Karaoke Is The Best Medicine: The Immeasurable Value of Hospital Recreation Workers Through The Early Twentieth Century

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

The evolution of pilgrimage practice in early modern Ireland

In the religious history of Lreland, the pilgrimages to Lough Derg and Our Lady's Island have occupied a special place of interest for centuries. The pilgrimage practice at Lough Derg offers insights into certain aspects of study which warrant further attention in pilgrimage scholarship. Historians have generally overlooked the significant shifts in the nature of the pilgrimage exercises brought about as a result of the Counter-Reformation. Efforts to transform the pilgrimage from a ritualistic experience into an inner spiritual experience demand a proper investigation into the nature of these devotional shifts. Ln the early seventeenth century pilgrims at Lough Derg performed ritual actions sanctioned by custom and transmitted by oral tradition. However, in the early eighteenth century the religious event was reshaped by the Franciscans. Pilgrims were provided with written instructions and encouraged to meditate on their actions, turning the ritual into an example of Tridentine spirituality. This study attempts to compare the significant shifts in the nature of the Lough Derg pilgrimage with other Irish pilgrimage sites such as Our Lady's Island, Croagh Patrick and Struell Wells. It is also the objective of this study to investigate the antiquity of traditional practices modified by the clergy. Traditional practices were subject to minute shifts over time. The main aim in this thesis is to examine how newly invented traditions became accepted and embedded, and how they were in turn, expanded on

Five Principles for Vertical Merger Enforcement Policy

There seems to be consensus that the Department of Justice’s 1984 Vertical Merger Guidelines do not reflect either modern theoretical and empirical economic analysis or current agency enforcement policy. Yet widely divergent views of preferred enforcement policies have been expressed among agency enforcers and commentators. Based on our review of the relevant economic literature and our experience analyzing vertical mergers, we recommend that the enforcement agencies adopt five principles: (i) The agencies should consider and investigate the full range of potential anticompetitive harms when evaluating vertical mergers; (ii) The agencies should decline to presume that vertical mergers benefit competition on balance in the oligopoly markets that typically prompt agency review, nor set a higher evidentiary standard based on such a presumption; (iii) The agencies should evaluate claimed efficiencies resulting from vertical mergers as carefully and critically as they evaluate claimed efficiencies resulting from horizontal mergers, and require the merging parties to show that the efficiencies are verifiable, merger-specific and sufficient to reverse the potential anticompetitive effects; (iv) The agencies should decline to adopt a safe harbor for vertical mergers, even if rebuttable, except perhaps when both firms compete in unconcentrated markets; (v) The agencies should consider adopting rebuttable anticompetitive presumptions that a vertical merger harms competition when certain factual predicates are satisfied. We do not intend these presumptions to describe all the ways by which vertical mergers can harm competition, so the agencies should continue to investigate vertical mergers that raise concerns about input and customer foreclosure, loss of a disruptive or maverick firm, evasion of rate regulation or other threats to competition, even if the specific factual predicates of the presumptions are not satisfied

Reading list (R)evolution – exploring the value of reading lists as a pedagogical tool to support students' development of information skills

Reading list (R)evolution – exploring the value of reading lists as a pedagogical tool to support students’ development of information skills. Reading lists are a ubiquitous part of U.K. Higher Education (H.E.); every course has one, tutors are required to provide them, students expect to have them. There are clear expectations that reading lists exist in H.E., but beyond that, it is not exactly clear what their value is and how are they really being used. Existing literature is primarily concerned with the content and structure of reading lists, rather than their role in supporting students’ learning (Thomson et al., 2003; Stokes and Martin, 2008). Some studies have highlighted the value of annotated reading lists for signposting students to different sources of information in terms of format, level and style of writing (Smith, 2008; Chelin et al., 2005; Maher and Mitchell, 2010). This can help to support or ‘scaffold’ students’ development of key information skills (Lumsden et al., 2010), notably the ability to access, retrieve and use information appropriately and effectively. The use of reading lists as a tool for supporting information skills development requires an active approach to the design and management of reading lists (Miller, 1999; Stokes and Martin, 2008). It is time to put reading lists under the spotlight (Martin and Stokes, 2006) and to recognise that reading lists are a core part of students’ learning experience. We need to explore how students use and view reading lists, and design them accordingly, so that we can create relevant and valuable reading lists. This seminar presents interim practitioner research designed to explore the potential of enhanced reading lists to support students’ information skills development. In summer 2011 the presenters were awarded the Library and Information Research Group (LIRG) Research Award to fund their action research into reading lists. The first stage of the project involved a reading list analysis, based on a checklist of criteria informed by key themes emerging from the literature. The themes were then used to plan semi-structured interviews with academic staff and focus groups with students to explore their expectations and experiences of reading lists. This research has been supported by the work of a university funded student research assistant, who gained research experience and a bursary. The student researcher added another perspective to the project and was involved in conducting the focus groups to encourage students to share openly amongst their peers. This research seminar will report our findings so far and consider the impact of reading lists on the student experience. The seminar will engage participants in discussions around the value and relevance of reading lists for supporting students’ learning and skills development, including views of the use and expectation of reading lists. Examples of reading lists will be used as discussion points and to encourage participants to reflect on the students’ experience of reading lists. The seminar will facilitate the sharing and generation of ideas on how we can promote more active engagement with reading lists by all stakeholders (academics, students, librarians). Our research is designed to encourage the (r)evolution of reading lists so that they are used as a valuable pedagogical tool to support students’ information skills development and enhance their learning at universit

