Nature connectedness: Associations with well-being and mindfulness

a b s t r a c t Wilson's (1984) biophilia hypothesis predicts that people's psychological health is associated with their relationship to nature. Two studies examined associations among nature connectedness, well-being, and mindfulness in samples of undergraduate students while socially desirable responding was controlled. Significant associations emerged among measures of nature connectedness and indices of wellbeing (in Study 1 and Study 2) and mindfulness (in Study 2). Results are discussed in relation to possible mediators and moderators of the association between nature connectedness and mental health

Then and Now: Women in Statistics

Abstract: By highlighting the contributions of two outstanding female statisticians, Florence Nightingale (1820 -1910) and Nancy Reid (1952-), we will illustrate how the relative young discipline of Statistics has changed in the last 150 years. Nightingale, living in Victorian times, required permission from her father to get an education and work. She devised and applied ideas on how to effectively illustrate and display data. Reid, graduated from Stanford University and is now a professor of Statistics at the University of Toronto. She is recognized internationally as one of the leading theoretical statisticians and made contributions to diverse areas like higher order asymptotics, conditional inference, and Bayesian and frequentist statistical methods. About the speaker: Dr. Buro completed her PhD in mathematics at the Technical University in Aachen, Germany in 1995. She joined MacEwan University in 2003 as a full-time faculty member in the department of Mathematics and Statistics and became chair of the department in 2013. Her research interests are in statistical design theory and the mathematics of electoral systems. She enjoys an extensive number of collaborations with researchers from various disciplines, providing statistical support for their projects.Non UBCUnreviewedAuthor affiliation: Grant MacEwan UniversityResearche

Simultaneously Searching with Multiple Settings: An Alternative to Parameter Tuning for Suboptimal Single-Agent Search Algorithms

Many search algorithms have parameters that need to be tuned to get the best performance. Typically, the parameters are tuned offline, resulting in a generic setting that is supposed to be effective on all problem instances. For suboptimal single-agent search, problem-instance-specific parameter settings can result in substantially reduced search effort. We consider the use of dovetailing as a way to take advantage of this fact. Dovetailing is a procedure that performs search with multiple parameter settings simultaneously. Dovetailing is shown to improve the search speed of weighted IDA* by several orders of magnitude and to generally enhance the performance of weighted RBFS. This procedure is trivially parallelizable and is shown to be an effective form of parallelization for WA* and BULB. In particular, using WA* with parallel dovetailing yields good speedups in the sliding-tile puzzle domain, and increases the number of problems solved when used in an automated planning system

Early History, Mealtime Environment, and Parental Views on Mealtime and Eating Behaviors among Children with ASD in Florida

This study was a cross-sectional study to examine problematic mealtime behaviors among children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Florida. Forty-one parents completed a 48-item survey. The mean age of their children was 8.1 years and 73% were male. The data were divided and compared by age group: Ages 2⁻6, 7⁻11, and 12⁻17. Data from the 3- to 6-year-old children were extracted and compared with the references from Provost et al. (2010). There were age differences in eating difficulties at home (p = 0.013), fast food restaurants (p = 0.005), and at regular restaurants (p = 0.016). The total mealtime behavior score was significantly higher in early childhood (p < 0.001) and mid-childhood (p = 0.005) than adolescents. More parents of ages 3⁻6 with ASD reported difficulties with breastfeeding (p < 0.01); concerns about eating (p < 0.001); difficulties related to mealtime locations (p < 0.05), craving certain food (p < 0.05), and being picky eaters (p < 0.01) compared to typically developing children. The total mealtime behavior score was significantly higher in children with ASD than typically developing children (p < 0.001). The results indicate that early childhood interventions are warranted and further research in adolescents is needed