The Practitioner's Dilemma: How to Assess the Credibility of Downscaled Climate Projections

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/101803/1/eost2013EO460005.pd

Exploring the meaning in meaningful coincidences: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of synchronicity in therapy

Synchronicity experiences (SEs) are defined as psychologically meaningful connections between inner events (e.g. thought, dream or vision) and one or more external events occurring simultaneously or at a future point in time. There has been limited systematic research that has investigated the phenomenology of SEs in therapy. This study aimed to redress this by exploring the process and nature of such experiences from the perspective of the practitioner. Semi-structured face-to-face interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of nine practitioners who reported SEs in their therapeutic sessions (three counsellors, three psychologists and three psychotherapists), and focused on how participants make sense of their experiences of synchronicity in therapy. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used to identify three superordinate themes: sense of connectedness, therapeutic process, and professional issues. Findings suggest that SEs can serve to strengthen the therapeutic relationship and are perceived as useful harbingers of information about the therapeutic process, as well as being a means of overcoming communication difficulties, as they are seen to provide insights into the client’s experiencing of themselves and others, regardless of whether or not the SE is acknowledged by the client or disclosed by the therapist

A Portuguese East Indiaman from the 1502-1503 Fleet of Vasco da Gama off Al Hallaniyah Island, Oman: An interim report

Two Portuguese naus from Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India, left behind to disrupt maritime trade between India and the Red Sea, were wrecked in May 1503 off the north-eastern coast of Al Hallaniyah Island, Oman. The ships, Esmeralda and São Pedro, had been commanded by da Gama's maternal uncles, Vicente and Brás Sodré, respectively. A detailed study and scientific analysis of an artefact assemblage recovered during archaeological excavations conducted in Al Hallaniyah in 2013 and 2014 confirms the location of an early 16th-century Portuguese wreck-site, initially discovered in 1998. Esmeralda is proposed as the probable source of the remaining, un-salved wreckage

The Impact of Parameterized Convection on the Simulation of Crop Processes

Global climate and weather models are a key tool for the prediction of future crop productivity, but they all rely on parameterizations of atmospheric convection, which often produce significant biases in rainfall characteristics over the tropics. The authors evaluate the impact of these biases by driving the General Large Area Model for annual crops (GLAM) with regional-scale atmospheric simulations of one cropping season over West Africa at different resolutions, with and without a parameterization of convection, and compare these with a GLAM run driven by observations. The parameterization of convection produces too light and frequent rainfall throughout the domain, as compared with the short, localized, high-intensity events in the observations and in the convection-permitting runs. Persistent light rain increases surface evaporation, and much heavier rainfall is required to trigger planting. Planting is therefore delayed in the runs with parameterized convection and occurs at a seasonally cooler time, altering the environmental conditions experienced by the crops. Even at high resolutions, runs driven by parameterized convection underpredict the small-scale variability in yields produced by realistic rainfall patterns. Correcting the distribution of rainfall frequencies and intensities before use in crop models will improve the process-based representation of the crop life cycle, increasing confidence in the predictions of crop yield. The rainfall biases described here are a common feature of parameterizations of convection, and therefore the crop-model errors described are likely to occur when using any global weather or climate model, thus remaining hidden when using climate-model intercomparisons to evaluate uncertainty

Fact and fiction in housing research: utilizing the creative imagination

As much of our conceptual framework is informed by the experience of the imagination, there is much to be learnt from a study of various creative forms. Narrative fiction can be one such form, allowing us to gain a useful insight into complex features of social life. The purpose of this article is to investigate the treatment of housing issues in contemporary literature in order to gain insights into attitudes, experiences and interpretations from the perspective of a broad cultural milieu. Discussions of professionalism, housing tenure and homelessness have tended to be conducted within a narrow framework and adopted orthodox modes of evaluation. Consequently, the neglect of housing within a wider cultural context has reinforced the isolation of housing issues. The article argues that although discussions of housing and housing policy have been seriously limited within the contemporary novel, there are a number of key insights that can be gained from a discussion of issues within a fictional setting

Fire as a fundamental ecological process: Research advances and frontiers

© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society Fire is a powerful ecological and evolutionary force that regulates organismal traits, population sizes, species interactions, community composition, carbon and nutrient cycling and ecosystem function. It also presents a rapidly growing societal challenge, due to both increasingly destructive wildfires and fire exclusion in fire-dependent ecosystems. As an ecological process, fire integrates complex feedbacks among biological, social and geophysical processes, requiring coordination across several fields and scales of study. Here, we describe the diversity of ways in which fire operates as a fundamental ecological and evolutionary process on Earth. We explore research priorities in six categories of fire ecology: (a) characteristics of fire regimes, (b) changing fire regimes, (c) fire effects on above-ground ecology, (d) fire effects on below-ground ecology, (e) fire behaviour and (f) fire ecology modelling. We identify three emergent themes: the need to study fire across temporal scales, to assess the mechanisms underlying a variety of ecological feedbacks involving fire and to improve representation of fire in a range of modelling contexts. Synthesis: As fire regimes and our relationships with fire continue to change, prioritizing these research areas will facilitate understanding of the ecological causes and consequences of future fires and rethinking fire management alternatives

Beyond Hybridity to the Politics of Scale: International Intervention and 'Local' Politics

The evident failures of international peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions (PSBIs) have recently prompted a focus on the interaction between interventions and target societies and states. Especially popular has been the ‘hybridity’ approach, which understands forms of peace and governance emerging through the mixing of local and international agendas and institutions. This article argues that hybridity is a highly problematic optic. Despite contrary claims, hybridity scholarship falsely dichotomizes ‘local’ and ‘international’ ideal-typical assemblages, and incorrectly presents outcomes as stemming from conflict and accommodation between them. Scholarship in political geography and state theory provides better tools for explaining PSBIs’ outcomes as reflecting socio-political contestation over power and resources. We theorize PSBIs as involving a politics of scale, where different social forces promote and resist alternative scales and modes of governance, depending on their interests and agendas. Contestation between these forces, which may be located at different scales and involved in complex, tactical, multi-scalar alliances, explains the uneven outcomes of international intervention. We demonstrate this using a case study of East Timor, focusing on decentralization and land policy

Randomised controlled trial of school-based humanistic counselling for emotional distress in young people: Feasibility study and preliminary indications of efficacy

The purpose of this study was to test the feasibility of a randomised controlled trial comparing six weeks of humanistic school-based counselling versus waiting list in the reduction of emotional distress in young people, and to obtain initial indications of efficacy. Following a screening procedure, young people (13 - 15 years old) who experienced emotional distress were randomised to either humanistic counselling or waiting list in this multi-site study. Outcomes were assessed using a range of self-report mental health measures, with the emotional symptoms subscale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) acting as the primary outcome indicator. Recruitment procedures were successful, with 32 young people consenting to participate in the trial and 27 completing endpoint measures. Trial procedures were acceptable to all involved in the research. No significant differences were found between the counselling and waiting list groups in reductions in levels of emotional symptoms (Hedges' g = 0.03), but clients allocated to counselling showed significantly greater improvement in prosocial behaviour (g = 0.89) with an average effect size (g) across the nine outcome measures of 0.25. Participants with higher levels of depressive symptoms showed significantly greater change. This study suggested that a randomised controlled trial of counselling in schools is acceptable and feasible, although initial indications of efficacy are mixed