Opportunity for development or necessary nuisance? The case for viewing working with interpreters as a bonus in therapeutic work

This paper explores the central role a language interpreter can play in the process of the therapeutic relationship. Although others have described the changes to the therapeutic dyad that the presence of a third party (an interpreter) brings, little attention has been paid to the advantages and additional opportunities of this altered therapeutic situation. This paper details these gains and further argues that clinicians who are willing to gain experience of working with interpreters will find that benefits accrue at the micro and macro levels: at the micro level, through enhancement of their work with individual non English speaking clients, and at the macro level through learning about different cultural perspectives, idioms of distress and the role of language in the therapeutic endeavour. This is in addition to developing skills to fulfil legal and professional requirements relating to equity of service provision. Some ideas are offered to explain the negative slant than runs throughout the literature in this area and tends to colour the overall discussion of therapeutic work with interpreters and, before the final section, makes some specific suggestions which may help maximise the gains possible in such work while reducing difficulties

Behaviour of calcium abundance in Am-Fm stars with evolution

Calcium abundance in the atmosphere of Am stars is examined as a function of their evolutionary state within the main sequence. New spectroscopic abundances as well as abundances abtained photometrically by Guthrie (1987) are used, since they are mutually quite consistent. The main result of this work is that, contrary to earlier suggestions, calcium abundance does not tend to be larger in evolved Am stars than in unevolved ones, for objects distributed along a given evolutionary track in the HR diagram. The trend appears to be the reverse, if it is present at all. For our whole sample of Am stars, there is a significant correlation between calcium abundance and effective temperature, in the sense that the cooler objects are the most Ca-deficient, hance have the most pronounced Am peculiarity. This implies an apparent correlation between calcium deficiency and age, although the lack of Am stars younger than log(t) = 8.6 seems real. Our results are fully consistent with the low rate of Am stars observed in young clusters and with theoretical predictions of time-dependent radiative diffusion (Alecian 1996).Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, accepted for A&

Are metallic A-F giants evolved Am stars? Rotation and rate of binaries among giant F stars

We test the hypothesis of Berthet (1992) which foresees that Am stars become giant metallic A and F stars (defined by an enhanced value of the blanketing parameter Delta_m_2 of the Geneva photometry) when they evolve. If this hypothesis is right, Am and metallic A-FIII stars need to have the same rate of binaries and a similar distribution of vsini. From our new spectroscopic data and from vsini and radial velocities in the literature, we show that it is not the case. The metallic giant stars are often fast rotators with vsini larger than 100 km/s, while the maximum rotational velocity for Am stars is about 100 km/s. The rate of tight binaries with periods less than 1000 days is less than 30 percent among metallic giants, which is incompatible with the value of 75 percent for Am stars (Abt & Levy 1985). Therefore, the simplest way to explain the existence of giant metallic F stars is to suggest that all normal A and early F stars might go through a short "metallic" phase when they are finishing their life on the main sequence. Besides, it is shown that only giant stars with spectral type comprised between F0 and F6 may have a really enhanced Delta_m_2 value, while all A-type giants seem to be normal.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, to appear in A&A

Dialogando com o circuito científico cultural

Trabalho apresentado no II Congresso Nacional do PROJETO RONDON, realizado em Florianópolis, SC, no período de 23 a 25 de setembro de 2015 - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina.O campus da universidade estadual paulista Júlio De Mesquita Filho de Presidente Prudente oferece opções de visitas para a população, nesse sentido o projeto científico cultural abrange alguns laboratórios da unidade, como o centro de ciências, de museologia, antropologia e arqueologia - CEMAARQ, centro de ciências, laboratório de geologia e meteorologia, integrando cultura com o Projeto Rondon

How do you explain the risk of air pollution to your patients?

.@ERStalk Environ & Health committee workshop concludes: HCPs vital to raising awareness of air pollution to patients http://ow.ly/pfOe301FoIg

An analysis of finger and hand injuries in children in a tertiary paediatric emergency department.

