Volunteers and volunteering in leisure : social science perspectives

Leisure has been widely examined within the context of social science theory; however, little work has considered the range of social science disciplines and applied them to specific phenomena located within the leisure field. This paper adopts such an approach to conceptualise and examine volunteers and volunteering in leisure settings. In a disciplinary sense, therefore, the sociological view focuses upon the conceptualisation of volunteering as leisure, the psychological view seeks to understand motivations driving volunteering while the perspective of economists tends to complement these standpoints in terms of why people volunteer and further examines the value of volunteer contributions. Comparative analysis of the perspectives enunciated within these key disciplines provides a picture of the status of research relating to leisure volunteers and volunteering. The purposes of this paper are to identify gaps in current knowledge, drawing out conclusions and their implications for an improved understanding of this area as well as to enhance comprehension of disciplinary contributions to the study of leisure phenomena

Force, fraud, and coercion : Bridging from knowledge of intercountry adoption to global surrogacy

This report discusses concerns raised by participants of Thematic Area 4 (Force, Fraud and Coercion) of the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy held in August 2014. There has been a significant body of research on intercountry adoption practices over the past 30 years; force, fraud, and coercion have been identified in a small but important component of the literature. However, this knowledge in intercountry adoption has not yet truly bridged into research in global surrogacy with some recent exceptions. Learning from the past of ICA and connecting the evidence is particularly relevant due to the fact that the need for international law focused on global surrogacy and issues of parentage has been considered. The lessons learned from a history of corruption and human rights abuses are important to integrate when formulating future international law and regulations to protect vulnerable peoples in global surrogacy practices. Concepts of exploitation and human trafficking are explored with considerations of how to prevent, protect, and prosecute as emergent focal points of discourse. Effective prosecution of crimes, implications for a convention on global surrogacy, exploitation in global surrogacy arrangements, emotional safeguards for surrogate mothers, limited knowledge about the sense of origin, and experiences of children born through surrogacy are all areas in need of continued research

The role of planetary waves in the tropospheric jet response to stratospheric cooling

K.L.S. is funded in part by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship. R.K.S. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation.An idealized general circulation model is used to assess the importance of planetary-scale waves in determining the position of the tropospheric jet, specifically its tendency to shift poleward as winter stratospheric cooling is increased. Full model integrations are compared against integrations in which planetary waves are truncated in the zonal direction, and only synoptic-scale waves are retained. Two series of truncated integrations are considered, using (i) a modified radiative equilibrium temperature or (ii) a nudged-bias correction technique. Both produce tropospheric climatologies that are similar to the full model when stratospheric cooling is weak. When stratospheric cooling is increased, the results indicate that the interaction between planetary- and synoptic-scale waves plays an important role in determining the structure of the tropospheric mean flow and rule out the possibility that the jet shift occurs purely as a response to changes in the planetary- or synoptic-scale wave fields alone.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Perceptions and Reactions of Language Arts and Reading Teachers

The success of whole language will depend upon its acceptance or rejection by classroom teachers. Some teachers avidly support change to whole language while others are reluctant to do so. Given the shift of language arts instruction from the mastery of skills and subskills to a whole language approach, this study investigated current practices in language instruction, the nature of changes, and the perceptions and reactions of teachers. Although the basal reading program continues to be the most widely-used approach to teaching reading in our country (Flood and Lapp, 1986; Barksdale, Thomas and Jones, 1990), a whole language philosophy is infiltrating elementary schools and appears to be establishing a foothold in many schools. In many instances whole language instruction has been initiated at the grassroots level where teachers are viewing it as a natural process to teaching reading and writing

Stop the escalation before it begins by using the pediatric Behavior Response Team protocol

In today's world, clinicians need to be prepared to care for challenging patients and families that are struggling with the stress of illness and hospitalization and have inadequate coping skills. The University of Michigan Health System (UMHS) has developed a protocol identifying a team with representatives from psychiatry, security, and risk management to provide a rapid response in situations that historically have resulted in, at worst, sentinel/adverse events and at best, service disasters. The pediatric BRT protocol formalizes the purpose of the team, how staff should access them, and the expectation for involved staff to debrief about the interventions at identified times. It has proven to be an effective intervention and allows clinicians to provide needed care to the patients.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/92390/1/21082_ftp.pd

Rigorous sufficient conditions for index-guided mode in microstructured dielectric waveguides

We derive a sufficient condition for the existence of index-guided modes in a very general class of dielectric waveguides, including photonic-crystal fibers (arbitrary periodic claddings, such as ``holey fibers''), anisotropic materials, and waveguides with periodicity along the propagation direction. This condition provides a rigorous guarantee of cutoff-free index-guided modes in any such structure where the core is formed by increasing the index of refraction (e.g. removing a hole). It also provides a weaker guarantee of guidance in cases where the refractive index is increased ``on average'' (precisely defined). The proof is based on a simple variational method, inspired by analogous proofs of localization for two-dimensional attractive potentials in quantum mechanics.Comment: 15 page

The Therapeutic Camping Needs Of Children: The Hole-In-The-Hills At Wa-Shawtee

This executive summary of the preliminary report documents the major findings, to date, of the first two components of a needs assessment being conducted for the Hole in the Hills at Wa-Shawtee (HITH). The purpose of the study is to determine if a new, medically-equipped and professionally-staffed therapeutic camp in the Great Plains region of the Midwest has the capacity to be a success. There are almost 3.5 million children between the ages of five and seventeen in the 6-state HITH region, 1 an unknown number of whom are seriously-ill and/or have special medical conditions and health care needs, who could potentially benefit from a therapeutic camping facility. The first two completed sections of the needs assessment are: 1) an inventory of existing camps and camp programs for selected pediatric conditions in the 6-state catchment area and 2) an inventory of the population to be served, including the prevalence of priority illnesses/conditions and the levels of unmet need or potential camp demand in the HITH region. The remaining two components of the assessment, which will be included in the final report are: 3) the identification and ranking of the needs of seriously-ill children in the priority disease groups, and 4) the identification and ranking of the needs of these children’s parents and families

Penguin decays of B mesons

Penguin, or loop, decays of B mesons induce effective flavor-changing neutral currents, which are forbidden at tree level in the Standard Model. These decays give special insight into the CKM matrix and are sensitive to non-standard model effects. In this review, we give a historical and theoretical introduction to penguins and a description of the various types of penguin processes: electromagnetic, electroweak, and gluonic. We review the experimental searches for penguin decays, including the measurements of the electromagnetic penguins b -> s gamma and B -> K* gamma and gluonic penguins B -> K pi, B+ -> omega K+ and B -> eta' K, and their implications for the Standard Model and New Physics. We conclude by exploring the future prospects for penguin physics.Comment: 49 pages, LATEX, 30 embedded figures, submitted to Annual Reviews of Nuclear and Particle Scienc

Improved cache performance in Monte Carlo transport calculations using energy banding

We present an energy banding algorithm for Monte Carlo (MC) neutral particle transport simulations which depend on large cross section lookup tables. In MC codes, read-only cross section data tables are accessed frequently, exhibit poor locality, and are typically too much large to fit in fast memory. Thus, performance is often limited by long latencies to RAM, or by off-node communication latencies when the data footprint is very large and must be decomposed on a distributed memory machine. The proposed energy banding algorithm allows maximal temporal reuse of data in band sizes that can flexibly accommodate different architectural features. The energy banding algorithm is general and has a number of benefits compared to the traditional approach. In the present analysis we explore its potential to achieve improvements in time-to-solution on modern cache-based architectures.United States. Department of Energy. Office of Science (Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357