The Effect of Combined Sensory and Semantic Components on Audio–Visual Speech Perception in Older Adults

Previous studies have found that perception in older people benefits from multisensory over unisensory information. As normal speech recognition is affected by both the auditory input and the visual lip movements of the speaker, we investigated the efficiency of audio and visual integration in an older population by manipulating the relative reliability of the auditory and visual information in speech. We also investigated the role of the semantic context of the sentence to assess whether audio–visual integration is affected by top-down semantic processing. We presented participants with audio–visual sentences in which the visual component was either blurred or not blurred. We found that there was a greater cost in recall performance for semantically meaningless speech in the audio–visual ‘blur’ compared to audio–visual ‘no blur’ condition and this effect was specific to the older group. Our findings have implications for understanding how aging affects efficient multisensory integration for the perception of speech and suggests that multisensory inputs may benefit speech perception in older adults when the semantic content of the speech is unpredictable

Ruling Culture: Tomb Robbers, State Power, and the Struggle for Italian Antiquities.

Ancient artifacts and ruins are evocative symbols of modern Italy. Long subject to contingent valuations, ranging from hostility and active destruction to romanticization and ardent protection, antiquities are now fiercely contested resources for state power, scientific expertise, and cultural identity. Employing ethnographic, historical, material, and institutional methods, this dissertation shows how these domains of authority come together to constitute what I call cultural power. The nationalization of Italian antiquities offered a blueprint for other nation-states which sought to assert control over the circulation of ancient objects and ruins – key symbolic resources. The core finding in the dissertation is that cultural power is a distinct sphere of state power that is constituted by control over sites, objects, and practices but is not limited to the cultural sphere. Drawing on theories and methods from sociology, cultural anthropology, art history, and legal studies, I ask why the current framework for antiquities nationalization took shape the way it did, and what effect it has on the ways that people “know” the common national past. The reclassification of antiquities as state property was a crucial, early event in the amassing of cultural power in Italy. The 1969 establishment of the world’s first art crimes police unit (the “Art Squad”) extended Italian cultural power to repatriation practices, a key praxis in which nation-states’ heritage programs conflict and compete. A decades-long campaign against unauthorized excavators, known as “tomb robbers” (tombaroli in Italian) flexes cultural power at home. Cultural power also impacts nationhood epistemology. The confluence of science, state administration, and archaeological mysticism promotes a new mode of experience with Italy’s ancient past: indexical history, in which antiquities configure as quantifiable “wins”, as contrasted with iconical history, which narrated the past through select, sacralized images and objects. Key scholarly contributions of my project are clarification of the relationship between state power, science, and culture by transcending the traditional scholarly distinction between ethnic and civic nationalism; original ethnographic data that complicate existing scholarly views on looting and the illicit antiquities trade; and a material-focused agenda for studying the relationship between state and nation.PHDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108983/1/frose_1.pd

Recommendations and Comments on the Draft Vertical Merger Guidelines

These recommendations and comments respond to the request by the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division for public comment on the draft 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines. We commend the agencies for updating the 1984 non-horizontal merger guidelines by recognizing the substantial advances in economic thinking about vertical mergers in the thirty-five years since those guidelines were issued. Our comments emphasize four issues: (i) the treatment of the elimination of double marginalization (“EDM”), particularly that the draft vertical merger guidelines appear inappropriately to make proof of cognizability part of the agencies burden and that they appear to inappropriately treat the merging firm’s failure to have eliminated double marginalization pre-merger as proof that the merger would lead to EDM and that the post-merger EDM would be merger-specific; (ii) the seemingly arbitrary and inappropriately permissive safe harbor; (iii) the inappropriate (though perhaps unintended) apparent requirement that harms be quantified; and (iv) the inappropriate (though perhaps unintended) apparent requirement that the agencies show that foreclosure would not have been profitable before the merger. We are concerned that these features of the draft Guidelines will lead to under-enforcement and false negatives (including under-deterrence)

