Stimulating Flexible Citizenship: The Impact of Dutch and Indian Migration Policies on the Lives of Highly Skilled Indian Migrants in the Netherlands

This paper explores the relationship between migration and integration policies in the Netherlands, diaspora policies in India, and the transnational practices of Indian highly skilled migrants to the Netherlands. We employ anthropological transnational migration theories (e.g., Ong 1999; Levitt and Jaworsky 2007) to frame the dynamic interaction between a sending and a receiving country on the lives of migrants. This paper makes a unique contribution to migration literature by exploring the policies of both sending and receiving country in relation to ethnographic data on migrants. The international battle for brains has motivated states like the Netherlands and India to design flexible migration and citizenship policies for socially and economically desirable migrants. Flexible citizenship policies in the Netherlands are primarily concerned with individual and corporate rights and privileges, whereas Indian diaspora policies have been established around the premise of national identity

Data-driven MRI analysis reveals fitness-related functional change in default mode network and cognition following an exercise intervention

Previous research has indicated that cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is structurally and functionally neuroprotective in older adults. However, questions remain regarding the mechanistic role of CRF on cognitive and brain health. The purposes of this study were to investigate if higher pre-intervention CRF was associated with greater change in functional brain connectivity during an exercise intervention and to determine if the magnitude of change in connectivity was related to better post-intervention cognitive performance. The sample included low-active older adults (n = 139) who completed a 6-month exercise intervention and underwent neuropsychological testing, functional neuroimaging, and CRF testing before and after the intervention. A data-driven multi-voxel pattern analysis was performed on resting-state MRI scans to determine changes in whole-brain patterns of connectivity from pre- to post-intervention as a function of pre-intervention CRF. Results revealed a positive correlation between pre-intervention CRF and changes in functional connectivity in the precentral gyrus. Using the precentral gyrus as a seed, analyses indicated that CRF-related connectivity changes within the precentral gyrus were derived from increased correlation strength within clusters located in the Dorsal Attention Network (DAN) and increased anti-correlation strength within clusters located in the Default Mode Network (DMN). Exploratory analysis demonstrated that connectivity change between the precentral gyrus seed and DMN clusters were associated with improved post-intervention performance on perceptual speed tasks. These findings suggest that in a sample of low-active and mostly lower-fit older adults, even subtle individual differences in CRF may influence the relationship between functional connectivity and aspects of cognition following a 6-month exercise intervention.Center for Nutrition, Learning, and Memory at University of Illinois, Grant/Award Number: C4712National Institute on Aging, Grant/Award Number: R37 AG02566

Enhancing Breastfeeding Rates Among African American Women: A Systematic Review of Current Psychosocial Interventions

The goals of this article are to provide a review of key interventions and strategies that impact initiation and duration of breastfeeding with particular focus on low-income African American mothers' maternal psychological vulnerabilities during the early postpartum period using a social ecological perspective as a guiding framework. Although modest gains have been achieved in breastfeeding initiation rates in the United States, a projected gap remains between infant feeding practices and national Healthy People breastfeeding goals set for 2020, particularly among African Americans. These disparities raise concerns that socially disadvantaged mothers and babies may be at increased risk for poor postnatal outcomes because of poorer mental health and increased vulnerability to chronic health conditions. Breastfeeding can be a protective factor, strengthening the relationship between mother and baby and increasing infant health and resilience. Evidence suggests that no single intervention can sufficiently address the multiple breastfeeding barriers faced by mothers. Effective intervention strategies require a multilevel approach. A social ecological perspective highlights that individual knowledge, behavior, and attitudes are shaped by interactions between the individual woman, her friends and family, and her wider historical, social, political, economic, institutional, and community contexts, and therefore effective breastfeeding interventions must reflect all these aspects. Current breastfeeding interventions are disjointed and inadequately meet all African American women's social and psychological breastfeeding needs. Poor outcomes indicate a need for an integrative approach to address the complexity of interrelated breastfeeding barriers mothers' experience across layers of the social ecological system.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140312/1/bfm.2014.0023.pd

'I don’t have any emotions': feeling rules and surface acting in the emergency department …

The National Health Service (NHS) in England is under significant pressure. It is undeniable that the challenges facing the NHS have implications for the staff tasked with delivering care. Low rates of well-being have a direct impact on the quality of care delivered (Boorman, 2009). English nurses’ rates of stress, burnout and intention to leave the profession are among the highest in Europe and are higher than those in America (Aiken et al, 2012). Despite evidence showing the importance of positive nurse well-being, the emotional component of the role (a great influencer in well-being) (Warren, 2016; Johnson and Spector, 2007), is overlooked (Smith, 2012). An integral part of nursing is often neglected: the emotional labour of nursing. I have applied Hochschild’s theory of emotional labour to a previously unexplored clinical speciality: emergency care. Emergency departments (EDs) are struggling to meet demand, with increasing patient attendance over the last 70 years (The King’s Fund, 2018) and intense government targets (NHS England, 2018). In spite of these challenges, and the nature of EDs, an exploration of ED nurses’ emotional labour is missing from current understanding. We know little of how the ED environment influences the management of emotion. There is also limited knowledge of how nursing specialties, such as emergency care, drive the ‘speciality-specific’ feeling rules. The ED therefore offered a fitting case study to explore and contribute to the concept of emotional labour. Ethnography, through an interpretivist philosophy, enabled immersion in the ED setting, gathering the lived experiences and narratives of the ED nursing team. I undertook direct and first-hand observations, using an ethnographic approach. This allowed room for the dynamism of the setting, workload and pace. Semi-structured interviews were also undertaken with ED staff and the wider ‘well-being’ team. I used two departments for a rich and illuminative dataset. I firstly aimed to understand how the environmental, institutional and organisational dynamics of the ED instrumented the emotional labour. I found that elements of time and space were ‘moderators’ of ED nurses’ emotional labour – in essence, understanding these moderators’ integrated relevance offers the first contribution to knowledge. Understanding the moderators of emotional labour from an organisational ‘meso-level’ perspective, in addition to the study of the more familiar micro level exploration is of interest to those outside of the case study. In particular, those studying organisational behaviour and sociology. Secondly, I aimed to understand the feeling rules driving and underpinning this behaviour. I found that ED nurses’ feeling rules were grown from the distinctive context and that four feeling rules drove their emotional labour, offering a further contribution. These contributions are aimed at both practice based and academic nursing audiences. The recommendations from this thesis relate to working environments and nursing education. Although an ED case study was utilised, the findings can be applied to other healthcare settings, specialties and professionals, along with organisations outside of health. In addition, the findings are applicable to healthcare policy

Hardware-efficient learning of quantum many-body states

Efficient characterization of highly entangled multi-particle systems is an outstanding challenge in quantum science. Recent developments have shown that a modest number of randomized measurements suffices to learn many properties of a quantum many-body system. However, implementing such measurements requires complete control over individual particles, which is unavailable in many experimental platforms. In this work, we present rigorous and efficient algorithms for learning quantum many-body states in systems with any degree of control over individual particles, including when every particle is subject to the same global field and no additional ancilla particles are available. We numerically demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms for estimating energy densities in a U(1) lattice gauge theory and classifying topological order using very limited measurement capabilities.Comment: 7+28 pages, 6 figure