Using virtual reality for anxiety therapy

Phobias, defined as a persistent and often irrational fear of an object or situation, are a very common type of anxiety disorder that can make it extremely difficult if not impossible for sufferers to interact with the world in a normal and healthy fashion. Traditionally therapists have used a concept known as systematic desensitization to help patients gain control of the emotional and physical reaction to their phobia. Systematic desensitization is employed using a type of treatment known as exposure therapy in which the patients are gradually made to think about and eventually face whatever triggers their anxiety until they are able to control their response during full exposure. While this treatment method can prove effective for some patients, we have identified two major problems with it. First, many patients are reluctant to undergo treatment and would rather ignore their phobia than be forced to face it. Second, depending on the type of phobia, treatment can quickly become expensive if the therapist has to travel with the patient outside of the office. This paper outlines a system we developed that implements emerging virtual reality technologies as a tool for therapists to supplement the traditional treatments for anxiety disorders such as phobias. Our system uses the Oculus Rift, the Leap Motion, a mobile application, and a simulation running in the Unity Game Engine to create an immersive virtual experience for the patient while still giving the therapist the necessary control over the treatment. We believe that this system has the potential to provide therapists with a safer, more controlled, cheaper, and ultimately more effective way to expose their patients to their phobias

Play and Creativity

Can students learn to be more creative? Creativity may not be a matter of learning but of unlearning. We have in us a natural innate built-in drive designed to push us to learn and experience important principles of creativity, things like; curiosity, discovery, exploration, experimentation, communicating, and socializing. This instinctive drive is called play. Play attributes are like creative attributes but are not sufficiently comprehensive as to be considered synonymous. What can be learned from play and what can be unlearned from our training to be more creative. It is time to push back and provide opportunities for unlearning those things that limit our creativity and relearn those important attributes gained through principles of play

Kepler Transit Depths Contaminated by a Phantom Star

We present ground-based observations from the Discovery Channel Telescope (DCT) of three transits of Kepler-445c---a supposed super-Earth exoplanet with properties resembling GJ 1214b---and demonstrate that the transit depth is approximately 50 percent shallower than the depth previously inferred from Kepler Spacecraft data. The resulting decrease in planetary radius significantly alters the interpretation of the exoplanet's bulk composition. Despite the faintness of the M4 dwarf host star, our ground-based photometry clearly recovers each transit and achieves repeatable 1-sigma precision of approximately 0.2 percent (2 millimags). The transit parameters estimated from the DCT data are discrepant with those inferred from the Kepler data to at least 17-sigma confidence. This inconsistency is due to a subtle miscalculation of the stellar crowding metric during the Kepler pre-search data conditioning (PDC). The crowding metric, or CROWDSAP, is contaminated by a non-existent "phantom star" originating in the USNO-B1 catalog and inherited by the Kepler Input Catalog (KIC). Phantom stars in the KIC are likely rare, but they have the potential to affect statistical studies of Kepler targets that use the PDC transit depths for a large number of exoplanets where individual follow-up observation of each is not possible. The miscalculation of Kepler-445c's transit depth emphasizes the importance of stellar crowding in the Kepler data, and provides a cautionary tale for the analysis of data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which will have even larger pixels than Kepler.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication in AJ. Transit light curves will be available from AJ as Db

Web-Based Digital Portfolios and Counselor Supervision

Web-based digital portfolios provide a promising tool for counselor supervisors looking for effective ways to evaluate counselor candidates while maximizing the associated learning process. This paper describes a project involving the use of web-based portfolios that were created by counselor candidates. The project illustrates the benefits of the web-based portfolio for both the counselor supervisor and for the counselors in training

Skin prick testing does not reflect the presence of IgE against food allergens in adult eosinophilic esophagitis patients: a case study

Skin prick testing is widely used to predict the presence of allergen-specific IgE. In eosinophilic esophagitis patients, who frequently exhibit polysensitization and broad reactivity upon skin prick testing, this is commonly used to aid avoidance recommendations in the clinical management of their disease. We present here the predictive value of skin prick testing for the presence of allergen-specific IgE, in 12 patients, determined by immunoblot against the allergen extracts using individual-matched serum. Our results demonstrate a high degree of predictive value for aeroallergens but a poor predictive value for food allergens. This suggests that skin prick testing likely identifies IgE reactivity towards aeroallergens in adult eosinophilic esophagitis but this is not true for foods. Consequently, IgE immunoblotting might be required for determining food avoidance in these patients

The influence of nuclei content on cloud cavitation about a hydrofoil

International audienceThe dynamics of cloud cavitation about a 3D hydrofoil are investigated experimentally in a cavitation tunnel with both an abundance and dearth of freestream nuclei. The rectangular-planform, NACA hydrofoil was tested at a Reynolds number of $1.4 × 10^6$, a cavitation number of 0.55 and an incidence of 6°. High-speed photography of cavitation shedding phenomena was acquired simultaneously with unsteady force measurement to enable identification of cavity shedding modes corresponding with force spectral peaks. Two shedding modes are evident for both the nuclei deplete and abundant cases, although each are driven by different flow phenomena. The high-frequency mode for the nuclei deplete case is driven primarily by large-scale re-entrant jet formation during the growth phase, but shockwave propagation for the collapse phase of the cycle. The weaker low-frequency mode occurs because the strength of shedding at the hydrofoil tip varies at half the fundamental frequency. The dominant mode for the abundant case is the low-frequency mode which is some. times slower than the nuclei deplete case. The high-frequency mode for the nuclei abundant case is due to the propagation of two shockwaves; the passage of the first only partially condenses the cavity, while the second condenses a much larger region of the cavity

Multiwavelength transit observations of the candidate disintegrating planetesimals orbiting WD 1145+017

We present multiwavelength, ground-based follow-up photometry of the white dwarf WD 1145+017, which has recently been suggested to be orbited by up to six or more short-period, low-mass, disintegrating planetesimals. We detect nine significant dips in flux of between 10% and 30% of the stellar flux in our ~32 hr of photometry, suggesting that WD 1145+017 is indeed being orbited by multiple, short-period objects. Through fits to the asymmetric transits that we observe, we confirm that the transit egress is usually longer than the ingress, and that the transit duration is longer than expected for a solid body at these short periods, all suggesting that these objects have cometary tails streaming behind them. The precise orbital periods of the planetesimals are unclear, but at least one object, and likely more, have orbital periods of ~4.5 hr. We are otherwise unable to confirm the specific periods that have been reported, bringing into question the long-term stability of these periods. Our high-precision photometry also displays low-amplitude variations, suggesting that dusty material is consistently passing in front of the white dwarf, either from discarded material from these disintegrating planetesimals or from the detected dusty debris disk. We compare the transit depths in the V- and R-bands of our multiwavelength photometry, and find no significant difference; therefore, for likely compositions, the radius of single-size particles in the cometary tails streaming behind the planetesimals must be ~0.15 μm or larger, or ~0.06 μm or smaller, with 2σ confidence