Accreditation of practice educators: An expectation too far ?

The successful completion of practice placements is essential to the education of occupational therapists; however, ensuring quality placements is challenging for occupational therapy educators. In 2000, Brunel University introduced a revised system of accreditation of practice educators which involved attendance at a course, the supervision of a student and the submission of an essay to be assessed. An audit revealed that a total of 314 therapists attended 15 courses between 2000 and 2003; of these, 243 (77%) subsequently supervised students and 32 (10%) became accredited. The requirement to accredit practice educators, which is a commendable attempt to ensure quality, may paradoxically have been detrimental in achieving quality. The College of Occupational Therapists’ apparent change of emphasis on this topic is welcome

Occupational therapists' perceptions of predischarge home assessments with older adults in acute care

Predischarge occupational therapy home assessments are routinely performed with older adults in Europe, Australia and North America. Their primary aim is to facilitate a timely and safe discharge from hospital. However, there is a lack of published research on this topic, especially studies exploring occupational therapists' perceptions of home assessments. The paper aims to redress this by describing occupational therapists' perceptions of predischarge occupational therapy home assessments with older adults in acute care. All occupational therapists who undertook home assessments in an acute care hospital with older adults during the duration of the study period were invited to complete a reflective diary. In total, 15 reflective diaries were completed by six therapists. The data were analysed using thematic content analysis. The findings suggest that home assessments were carried out because of mobility or environmental concerns. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the outcome of the home assessment were related to the incidents that occurred during the assessment. Some of the occupational therapists' anxieties were related to the older adults' level of functioning or ill health, and the older adults' own concerns did have an impact upon the therapists' expectations of the home assessment process

An Argentine Child’s Wake, with Music and Dancing – As seen by Alfred Ébélot and R. B. Cunninghame Graham

The French engineer Alfred Ébélot in 1870s Argentina helped lay out a ditch 300-plus kilometres long across the grasslands – the pampa – of the huge Province of Buenos Aires. This was to hinder Indian raiders seeking to make off south with white captives and huge numbers of animals. Somewhere Ébélot witnessed a traditional child’s wake, accompanied by music and dancing. Graham, fluent Spanish speaker and expert horseman, was in the 1870s utterly captivated by the unfenced pampa and by its cow-herders, the gauchos. He too witnessed a child’s wake with music and dancing. “El Velorio” (The Wake), the first of Ébélot’s vignettes in La Pampa (1890), describes such a child’s wake. In 1894 W. H. Hudson, the Argentine-born naturalist and author, recommended La Pampa to his friend Graham, advising him to switch his writing focus to short sketches based on his pampa experiences. In 1899, Graham’s “El Angelito” (The Little Angel) is a five-part description of a child’s wake very similar in design to Ébélot’s “El Velorio”. Ébélot, a positivist, is more critical than Graham of the commercialisation of the child’s wake tradition. Graham’s passion for the pampa and especially his ability to highlight compelling details give the literary edge to Graham’s sketch. Ébélot’s La Pampa proved a useful help to Graham in his rapid development in the late 1890s as a writer of literary sketches. In 1870, two foreigners landed in Argentina for the first time – the Frenchman Alfred Ébélot and the Scotsman Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham. In different places each witnessed a traditional child’s wake accompanied by music and dancing. This article compares their experiences of Argentina and their literary interpretations of an intriguing piece of Hispano-Argentine folklore

Fluorine gas as a cleaning agent for Apollo bulk-sample containers

A technique has been developed for cleaning Apollo bulk sample containers using fluorine gas as the cleaning agent

Forward Pointing Introductory Formulas in the Gospel of Matthew: A Solution to One of Matthew’s Most Problematic Scripture Citations

