Unveiling the invisible: A narrative inquiry about the life of adults in Malta who grew up with a sibling diagnosed with a depressive or anxiety disorder

Mental health not only affects the individual, but also other members of the family. Literature focuses mostly on the parents and/or the individual being affected by the mental illness, while putting aside the siblings and how they are affected when issues related to mental illness emerge during their adolescence. As siblings grow up, the tendency is that they spend a lot of time together, and when mental health emerges, a lot of changes are incurred. This study aims to give a voice to the people who are normally silenced. Therefore, through their narratives, the study aims to understand better the trajectories of the silenced sibling, from adolescence to adulthood and how this journey shaped one’s meaning of life. Furthermore, through understanding one’s story, the helping professionals can work in a holistic manner within the family system. A narrative approach was adopted and thus, seven semi- structured interviews were conducted with participants who experienced having a sibling with depression and other mental health issues emerging during their adolescence. Elliot’s first and second order narrative analysis was used to elicit four main themes. The findings revealed that due to the emergence of symptoms of mental illness within the family, the participants had to adopt new roles to be of help to the family. Moreover, how the participants felt and dealt with mental health within the family was explored. In addition, the theme of loss and how this journey has left an effect on their adulthood was highlighted. The participants explored how their siblings’ mental illness have left them struggling in some aspects in their adulthood, but also how they have grown from this experience, making the purpose of living more meaningful to them. It seems that therapy has helped most of participants to heal and grow form this experience. Since the sample was small and based in Malta, results cannot be generalized as the participants spoke from a Maltese cultural background related to mental health, yet the meaning can be transferable. Recommendation for helping professionals to work more with all the family members, from an early start, would be beneficial in the long run

Blood lead levels in pregnant women and the neonate

Population studies carried out during the 1980s had shown that the Maltese population was characterized by high blood lead (PbB) levels. These high levels appeared to be a feature at all age groups including neonates. A number of environmental control measures had been initiated to attempt to decrease these PbB levels. The present study reviews PbB levels in pregnant women and newborns. It is shown that mean cord PbB levels decreased significantly in the last decade from a mean of 165.1 + 87.9 ug/I in 1985 to 89.79 + 31.23 ug/I in 1996. This decrease did not correlate with the increasing use of multimineral supplements which include the zinc cation said to be useful to counter the effects of chronic lead intoxication. Placental transfer of lead is also shown to follow closely maternal levels with a correlation coefficient of 0.81. In spite of the apparent decrease in PbB levels, about half of newborns still I have levels which require preventive community measures.peer-reviewe

Quadratic solitary waves in a counterpropagating quasi-phase-matched configuration

We demonstrate the possibility of self-trapping of optical beams by use of quasi phase matching in a counterpropagating configuration in quadratic media. We also show the predominant stability of these spatial self-guided beams and estimate the power level required for their experimental observation.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figure

An action semantics for MML.

This paper describes an action semantics for UML based on the Meta-Modelling Language (MML) - a precise meta-modelling language designed for developing families of UML languages. Actions are de¯ned as computational procedures with side-e®ects. The action semantics are described in the MML style, with model, instance and semantic packages. Di®erent actions are described as specializations of the basic action in their own package. The aim is to show that by using a Catalysis like package extension mechanism, with precise mappings to a simple semantic domain, a well-structured and extensible model for an action language can be obtained

Revised submission for MOF 2.0 query / views / transformations RFP.

