Book Review of UNESCO on the Ground: Local Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage. Michael Dylan Foster and Lisa Gilman, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015,

UNESCO on the Ground: Local Perspectives on Intangible Cultural Heritage. Michael Dylan Foster and Lisa Gilman, eds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015, 180 pp. $30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-253-01953-0

Empowerment through architecture: women’s transitional cohousing in Northern Ontario

This thesis is a response to the lack of supportive post-intervention housing for women who have survived domestic violence. In Canada, 76.2% of the women who are murdered, are killed by a spouse, family member or intimate partner. Women are statistically at a higher risk of being killed by someone they are close to than their male counterparts. As a result of experiencing violence, they require new housing and support as their previous residence is not an appropriate place to return. Additionally, having an affordable and safe housing option when vulnerable situations arise is important for women, so safety does not need to be compromised for the sake of urgent need or financial circumstances. This presents the need for housing options for women transitioning out of vulnerable situations. Women are celebrated in the proactive and reactive supportive housing model that is explored in the design proposal for the Women’s Transitional Cohousing.Master of Architecture (M.Arch

The value of embedded secondary-care-based psychology services in rheumatology: an exemplar for long-term conditions

Rheumatoid arthritis is an exemplar long term condition, complicated by pain, disability, co-morbidities and long term medication use. It has significant effects on mobility, work performance, social role, sexual function and relationships. It is commonly associated with fatigue and mood disturbance as a result of complex interactions of physical (disease related) and psychosocial factors. NICE guidance recommends the availability of psychological support for these patients. We have implemented a psychology service for our patients with chronic rheumatological conditions. This study was set up to capture the value of this service

Low Vision Services Provision throughout NHS Trusts in the UK

Background/Aims: The aim of this study was to understand the picture of low vision service provision within NHS Trusts in the United Kingdom, for children and adults. Method: A survey was distributed to all members of the British and Irish Orthoptic Society (BIOS) and to all Eye Clinic Liaison Officers (ECLOs) through the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB). The survey was also directly emailed to Orthoptic contacts of all 238 Trusts/Health Boards, which covered the four nations of the United Kingdom. The survey asked whether their Trust had a clinical low vision service, which professions were involved in leading and working within it, where it was based, and whether provision was offered to children, adults, or both. Results: In the United Kingdom (UK), 117 out of 238 (49%) Trusts responded. Of these responders, 94% had a level of Trust-delivered low vision service provision; 90% had services for adults; 83% had services for children; and 79% had services for both adults and children. Service accessibility for patients of all ages had regional and national variation. Conclusion: Significant variation was found in low vision service provision throughout the UK, with some regions having no NHS-delivered provision for either children, adults, or both. This calls for further research to gain a more comprehensive understanding of low vision service provision and remove inequalities in provision, access and resourcing, aiming to ensure equitable access for all

The Lived Experience of Caregiving and Perception of Service Provision among Family-Caregivers of People with Late-Stage Parkinson’s: A Qualitative Study

Background. The complex nature of late-stage Parkinson’s requires multiagency support and leads to an increased burden on family members who assume a multiplicity of responsibilities. The aim of this study is to further understand the lived experiences of family-caregivers and their perception of, and satisfaction with, service provision. Methods. This qualitative substudy was a part of the European multicentre Care of Late-Stage Parkinsonism (CLaSP) project. Purposive sampling resulted in a sample of eleven family-caregivers of people with late-stage Parkinson’s, who were interviewed using semistructured open-ended questions. Thematic analysis followed. Findings. Three overarching themes were developed from the data: ensuring continuous support is vital to providing care at home, perceiving unmet service provision needs, and advocating and co-ordinating all aspects of care take their toll. These themes include not only experience of services that caregivers find supportive in order to deliver care but also of disjointed care between multiple agencies, a perceived lack of Parkinson’s expertise, and there was a lack of anticipatory future planning. The constancy and scope of the family-caregiver role is described, including the need to project manage multiple aspects of care with multiple agencies, to be an advocate, and to assume new roles such as managing finances. Multiple losses were reported, which in part was mitigated by gaining expertise through information and support from professionals and organised and informal support. Conclusion. The intricacies and consequences of the family-caregivers’ role and their experience of service provision indicate the need to acknowledge and consider their role and needs, fully involve them in consultations and provide information and joined-up support to improve their well-being, and ensure their continuous significant contribution to the ongoing care of the person with Parkinson’s

Work environment choice among knowledge workers : a mixed methods investigation

As a result of technological advances, workers have become increasingly mobile; people can perform work in a whole host of new locations. Teleworking arrangements challenge traditional managerial practices, however, and call attention to the tensions between attempting to control or surveil workers to extract maximum effort while also granting workers spatial autonomy. Through a synthesis of labor process and self determination theories, work environment choice is examined. Specifically, this dissertation (1) integrates these two theories to build propositions regarding the relationships between location autonomy, motivation, productivity, creativity, and well-being, (2) builds a model of influential factors impacting work environment choice among knowledge workers, and (3) tests the impact of perceived location autonomy and intrinsic motivation on worker productivity and well-being. Current studies of work environment-task fit assume that individuals are assigned to a space where they complete their work tasks. In contrast, this study, via a mixed methods approach using data from mobile knowledge workers in a university setting (i.e. undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty), adds to the literature by examining situations in which workers can choose their work environments. Through this examination I identify how perceptions of location autonomy and intrinsic motivation affect the work environment choice process and the outcomes of worker productivity and well-being

