Applications of Transformative Justice Principles for Centering Transgender and Gender Expansive Experiences in Social Work Education and Practice

Social work education has traditionally used frameworks, such as cultural competency, to guide implicit and explicit curricula that shape how we think about communities that live and thrive outside of white supremacist and cis/heteronormative norms and values. While the cultural competency framework intends to promote a level of consciousness and attention that is required to practice with diverse individuals, families, and communities whose identities differ from that of the social worker, it instead inadvertently creates a knowledge base that reinforces harmful power dynamics between social worker and client/community. The cultural competency framework is absent of historical and structural context and lacks critical examination of positionality. The use of such frameworks has positioned social work educators and practitioners as the “experts” about culture, thus reinforcing the oppressive dynamic that allows for transgender and gender expansive (TGE) erasure, white supremacy, and transphobia to go unchecked. Without structural knowledge about the ways in which trans- phobic rhetoric and white supremacist ideology, for example, are reflected in policies and practices, social workers may be unable to develop the skills necessary to challenge these forms of injustice and ultimately hold them- selves, their colleagues, policymakers and the profession accountable. We suggest a shift in positioning that encourages and practices accountability rooted in transformative justice (TJ) principles. Drawing on knowledge and practices which emerge from activist spaces, an accountability frame- work is built upon a systemic understanding that requires shifts in belief, thinking, and behavior at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, and societal levels. This paper will introduce a suggested framework for social work education to engage in accountability rather than competency-based education and practice, and discuss how it may be applied to guide a response to anti-transgender legislation across the U.S

Fisheries Utilization of Remotely Sensed Data

The Fisheries Engineering Laboratory has conducted experiments in conjunction with ERTS-1 and Skylab-3 overflights, and is initiating an experiment using LANDSAT data acquisition systems. Data analyses have demonstrated relationships between remotely sensed oceanographic conditions and the distribution and abundance of specific living marine resources. These correlations have been used as the basis for predictive models which, when validated and refined, may benefit the fishing industry and the biological community

LANDSAT menhaden and thread herring resources investigation

The author has identified the following significant results. The relationship between the distribution of menhaden and selected oceanographic parameters (water color, turbidity, and possibly chlorophyll concentrations) was established. Similar relationships for thread herring were not established nor were relationships relating to the abundance of either species. Use of aircraft and LANDSAT remote sensing instruments to measure or infer a set of basic oceanographic parameters was evaluated. Parameters which could be accurately inferred included surface water temperature, salinity, and color. Water turbidity (Secchi disk) was evaluated as marginally inferrable from the LANDSAT MSS data and chlorophyll-a concentrations as less than marginal. These evaluations considered the parameters only as experienced in the two test areas using available sensors and statistical techniques

Parietal but not temporoparietal alpha-tACS modulates endogenous visuospatial attention

Visuospatial attention can either be voluntarily directed (endogenous/top-down attention) or automatically triggered (exogenous/bottom-up attention). Recent research showed that dorsal parietal transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) at alpha frequency modulates the spatial attentional bias in an endogenous but not in an exogenous visuospatial attention task. Yet, the reason for this task-specificity remains unexplored. Here, we tested whether this dissociation relates to the proposed differential role of the dorsal attention network (DAN) and ventral attention network (VAN) in endogenous and exogenous attention processes respectively. To that aim, we targeted the left and right dorsal parietal node of the DAN, as well as the left and right ventral temporoparietal node of the VAN using tACS at the individual alpha frequency. Every participant completed all four stimulation conditions and a sham condition in five separate sessions. During tACS, we assessed the behavioral visuospatial attention bias via an endogenous and exogenous visuospatial attention task. Additionally, we measured offline alpha power immediately before and after tACS using electroencephalography (EEG). The behavioral data revealed an effect of tACS on the endogenous but not exogenous attention bias, with a greater leftward bias during (sham-corrected) left than right hemispheric stimulation. In line with our hypothesis, this effect was brain area-specific, i.e., present for dorsal parietal but not ventral temporoparietal tACS. However, contrary to our expectations, there was no effect of ventral temporoparietal tACS on the exogenous visuospatial attention bias. Hence, no double dissociation between the two targeted attention networks. There was no effect of either tACS condition on offline alpha power. Our behavioral data reveal that dorsal parietal but not ventral temporoparietal alpha oscillations steer endogenous visuospatial attention. This brain-area specific tACS effect matches the previously proposed dissociation between the DAN and VAN and, by showing that the spatial attention bias effect does not generalize to any lateral posterior tACS montage, renders lateral cutaneous and retinal effects for the spatial attention bias in the dorsal parietal condition unlikely. Yet the absence of tACS effects on the exogenous attention task suggests that ventral temporoparietal alpha oscillations are not functionally relevant for exogenous visuospatial attention. We discuss the potential implications of this finding in the context of an emerging theory on the role of the ventral temporoparietal node

