77 research outputs found
Bad Practice in Erosion Management: The Southern Sicily Case Study
This case study from Sicily illustrates a common sequence of events
where one unwise action was countered with another, which in turn created
additional problems. The situation arose through strong political interference and
ignorance (or lack of concern) regarding the environmental impacts of human
interventions on the shoreline and by the public perception that government has a
duty to protect private property. The poor design and location of ports and harbours
produced infilling problems and huge updrift accretion with concomitant downdrift
erosion. The human-induced coastal retreat was counteracted by the progressive
emplacement of breakwaters creating a âdominoâ effect. On many occasions
these were constructed to protect unplanned and illegal (in the sense that they do
not conform to planning regulations) beachfront summer houses. Without the
presence of these structures, there would have been no need for publicly funded
intervention.
Furthermore, only a narrow coastal belt close to the shoreline is used by
bathers on the wide beaches formed updrift of ports and harbours and in the lee
of breakwaters, most of the accreted beach being unused or partially occupied by
tourist developments. Thus beach users and municipalities acquired some benefits
from beach accretion at specific sites, the opposite being true in eroding areas
Self-Motion Holds a Special Status in Visual Processing
Agency plays an important role in self-recognition from motion. Here, we investigated whether our own movements benefit from preferential processing even when the task is unrelated to self-recognition, and does not involve agency judgments. Participants searched for a moving target defined by its known shape among moving distractors, while continuously moving the computer mouse with one hand. They thereby controlled the motion of one item, which was randomly either the target or any of the distractors, while the other items followed pre-recorded motion pathways. Performance was more accurate and less prone to degradation as set size increased when the target was the self-controlled item. An additional experiment confirmed that participant-controlled motion was not physically more salient than motion recorded offline. We found no evidence that self-controlled items captured attention. Taken together, these results suggest that visual events are perceived more accurately when they are the consequences of our actions, even when self-motion is task irrelevant
Substance abuse and intimate partner violence: treatment considerations
Given the increased use of marital- and family-based treatments as part of treatment for alcoholism and other drug disorders, providers are increasingly faced with the challenge of addressing intimate partner violence among their patients and their intimate partners. Yet, effective options for clinicians who confront this issue are extremely limited. While the typical response of providers is to refer these cases to some form of batterers' treatment, three fundamental concerns make this strategy problematic: (1) most of the agencies that provide batterers' treatment only accept individuals who are legally mandated to complete their programs; (2) among programs that do accept nonmandated patients, most substance-abusing patients do not accept such referrals or drop out early in the treatment process; and (3) available evidence suggests these programs may not be effective in reducing intimate partner violence. Given these very significant concerns with the current referral approach, coupled with the high incidence of IPV among individuals entering substance abuse treatment, providers need to develop strategies for addressing IPV that can be incorporated and integrated into their base intervention packages
On-demand manufacturing of clinical-quality biopharmaceuticals
Conventional manufacturing of protein biopharmaceuticals in centralized, large-scale, single-product facilities is not well-suited to the agile production of drugs for small patient populations or individuals. Previous solutions for small-scale manufacturing are limited in both process reproducibility and product quality, owing to their complicated means of protein expression and purification. We describe an automated, benchtop, multiproduct manufacturing system, called Integrated Scalable Cyto-Technology (InSCyT), for the end-to-end production of hundreds to thousands of doses of clinical-quality protein biologics in about 3 d. Unlike previous systems, InSCyT includes fully integrated modules for sustained production, efficient purification without the use of affinity tags, and formulation to a final dosage form of recombinant biopharmaceuticals. We demonstrate that InSCyT can accelerate process development from sequence to purified drug in 12 weeks. We used integrated design to produce human growth hormone, interferon α-2b and granulocyte colony-stimulating factor with highly similar processes on this system and show that their purity and potency are comparable to those of marketed reference products
Emotion regulation
Synonyms: emotional control; emotion-related self-regulation; stress-regulation; mood-regulation; affect-regulation; emotional intelligence
Definition: Emotion regulation refers to the conscious or unconscious processes of monitoring, evaluating, modulating, and managing emotional experiences and expression of emotion in terms of intensity, form, and duration of feelings, emotion-related physiological states and behaviors
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