AIMS OF THE STUDY This study set out to examine the association between current subspecialty (paediatric and hand surgery) consultation practice for children with hand and finger injuries presenting to a tertiary paediatric emergency department and length of stay in the paediatric emergency department. Also, incidence and injury pattern of hand and finger injuries in this patient group were analysed. METHODS This was a retrospective cross-sectional study, which was undertaken as a clinical audit service. All patients under 17 years presenting to our paediatric emergency department with hand and finger injuries over a 17-month period were included in the analysis. We studied incidence and injury mechanism, current subspecialty referral practice, as well as paediatric emergency department and hospital length of stay. RESULTS We identified 929 children for inclusion in the analysis. The most frequent reasons for presentation were hand contusions (25.5%) and fractures (20.8%). Paediatric emergency medicine physicians alone managed 845 patients (90.6%), paediatric surgery referral occurred in 50 (5.4%) and hand surgery consultation in 37 (4.0%) cases. Mean length of stay in the paediatric emergency department was 154 min and significantly longer when subspecialty review occurred. Hospital admission occurred in 87 cases (9.3%). CONCLUSIONS Involvement of subspecialties in the care of hand and finger injuries was associated with significantly increased length of stay in the paediatric emergency department. We discuss obstacles and enablers for timely patient referral and management. We suggest the implementation of referral guidelines, tailored to the individual emergency department, to reduce unnecessary patient journey delays and to ensure higher quality repair of complex hand injuries by the appropriate surgeon, with better outcomes. Making use of the emergence of multiple surgical subspecialties for targeted treatment of paediatric finger and hand injuries might be desirable

Measuring the health effects of air pollution : to what extent can we really say people are dying from bad air?

Estimation of the effects of environmental impacts is a major focus of current theoretical and policy research in environmental economics. Such estimates are used to set regulatory standards for pollution exposure; design appropriate environmental protection and damage mitigation strategies; guide the assessment of environmental impacts; and measure public willingness to pay for environmental amenities. It is a truism that the effectiveness of such strategies depends crucially on the quality of the estimates used to inform them. However, this paper argues that in respect to at least one area of the empirical literature - the estimation of the health impacts of air pollution using daily time series data - existing estimates are questionable and thus have limited relevance for environmental decision-making. By neglecting the issue of model uncertainty - or which models, among the myriad of possible models researchers should choose from to estimate health effects - most studies overstate confidence in their chosen model and underestimate the evidence from other models, thereby greatly enhancing the risk of obtaining uncertain and inaccurate results. This paper discusses the importance of model uncertainty for accurate estimation of the health effects of air pollution and demonstrates its implications in an exercise that models pollution-mortality impacts using a new and comprehensive data set for Toronto, Canada. The main empirical finding of the paper is that standard deviations for air pollution-mortality impacts become very large when model uncertainty is incorporated into the analysis. Indeed they become so large as to question the plausibility of previously measured links between air pollution and mortality. Although applied to the estimation of the effects of air pollution, the general message of this paper - that proper treatment of model uncertainty critically determines the accuracy of the resulting estimates - applies to many studies that seek to estimate environmental effects

Frequency ratio method for seismic modeling of Gamma Doradus stars

A method for obtaining asteroseismological information of a Gamma Doradus oscillating star showing at least three pulsation frequencies is presented. This method is based on a first-order asymptotic g-mode expression, in agreement with the internal structure of Gamma Doradus stars. The information obtained is twofold: 1) a possible identification of the radial order n and degree l of observed frequencies (assuming that these have the same l), and 2) an estimate of the integral of the buoyancy frequency (Brunt-Vaisala) weighted over the stellar radius along the radiative zone. The accuracy of the method as well as its theoretical consistency are also discussed for a typical Gamma Doradus stellar model. Finally, the frequency ratios method has been tested with observed frequencies of the Gamma Doradus star HD 12901. The number of representative models verifying the complete set of constraints (the location in the HR diagram, the Brunt-Vaisala frequency integral, the observed metallicity and frequencies and a reliable identification of n and l) is drastically reduced to six.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figure