Early interventions following exposure to traumatic events: psychological debriefing and the law

Defines Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and discusses the advantages of providing "Critical Incident Stress Debriefing" (CISD) to those who have witnessed traumatic events to prevent them developing PTSD. Outlines the development of CISD, the procedure itself and concerns arising from medical studies into its effectiveness. Examines the legal implications, including the existence of a duty of care to provide CISD or liability for debriefings which are negligently provided. Sets out briefly the status of psychological debriefing amongst support organisations

Higher education in the Republic of Yemen : the University of Sana'a

Enrollment in the University of Sana'a grew gradually from fewer than 100 students in 1970, shortly after it opened, to about 4,500 in 1979. Government policy at first tried to balance the university enrollment with the capacity of the marketplace to absorb university graduates. University enrollment began to increase at an outstanding rate after 1985, following the heavy expansion of secondary education in the country in the late 1970s. From 1987 to 1991, total enrollment expanded from about 17,000 to 44,000 students. If the present rate of intake continues, total enrollment is projected to reach 79,000 students by the year 2000. This explosive growth has created numerous problems, including overcrowded classrooms, insufficient staff resources, deteriorating physical plant and equipment, inadequate educational materials and equipment, and a low level of absorption of graduates into the labor force. These developments threaten the quality of degree programs in several disciplines. The government should act immediately to develop a strategy to protect its investment in higher education. The policy should consider the country's medium and long-term needs, the constraints on its resources, and the growing social aspirations of its people. The goal of this assessment should be to design a strategy that will make higher education a more effective investment to serve the needs of the country and to protect itsresources.Gender and Education,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Teaching and Learning,Curriculum&Instruction,Tertiary Education

Recent trends in metals extraction

After near 70 years of practical usage, solvent extraction is a perfectly mastered technique of separation, widely used on an industrial scale for the separation of metals mainly from raw materials. However, currently, in the era of depleting natural resources and increasingly less accessible deposits, environmental restrictions, etc., an increasing interest, both from social and economical constrains, is being directed at the extraction of metals from the secondary sources (such as batteries, electronic scrap). In many cases, solvent extraction, due to its operational characteristics, can be considered as the Best Available Technology for the purpose of separating multielemental metal solutions. This paper provides a brief overview of past achievements and present scenario of solvent extraction investigations and developments, describing some recently commissioned solvent extraction plants, whereas the Skorpion Zinc plant (Namibia) for zinc extraction from raw materials and caesium removal from radioactive High Level Wastes (HLWs) are told over in detail as case studies. The paper also presents some proposals for the use of liquid-liquid extraction to separate metal ions from secondary sources (e.g. cobalt from industrial waste streams). The review highlights the emerging use of ionic liquids as new extractants for metals, providing an insight into this exciting research field. Despite its detractors, solvent extraction has entered in force into XXI century as a leading separation technology for metals.Peer Reviewe

Transport of Zn(II), Fe(II), Fe(III) across polymer inclusion membranes (PIM) and flat sheet supported liquid membranes (SLM) containing phosphonium ionic liquids as metal ion carriers

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Separation Science and Technology on 18/04/2016, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01496395.2016.1174265In this work transport of Zn(II), Fe(II) and Fe(III) ions from chloride aqueous solutions across polymer inclusion membranes (PIMs) and supported liquid membranes (SLMs) containing one of three phosphonium ionic liquids: trihexyl(tetradecyl)phosphonium chloride (Cyphos IL 101), trihexyl(tetradecyl)phosphonium bis(2,4,4-trimethylpentyl)phosphinate (Cyphos IL 104) and tributyl(tetradecyl)phosphonium chloride (Cyphos IL 167) as an ion carrier was reported. The results show that Zn(II) and Fe(III) are effectively transported through PIMs and SLMs, while Fe(II) transport is not effective. The highest values of initial flux and permeability coefficient of Zn(II) were noticed for SLM containing Cyphos IL 167. Cyphos IL 101-containing SLM is more stable than PIM.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A longitudinal investigation of the relationship between unconditional positive self-regard and posttraumatic growth

The present study investigated whether unconditional positive self-regard (UPSR) is associated with subsequent posttraumatic growth (PTG) following the experience of a traumatic life event. A total of 143 participants completed an online questionnaire to assess the experience of traumatic life events, posttraumatic stress, well-being and UPSR (Time 1). Three months later, 76 of the participants completed measures of well-being and perceived PTG (Time 2). Analyses were conducted to test for association between UPSR at Time 1 and perceptions of PTG at Time 2. Results showed that higher UPSR at T1 was associated with higher perceived PTG at Time 2. To measure actual growth, individual differences in well-being were computed between Time 1 and Time 2. Results showed that higher UPSR at T1 was associated with higher actual PTG. Implications of these findings are discussed and future directions for research in this area considered. Specifically, results are consistent with a person-centered understanding of therapeutic approaches to the facilitation of PT