This paper will seek to interpret one of the most problematic passages in intertextual studies. Matthew 2:23 does not have a clear Old Testament referent, and this presents a problem. How can an unknown prophecy be fulfilled; where is the text cited to be found? However, by keeping the original in mind during interpretation, it seems that Matthew was intentionally creating a hermeneutic of suspicion creating a deliberate rhetorical effect. This paper will seek to determine how Matthew artistically arranged and derived the significance of the Old Testament for his contemporary readership in light of the Christ event. It will be argued that the unknown citation of Matthew 2:19-23 can be found in the next identical citation formula resolving the suspense created by the allusion citation of Matthew 2:23 highlighting the narrative material between the two passages as a sort of inclusio

Matthew Doesn’t Mean What You Think He Means, and Why It\u27s Significant: A Form Critical Evaluation of Plēroō’s relation to Pesher Formulas and its Solution to an Age-Old Problem

This paper will evaluate Matthew 2:13-15 analyzing Matthew’s questionable use of Hosea 11:1. Turner has noted that, “Those who think that Matthew saw a prediction of Jesus in Hos. 11:1 must either disparage Matthew’s hermeneutic . . . or attribute to Matthew revelatory insight into the sensus plenior of Hosea” (Turner, 2008). While the majority of commentators have found Matthew to be practicing typological interpretation, there has been a neglect to analyze the structure of Matthew’s particular introductory formula since Stendahl (1968), which have led many to see a pesher employment by Matthew in these formulas. This paper evaluates the form of Matthew’s quotations in light of persher forms, ultimately finding that Matthew has inverted the form. This inverted form shows that Matthew was seeking to interpret his current situation in light of the scriptures, and not to interpret scriptures at all. This difference is pivotal to see, since it validates Matthew’s use of the Old Testament in πληρόω formulas because he is giving a contemporary significance of how a text affects his current situation, and not reinterpreting meaning into that text from his new situation. This confusion between meaning and significance has proliferated interpretations, and has been a problem that Walter C. Kaiser and E. D. Hirsch have sought to remedy, but has not yet been fruitful for interpretations in Matthew’s use of the Old Testament

A HUMAN BEHAVIORAL ECOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE YELLOWSTONE LAKE BASIN, YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, WYOMING

The Yellowstone Lake Basin has been an important region for hunter-gatherers since the close of the Late Pleistocene that has provided an abundance and well diverse suite of subsistence resources ( i.e prey animals and edible plants). Due the diversity found within this ecosystem, the primary objective of this thesis is to demonstrate that through the tenants of human behavioral ecology, it can be argued that the subsistence and settlement strategies of mobile foragers were heavily influenced by the abundance and availability of subsistence resources. This is based on the premise that resource patches comprising of riparian and grassland habitats obtain high productions of subsistence resources which would have encouraged mobile foragers to occupy these areas. Furthermore, these tenants can be applied on a macro-evolutionary scale to demonstrate how shifts in climate over the past 12,000 years affected the subsistence and settlement strategies of hunter-gatherers. Like all ecosystems, the Yellowstone Lake Basin is constantly undergoing ecological transformations in response to disturbances in the climate. Shifts in climate may have had significant impacts on the distribution and compositions of vegetative zones that in turn affected the quality and production of resource patches. It is suspected that when poor patch conditions existed, mobile foragers responded by dispersing to new resource patches that were more productive. Conversely, when patch conditions became favorable, mobile foragers occupied these areas more frequently and over longer periods of time. The final objective of this thesis was to determine if the spatial distribution of prehistoric sites could be associated to paleo-shorelines that reflected past lake levels. This objective was carried out by applying the principle tenants used in the geosciences. Using Nicolaus Steno’s principle of superposition, it will be demonstrated that archaeological sites with intact and undisturbed contexts will only be associated with paleo-shoreline features that were exposed prior to any drops in lake levels. This is based on the geologic principle that younger layers of strata will overlie older deposits, which can be applied here by arguing that older archaeological deposits should be associated with lake levels reflecting similar ages while younger deposits should correspond to lake levels reflecting younger ages