel. Continuous polarization states (that contain the signal encoding as well as a local oscillator in the same spatial mode) are prepared and sent over the link in a polarization multiplexed setting. Both signal and local oscillator undergo the same atmospheric fluctuations. These are intrinsically auto-compensated which removes detrimental influences on the interferometric visibility. At the receiver, we measure the Q-function and interpret the data using the framework of effective entanglement. We compare different state amplitudes and alphabets (two-state and four-state) and determine their optimal working points with respect to the distributed effective entanglement. Based on the high entanglement transmission rates achieved, our system indicates the high potential of atmospheric links in the field of CV QKD.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Construct and correlates of basic motor competencies in primary school-aged children

Background: A central aim of physical education is the promotion of basic motor competencies (in German: Motorische Basiskompetenzen; MOBAK), which are prerequisites for children’s active participation in sports culture. This article introduces the MOBAK-1 test instrument for 6- to 8-year-old children and determines the construct validity of this test instrument. In addition, the relationship between MOBAK and motor ability (i.e., strength) as well as body mass index (BMI), sex, and age is investigated. Methods: We analyzed data of 923 first and second graders (422 girls, 501 boys, age = 6.80 +/- 0.44 years). The children’s basic motor competencies were assessed by the MOBAK-1 test instrument. Besides analyses of frequency, correlation, and variance, 3 confirmatory factor analyses with covariates were performed. Results: We found 2 MOBAK factors consisting of 4 items each. The first factor, locomotion, included the items balancing, rolling, jumping, and side stepping; the second factor, object control, included the items throwing, catching, bouncing, and dribbling. The motor ability strength had a significant influence on the factors locomotion (β = 0.60) and object control (β = 0.50). Older pupils achieved better results than younger pupils on object control (β = 0.29). Boys performed better on object control (β = -0.44), whereas girls achieved better results in locomotion (β = 0.07). Pupils with a high BMI achieved lower performance only on the factor locomotion (β = -0.28). Conclusion: The MOBAK-1 test instrument developed for this study meets psychometric validity demands and is suitable to evaluate effects of sports and physical education.+repphzhbib2019

Inflammatory measures in depressed patients with and without a history of adverse childhood experiences

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a complex psychiatric condition with different subtypes and etiologies. Exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACE) is an important risk factor for the development of MDD later in life. Evidence suggests that pro-inflammatory processes may convey this risk as both MDD and ACE have been related to increased levels of inflammation. In the present study, we aimed to disentangle the effects of MDD and ACE on inflammation levels. Methods: Markers of inflammation (plasma interleukin(IL)-6 and high sensitive C-reactive protein (hsCRP) concentrations, white blood cell (WBC) count and a composite inflammation score (CIS) combining all three) were assessed in 23 MDD patients with ACE, 23 MDD patients without ACE, 21 healthy participants with ACE, and 21 healthy participants without ACE (mean age: 35 +/- 11 (SD) years). None of the patients and participants was taking psychotropic medication. ACE was assessed with the Early Trauma Inventory (ETI) and was defined as moderate to severe exposure to sexual or physical abuse. Results: Group differences in the different inflammatory measures were observed. MDD patients with ACE showed significantly higher IL-6 concentrations (p = 0.018), higher WBC counts (p = 0.003) and increased general inflammation levels as indicated by the CIS (p = 0.003) compared to healthy controls. In contrast, MDD patients without ACE displayed similar inflammation levels to the control group (p = 0.93). Conclusion: We observed elevated inflammation in MDD patients with a history of ACE, which could indicate a subtype of "inflammatory depression". Accordingly, MDD patients with ACE might potentially benefit from anti-inflammatory therapies

