Too Much Light: The Art of the Hero’s Journey (Photo Essay)

We live in an age in which spiritual searching and seeking is more common, particularly among the youth. The need for answers and solutions to a world in danger of dying, of a society in which corruption and decay are so transparently obvious, leads many on paths which are dangerous and uncharted. The metaphor of journey, the practice of pilgrimage, the art of navigation, all contain the notion of process and movement rather than stagnation. They provide us with tools to not only emerge whole from experiences which have the power to break and shatter us but to provide maps for others to use. The title, ‘Too Much Light: The Art of The Hero’s Journey’, reflects the experience of Spiritual Crisis of both Karen Adler and Teresa McLaren. This phenomenon is little known in Western society and is most easily understood as an extreme emotional state with symptoms such as loss of contact with consensual reality, delusions and hallucinations which are similar to those labelled psychosis (Grof & Grof, 1989; Phillips et al. 2009). Stories of Too Much Light, becoming lost and ultimately finding one\u27s way back to health, happiness and sanity via the arts and The Hero’s Journey archetype, are shared by many in the world today. It is a common initiation story in very disparate cultures and among very different individuals. The commonalities of these stories serve to illustrate the underlying connectedness of who we are as human beings. Stories and artworks by those who have survived these experiences encourage others to listen to and benefit from the deep wisdom, beauty and strength that reside in all of us. We hope that lay people, academics and members of the mental health professions will use this resource as a source of explanation and understanding for experiences which are deeply disturbing, quite often terrifying but ultimately life-enhancing. Marie Grace Brook writes that knowing about these experiences have ‘Implications for spiritual tourism and pilgrimage … both for the purpose of supporting people in their spiritual[ly] transformative journeys, and for normalizing characteristic extreme states mimicking psychosis that potentially accompany powerful spiritual experience’ (Brook 2020:1)

The Influence of Instructional Model on the Conceptual Understanding of Preservice Elementary Teachers

This study compared the influence of two instructional models--explicit instruction and problem-based instruction--on the procedural and conceptual understanding attained by prospective elementary teachers from a unit on place value in different number bases. In the explicit instruction the instructor included intuitive conceptual explanations. In the problem-based instruction students worked on tasks intended to elicit the students' discovery of these same conceptual understandings. Students worked in groups and then explained their insights and approaches to the whole class. The essential difference in the instructional models was who was responsible for providing explanations: the teacher or the students. The students answered procedural and conceptual questions on an immediate post-test and on a delayed post-test, and wrote a written reflection on place value. The differences in scores on the post-tests and written reflection were not attributable to the differences in instructional model, even after using math SAT scores as a covariate. A mild interaction was observed between treatment and math SAT score on the conceptual portion of the delayed post-test, in which students with lower math SAT scores who were in the problem-based group did somewhat better than those with lower math SAT scores in the explicit instruction group. Seven students were interviewed to learn more about their understanding, attitudes, and persistence in problem solving. The interview analysis suggested that students' differences in understanding, attitudes, and persistence were due to their prior (pre-study) experience rather than to differences in instructional model for the study unit. The students from the problem-based group, however, were more likely to identify working in groups as a helpful learning strategy than those from the explicit instruction group

A culture of silence: modes of objectification and the silencing of disabled bodies

Throughout history different practices have attempted to silence the experiences of disabled people. In this paper we explore some of these practices including the medical, familial, and self-subjugating practices English-speaking Canadian polio survivors experienced throughout their lives. We analyze participant’s experiences of silence and silencing through a Foucauldian lens, drawing on the three modes of objectification to explain the institutional and cultural discourses around polio subjects that acted upon and through the polio body to silence it. Participants’ oral history accounts demonstrate how sociocultural and medical practices effectively silenced survivors from speaking about their polio experiences. However, the trope of silence is also uprooted within oral history traditions. We will demonstrate how participants broke their silence and shifted their perspectives on polio and disability, and how this process contributed to their resistance of hegemonic conceptualizations of disability as defective