Improving parsing by incorporating "prosodic clause boundaries" into a grammar

In written language, punctuation is used to separate main and subordinate clause. In spoken language, ambiguities arise due to missing punctuation, but clause boundaries are often marked prosodically and can be used instead. We detect PCBs (Prosodically markedClauseBoundaries) by using prosodic features (duration, intonation, energy, and pause information) with a neural network, achieving a recognition rate of 82%. PCBs are integrated into our grammar using a special syntactic category "break" that can be used in the phrase-structure rules of the grammar in a similar way as punctuation is used in grammars for written language. Whereas punctuation in most cases is obligatory, PCBs are sometimes optional. Moreover, they can in principle occur everywhere in the sentence due e.g. to hesitations or misrecognition. To cope with these problems we tested two different approaches: A slightly modified parser for word chains containing PCBs and a word graph parser that takes the probabilities of PCBs into account. Tests were conducted on a subset of infinitive subordinate clauses from a large speech database containing sentences from the domain of train table inquiries. The average number of syntactic derivations could be reduced by about 70 % even when working on recognized word graphs

Automatic classification of prosodically marked phrase boundaries in German

A large corpus has been created automatically and read by speakers. Phrase boundaries were labeled in the sentences automatically during sentence generation. Perception experiments on a subset of 500 utterances showed a high agreement between the automatically generated boundary markers and the ones perceived by listeners. Gaussian distribution and polynomial classifiers were trained on a set of prosodic features computed from the speech signal using the automatically generated boundary markers. Comparing the classification results with the judgments of the listeners yielded in a recognition rate of 87%. A combination with stochastic language models improved the recognition rate to 90%. We found that the pause and the durational features are most important for the classification, but that the influence of F0 is not neglectable

Breaking stress of neutron star crust

The breaking stress (the maximum of the stress-strain curve) of neutron star crust is important for neutron star physics including pulsar glitches, emission of gravitational waves from static mountains, and flares from star quakes. We perform many molecular dynamic simulations of the breaking stress at different coupling parameters (inverse temperatures) and strain rates. We describe our results with the Zhurkov model of strength. We apply this model to estimate the breaking stress for timescales ~1 s - 1 year, which are most important for applications, but much longer than can be directly simulated. At these timescales the breaking stress depends strongly on the temperature. For coupling parameter <200, matter breaks at very small stress, if it is applied for a few years. This viscoelastic creep can limit the lifetime of mountains on neutron stars. We also suggest an alternative model of timescale-independent breaking stress, which can be used to estimate an upper limit on the breaking stress.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letter

Oxygenation inhibits the physiological tissue-protecting mechanism and thereby exacerbates acute inflammatory lung injury

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) usually requires symptomatic supportive therapy by intubation and mechanical ventilation with the supplemental use of high oxygen concentrations. Although oxygen therapy represents a life-saving measure, the recent discovery of a critical tissue-protecting mechanism predicts that administration of oxygen to ARDS patients with uncontrolled pulmonary inflammation also may have dangerous side effects. Oxygenation may weaken the local tissue hypoxia-driven and adenosine A2A receptor (A2AR)-mediated anti-inflammatory mechanism and thereby further exacerbate lung injury. Here we report experiments with wild-type and adenosine A2AR-deficient mice that confirm the predicted effects of oxygen. These results also suggest the possibility of iatrogenic exacerbation of acute lung injury upon oxygen administration due to the oxygenation-associated elimination of A2AR-mediated lung tissue-protecting pathway. We show that this potential complication of clinically widely used oxygenation procedures could be completely prevented by intratracheal injection of a selective A2AR agonist to compensate for the oxygenation-related loss of the lung tissue-protecting endogenous adenosine. The identification of a major iatrogenic complication of oxygen therapy in conditions of acute lung inflammation attracts attention to the need for clinical and epidemiological studies of ARDS patients who require oxygen therapy. It is proposed that oxygen therapy in patients with ARDS and other causes of lung inflammation should be combined with anti-inflammatory measures, e.g., with inhalative application of A2AR agonists. The reported observations may also answer the long-standing question as to why the lungs are the most susceptible to inflammatory injury and why lung failure usually precedes multiple organ failure