SIRT3 Mediates Multi-Tissue Coupling for Metabolic Fuel Switching

SummarySIRT3 is a member of the Sirtuin family of NAD+-dependent deacylases and plays a critical role in metabolic regulation. Organism-wide SIRT3 loss manifests in metabolic alterations; however, the coordinating role of SIRT3 among metabolically distinct tissues is unknown. Using multi-tissue quantitative proteomics comparing fasted wild-type mice to mice lacking SIRT3, innovative bioinformatic analysis, and biochemical validation, we provide a comprehensive view of mitochondrial acetylation and SIRT3 function. We find SIRT3 regulates the acetyl-proteome in core mitochondrial processes common to brain, heart, kidney, liver, and skeletal muscle, but differentially regulates metabolic pathways in fuel-producing and fuel-utilizing tissues. We propose an additional maintenance function for SIRT3 in liver and kidney where SIRT3 expression is elevated to reduce the acetate load on mitochondrial proteins. We provide evidence that SIRT3 impacts ketone body utilization in the brain and reveal a pivotal role for SIRT3 in the coordination between tissues required for metabolic homeostasis

On staying grounded and avoiding Quixotic dead ends

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I first review theoretical approaches raised in these articles that I believe are Quixotic dead ends, namely, approaches that are principled and inspired but likely to fail. In the process, I review various theories of amodal symbols, their distortions of grounded theories, and fallacies in the evidence used to support them. Incorporating further contributions across articles, I then sketch a theoretical approach that I believe is likely to be successful, which includes grounding, abstraction, flexibility, explaining classic conceptual phenomena, and making contact with real-world situations. This account further proposes that (1) a key element of grounding is neural reuse, (2) abstraction takes the forms of multimodal compression, distilled abstraction, and distributed linguistic representation (but not amodal symbols), and (3) flexible context-dependent representations are a hallmark of conceptual processing

Verification of Decision Making Software in an Autonomous Vehicle: An Industrial Case Study

Correctness of autonomous driving systems is crucial as\ua0incorrect behaviour may have catastrophic consequences. Many different\ua0hardware and software components (e.g. sensing, decision making, actuation,\ua0and control) interact to solve the autonomous driving task, leading to a level of complexity that brings new challenges for the formal verification\ua0community. Though formal verification has been used to prove\ua0correctness of software, there are significant challenges in transferring\ua0such techniques to an agile software development process and to ensure\ua0widespread industrial adoption. In the light of these challenges, the identification\ua0of appropriate formalisms, and consequently the right verification\ua0tools, has significant impact on addressing them. In this paper, we\ua0evaluate the application of different formal techniques from supervisory\ua0control theory, model checking, and deductive verification to verify existing\ua0decision and control software (in development) for an autonomous\ua0vehicle. We discuss how the verification objective differs with respect tothe choice of formalism and the level of formality that can be applied.\ua0Insights from the case study show a need for multiple formal methods to\ua0prove correctness, the difficulty to capture the right level of abstraction\ua0to model and specify the formal properties for the verification objectives

Interpreting Spatial Language in Image Captions

The map as a tool for accessing data has become very popular in recent years, but a lot of data do not have the necessary spatial meta-data to allow for that. Some data such as photographs however have spatial information in their captions and if this could be extracted, then they could be made available via map-based interfaces. Towards this goal, we introduce a model and spatio-linguistic reasoner for interpreting the spatial information in image captions that is based upon quantitative data about spatial language use acquired directly from people. Spatial language is inherently vague, and both the model and reasoner have been designed to incorporate this vagueness at the quantitative level and not only qualitatively

Sensorimotor semantics on the spot: brain activity dissociates between conceptual categories within 150 ms

Although semantic processing has traditionally been associated with brain responses maximal at 350–400 ms, recent studies reported that words of different semantic types elicit topographically distinct brain responses substantially earlier, at 100–200 ms. These earlier responses have, however, been achieved using insufficiently precise source localisation techniques, therefore casting doubt on reported differences in brain generators. Here, we used high-density MEG-EEG recordings in combination with individual MRI images and state-of-the-art source reconstruction techniques to compare localised early activations elicited by words from different semantic categories in different cortical areas. Reliable neurophysiological word-category dissociations emerged bilaterally at ~ 150 ms, at which point action-related words most strongly activated frontocentral motor areas and visual object-words occipitotemporal cortex. These data now show that different cortical areas are activated rapidly by words with different meanings and that aspects of their category-specific semantics is reflected by dissociating neurophysiological sources in motor and visual brain systems

Gesture and naming therapy for people with severe aphasia: a group study

In this study, the authors (a) investigated whether a group of people with severe aphasia could learn a vocabulary of pantomime gestures through therapy and (b) compared their learning of gestures with their learning of words. The authors also examined whether gesture therapy cued word production and whether naming therapy cued gestures