The Impact of Healing Arts on Students at the University of Nebraska at Omaha

A recently emerging way to decrease stress of individuals is by practicing therapeutic art. The aim of this form of therapy is to provide a sense of expression and relief to individuals who suffer from constant anxiety and stress. Therapeutic art can be performed by a therapy session where an individual express themselves using art to communicate their thoughts and emotions. Since this form of therapy does not require artistic sense or skills, many individuals can benefit from it. Moreover, another form of this therapy is surrounding stressed individuals with calming art, such as photography, music, sculpture, and painting, etc. There are multiple research experiments that study the impact of therapeutic arts on different individuals. Therefore, this study was conducted to observe and analyze data collected from UNO students’ responses to three different pieces of art by using survey questions during two time periods, the beginning of the semester and at midterms. This will allow to have a clearer understanding of the relationship of UNO student’s stress and the influence of art therapy

“ANALISA KUALITAS PELAYANAN PASIEN PADA KLINIK UMUM PRATAMA KASIH BUNDA YANTI RAJAMANDALA”.

ABSTRAK   Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis kualitas pelayanan pasien yang diberikan oleh Klinik Umum Pratama Kasih Bunda Yanti Rajamandala. (studi kasus pasien Klinik Umum Pratama Kasih Bunda Yanti Rajamandala). Serta untuk mengukur indikator kualitas pelayanan pasien di Klinik Umum Pratama Kasih Bunda Yanti Rajamandala. Jenis penelitian ini adalah penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Dengan metode pengumpulan data yang digunakan adalah dengan wawancara sebanyak 3 orang pasien dengan ketentuan pasien yang berumur di atas 17 tahun dan pernah menginap minimal 1 hari. Untuk melihat kualitas pelayanan yang telah diberikan oleh pihak klinik, digunakan lima fokus kualitas jasa servis (Service Quality), antara lain yaitu : Kehandalan (Reliability), Daya Tanggap (Responsiveness), Jaminan (Assurance), Empati (Emphaty) dan Bukti Fisik (Tangibles). Kesimpulan dari hasil penelitian ini adalah kelima fokus tersebut pada pelayanan Klinik Umum Pratama Kasih Bunda Yanti Rajamandala sudah baik hanya pada fokus Bukti Fisik (Tangibles) pada indikator kebersihan, kerapihan dan kenyamanan ruang pasien dan kelengkapan alat-alat kesehatan pada Klinik Umum Pratama Kasih Bunda Yanti Rajamandala masih kurang baik.   Kata Kunci : Kualitas Pelayanan, Pasie

Misinformation of the Society by Internet Media and the Social Acceptance of this Phenomenon

Online media misinforming society and the social acceptance of this phenomenon. This article is an attempt to research the phenomenon of institutionalized lying, which in the author’s opinion is the practice of websites aiming to maximize the readership of their content to the detriment of the fairness and objectivity. First, an introduction to the basic concepts of media ethics and their source in general ethics will be presented. Then, a description of the changes which have taken place in the media over the past several years will be shown in order to identify potential sources of the problem and there is a review of opinions available on the Internet. The next step was to examine sample content published by selected websites, along with descriptions of the techniques and methods used by publishers that may be ethically questionable, and can be described as a lie. At the end there is an attempt to investigate the level of knowledge about this treatment and its acceptance by the Internet community as a process of institutionalized lying. The author also provides some ideas how to solve this problem

Using Platform Express for System-on-Chip Design

The advent of nanoscale technology brings with it an increase in system complexity with integrated circuit transistor numbers reaching hundreds of millions. Systems-on-chip are attaining a level of complexity where design turn-around times are a major factor. Reusing existing intellectual property blocks that are already verified for functionality could help minimize the design time and increase system reliability. This allows the designers to focus on more important product design aspects. Platform-based design is an effective method to deal with the increasing pressure on time-to-market. The approach also provides a practical solution to reduce the design and manufacturing costs. This thesis is a result of the of the ongoing Volunteer SoC project at the University of Tennessee and in this, we explore the possibility of employing the Platform Express (PX) tool for designing SoCs. The PX application enables system designers to rapidly build and verify SoC design concepts. The tool also promotes Intellectual Property (IP) integration within the built-in PX libraries. The tool utilizes XML for describing the IP data, which allows smooth integration of IP into a single design from many different sources. We have followed the complete IP integration flow and have successfully installed a component into the tool’s library and have also generated a system design using the same IP

Birds and people: studies based on citizen science and census data of Greater Gauteng, South Africa

Global human population growth has been predicted to grow exponentially, to a point where it exceeds the capacity of available resources to sustain it. The consequences that such exponential increase will have on the environment has also been the focus of several research. The spatial pattern of human population has reveal uneven pattern of human population with the urban areas being subject of increased influx of human population from the rural areas in search of better economic factors. The United Nations in 2007 revealed that at least half of the world’s 6.6 billion human population was living in urban areas. This number is expected to increase to over 60% of the world's population by the end of 2050. Most of this population growth is occurring in developing countries. While the health, security and town planning amongst other consequences of this global explosion in urbanization have been well-studied and documented, the impact which urbanization is having and will have on the ecosystem and on biodiversity, especially at regional and local scales has remained an a field of knowledge that has continued to evolve especially given the variable patterns and drivers of urbanization in different regions of the world as well as the different environmental factors and biodiversity in these regions. Biodiversity monitoring has been shown to be crucial to conservation goals aimed at accessing the state and condition of biodiversity. The Second South African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2) is a citizen science atlas project which commenced in 2007. Over a decade, SABAP2 has produced a rich source of data, capturing bird distributions in South Africa. This makes SABAP2 a powerful tool for monitoring observed changes in bird communities and by extension biodiversity through time. I examined the effect that urbanization is having on the avian biodiversity in South Africa, one of the most urbanized countries in Africa. My research was focused on the 576 pentads in the four one-degree grid cells (25S 27E, 25S 28E, 26S 27E and 26E 28E) centered on the Gauteng province, referred to as Greater Gauteng region. In addition to being very urbanized, Greater Gauteng is also the most populated area in the country, and is home to 30% of the country’s 51 million people. The region is the most atlased SABAP2 region in the country, with each pentad having a minimum of 11 full-protocol SABAP2 checklists. It thus provide opportunities for the development of tools to monitor the temporal dynamics of bird communities. The first chapter is the general introduction where I did an extensive literature review of the research subject and gave an overview of the data chapters that make up the thesis. In the second chapter, I examined spatial patterns of urbanization and avian biodiversity. I assess avian species composition in the urban and rural areas of Greater Gauteng. I categorized bird data from SABAP2 for Greater Gauteng Urban and Rural subgroups. The dataset for this chapter had 700 bird species. 644 showed no range preference for either urban or rural areas. Five species showed a preference for rural areas while 51 species showed a preference for urban areas. The higher species richness recorded in urban pentads highlights the often overlooked benefits of biodiversity conservation efforts in urban areas such as green spaces and parks, gardens and water bodies. This chapter highlights the need for conservation efforts to be targeted at birds and other biodiversity in urban spaces. It is also raises the need to further promote policies aimed at having conservation efforts incorporated into town planning. In the third and fourth chapters, I used data from SABAP2 to investigate how different protected areas such as Important Bird Areas (IBAs) are to their surrounding areas by demonstrating how different the Devon Grasslands (Chapter 3) and Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve (Chapter 4) IBAs are to their immediate surrounding areas in terms of avian species richness and assemblage. Atlas data from the pentads covering these two IBAs were compared with data from the surrounding pentads. Both IBAs stand out as having more bird species than their immediate surroundings. The simple yet effective method used in this chapters can be applied in identifying potential sites for biodiversity conservation. In the fifth chapter, using a variation of the Shannon-Weiner species diversity index which is known to reach an asymptote rapidly even while species richness keeps increasing, to investigate patterns of spatial distribution of species richness and proportional diversity in Greater Gauteng. The chapter provides insights into pentads with the richest bird communities and also provides a method which can be applied to citizen science data such as SABAP2 to discover areas where particular groups of species, such as waterbirds and threatened species, are concentrated in the region. The sixth chapter examines the relationship between reporting rates of birds and human population in Greater Gauteng. With Greater Gauteng being the most populated region in South Africa, it presented an ideal situation to investigate patterns of correlation between human population and the reporting rates of bird species in the region. Based on the results obtained, the species were grouped into 18 groups categorized by the relationship pattern revealed by species reporting rates and human population. The Seventh chapter follows a similar pattern with chapter six. However, chapter seven, examines patterns between a socio-economic index, mean income per person, and the reporting rates of birds in Greater Gauteng. The eighth chapter is the conclusion. It gives a synthesis of the thesis and presents the implications for conservation of avian biodiversity in Greater Gauteng. Overall, this thesis highlights the contribution of citizen science can make to research. It also makes for a strong case showing fundamental importance of large volumes of data such as SABAP2 data, and the useful information that can be harnessed from this data. The conservation-relevant studies in the chapters of this thesis are a result of the spatial distribution patterns of the avifauna revealed by SABAP2 data from Greater Gauteng. It showed how we can detect changes in species abundance, richness and composition in a pentad or in any area, a method we can extend further to detect when bird species are starting to decline or drop out of the species list for a pentad. The results reported in this thesis provides a rich field of study for future research, especially in the field of urban ecology

Discourse Analysis of the Political Speeches of the Ousted Arab Presidents during the Arab Spring Revolution uing Halliday and Hasan's Framework of Cohesion

This study is designed to explore the salient linguistic features of the political speeches of the ousted Arab presidents during the Arab Spring Revolution.  The sample of the study is composed of seven political speeches delivered by the ousted Arab presidents during the period from December 2010 to December 2012. Three speeches were delivered by the Tunisian president, Zain Al-Abedeen Bin Ali; three speeches by the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak; and one speech by the Libyan president, Muammer Al-Gaddafi. The selected speeches are taken from the Internet.  To achieve the main goal of this study, the analysis of the obtained data is conducted using the Halliday and Hasan's (1976) framework of cohesion. The results of this study revealed that the political speeches which were delivered during the Arab Spring Revolution have their distinctive features which are different from those features of the usual speeches of these presidents during the normal circumstances.  Most of the lexical features such as repetition, synonymy, and hyponymy are widely used in the speeches of the ousted presidents to achieve different political ideologies and strategies such as the ideology of threatening the civilian protesters. Keywords: Discourse Analysis, Political Speeches, Arab Spring Revolution

Preparing the Saudi Educational System to Serve the 2030 Vision: A Comparative Analysis Study

Saudi Arabia\u27s 2030 Vision (2019) aims to solidify the kingdom\u27s influence in the Middle East while also diversifying the economy and increasing quality of life and access to opportunity for Saudis. One critical component of preparing Saudis for the job market is addressing low English language proficiency among students in the public school system (Rugh, 2002a, 2002b; Habbash, 2011; Elyas & Picard, 2011; Alrashidi & Phan, 2015). This study reviews existing literature on the Saudi Arabian educational system, the controversy surrounding English language instruction, and the importance of English for economic opportunity. Then, using transformative leadership (Shields, 2010) as the theoretical underpinning, the researcher presents an analysis of educational policy documents for both nations. Finally, the researcher offers recommendations for how Saudi Arabia can institute reforms modeled after Bahrain\u27s education system, which has experienced similar economic challenges and systemic obstacles. The conclusions of this study highlight the need for clear and specific policy language, specifically pertaining to the infusion of Islamic values and principles; additional emphasis on language instruction as a whole; and strong guidance on the integration and application of feedback and support for instructors in the Saudi Arabian educational system. This study builds off existing literature by reaffirming the value of transformative leadership in evaluating educational policy and contributes to the larger conversation in educational policy studies by providing recommendations for future research on using English language education to effect change in pursuit of large-scale economic policy initiatives