Theory Application in Home-Based Counseling

Home-based counseling is a modality of counseling where a provider conducts sessions within a client’s home. Providing services in the home can improve access to services in rural areas or for clients without access to transportation or childcare and can increase participation in services in cases where traditional office-based services have been unsuccessful. Despite these benefits for clients, home-based counselors might struggle with applying counseling theory within this setting. Theory is an integral part of both counselor identity and treatment planning; a theoretical orientation helps counselors conceptualize client issues, guide treatment goals, and assess progress. Due to the lack of an overarching model in home-based counseling, it is paramount to understand how counselors in these settings are currently applying theory to improve treatment outcomes. The purpose of this qualitative narrative study was to understand the stories of home-based counselors applying theory in these settings. This research was guided by the question “How do home-based counselors perceive their experiences when applying theory in a client’s home?”. The participants included six home-based providers who were currently working for community mental health agencies. Sources of data included observational data and one narrative interview per participant. The data were analyzed according to McCormack’s multi-step narrative analysis process and the theoretical frameworks of this study including Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Theory (DOI) and Stoltenberg’s Integrative Developmental Model (IDM). The findings suggested six shared themes including 1) Safety, 2) Confidentiality, 3) Control in Theory Choice and Application, 4) Creative Integration of Theory, 5) Counselor Identity, and 6) Supervision and Alternative Supports. Lastly, implications for counselor educators, supervisors, and agencies are presented as well as recommendations for future research

Tapping In: A Movement Meditation for Wellness

Victoria Rodriguez’s thesis paper and accompanying video explore the somatic movement sequence Tapping In. Tapping In was born to facilitate the mind-body connection, muscular balance, and flexibility as well as implement tools for the physical and mental release of trauma. The written manifestation explores the practices that allowed for the creation of the Tapping In movement sequences such as Pilates, Yoga, Emotional Freedom Technique, Physical Therapy, and more. Each method provides a unique and valuable stance on navigating the previously mentioned goals, but no single technique led to the results Victoria was looking for. As a result, it is through Victoria’s work with these practices and previous undergraduate education that the Tapping In movement sequence was created. This intention is derived from a lifetime of high stress and physical pain due to chronic illness, as well as the observation that for a large portion of people, a high level of both physical and mental discomfort is the norm. The video portion of this thesis acts as a creative manifestation of Victoria’s experience working with the Tapping In sequence. Between personal reflection and the use of this practice with other bodies, Victoria received detailed feedback on their work’s effect, which then served as the source of inspiration for movement in the video portion. The video portion of this thesis serves as a movement meditation, reflecting on both where Victoria started at the beginning of creating this sequence, where they have come, and where they intend to be someday given enough time to work through their ailments with the long term assistance of the Tapping In Movement sequence

Consumers' Perceptions about Food Quality Attributes and Their Incidence in Argentinean Organic Choices

There is an increasing consumers' concern for food safety and quality and, at the same time, there has been a significant market increment in differentiated or high value products consumption, including organic products. The lack of empirical research in Argentina regarding consumers' awareness of food safety brought our attention. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to analyse consumers' perceptions about the risk and quality attributes of food consumption; and to evaluate the incidence of these factors when buying organic products in Argentina. The Lancaster model (1966) provided the theoretical basis for the use of products attributes and characteristics to analyse the incidence of these attributes in consumers' choices. The data used in this study derives from a food consumption survey on organic and non-organic consumers conducted in Buenos Aires City, Argentina, in April 2005. According to consumers' perceptions, 67% were worried about their health, 79% take care in meals, 57% perceived the high risk of hormones and pesticides in food content and 91% of consumers are used to reading labels before or during their purchase. A Logit Binomial Regression Model was applied to explore which factors affected organic food consumption. The results yielded by this model suggest that the consumers with higher educational level, who eat healthy food, and consider food control organisms 'inefficient' are more likely to buy organic products. A high percentage of consumers read and trust label information in Argentina. This has interesting policy implications to promote differentiated and high value products, and to reduce information asymmetries.Food safety, Quality attributes, Consumers, Organics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Q18, D1,

Contingent Valuation of Consumers’ Willingness-to-Pay for Organic Food in Argentina