The Sample Complexity of Dictionary Learning

A large set of signals can sometimes be described sparsely using a dictionary, that is, every element can be represented as a linear combination of few elements from the dictionary. Algorithms for various signal processing applications, including classification, denoising and signal separation, learn a dictionary from a set of signals to be represented. Can we expect that the representation found by such a dictionary for a previously unseen example from the same source will have L_2 error of the same magnitude as those for the given examples? We assume signals are generated from a fixed distribution, and study this questions from a statistical learning theory perspective. We develop generalization bounds on the quality of the learned dictionary for two types of constraints on the coefficient selection, as measured by the expected L_2 error in representation when the dictionary is used. For the case of l_1 regularized coefficient selection we provide a generalization bound of the order of O(sqrt(np log(m lambda)/m)), where n is the dimension, p is the number of elements in the dictionary, lambda is a bound on the l_1 norm of the coefficient vector and m is the number of samples, which complements existing results. For the case of representing a new signal as a combination of at most k dictionary elements, we provide a bound of the order O(sqrt(np log(m k)/m)) under an assumption on the level of orthogonality of the dictionary (low Babel function). We further show that this assumption holds for most dictionaries in high dimensions in a strong probabilistic sense. Our results further yield fast rates of order 1/m as opposed to 1/sqrt(m) using localized Rademacher complexity. We provide similar results in a general setting using kernels with weak smoothness requirements

Public conceptions of justice in climate engineering:evidence from secondary analysis of public deliberation

Secondary analysis of transcripts of public dialogues on climate engineering indicates that justice concerns are an important but as yet under-recognised dimension influencing public reactions to these emerging techniques. This paper describes and explores justice issues raised by participants in a series of deliberative public engagement meetings. Such justice issues included the distribution of costs and benefits across space and time; the relative power and influence of beneficiaries and others; and the weakness of procedural justice measures that might protect public interests in decision making about climate engineering. We argue that publics are mobilising diverse concepts of justice, echoing both philosophical and practical sources. We conclude that a better understanding of conceptions of justice in this context could assist exploration and understanding of public perceptions of and attitudes towards climate engineering and the different technologies involved. Such detailed public engagement would appear essential if sound, well-informed and morally justifiable decisions are to be made regarding research or development of climate engineering

Evaluating lithium diffusion mechanisms in the complex spinel Li2NiGe3O8

Lithium-ion diffusion mechanisms in the complex spinel Li2NiGe3O8 have been investigated using solid-state NMR, impedance, and muon spectroscopies. Partial occupancy of migratory interstitial 12d sites is shown to occur at lower temperatures than previously reported. Bulk activation energies for Li+ ion hopping range from 0.43 ± 0.03 eV for powdered samples to 0.53 ± 0.01 eV for samples sintered at 950 °C for 24 h, due to the loss of Li during sintering at elevated temperatures. A lithium diffusion coefficient of 3.89 × 10−12 cm2 s−1 was calculated from muon spectroscopy data for Li2NiGe3O8 at 300 K

Finishing the finished human chromosome 22 sequence

A combination of approaches was used to close 8 of the 11 gaps in the original sequence of human chromosome 22, and to generate a total 1.018 Mb of new sequence

Dynamic instability of the major urinary protein gene family revealed by genomic and phenotypic comparisons between C57 and 129 strain mice

Targeted sequencing, manual genome annotation, phylogenetic analysis and mass spectrometry were used to characterise major urinary proteins (MUPs) and the Mup clusters of two strains of inbred mice

Insights into the influence of solvent polarity on the crystallization of poly(ethylene oxide) spin-coated thin films via in situ grazing incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering

Controlling polymer thin-film morphology and crystallinity is crucial for a wide range of applications, particularly in thin-film organic electronic devices. In this work, the crystallization behavior of a model polymer, poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO), during spin-coating is studied. PEO films were spun-cast from solvents possessing different polarities (chloroform, THF, and methanol) and probed via in situ grazing incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering. The crystallization behavior was found to follow the solvent polarity order (where chloroform chloroform > methanol). When spun-cast from nonpolar chloroform, crystallization largely followed Avrami kinetics, resulting in the formation of morphologies comprising large spherulites. PEO solutions cast from more polar solvents (THF and methanol) do not form well-defined highly crystalline morphologies and are largely amorphous with the presence of small crystalline regions. The difference in morphological development of PEO spun-cast from polar solvents is attributed to clustering phenomena that inhibit polymer crystallization. This work highlights the importance of considering individual components of polymer solubility, rather than simple total solubility, when designing processing routes for the generation of morphologies with optimum crystallinities or morphologies

Governance for Earth system tipping points – A research agenda

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