Counselling for people with sight loss in the UK: The need for provision and the need for evidence

For adults of any age the diagnosis of a visual impairment can be traumatic, and timely referral to informal peer support and/or professional counselling may be both beneficial and appropriate. It is estimated that 45/113 (40%) of UK voluntary organisations for people with sight loss provide professional counselling (n=17) or ‘informal support’ (n=28), such as peer support groups, telephone helplines and befriending.1 However, what is the evidence that these services help people adjust emotionally to their acquired vision loss and the consequences that flow from this? During the spring/summer of 2008, we conducted a follow-up to the scoping survey reported earlier1 to assess the evidence for effectiveness of professional counselling services for people with acquired sight loss. We contacted the 17 counselling services previously identified by Rees1 and further services via Vision 2020 UK,

Emotional well-being in people with sight loss: Lessons from the grey literature

Literature that is not peer-reviewed and distributed through a publisher is known as ‘grey’. As it is used to inform policy and practice we reviewed the grey literature concerning emotional well-being in people with sight loss. We consulted and searched the websites of UK voluntary organizations, and scanned reference lists of previous reviews for reports available from 2001 to 2008. We summarized 24 studies in two sections: observations that assessed psychosocial well-being or demand for support services (n = 15); and evaluations of interventions that aimed to improve emotional well-being (n = 9). Observations showed that people with sight loss can report low emotional well-being, but their statistical and clinical significance requires testing. Interventions showed promise for counselling but also require further evaluation. We encourage service providers and researchers to collaborate and produce high quality research to more persuasively inform policy and practice

Low-temperature dynamics of the Curie-Weiss Model: Periodic orbits, multiple histories, and loss of Gibbsianness

We consider the Curie-Weiss model at a given initial temperature in vanishing external field evolving under a Glauber spin-flip dynamics corresponding to a possibly different temperature. We study the limiting conditional probabilities and their continuity properties and discuss their set of points of discontinuity (bad points). We provide a complete analysis of the transition between Gibbsian and non-Gibbsian behavior as a function of time, extending earlier work for the case of independent spin-flip dynamics. For initial temperature bigger than one we prove that the time-evolved measure stays Gibbs forever, for any (possibly low) temperature of the dynamics. In the regime of heating to low-temperatures from even lower temperatures, when the initial temperature is smaller than the temperature of the dynamics, and smaller than 1, we prove that the time-evolved measure is Gibbs initially and becomes non-Gibbs after a sharp transition time. We find this regime is further divided into a region where only symmetric bad configurations exist, and a region where this symmetry is broken. In the regime of further cooling from low-temperatures there is always symmetry-breaking in the set of bad configurations. These bad configurations are created by a new mechanism which is related to the occurrence of periodic orbits for the vector field which describes the dynamics of Euler-Lagrange equations for the path large deviation functional for the order parameter. To our knowledge this is the first example of the rigorous study of non-Gibbsian phenomena related to cooling, albeit in a mean-field setup.Comment: 31 pages, 24 figure

Sensitivity of northwest Australian tropical cyclone activity to ITCZ migration since 500 CE

Tropical cyclones (TCs) regularly form in association with the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), and thus, its positioning has implications for global TC activity. While the poleward extent of the ITCZ has varied markedly over past centuries, the sensitivity with which TCs responded remains poorly understood from the proxy record, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere. Here, we present a high-resolution, composite stalagmite record of ITCZ migrations over tropical Australia for the past 1500 years. When integrated with a TC reconstruction from the Australian subtropics, this time series, along with downscaled climate model simulations, provides an unprecedented examination of the dependence of subtropical TC activity on meridional shifts in the ITCZ. TCs tracked the ITCZ at multidecadal to centennial scales, with a more southward position enhancing TC-derived rainfall in the subtropics. TCs may play an increasingly important role in Western Australia’s moisture budgets as subtropical aridity increases due to anthropogenic warming

A theorem proving framework for the formal verification of Web Services Composition

We present a rigorous framework for the composition of Web Services within a higher order logic theorem prover. Our approach is based on the proofs-as-processes paradigm that enables inference rules of Classical Linear Logic (CLL) to be translated into pi-calculus processes. In this setting, composition is achieved by representing available web services as CLL sentences, proving the requested composite service as a conjecture, and then extracting the constructed pi-calculus term from the proof. Our framework, implemented in HOL Light, not only uses an expressive logic that allows us to incorporate multiple Web Services properties in the composition process, but also provides guarantees of soundness and correctness for the composition.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2011, arXiv:1108.208

Conformal and Affine Hamiltonian Dynamics of General Relativity

The Hamiltonian approach to the General Relativity is formulated as a joint nonlinear realization of conformal and affine symmetries by means of the Dirac scalar dilaton and the Maurer-Cartan forms. The dominance of the Casimir vacuum energy of physical fields provides a good description of the type Ia supernova luminosity distance--redshift relation. Introducing the uncertainty principle at the Planck's epoch within our model, we obtain the hierarchy of the Universe energy scales, which is supported by the observational data. We found that the invariance of the Maurer-Cartan forms with respect to the general coordinate transformation yields a single-component strong gravitational waves. The Hamiltonian dynamics of the model describes the effect of an intensive vacuum creation of gravitons and the minimal coupling scalar (Higgs) bosons in the Early Universe.Comment: 37 pages, version submitted to Gen. Rel. Gra