An Exploration of Existential Group Art Therapy for Substance Abuse Clients with a History of Trauma

The purpose of this study was to explore existential group art therapy (EGAT) as an alternate or integrated method in treating clients with substance abuse and a history of trauma. Subjects for this study were male and/or female adults, ages 18 and older, volunteer participants who were in treatment for substance addiction at Tarzana Treatment Centers. A group of seven participants who met the criteria for both substance abuse and history of trauma received Existential Group Art Therapy (EGAT) treatment for eight consecutive weeks. Participants were asked to fill out the Scale for Existential Thinking (SET) at the start of the group and at the end of the treatment process to determine whether or not there was an increase in “existential thinking” following eight weeks of EGAT. The group engaged in the art-making process and discussion of their artwork each week, and were asked to answer Post Group Survey Questions (PGSQ) after the termination of the group. This study details four of the seven participants since they attended most consistently and were deeply engaged in the process. The statistical significance of the observed results was measured using a paired two sample for means T-test (one-tailed). Changes in SET scores were deemed to be statistically significant with a result of

Resources for Incorporating Action Research as Critique into Applied Linguistics Graduate Education

THE POLICY THAT INTRODUCES THE REviews section of each issue of the MLJ begins with this statement: "The MLJ reviews books, monographs, computer software, and other materials that . . . present results of research in-and methods of-foreign and second language teaching and learning" (MLJ , 2005, p. 292). In most issues, books in the "Theory and Practice" category are the most numerous, a reflection of the rapid expansion in the field of SLA and of the concomitant appetite among SLA professionals for publications that report on research, as well as those suitable for use as course textbooks. In the nearly 90-year history of the MLJ , the Reviews section has reinvented itself numerous times in terms of its focus (e.g., descriptive, evaluative), the standard length of reviews (from 300 to over 1,000 words), and the types of books the editor has chosen to include. Occasional review essays, inaugurated during the editorship of Charles L. King (1971King ( -1979, were largely laudatory descriptions of books considered by the editor to have major significance to the field. The review essays in this special issue represent an innovative and stimulating approach to the discussion of recent publications that come under the rubric of "Theory and Practice." By considering together a set of publications on a particular research paradigm, the essays by Crookes, Yates, and Chapelle provide readers with a thoughtful picture of recent books on action research, qualitative research, and quantitative research, respectively, that would not be possible in the traditional way the Reviews section has been structured. In addition, the particular tack that these writers have taken-a critical analysis of ethical issues inherent in their respective research traditions-brings to the fore a focus on issues of importance to language researchers that are discussed all too rarely. The books treated in the review essays were selected for their timeliness and for their significance to researchers in language learning and teaching. Because the MLJ strives to publish reviews of new materials within two years of publication, reviews of three of the nine books featured in the essays had already appeared by the time the shape of the reviews essays in the special issue had been decided: Burns, Collaborative Action Research for English Language Teachers (reviewed in MLJ , 85, 2001, p. 473); Edge, Action Research (reviewed in MLJ , 87, 2003, p. 131); and Holliday, Doing and Writing Qualitative Research (reviewed in MLJ , 88, 2004, p. 314). Reading the reviews of these three books in their two iterations highlights the impact that the approach taken in the special issue can offer to current and future scholars in our field as we contemplate not only the technical side of conducting research, but also deeper questions concerning the relationship between the methodological choices we make and the meanings we attribute to the outcomes of our research

Rheostats and Toggle Switches for Modulating Protein Function

A grant from the One-University Open Access Fund at the University of Kansas was used to defray the author’s publication fees in this Open Access journal. The Open Access Fund, administered by librarians from the KU, KU Law, and KUMC libraries, is made possible by contributions from the offices of KU Provost, KU Vice Chancellor for Research & Graduate Studies, and KUMC Vice Chancellor for Research. For more information about the Open Access Fund, please see http://library.kumc.edu/authors-fund.xml.The millions of protein sequences generated by genomics are expected to transform protein engineering and personalized medicine. To achieve these goals, tools for predicting outcomes of amino acid changes must be improved. Currently, advances are hampered by insufficient experimental data about nonconserved amino acid positions. Since the property “nonconserved” is identified using a sequence alignment, we designed experiments to recapitulate that context: Mutagenesis and functional characterization was carried out in 15 LacI/GalR homologs (rows) at 12 nonconserved positions (columns). Multiple substitutions were made at each position, to reveal how various amino acids of a nonconserved column were tolerated in each protein row. Results showed that amino acid preferences of nonconserved positions were highly context-dependent, had few correlations with physico-chemical similarities, and were not predictable from their occurrence in natural LacI/GalR sequences. Further, unlike the “toggle switch” behaviors of conserved positions, substitutions at nonconserved positions could be rank-ordered to show a “rheostatic”, progressive effect on function that spanned several orders of magnitude. Comparisons to various sequence analyses suggested that conserved and strongly co-evolving positions act as functional toggles, whereas other important, nonconserved positions serve as rheostats for modifying protein function. Both the presence of rheostat positions and the sequence analysis strategy appear to be generalizable to other protein families and should be considered when engineering protein modifications or predicting the impact of protein polymorphisms

