A Protocol for Animal Assisted Therapy in a Midwestern Hospital

Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) has been shown to improve physiological, psychological, social, and physical aspects of clients (Miller & Ingram, 2000; Diefenbeck, Bouffard, Matukaitis, Hastings & Coble, 2010). AAT increases an individual’s strength, cognition, range of motion, and balance (Miller & Ingram, 2000). The use of animals within therapy also decreases anxiety, heart rate, blood pressure, and pain while also improving attention and social participation (Diefenbeck et al., 2010). The role of animals within AAT provides the therapist with a unique tool to utilize in various aspects of therapy. Depending on the treatment plan, the therapist can utilize the animal in various ways in order to match the client’s physical or psychological needs. Treatment plans that utilize AAT to improve the client’s well-being, socialization, and activities of daily living have been proven to be effective through the use of walking, feeding, brushing, petting, and bathing the animal (Barak & Mavashev, 2001). Along with clients receiving benefits from AAT, therapy staff has also indicated benefits including increase in self-awareness, improved morale, and stress reductions as result of using animals as a tool for therapy (Rossetti, DeFabiis & Belpedio, 2008). Benefits of incorporating AAT into therapy have been documented throughout the literature, however, there are limited facilities in the Midwest that implement AAT and existing protocols have been written for recreational animal visits rather than goal directed therapy (Winkle & Jackson, 2012). An extensive literature review on the benefits and contraindications of AAT, the role of the interprofessional team using AAT, AAT policies and procedures, and implementation of an AAT program was conducted. Staff members at a Midwestern hospital interested in incorporating AAT into therapy also provided suggestions to the creation of this protocol. The purpose of this scholarly project was to provide occupational therapists and other health care professionals with a protocol for implementation of an AAT program into a neurological rehabilitation facility. The protocol includes an introduction to AAT, benefits of AAT, AAT incorporated into the occupational therapy practice framework, authorized AAT users, skills competency, policies and procedures, AAT requirements and eligibility, and an intervention guide for utilizing AAT

Effects of sodium butyrate on DNA content, glutathione S-transferase activities, cell morphology and growth characteristics of rat liver nonparenchymal epithelial cells in vitro

The effects of sodium butyrate, which has been shown to act as a differentiation promoting agent in several different tumor cell lines, were studied in a rat liver nonparenchymal epithelial cell line. Exposure of these cells to 3.75 mM butyrate resulted in an inhibition of cell proliferation and, at the same time, an increase in cell diameter (2- to 6-fold) and size of the nuclei (∼2-fold) after 3 days in culture. Binucleated cells arose, comprising ∼12% of the cells investigated, and the number of cells with an abnormal set of chromosomes was increased. Intercellular communication, measured by dye transfer of Lucifer Yellow, was unchanged. From the various xenobiotic metabolizing enzyme activities measured, only those of glutathione S-transferases were significantly altered (increases of 4- to 9-fold) by butyrate treatment. These increases were mainly due to the predominant rise in the π class isoenzyme which is a well-known tumour marker in rat hepatocarcinogenesis. Thus, our results cannot be interpreted as being either due to promotion of differentiation or due to transformation. The state and type of cell under study has to be considered and investigations of further differentiation parameters are needed to obtain a deeper insight into the biological activity and the underlying mechanisms of cell state modifying agents like butyrat

Soziale Grundsicherung in der Weltgesellschaft: Monetäre Mindestsicherungssysteme in den Ländern des Südens und des Nordens; Weltweiter Survey und theoretische Verortung

Auch Sozialpolitik globalisiert sich. Das Buch zeigt, dass sozialhilfe- und rentenartige Grundsicherungssysteme nicht nur in entwickelten, sondern auch in Entwicklungs- und Übergangsgesellschaften wirksame Instrumente der Armutsbekämpfung sein können. Direkte Geldleistungen etwa an von AIDS betroffene Familien, alleinerziehende Frauen und Alte können auch entwicklungspolitisch produktiv sein. Das Buch gibt erstmals einen weltweiten Überblick über monetäre Grundsicherungssysteme. Die Grundsicherungsstrategie markiert einen Paradigmenwechsel in der Entwicklungspolitik und stützt die These John W. Meyers einer sich verbreitenden universalistischen Weltkultur

Soziale Grundsicherung in der Weltgesellschaft

Auch Sozialpolitik globalisiert sich. Das Buch zeigt, dass sozialhilfe- und rentenartige Grundsicherungssysteme nicht nur in entwickelten, sondern auch in Entwicklungs- und Übergangsgesellschaften wirksame Instrumente der Armutsbekämpfung sein können. Direkte Geldleistungen etwa an von AIDS betroffene Familien, alleinerziehende Frauen und Alte können auch entwicklungspolitisch produktiv sein. Das Buch gibt erstmals einen weltweiten Überblick über monetäre Grundsicherungssysteme. Die Grundsicherungsstrategie markiert einen Paradigmenwechsel in der Entwicklungspolitik und stützt die These John W. Meyers einer sich verbreitenden universalistischen Weltkultur

Refining CLAMP - investigations towards improving the Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program

CLAMP (Climate Leaf Analysis Multivariate Program) has been used for the past 17 years to estimate palaeoclimatic conditions. The reliability and applicability of this method, based on leaf physiognomic characters of fossil woody dicots, has been widely discussed over the same period. The present study focuses on some technical aspects of CLAMP, mainly on its robustness in the context of the theoretical unimodal requirements of Canonical Correspondence Analysis, and introduces “correction coefficients” for these aspects of the statistical approach as a new way of interpreting and improving on CLAMP estimates. This tool was tested on datasets derived from 17 European fossil floras ranging in age from the Late Oligocene to the Pliocene. Additionally, an objective statistical method for the selection of the best-suited modern vegetation dataset from 144 site (Physg3br) or 173 (Physg3ar) extant biotopes is proposed

Concept drift over geological times : predictive modeling baselines for analyzing the mammalian fossil record

Fossils are the remains organisms from earlier geological periods preserved in sedimentary rock. The global fossil record documents and characterizes the evidence about organisms that existed at different times and places during the Earth's history. One of the major directions in computational analysis of such data is to reconstruct environmental conditions and track climate changes over millions of years. Distribution of fossil animals in space and time make informative features for such modeling, yet concept drift presents one of the main computational challenges. As species continuously go extinct and new species originate, animal communities today are different from the communities of the past, and the communities at different times in the past are different from each other. The fossil record is continuously increasing as new fossils and localities are being discovered, but it is not possible to observe or measure their environmental contexts directly, because the time is gone. Labeled data linking organisms to climate is available only for the present day, where climatic conditions can be measured. The approach is to train models on the present day and use them to predict climatic conditions over the past. But since species representation is continuously changing, transfer learning approaches are needed to make models applicable and climate estimates to be comparable across geological times. Here we discuss predictive modeling settings for such paleoclimate reconstruction from the fossil record. We compare and experimentally analyze three baseline approaches for predictive paleoclimate reconstruction: (1) averaging over habitats of species, (2) using presence-absence of species as features, and (3) using functional characteristics of species communities as features. Our experiments on the present day African data and a case study on the fossil data from the Turkana Basin over the last 7 million of years suggest that presence-absence approaches are the most accurate over short time horizons, while species community approaches, also known as ecometrics, are the most informative over longer time horizons when, due to ongoing evolution, taxonomic relations between the present day and fossil species become more and more uncertain.Peer reviewe