Masking Release for Igbo and English

In this research, we explored the effect of noise interruption rate on speech intelligibility. Specifically, we used the Hearing In Noise Test (HINT) procedure with the original HINT stimuli (English) and Igbo stimuli to assess speech reception ability in interrupted noise. For a given noise level, the HINT test provides an estimate of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required for 50%-correct speech intelligibility. The SNR for 50%-correct intelligibility changes depending upon the interruption rate of the noise. This phenomenon (called Masking Release) has been studied extensively in English but not for Igbo – which is an African tonal language spoken predominantly in South Eastern Nigeria. This experiment explored and compared the phenomenon of Masking Release for (i) native English speakers listening to English, (ii) native Igbo speakers listening to English, and (iii) native Igbo speakers listening to Igbo. Since Igbo is a tonal language and English is a non-tonal language, this allowed us to compare Masking Release patterns on native speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages. Our results for native English speakers listening to English HINT show that the SNR and the masking release are orderly and consistent with other English HINT data for English speakers. Our result for Igbo speakers listening to English HINT sentences show that there is greater variability in results across the different Igbo listeners than across the English listeners. This result likely reflects different levels of ability in the English language across the Igbo listeners. The masking release values in dB are less than for English listeners. Our results for Igbo speakers listening to Igbo show that in general, the SNRs for Igbo sentences are lower than for English/English and Igbo/English. This means that the Igbo listeners could understand 50% of the Igbo sentences at SNRs less than those required for English sentences by either native or non-native listeners. This result can be explained by the fact that the perception of Igbo utterances by Igbo subjects may have been aided by the prediction of tonal and vowel harmony features existent in the Igbo language. In agreement with other studies, our results also show that in a noisy environment listeners are able to perceive their native language better than a second language. The ability of native language speakers to perceive their language better than a second language in a noisy environment may be attributed to the fact that: a) Native speakers are more familiar with the sounds of their language than second language speakers. b) One of the features of language is that it is predictable hence even in noise a native speaker may be able to predict a succeeding word that is scarcely audible. These contextual effects are facilitated by familiarity.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01 DC00117

A critical evaluation of computational mechanisms of binocular disparity processing

The past decades of research in visual neuroscience have generated a large and disparate body of literature on the computation of binocular disparity in the primary visual cortex. Models have been proposed to describe specific phenomena, yet we lack a theoretical framework which is grounded in neurophysiology and also explains the effectiveness of disparity computation. Here, we examine neural circuits that are thought to play an important role in the computation of binocular disparity. Starting with the binocular energy model (Ohzawa et al. 1990), we consider plausible extensions which include suppressive mechanisms from units tuned to different phase disparities (Tanabe et al. 2011), which is formerly theorized to perform false disparity detection (Read & Cumming 2007) as well as coarse-to-fine (Menz & Freeman 2004a,b) and recurrent processing (Samonds et al. 2013). We rigorously cross-examine the consistency of these circuits with neurophysiology data including ocular dominance and binocular modulation (Ohzawa & Freeman 1990), spike-triggered analysis and temporal dynamics of disparity tuning (Tanabe et al. 2011) and attenuation to anti-correlated stimuli (Cumming & Parker 1997; Tanabe et al. 2011). We further evaluate the ability of the resulting computational models to recover depth, both theoretically and experimentally, using a dataset of natural and synthetic images. Overall, we find that a computational model which combines suppressive mechanisms by units with non-zero phase disparity, contrast normalization as well as lateral interaction between units tuned to specific combinations of phase and position disparities, seems consistent with all of the available V1 neurophysiology data and achieves the highest accuracy in real-world depth computation

High Prevalence of Pre-Existing Liver Abnormalities Identified Via Autopsies in COVID-19: Identification of a New Silent Risk Factor?

A high prevalence of hepatic pathology (in 17 of 19 cases) was reported in post-mortem (PM) examinations of COVID-19 patients, undertaken between March 2020 and February 2021 by a single autopsy pathologist in two English Coronial jurisdictions. The patients in our cohort demonstrated high levels of recognised COVID-19 risk factors, including hypertension (8/16, 50%), type 2 diabetes mellitus (8/16, 50%) and evidence of arteriopathy 6/16 (38%). Hepatic abnormalities included steatosis (12/19; 63%), moderate to severe venous congestion (5/19; 26%) and cirrhosis (4/19; 21%). A subsequent literature review indicated a significantly increased prevalence of steatosis (49%), venous congestion (34%) and cirrhosis (9.3%) in COVID-19 PM cases, compared with a pre-pandemic PM cohort (33%, 16%, and 2.6%, respectively), likely reflecting an increased mortality risk in SARS-CoV-2 infection for patients with pre-existing liver disease. To corroborate this observation, we retrospectively analysed the admission liver function test (LFT) results of 276 consecutive, anonymised COVID-19 hospital patients in our centre, for whom outcome data were available. Of these patients, 236 (85.5%) had significantly reduced albumin levels at the time of admission to hospital, which was likely indicative of pre-existing chronic liver or renal disease. There was a strong correlation between patient outcome (length of hospital admission or death) and abnormal albumin at the time of hospital admission (p = 0.000012). We discuss potential mechanisms by which our observations of hepatic dysfunction are linked to a risk of COVID-19 mortality, speculating on the importance of recently identified anti-interferon antibodies