A Case Study on Artefact-based RE Improvement in Practice

Most requirements engineering (RE) process improvement approaches are solution-driven and activity-based. They focus on the assessment of the RE of a company against an external norm of best practices. A consequence is that practitioners often have to rely on an improvement approach that skips a profound problem analysis and that results in an RE approach that might be alien to the organisational needs. In recent years, we have developed an RE improvement approach (called \emph{ArtREPI}) that guides a holistic RE improvement against individual goals of a company putting primary attention to the quality of the artefacts. In this paper, we aim at exploring ArtREPI's benefits and limitations. We contribute an industrial evaluation of ArtREPI by relying on a case study research. Our results suggest that ArtREPI is well-suited for the establishment of an RE that reflects a specific organisational culture but to some extent at the cost of efficiency resulting from intensive discussions on a terminology that suits all involved stakeholders. Our results reveal first benefits and limitations, but we can also conclude the need of longitudinal and independent investigations for which we herewith lay the foundation

A clinically relevant polymorphism in the Na+/taurocholate cotransporting polypeptide (NTCP) occurs at a rheostat position

Conventionally, most amino acid substitutions at “important” protein positions are expected to abolish function. However, in several soluble-globular proteins, we identified a class of nonconserved positions for which various substitutions produced progressive functional changes; we consider these evolutionary “rheostats”. Here, we report a strong rheostat position in the integral membrane protein, Na+/taurocholate (TCA) cotransporting polypeptide, at the site of a pharmacologically relevant polymorphism (S267F). Functional studies were performed for all 20 substitutions (S267X) with three substrates (TCA, estrone-3-sulfate, and rosuvastatin). The S267X set showed strong rheostatic effects on overall transport, and individual substitutions showed varied effects on transport kinetics (Km and Vmax) and substrate specificity. To assess protein stability, we measured surface expression and used the Rosetta software (https://www.rosettacommons.org) suite to model structure and stability changes of S267X. Although buried near the substrate-binding site, S267X substitutions were easily accommodated in the Na+/TCA cotransporting polypeptide structure model. Across the modest range of changes, calculated stabilities correlated with surface-expression differences, but neither parameter correlated with altered transport. Thus, substitutions at rheostat position 267 had wide-ranging effects on the phenotype of this integral membrane protein. We further propose that polymorphic positions in other proteins might be locations of rheostat positions

Hyponatremia Associated with Bupropion

Bupropion is widely used for the treatment of depressive disorder and smoking cessation. Hyponatremia, including a syndrome of inappropriate secretion of antidiuretic hormone (SIADH), is not rare complication of treatment with antipsychotic drugs. We report a 60-year-old man who experienced severe hyponatremia after a treatment with bupropion for depressive disorder for the first time in the Korea

Understanding the Role of Requirements Artifacts in Kanban

User stories are a well-established way to record requirements in agile projects. They can be used as such to guide the daily work of developers or be split further into tasks, which usually represent more technical requirements. User stories and tasks guide communication and collaboration in software projects. However, there are several challenges with writing and using user stories in practice that are not well documented yet. Learning about these challenges could raise awareness for potential problems. Understanding how requirements artifacts are used for daily work could lead to better guidelines on writing stories that support daily work tasks. Moreover, user stories may not be appropriate to capture all kinds of requirements that are relevant for a project. We explore how to utilize requirements artifacts effectively, what their benefits and challenges are, and how their scope granularity affects their utility. For this, we studied a software project carried out in the Software Factory at the Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki. We investigated the requirements artifacts and then interviewed the developers and the customer about their experiences. Story and task cards have helped the participants throughout the project. However, despite having a Kanban board and rich communication within the team, some requirements were still too implicit, which also led to misunderstandings. This and other challenges revealed by the study can guide future in-depth research.Peer reviewe