Neurodiversity and the Legal Profession

This article discusses ways to make the legal profession in Nebraska more accessible and inclusive for neurodivergent attorneys, beginning in law school and continuing through licensing, and hiring practices

Integrated psychological therapy: effectiveness in schizophrenia inpatient settings related to patients' age

Elderly people with schizophrenia often suffer from cognitive impairments, which affect their social functioning. Today, only a few therapy approaches for middle-aged and older patients are available. The Integrated Psychological Therapy (IPT) combines neurocognitive and social cognitive interventions with social skills approaches. The aim of this study was to evaluate (1) whether IPT is effective in younger patients (age < 40 years) and middle-aged patients (age ≥ 40 years) and (2) whether control conditions (treatment as usual or unspecific group activities) reveal some change in outcome depending on age

One-Year Randomized Controlled Trial and Follow-Up of Integrated Neurocognitive Therapy for Schizophrenia Outpatients

Objective: Cognitive remediation (CR) approaches have demonstrated to be effective in improving cognitive functions in schizophrenia. However, there is a lack of integrated CR approaches that target multiple neuro- and social-cognitive domains with a special focus on the generalization of therapy effects to functional outcome. Method: This 8-site randomized controlled trial evaluated the efficacy of a novel CR group therapy approach called integrated neurocognitive therapy (INT). INT includes well-defined exercises to improve all neuro- and social-cognitive domains as defined by the Measurement And Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (MATRICS) initiative by compensation and restitution. One hundred and fifty-six outpatients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder according to DSM-IV-TR or ICD-10 were randomly assigned to receive 15 weeks of INT or treatment as usual (TAU). INT patients received 30 bi-weekly therapy sessions. Each session lasted 90min. Mixed models were applied to assess changes in neurocognition, social cognition, symptoms, and functional outcome at post-treatment and at 9-month follow-up. Results: In comparison to TAU, INT patients showed significant improvements in several neuro- and social-cognitive domains, negative symptoms, and functional outcome after therapy and at 9-month follow-up. Number-needed-to-treat analyses indicate that only 5 INT patients are necessary to produce durable and meaningful improvements in functional outcome. Conclusions: Integrated interventions on neurocognition and social cognition have the potential to improve not only cognitive performance but also functional outcome. These findings are important as treatment guidelines for schizophrenia have criticized CR for its poor generalization effect

MoSculp: Interactive Visualization of Shape and Time

We present a system that allows users to visualize complex human motion via 3D motion sculptures---a representation that conveys the 3D structure swept by a human body as it moves through space. Given an input video, our system computes the motion sculptures and provides a user interface for rendering it in different styles, including the options to insert the sculpture back into the original video, render it in a synthetic scene or physically print it. To provide this end-to-end workflow, we introduce an algorithm that estimates that human's 3D geometry over time from a set of 2D images and develop a 3D-aware image-based rendering approach that embeds the sculpture back into the scene. By automating the process, our system takes motion sculpture creation out of the realm of professional artists, and makes it applicable to a wide range of existing video material. By providing viewers with 3D information, motion sculptures reveal space-time motion information that is difficult to perceive with the naked eye, and allow viewers to interpret how different parts of the object interact over time. We validate the effectiveness of this approach with user studies, finding that our motion sculpture visualizations are significantly more informative about motion than existing stroboscopic and space-time visualization methods.Comment: UIST 2018. Project page: http://mosculp.csail.mit.edu

Emerging technologies for school librarians

Codecademy -- Goodreads -- The Khan Academy -- My Friend Robot App -- Netflix for Kids -- Pinterest -- Socrative -- Storybird -- TED-Ed -- Twitter

Financial times: Competing temporalities in the age of finance capitalism

This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism’s logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times

Functioning and health in patients with cancer on home-parenteral nutrition: a qualitative study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Malnutrition is a common problem in patients with cancer. One possible strategy to prevent malnutrition and further deterioration is to administer home-parenteral nutrition (HPN). While the effect on survival is still not clear, HPN presumably improves functioning and quality of life. Thus, patients' experiences concerning functioning and quality of life need to be considered when deciding on the provision of HPN. Currently used quality of life measures hardly reflect patients' perspectives and experiences. The objective of our study was to investigate the perspectives of patients with cancer on their experience of functioning and health in relation to HPN in order to get an item pool to develop a comprehensive measure to assess the impact of HPN in this population.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We conducted a series of qualitative semi-structured interviews. The interviews were analysed to identify categories of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) addressed by patients' statements. Patients were consecutively included in the study until an additional patient did not yield any new information.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We extracted 94 different ICF-categories from 16 interviews representing patient-relevant aspects of functioning and health (32 categories from the ICF component 'Body Functions', 10 from 'Body Structures', 32 from 'Activities & Participation', 18 from 'Environmental Factors'). About 8% of the concepts derived from the interviews could not be linked to specific ICF categories because they were either too general, disease-specific or pertained to 'Personal Factors'. Patients referred to 22 different aspects of functioning improving due to HPN; mainly activities of daily living, mobility, sleep and emotional functions.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The ICF proved to be a satisfactory framework to standardize the response of patients with cancer on HPN. For most aspects reported by the patients, a matching concept and ICF category could be found. The development of categories of the component 'Personal Factors' should be promoted to close the existing gap when analyzing interviews using the ICF. The identification and standardization of concepts derived from individual interviews was the first step towards creating new measures based on patients' preferences and experiences which both catch the most relevant aspects of functioning and are sensitive enough to monitor change associated to an intervention such as HPN in a vulnerable population with cancer.</p