Throughout these last years, organic agriculture has undergone a remarkable expansion due, among other things, to the greater interest shown by consumers aware of food safety concerns involving real or perceived quality risks [1]. This paper aims to estimate consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for organic food products available in the Argentinean domestic market, with a view to providing some useful insights to gain support and outline strategies for promotion of organic production, marketing, regulation, and labelling programs of organic food products. A Binomial Multiple Logistic Regression model is estimated with data from a food consumption survey conducted in Buenos Aires city, Argentina, in April 2005. The Contingent Valuation Method was chosen in order to calculate their WTP for five organic selected products: Regular Milk, Leafy Vegetables, Whole Wheat Flour, Fresh Chicken and Aromatic Herbs. The empirical results reveal that consumers are willing to pay a premium for these products and that although prices play an important role, lack of store availability and of a reliable regulatory system to mitigate quality risks constraint consumption of organic products in this country.Willingness-to-pay, Food attributes, Organics, Demand and Price Analysis,

Willingness to pay for organic food in Argentina: Evidence from a consumer survey

Most food markets do not count on complete information about food quality for consumers. Quality has become a key concept in the new approaches of the Demand Theory (Lancaster, 1966; Antle, 1999), and, therefore, food quality information has turned into a crucial factor when explaining the existing differences between demand profiles. Throughout these last years, organic agriculture has undergone a notorious expansion due, among other things, to the greater interest shown by consumers aware of food safety concerns involving real or potential quality risks perceptions. (Henson, 1996) This paper aims to estimate consumers´ willingness to pay (WTP) for organic food products available in the Argentinean domestic market, with a view to providing useful evidence to the government, and thus gain support in the promotion of organic production, regulation processes and labelling programs. The Contingent Valuation Method (Hanemann, 1984) was selected to estimate WTP. Data derives from a food consumption survey conducted in Buenos Aires city in April 2005. The parameters estimates for the selected products were obtained by applying a Binomial Multiple Logistic Regression. The results indicate that Argentinean consumers are willing to pay a price premium to acquire better quality products. Indeed, this is conditioned by the effective prices in the domestic market, in which price premiums range from 6% to 200%, thereby restricting their acquisition. Besides, the scarce availability of these healthy products has also become another meaningful obstacle for domestic consumption expansion in Argentina.Willingness to pay, Food quality attributes, Organic price premium, Argentina., Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Information Retrieval-Based Optimization Approaches for Requirement Traceability Recovery

Requirements traceability provides support for important software engineering activities. Requirements traceability recovery (RTR) is becoming increasingly important due to the numerous benefits to the overall quality of software. Improving the RTR problem has become an active topic of research for software engineers; researchers have proposed a number of approaches for improving and automating RTR across the requirements and the source code of the system. Textual analysis and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been applied to the RTR problem for many years; however, most of the existing IR-based methodologies applied to the RTR problem are semiautomatic or time-consuming, even though many links are correctly recovered using IR. Thus, there is a need for effective and innovative approaches for automatization in the RTR problem. In this research, we study IR techniques applied to the RTR problem to determine the optimal alternative to RTR across the textual content of requirements and system source code, and propose innovative methodologies based on computational intelligence combine with IR to achieve automatization. We approach the study of the RTR problem as an optimization problem; the problem is formulated as a multi or mono objective search in which we assign one-to-many relationships between each requirement and source code classes by considering similarity in their textual content. The Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) and Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), when combined with IR techniques, appear to provide promising alternatives for finding a complete and accurate list of traceability links. We adapt the NGSA-II and ABC algorithms to solve the RTR problem, generate programing tools for experimentation, and report the results on three open source projects. Results show values of precision and recall above 70%. NSGA-II and ABC are also analyzed based on time complexity using the big-O notation; results indicate NSGA-II is more time efficient and less precise than ABC

Grantmakers on Funding Social Issue Media Projects

This is a chapter from a longer piece. The collaborations documented here demonstrate a shared space of values. They also respond to driving necessity, as new communications media both permit greater interconnections, and also challenge the terms of business as usual. Our public television services no longer can presume an audience grateful for an alternative to commercial TV. Public television leaders now distinguish the service on the basis of its role as a community resource and partner. Funders now routinely build communications components -- the video, the Web site, the study guides, the 800 number -- into their projects from the beginning, and look for them to help build the project as it develops. Social action and community organizations find themselves operating both locally and globally, as they plug into media resources that can extend and achieve their goals, and build their networks of contacts. These organizations need each other as much as they need powerful media tools

Diseño de una calculadora de la eficiencia energética en la iluminación basada en LEDs. Aplicación en el campus de la UPC.

