Relational patterns of being in communicative psychotherapy

Communicative Psychotherapy is characterised by its distinctive focus on the immediate therapeutic interaction. The approach identifies the client's unconscious curative abilities to guide the treatment process, while also acknowledging the practitioner's potential to also disturb the therapeutic procedure. The major thrust of Communicative Psychotherapy is related to the significance of death anxiety. This notion is consistently addressed around the boundary issues (as they arise) of the therapeutic environment. The approach emphasizes the interpersonal influence that this ongoing existential concern has on the quality of the therapeutic relationship. The school of Existential Phenomenology is generally viewed as antagonistic to theories of human behaviour that stress the role of the unconscious. The research has examined the connections between some major existential themes, taken from a specific tradition of European existentialism and the communicative approach to psychotherapy. The discourse has explored and juxtaposed some key existential concepts of being in the world in order to clarify the interpersonal communicative focus on being - between client and therapist in the consulting room. The work has sought to display a common philosophical thread that unites existentialism to the communicative model. The research has also systematically applied and revealed a link between fractal patterns that signify disorder in Dynamical Systems Theory and communicative practice, which is principally focused on the client's recurring narrative themes that relate to the boundary disturbances in the therapeutic system. The context statement has extended, amplified and grounded the main topic of the thesis by integrating three further features. (1) By augmenting the triple link between Existential Philosophy, Chaos Theory and Communicative Psychotherapy. (2) By displaying the relational principles that are implied in the three manifestly divergent disciplines. (3) By illustrating the phenomenological aspects of the communicative method

A decision-theoretic approach for segmental classification

This paper is concerned with statistical methods for the segmental classification of linear sequence data where the task is to segment and classify the data according to an underlying hidden discrete state sequence. Such analysis is commonplace in the empirical sciences including genomics, finance and speech processing. In particular, we are interested in answering the following question: given data $y$ and a statistical model $\pi(x,y)$ of the hidden states $x$, what should we report as the prediction $\hat{x}$ under the posterior distribution $\pi (x|y)$? That is, how should you make a prediction of the underlying states? We demonstrate that traditional approaches such as reporting the most probable state sequence or most probable set of marginal predictions can give undesirable classification artefacts and offer limited control over the properties of the prediction. We propose a decision theoretic approach using a novel class of Markov loss functions and report $\hat{x}$ via the principle of minimum expected loss (maximum expected utility). We demonstrate that the sequence of minimum expected loss under the Markov loss function can be enumerated exactly using dynamic programming methods and that it offers flexibility and performance improvements over existing techniques. The result is generic and applicable to any probabilistic model on a sequence, such as Hidden Markov models, change point or product partition models.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOAS657 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Towards a More Inclusive Music Education: Experiences of LGBTQQIAA Students in Music Teacher Education Programs Across Pennsylvania

During the past decade, the field of music education has seen an increase in the amount of scholarship surrounding LGBTQ studies in music teaching and learning. For example, the University of Illinois hosted three symposia for the field of music education dedicated to LGBTQ studies (2010, 2012, 2016), and proceedings from these symposia were published in three separate issues of the of the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education (2011, 2014, 2016). Other notable scholarship has been published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education (Gould 2005); the Music Educators Journal (Bergonzi, 2009; Carter, 2011; McBride, 2016); the Journal of Research in Music Education (Carter, 2013; Nicholas, 2013); and UPDATE: Applications of Research in Music Education (Garrett, 2012). (excerpt

Improved Method of Determining Metabolic Function

The present invention provides a novel lactate difference imaging (LDI) technique, allowing assessment of the metabolic response to tissue over a period of time. This approach utiliizes lactate change over a time period as an indiactor of viable tissue, and offers benefits in the management and treatment of the effects of many common diseases, in particular stroke

Use of programme budgeting and marginal analysis to set priorities for local NHS dental services: learning from the north east of England

Background - Priority setting is necessary where competing demands exceed the finite resources available. The aim of the study was to develop and test a prioritization framework based upon programme budgeting and marginal analysis (PBMA) as a tool to assist National Health Service (NHS) commissioners in their management of resources for local NHS dental services. Methods - Twenty-seven stakeholders (5 dentists, 8 commissioners and 14 patients) participated in a case-study based in a former NHS commissioning organization in the north of England. Stakeholders modified local decision-making criteria and applied them to a number of different scenarios. Results - The majority of financial resources for NHS dental services in the commissioning organization studied were allocated to primary care dental practitioners’ contracts in perpetuity, potentially constraining commissioners’ abilities to shift resources. Compiling the programme budget was successful, but organizational flux and difficulties engaging local NHS commissioners significantly impacted upon the marginal analysis phase. Conclusions - NHS dental practitioners’ contracts resemble budget-silos which do not facilitate local resource reallocation. ‘Context-specific’ factors significantly challenged the successful implementation and impact of PBMA. A local PBMA champion embedded within commissioning organizations should be considered. Participants found visual depiction of the cost-value ratio helpful during their initial priority setting deliberations

Vibration damping system Patent

Vibration damping system operating in low vacuum environment for spacecraft mechanism