This submission presents the QVT-Partners proposal for the MOF 2.0 QVT standard. The proposal consists of a number of key ingredients which we briefly discuss in this section. -Specification and implementation: A common scenario in the development of any artifact is to first create a specification of the form and behaviour of the the artifact, and then realise an implementation which satisfies the specification. The specification is characterised by a lack of implementation details, but having a close correspondence to the requirements; conversely an implementation may lack close correspondence to the requirements. This submission maintains this important distinction. Relations provide a specification oriented view of the relationship between models and are specified in a language that can be easily understood. They say what it means to translate between several models but without saying precisely how the translation is achieved. Those details are realised by mappings which characterise the means by which models are translated. It should be noted though, that while the mappings language is rich enough to provide an implementation of relations it also manages to maintain a requirements oriented focus. This may give rise to a scenario where developers prefer to omit relations and directly define mappings. -Scalability and reuse: Decomposition is a key approach to managing complexity. This submission provides a number of composition mechanisms whereby relations and mappings can be composed to form more complex specifications. These mechanisms also aid reuse since mappings and relations can be treated as reusable components which are composed for specific contexts. -Usability: Diagrammatic notations have been important to the success of many OMG standards. This proposal presents a diagrammatic notation which is an extension of collaboration object diagrams and is therefore familiar to many end users. A criticism often levelled at diagrammatic notations is their scalability. This submission also presents a textual syntax, constructs of the diagrammatic notations are closely aligned with its textual counterpart. Considering the domains of relations and mappings at the generic type level is often too limiting. Instead it often is specific-types of things that are of interest. This submission uses patterns to describe the domains of both relations and mappings. Patterns are a means of succinctly describing specific-types of model elements and enable domains of interest to be rapidly stated with ease. -Semantic soundness: By definition a standard should give rise to consistency across differing implementations. It is important that an end user can get the same results on two different implementations. For this reason, this submission goes to some effort to ensure that all the constructs have a well-defined semantic basis. This is achieved by treating the submission in two parts. The infrastructure part has a small number of constructs which can be easily and consistently understood from informal descriptions (although a mathematical semantics is given in Appendix B for the sake of completeness and rigour). The superstructure part uses the infrastructure as its semantic basis and defines the syntax that the end user deals with. The relationship between the superstructure and the infrastructure is expressed as a translation

Defining OCL expressions using templates.

OCL expressions are an essential part of UML. The current versions of OCL fail to have a meta-model which means that the integration of OCL with the UML meta-model cannot be formally defined [1]. This can result in ambiguous descriptions of systems which may compromise designs. The need to redesign the OCL has been addressed by a number of proposals submitted to the OMG. In this paper we demonstrate how a definition for OCL can be stamped out from a small number of templates. Such an approach enables a high level of reuse and an increased confidence that the definition is correct. This work forms part of the 2U consortium’s efforts for the definition of UML 2.0

Illumination invariant face recognition

Few of the face recognition methods reported in the literature are capable of recognising faces under varying illumination conditions. The paper discusses a method which can achieve a higher recognition rate than those obtained for existing methods. The novelty of this new method is the use of an embossing technique to process a face image before presenting it to a standard face recognition system. Using a large database of face images, the performance of the proposed method is evaluated by comparing it against the performances of three existing methods. The experimental results demonstrate the successfulness of the proposed method

National strategy for health research and innovation

In 2011, the Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST) commissioned the Development of a dedicated strategy for health research and innovation in line with its mandate from Government to identify areas of national priority and design and to also implement strategic approaches to enhance economic competitiveness and quality of life. The Strategy was drawn up by a steering group which also included people from outside the health sector, to ensure that it also keeps note of the economic side of things.peer-reviewe

MDA-driven development of standard-compliant OSS components: the OSS/J inventory case-study.

The telecommunications-oriented Operational Support Systems (OSS) industry have recognised the value of technology independent modelling of OSS solutions as a way to reduce cost, add agility, validate and verify solution designs against architectural guidelines of an enterprise and most importantly provide traceability in the design methodology process. The challenges faced by the OSS community is how MDA tools can deliver the promise of advanced meta-modelling, model definition and validation and model transformation for both OSS software components and integration logic in the larger OSS landscape. This paper describes how an advanced extensible meta-modelling tool is used to build an OSS component following best practice industry guidelines. Extended MOF, extended executable OCL and a powerful transformation language are used to capture the constraints in the meta-models as well as models followed by complete, 100% code generation from models. Furthermore, meta-models are also developed to capture graphical user interface elements in conjunction with the inventory data models, which are then automatically translated into code. This work is the precursor for defining extensive meta-models for a component-based OSS infrastructure based on industry best practice, for adding high degree of formality to model specifications and for enabling the verification of domain requirements by executing the models through model snapshot creation, way before system implementation takes place