Inhibition of Haemonchus contortus larval development by fungal lectins

BACKGROUND Lectins are carbohydrate-binding proteins that are involved in fundamental intra- and extracellular biological processes. They occur ubiquitously in nature and are especially abundant in plants and fungi. It has been well established that certain higher fungi produce lectins in their fruiting bodies and/or sclerotia as a part of their natural resistance against free-living fungivorous nematodes and other pests. Despite relatively high diversity of the glycan structures in nature, many of the glycans targeted by fungal lectins are conserved among organisms of the same taxon and sometimes even among different taxa. Such conservation of glycans between free-living and parasitic nematodes is providing us with a useful tool for discovery of novel chemotherapeutic and vaccine targets. In our study, a subset of fungal lectins emanating from toxicity screens on Caenorhabditis elegans was tested for their potential to inhibit larval development of Haemonchus contortus. METHODS The effect of Coprinopsis cinerea lectins - CCL2, CGL2, CGL3; Aleuria aurantia lectin - AAL; Marasmius oreades agglutinin - MOA; and Laccaria bicolor lectin - Lb-Tec2, on cultivated Haemonchus contortus larval stages was investigated using a larval development test (LDT). To validate the results of the toxicity assay and determine lectin binding capacity to the nematode digestive tract, biotinylated versions of lectins were fed to pre-infective larval stages of H. contortus and visualized by fluorescent microscopy. Lectin histochemistry on fixed adult worms was performed to investigate the presence and localisation of lectin binding sites in the disease-relevant developmental stage. RESULTS Using an improved larval development test we found that four of the six tested lectins: AAL, CCL2, MOA and CGL2, exhibited a dose-dependent toxicity in LDT, as measured by the number of larvae developing to the L3 stage. In the case of AAL, CGL2 and MOA lectin, doses as low as 5 μg/ml caused >95 % inhibition of larval development while 40 μg/ml were needed to achieve the same inhibition by CCL2 lectin. MOA was the only lectin tested that caused larval death while other toxic lectins had larvistatic effect manifesting as L1 growth arrest. Using lectin histochemistry we demonstrate that of all lectins tested, only the four toxic ones displayed binding to the larvae's gut and likewise were found to interact with glycans localized to the gastrodermal tissue of adults. CONCLUSION The results of our study suggest a correlation between the presence of target glycans of lectins in the digestive tract and the lectin-mediated toxicity in Haemonchus contortus. We demonstrate that binding to the structurally conserved glycan structures found in H. contortus gastrodermal tissue by the set of fungal lectins has detrimental effect on larval development. Some of these glycan structures might represent antigens which are not exposed to the host immune system (hidden antigens) and thus have a potential for vaccine or drug development. Nematotoxic fungal lectins prove to be a useful tool to identify such targets in parasitic nematodes

On the Use of Airborne Imaging Spectroscopy Data for the Automatic Detection and Delineation of Surface Water Bodies

There is economical and ecological relevance for remote sensing applications of inland and coastal waters: The European Union Water Framework Directive (European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, 2000) for inland and coastal waters requires the EU member states to take actions in order to reach a good ecological status in inland and coastal waters by 2015. This involves characterization of the specific trophic state and the implementation of monitoring systems to verify the ecological status. Financial resources at the national and local level are insufficient to assess the water quality using conventional methods of regularly field and laboratory work only. While remote sensing cannot replace the assessment of all aquatic parameters in the field, it powerfully complements existing sampling programs and offers the base to extrapolate the sampled parameter information in time and in space. The delineation of surface water bodies is a prerequisite for any further remote sensing based analysis and even can by itself provide up-to-date information for water resource management, monitoring and modelling (Manavalan et al., 1993). It is further important in the monitoring of seasonally changing water reservoirs (e.g., Alesheikh et al., 2007) and of shortterm events like floods (Overton, 2005). Usually the detection and delineation of surface water bodies in optical remote sensing data is described as being an easy task. Since water absorbs most of the irradiation in the near-infrared (NIR) part of the electromagnetic spectrum water bodies appear very dark in NIR spectral bands and can be mapped by simply applying a maximum threshold on one of these bands (Swain & Davis, 1978: section 5-4). Many studies took advantage of this spectral behaviour of water and applied methods like single band density slicing (e.g., Work & Gilmer, 1976), spectral indices (McFeeters, 1996, Xu, 2006) or multispectral supervised classification (e.g., Frazier & Page, 2000, Lira, 2006). However, all of these methods have the drawback that they are not fully automated since the analyst has to select a scene-specific threshold (Ji et al., 2009) or training pixels. Moreover there are certain situations where these methods lead to misclassification. For instance, water constituents in turbid water as well as water bottom reflectance and sun glint can raise the reflectance spectrum of surface water even in the NIR spectral range up to a reflectance level which is typical for dark surfaces on land such as dark rocks (e.g., basalt, lava), bituminous roofing materials and in particular shadow regions. Consequently, Carleer & Wolff (2006) amongst others found the land cover classes water and shadow to be highly confused in image classifications. This problem especially occurs in environments where both, a high amount of shadow and water regions can exist, such as urban landscapes, mountainous landscapes or cliffy coasts as well as generally in images with water bodies and cloud shadows. In this investigation we focus on the development of a new surface water body detection algorithm that can be automatically applied without user knowledge and supplementary data on any hyperspectral image of the visible and near-infrared (VNIR) spectral range. The analysis is strictly focused on the VNIR part of the electromagnetic spectrum due to the growing number of VNIR imaging spectrometers. The developed approach consists of two main steps, the selection of potential water pixels (section 4.1) and the removal of false positives from this mask (sections 4.2 and 4.3). In this context the separation between water bodies and shadowed surfaces is the most challenging task which is implemented by consecutive spectral and spatial processing steps (sections 4.3.1 and 4.3.2) resulting in very high detection accuracies