Exploring Art Therapy Techniques in Parent-Child Dyads with Children Who Have Experienced Trauma

Exposure to trauma during childhood has been shown to have severe long-term consequences. It has been shown that art therapy promotes the reduction of trauma symptoms in children, as it allows them to easily engage in the process of therapy through non-verbal treatment. Involving the caregiver in the treatment process of children was shown to hold significant benefits for children, especially in a setting of parent-child art therapy interventions. In this capstone thesis, I present a case study in which I explored the impact of art therapy interventions performed in a parent-child dyad on the well-being of a child who has experienced trauma. The interventions were performed in family sessions over the course of two weeks in a virtual in-home therapy setting. The case study presents significant benefits of the creative interventions on the child’s experienced symptoms, as well as on the parent-child relationship. These preliminary results show a growing need for additional studies on the topic of dyadic art therapy with children who have experienced trauma, in order to improve outcomes in the child’s treatment as well as to strengthen the family relationships and the parent’s ability to support their child

Prolapse in pregnancy

Presentation of uterine prolapse is a normal event in a pregnant woman which can be pre-existent or else manifest in the course of pregnancy. Complications resulting from prolapse of uterus vary from minor cervical infection to spontaneous abortion to preterm labour, maternal and fetal mortality, acute retention of urine and urinary tract infection. Authors of this paper have studied a case of a pregnant lady who presented to the emergency department with prolapse and her line of management which was executed. This was a case report study and management were done as per standard obstetrical guidelines. Patient was counselled at the time of discharge. Implementation of conservative treatment modalities throughout pregnancy with prolapse and their application in accordance of severity of uterine prolapse and patient’s preference may be sufficient to achieve an uneventful pregnancy, normal and spontaneous vaginal delivery.

How do teachers deal with uncertainty in relation to working with children with autism in the context of the introduction of a new technology tool?

This study is an exploration of how teachers deal with uncertainty in the classroom. The particular context of the European Commission funded HANDS project, which developed a mobile technology tool to help children with autism to develop social and life skills. The first prototype of the HANDS tool, running on smartphones, was tested at four special schools across Europe in the 2009/10 academic year. The context of teachers working with children with autism combined with the introduction of a technology innovation is viewed as a fertile crucible for exploring teacher uncertainty. The concept of uncertainty is developed via an integration of Donald Schön‘s idea of reflection in action and Wilfred Bion‘s epistemology. In tandem, a psycho-social interpretivist approach to understanding the teachers‘ work in the classroom, based on infant observation, is developed and applied to a detailed consideration of the work of five teachers at the UK school using HANDS. Several areas of potential uncertainty are identified, including uncertainty relating to areas of practice including diagnosis, the relationship between expert knowledge and practice, the implications of autism for autonomy and agency, and uncertainties in relation to the understanding of and use of new technologies per se. Conclusions are drawn about teacher identifications to new technology, the potentially productive role of uncertainty in the intersubjective relationship between teacher and child, and the relevance of a psycho-social approach to considering professional thinking

Routing in Delay Tolerant Networks

Delay-tolerant networks (DTNs) have the great potential to connecting devices and regions of the world that are presently under-served by current networks. A vital challenge for Delay Tolerant Networks is to determine the routes through the network without ever having an end to end path, or knowing which routers will be connected at any given instant of time. The problem has an added constraint of limited size of buffers at each node. This situation limits the applicability of traditional routing techniques which categorize lack of path as failure of nodes and try to seek for existing end-to-end path. Approaches have been proposed which focus either on epidemic message replication or on previously known information about the connectivity schedule. The epidemic approach, which is basically a flooding technique, of replicating messages to all nodes has a very high overhead and does not perform well with increasing load. It can, however, operate without any prior information on the network configuration. On the other hand, the alternatives, i.e., having a prior knowledge about the connectivity, seems to be infeasible for a self-configuring network. In this project we try to maximize the message delivery rate without compromising on the amount of message discarded. The amount of message discarded has a direct relation to the bandwidth used and the battery consumed. The more the message discarded more is the bandwidth used and battery consumed by every node in transmitting the message. At the same time, with the increase in the number of messages discarded, the cost for processing every message increases and this adversely affects the nodes. Therefore, we have proposed an algorithm where the messages are disseminated faster into the network with lesser number of replication of individual messages. The history of encounter of a node with other nodes gives noisy but valuable information about the network topology. Using this history, we try to route the packets from one node to another using an algorithm that depends on each node’s present available neighbours/contact and the nodes which it has encountered in the recent past. We have also focused on passing the messages to those nodes which are on the move away from the source/forwarder node, as the nodes moving away have a greater probability of disseminating the messages throughout the network and hence increases chances of delivering the message to the destination

Resolving Power of Optical Instruments Using Finite Element Method

The provided simulation takes in various tasks in various parameters to calculate the resolving power of the optical instruments and also conveniently simulates their behavior. To calculate the resolving power of the optical instruments such as prism,telescope or microscope a special technique known as “FINITE ELEMENT METHOD” has been used. Basically in this method the convex lens is divided into several segments and resolving power of each segment is computed separately, details of which is provided in the concerned topic. Finally a software model has been developed for prism, single convex lens and combination of lenses to study and show the required behavior. This software model is developed using Visual C++

Quantization, Dequantization, and Distinguished States

Geometric quantization is a natural way to construct quantum models starting from classical data. In this work, we start from a symplectic vector space with an inner product and -- using techniques of geometric quantization -- construct the quantum algebra and equip it with a distinguished state. We compare our result with the construction due to Sorkin -- which starts from the same input data -- and show that our distinguished state coincides with the Sorkin-Johnson state. Sorkin's construction was originally applied to the free scalar field over a causal set (locally finite, partially ordered set). Our perspective suggests a natural generalization to less linear examples, such as an interacting field.Comment: 42 page

Prevalence & risk factors for soil transmitted helminth infection among school children in south India

Background & objectives: Soil-transmitted helminths (STH) are a major public health problem in tropical and sub-tropical countries, affecting the physical growth and cognitive development in schoolage children. This study was aimed to assess the prevalence and risk factors of STH infection among school children aged 6-14 yr in Vellore and Thiruvanamalai districts in south India. Methods: Children aged 6-14 yr, going to government and government aided schools (n=33, randomly selected) in Vellore and Thiruvanamalai districts were screened to estimate the prevalence of STH, and a case control study was done on a subset to assess the risk factors for the infection. Results: The prevalence of STH was 7.8 per cent, varying widely in schools from 0 to 20.4 per cent, in 3706 screened children. Hookworm (8.4%) rates were high in rural areas, while Ascaris (3.3%) and Trichuris (2.2%) were more prevalent among urban children. Consumption of deworming tablets (OR=0.25, P<0.01) offered protection, while residing in a field hut (OR=6.73, P=0.02) and unhygienic practices like open air defaecation (OR=5.37, P<0.01), keeping untrimmed nails (OR=2.53, P=0.01) or eating food fallen on the ground (OR=2.52, P=0.01) were important risk factors for STH infection. Interpretation & conclusions: Our study indicated that school children with specific risk factors in the studied area were vulnerable subpopulation with elevated risk of STH infection. Identifying risk factors and dynamics of transmission in vulnerable groups can help to plan for effective prevention strategies