Ships, ports and particulate air pollution - an analysis of recent studies

The duration of use is usually significantly longer for marine vessels than for roadside vehicles. Therefore, these vessels are often powered by relatively old engines which may propagate air pollution. Also, the quality of fuel used for marine vessels is usually not comparable to the quality of fuels used in the automotive sector and therefore, port areas may exhibit a high degree of air pollution. In contrast to the multitude of studies that addressed outdoor air pollution due to road traffic, only little is known about ship-related air pollution. Therefore the present article aims to summarize recent studies that address air pollution, i.e. particulate matter exposure, due to marine vessels. It can be stated that the data in this area of research is still largely limited. Especially, knowledge on the different air pollutions in different sea areas is needed

Unrecognized controls on microbial functioning in Blue Carbon ecosystems: The role of mineral enzyme stabilization and allochthonous substrate supply

Tidal wetlands are effective carbon sinks, mitigating climate change through the long‐term removal of atmospheric CO2. Studies along surface‐elevation and thus flooding‐frequency gradients in tidal wetlands are often used to understand the effects of accelerated sea‐level rise on carbon sequestration, a process that is primarily determined by the balance of primary production and microbial decomposition. It has often been hypothesized that rates of microbial decomposition would increase with elevation and associated increases in soil oxygen availability; however, previous studies yield a wide range of outcomes and equivocal results. Our mechanistic understanding of the elevation–decomposition relationship is limited because most effort has been devoted to understanding the terminal steps of the decomposition process. A few studies assessed microbial exo‐enzyme activities (EEAs) as initial and rate‐limiting steps that often reveal important insight into microbial energy and nutrient constraints. The present study assessed EEAs and microbial abundance along a coastal ecotone stretching a flooding gradient from tidal flat to high marsh in the European Wadden Sea. We found that stabilization of exo‐enzymes to mineral sediments leads to high specific EEAs at low substrate concentrations in frequently flooded, sediment‐rich zones of the studied ecotone. We argue that the high background activity of a mineral‐associated enzyme pool provides a stable decomposition matrix in highly dynamic, frequently flooded zones. Furthermore, we demonstrate that microbial communities are less nutrient limited in frequently flooded zones, where inputs of nutrient‐rich marine organic matter are higher. This was reflected in both increasing exo‐enzymatic carbon versus nutrient acquisition and decreasing fungal versus bacterial abundance with increasing flooding frequency. Our findings thereby suggest two previously unrecognized mechanisms that may contribute to stimulated microbial activity despite decreasing oxygen availability in response to accelerated sea‐level rise

Mobile air quality studies (MAQS) in inner cities: particulate matter PM10 levels related to different vehicle driving modes and integration of data into a geographical information program

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Particulate matter (PM) is assumed to exert a major burden on public health. Most studies that address levels of PM use stationary measure systems. By contrast, only few studies measure PM concentrations under mobile conditions to analyze individual exposure situations. METHODS: By combining spatial-temporal analysis with a novel vehicle-mounted sensor system, the present Mobile Air Quality Study (MAQS) aimed to analyse effects of different driving conditions in a convertible vehicle. PM10 was continuously monitored in a convertible car, driven with roof open, roof closed, but windows open, or windows closed. RESULTS: PM10 values inside the car were nearly always higher with open roof than with roof and windows closed, whereas no difference was seen with open or closed windows. During the day PM10 values varied with high values before noon, and occasional high median values or standard deviation values due to individual factors. Vehicle speed in itself did not influence the mean value of PM10; however, at traffic speed (10 -- 50 km/h) the standard deviation was large. No systematic difference was seen between PM10 values in stationary and mobile cars, nor was any PM10 difference observed between driving within or outside an environmental (low emission) zone. CONCLUSIONS: he present study has shown the feasibility of mobile PM analysis in vehicles. Individual exposure of the occupants varies depending on factors like time of day as well as ventilation of the car; other specific factors are clearly identifiably and may relate to specific PM10 sources. This system may be used to monitor individual exposure ranges and provide recommendations for preventive measurements. Although differences in PM10 levels were found under certain ventilation conditions, these differences likely are not of concern for the safety and health of passengers