Actualmente la tecnología de iluminación LED es la técnica de iluminación más eficiente. Además de ser la tecnología más limpia, ya que no produce residuos contaminantes, también es la forma de iluminación más duradera, debido a su extensa vida útil, que duplica la de los fluorescentes, la más alta hasta el momento. La desventaja principal que presenta el LED es que al ser una tecnología nueva y poco desarrollada tiene un coste bastante elevado por lo que para poder hacer su instalación se necesita una gran inversión inicial. Debido a todas las ventajas que presenta y a pesar de su precio, se está extendiendo su uso tanto en iluminación de obras nuevas como para la substitución de la iluminación tradicional en edificios ya construidos. El objetivo del trabajo es desarrollar una herramienta que permita analizar el ahorro energético y económico en la substitución de la iluminación actual por sistemas basados en tecnología LED. Se trata de una calculadora, creada con el programa QT creator, que como input pide introducir la cantidad de lámparas y seleccionar, de la base de datos, el tipo y consumo de éstas. De esta forma el programa proporciona diferentes datos como el ahorro energético, económico, el ahorro en emisiones de CO2, los arboles equivalentes a este ahorro, el ahorro en mantenimiento, la inversión inicial necesaria y el tiempo que se tarda en recuperar esta inversión. Como ejemplo de aplicación se ha analizado el Parc Mediterrani de la Tecnologia(PMT). Para ello ha sido necesario realizar un inventario de todos los puntos de luz de los edificios que pertenecen al PMT. Este se ha introducido en la calculadora y los resultados obtenidos indican que la substitución de las lámparas por LEDs es totalmente viable.Anglès:Actually LED lighting technology is the most efficient lighting technology. In addition of being the cleanest technology, since it doesn't produce any polluting waste, it is also the most durable form of lighting, due to its long service life, which doubles the fluorescents one, the largest until the arrive of LEDs. The main disadvantage presented by the LED technology is that being a new and undeveloped technology it costs much more than the rest of lighting technologies. This means a large initial investment for its installation. Because of all the advantages that presents and despite of its price, the use of LED technology is expanding both new construction and replacement of traditional lighting in existing buildings. The aim of this project is to develop a tool to analyze the energy and costs savings in replacing current lighting systems by LEDs. It is a calculator, created with the QT creator, which as input requests the number of lamps, and the selection from the database of the type and consumption of the lamps. So that, the program provides different data as the energetic and economic savings, the CO2 emissions saving, the equivalent trees, the maintenance saving, the initial investment and the payback. As an example of application we have analyzed the Parc Mediterrani de la Tecnologia(PMT). For this reason it has been necessary to realize an inventory of all the lighting points of the buildings that pertain to PMT. This inventory has been introduced to the calculator and the results obtained indicate that the substitution of the lamps for LEDs is viable

Un mundo de símbolos

A lo largo de la historia la simbología ha jugado un papel muy importante en la sociedad. La paloma, la liebre o el gato son sólo una muestra de los imaginarios colectivos que se extendieron en las culturas a través de la tradición y de su presencia en obras tan dispares como el Nuevo Testamento, la pintura renacentista o los últimos estrenos de Hollywood

A viral effector suppresses cell-to-cell spread of silencing by targeting two plasmodesmal receptor-like kinases

RNA interference (RNAi) in plants can move from cell to cell, allowing for systemic spread of an anti-viral immune response. How this cell-to-cell spread of silencing is regulated is currently unknown. Here, we describe that the C4 protein from Tomato yellow leaf curl virus can inhibit the intercellular spread of RNAi. Using this viral protein as a probe, we have identified the receptor-like kinase (RLK) BARELY ANY MERISTEM 1 (BAM1) as a positive regulator of the cell-to-cell movement of RNAi, and determined that BAM1 and its closest homologue, BAM2, play a redundant role in this process. C4 interacts with the intracellular domain of BAM1 and BAM2 at the plasma membrane and plasmodesmata, the cytoplasmic connections between plant cells, interfering with the function of these RLKs in the cell-to-cell spread of RNAi. Our results identify BAM1 as an element required for the cell-to-cell spread of RNAi and highlight that signalling components have been co-opted to play multiple functions in plants.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech