Opportunity for development or necessary nuisance? The case for viewing working with interpreters as a bonus in therapeutic work

This paper explores the central role a language interpreter can play in the process of the therapeutic relationship. Although others have described the changes to the therapeutic dyad that the presence of a third party (an interpreter) brings, little attention has been paid to the advantages and additional opportunities of this altered therapeutic situation. This paper details these gains and further argues that clinicians who are willing to gain experience of working with interpreters will find that benefits accrue at the micro and macro levels: at the micro level, through enhancement of their work with individual non English speaking clients, and at the macro level through learning about different cultural perspectives, idioms of distress and the role of language in the therapeutic endeavour. This is in addition to developing skills to fulfil legal and professional requirements relating to equity of service provision. Some ideas are offered to explain the negative slant than runs throughout the literature in this area and tends to colour the overall discussion of therapeutic work with interpreters and, before the final section, makes some specific suggestions which may help maximise the gains possible in such work while reducing difficulties

The lattice Boltzmann advection-diffusion model revisited

Advection-diffusion processes can be simulated by the Lattice Boltzmann method. Two formulations have been proposed in the literature. We show that they are not fully correct (only first order accurate). A new formulation is proposed, which is shown to produce better results, both from the point of view of the Chapman-Enskog expansion or when comparing simulations with an exact time-dependent solution of the advection-diffusion equatio

Analysis of Energy Consumption Performance towards Optimal Radioplanning of Wireless Sensor Networks in Heterogeneous Indoor Environments

In this paper the impact of complex indoor environment in the deployment and energy consumption of a wireless sensor network infrastructure is analyzed. The variable nature of the radio channel is analyzed by means of deterministic in-house 3D ray launching simulation of an indoor scenario, in which wireless sensors, based on an in-house CyFi implementation, typically used for environmental monitoring, are located. Received signal power and current consumption measurement results of the in-house designed wireless motes have been obtained, stating that adequate consideration of the network topology and morphology lead to optimal performance and power consumption reduction. The use of radioplanning techniques therefore aid in the deployment of more energy efficient elements, optimizing the overall performance of the variety of deployed wireless systems within the indoor scenario

Joint Astrophysics Nascent Universe Satellite:. utilizing GRBs as high redshift probes

The Joint Astrophysics Nascent Universe Satellite (JANUS) is a multiwavelength cosmology mission designed to address fundamental questions about the cosmic dawn. It has three primary science objectives: (1) measure the massive star formation rate over 5 ≤ z ≤ 12 by discovering and observing high-z gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and their afterglows, (2) enable detailed studies of the history of reionization and metal enrichment in the early Universe, and (3) map the growth of the first supermassive black holes by discovering and observing the brightest quasars at z ≥ 6. A rapidly slewing spacecraft and three science instruments – the X-ray Coded Aperture Telescope (XCAT), the Near InfraRed Telescope (NIRT), and the GAmma-ray Transient Experiment for Students (GATES) – make-up the JANUS observatory and are responsible for realizing the three primary science objectives. The XCAT (0.5–20 keV) is a wide field of view instrument responsible for detecting and localizing ∼60 z ≥ 5 GRBs, including ∼8 z ≥ 8 GRBs, during a 2-year mission. The NIRT (0.7–1.7 µm) refines the GRB positions and provides rapid (≤ 30 min) redshift information to the astronomical community. Concurrently, the NIRT performs a 20, 000 deg2 survey of the extragalactic sky discovering and localizing ∼300 z ≥ 6 quasars, including ∼50 at z ≥ 7, over a two-year period. The GATES provides high-energy (15 keV −1.0 MeV) spectroscopy as well as 60–500 keV polarimetry of bright GRBs. Here we outline the JANUS instrumentation and the mission science motivations

Triangular Textures for Quark Mass Matrices

The hierarchical quark masses and small mixing angles are shown to lead to a simple triangular form for the U- and D-type quark mass matrices. In the basis where one of the matrices is diagonal, each matrix element of the other is, to a good approximation, the product of a quark mass and a CKM matrix element. The physical content of a general mass matrix can be easily deciphered in its triangular form. This parameterization could serve as a useful starting point for model building. Examples of mass textures are analyzed using this method.Comment: 10 pages, no figure

Meson Correlation Function and Screening Mass in Thermal QCD

Analytical results for the spatial dependence of the correlation functions for all meson excitations in perturbative Quantum Chromodynamics, the lowest order, are calculated. The meson screening mass is obtained as a large distance limit of the correlation function. Our analysis leads to a better understanding of the excitations of Quark Gluon Plasma at sufficiently large temperatures and may be of relevance for future numerical calculations with fully interacting Quantum Chromodynamics.Comment: 11 page

Seesaw mechanism, baryon asymmetry and neutrinoless double beta decay

A simplified but very instructive analysis of the seesaw mechanism is here performed. Assuming a nearly diagonal Dirac neutrino mass matrix, we study the forms of the Majorana mass matrix of right-handed neutrinos, which reproduce the effective mass matrix of left-handed neutrinos. As a further step, the important effect of a non diagonal Dirac neutrino mass matrix is explored. The corresponding implications for the baryogenesis via leptogenesis and for the neutrinoless double beta decay are reviewed. We propose two distinct models where the baryon asymmetry is enhanced.Comment: 21 pages, RevTex. Revise

Mortality of patients with multiple sclerosis: a cohort study in UK primary care

We aimed to estimate rates, causes and risk factors of all-cause mortality in a large population-based cohort of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients compared with patients without MS. Using data from the UK General Practice Research Database, we identified MS cases diagnosed during 2001–2006 and validated using patients’ original records where possible. We also included MS cases during 1993–2000 identified and validated in an earlier study. Cases were matched to up to ten referents without MS by age, sex, index date (date of first MS diagnosis for cases and equivalent reference date for controls), general practice and length of medical history before first MS diagnosis. Patients were followed up to identify deaths; hazard ratios (HRs) and 95 % confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using Cox-proportional regression. MS patients (N = 1,822) had a significantly increased risk of all-cause mortality compared with referents (N = 18,211); adjusted HR 1.7 (95 % CI 1.4–2.1). Compared with referents, female MS patients had a higher but not significantly different HR for death than males; adjusted HR 1.86 (95 % CI 1.46–2.38) vs. HR 1.31 (95 % CI 0.93–1.84), respectively. The most commonly recorded cause of death in MS patients was ‘MS’ (41 %), with a higher proportion recorded among younger patients. A significantly higher proportion of referents than MS patients had cancer recorded as cause of death (40 vs. 19 %). Patients with MS have a significant 1.7-fold increased risk of all-cause mortality compared with the general population. MS is the most commonly recorded cause of death among MS patients. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00415-014-7370-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Path Tracking Control for Autonomous Driving Applications

Autonomous or self-driving vehicles are becoming a consolidate reality that involves both industrial and academic elds also for its impact in social and governmental communities, well far from automotive engineering. The intent of the present paper is to design an automatic steering control for an autonomous vehicle equipped with steer-by-wire and drive-by-wire technologies. The steering action is calculated to let the vehicle follow a reference path which is stored in a Digital Map properly built to be available in real-time. A Proportional + Derivative (PD) control strategy is deigned based on the Parameter State Approach (PSA) and it is coupled with a Feedforward (FF) term for improving the path tracking control in cornering maneuvers. Some experimental results are shown to demonstrates the ecacy of the controller presented