Priority Symptoms, Causes, and Self-Management Strategies Reported by AYAs With Cancer

Context Cancer and symptom experiences of adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with cancer can be highly variable, creating challenges for clinicians and researchers who seek to optimize AYAs\u27 health outcomes. Understanding the heuristics AYAs use to designate priority symptoms can provide insight into the meaning they assign to their symptoms and self-management behaviors. Objectives This study described the frequency and characteristics of priority symptoms. It qualitatively explored reasons for a symptom\u27s designation as a priority symptom, perceived causes of priority symptoms, and strategies AYAs use to manage priority symptoms. Methods Participants in this single-group, longitudinal study reported symptoms using a heuristics-based symptom reporting tool, the Computerized Symptom Capture Tool, at two scheduled visits for chemotherapy. AYAs designated priority symptoms and responded to three short answer questions: What makes this a priority symptom?, What do you think causes it?, and What do you do to make it better? Results Eighty-six AYAs, 15–29 years of age (median 19 years), identified 189 priority symptoms. Priority symptoms were of greater severity (t = 3.43; P \u3c 0.01) and distress (t = 4.02; P \u3c 0.01) compared with nonpriority symptoms. Lack of energy, nausea, difficulty sleeping, and pain comprised 39% of priority symptoms. Reasons for priority designation included the impact of the symptom and the attributes of the symptom. Categories of self-management strategies included “Physical Care Strategies,” “Things I take (or not),” and “Psychosocial Care Strategies.” Conclusion Supporting AYAs to identify their priority symptoms may facilitate a more personalized approach to care. Seeking the patient\u27s perspective regarding priority symptoms could enhance patient-clinician collaboration in symptom management

Saying Hello World with Epsilon - A Solution to the 2011 Instructive Case

Epsilon is an extensible platform of integrated and task-specific languages for model management. With solutions to the 2011 TTC Hello World case, this paper demonstrates some of the key features of the Epsilon Object Language (an extension and reworking of OCL), which is at the core of Epsilon. In addition, the paper introduces several of the task-specific languages provided by Epsilon including the Epsilon Generation Language (for model-to-text transformation), the Epsilon Validation Language (for model validation) and Epsilon Flock (for model migration).Comment: In Proceedings TTC 2011, arXiv:1111.440

Can co-created knowledge mobilisation interventions alter and enhance mindlines to improve childhood eczema care? A UK-based Social Impact Framework evaluation

Objective To evaluate the impact of using knowledge mobilisation interventions to alter and enhance mindlines and improve childhood eczema care.Design The eczema mindlines study involved three stages: (1) mapping and confirming eczema mindlines, (2) intervention development and delivery and (3) analysis of intervention impact. The focus of this paper is on stage 3. Data analysis was guided by the Social Impact Framework to address the questions: (1) what is the impact of this study on individuals and groups? (2) what changes in behaviour and practice have occurred due to their involvement? (3) what mechanisms have enabled these impacts or changes to occur? and (4) what are the recommendations and questions arising from this research?Settings A deprived inner-city neighbourhood in central England and national/international settings.Participants Patients, practitioners and wider community members exposed to the interventions locally, nationally and internationally.Results Data revealed tangible multi-level, relational and intellectual impacts. Mechanisms supporting impact included: simplicity and consistency of messages adapted to audience, flexibility, opportunism and perseverance, personal interconnectivity and acknowledgement of emotion. Co-created knowledge mobilisation strategies to alter and enhance mindlines mediated through knowledge brokering were effective in producing tangible changes in eczema care practice and self-management and in ‘mainstreaming’ childhood eczema in positive way across communities. These changes cannot be directly attributed to the knowledge mobilisation interventions, however, the evidence points to the significant contribution made.Conclusion Co-created knowledge mobilisation interventions offer a valuable method of altering and enhancing eczema mindlines across lay-practitioner-wider society boundaries. The Social Impact Framework provides comprehensive method of understanding and documenting the complex web of impact occurring as a result of knowledge mobilisation. This approach is transferable to managing other long-term conditions