Surrendering Safely: Increasing Clinicians’ Understandings of Kink

Social workers may be uncertain of the appropriateness of asking about kink behaviors during a sexual health history and be concerned about their lack of knowledge or preparation to discuss kink with clients. Understanding the subjective experience of individuals engaging in kink could help professionals understand the variations, challenges, and benefits of kink. The purpose of this study was to learn of the benefits and challenges of engaging in kink that clients report to their clinicians. In addition to this, participating mental health clinicians were asked to report different outcomes from different kink practices and what internal processes occur that lead to these various outcomes from their perspective. Eight interviews were conducted and data were analyzed using both inductive and deductive approaches in which categories emerged and were then linked to the literature review. The findings suggest that there are specific qualifications practitioners should have to be kink culturally-competent. The findings also indicated there are potential physical, psychological, and interpersonal benefits to engaging in kink. This study lastly found that internal stigma, external stigma, community issues, and interpersonal issues were the primary reported challenges for those engaging in kink. This research suggests that engaging in kink can lead to empowerment and self-actualization

Surrendering Safely: Increasing Clinicians’ Understandings of Kink

Social workers may be uncertain of the appropriateness of asking about kink behaviors during a sexual health history and be concerned about their lack of knowledge or preparation to discuss kink with clients. Understanding the subjective experience of individuals engaging in kink could help professionals understand the variations, challenges, and benefits of kink. The purpose of this study was to learn of the benefits and challenges of engaging in kink that clients report to their clinicians. In addition to this, participating mental health clinicians were asked to report different outcomes from different kink practices and what internal processes occur that lead to these various outcomes from their perspective. Eight interviews were conducted and data were analyzed using both inductive and deductive approaches in which categories emerged and were then linked to the literature review. The findings suggest that there are specific qualifications practitioners should have to be kink culturally-competent. The findings also indicated there are potential physical, psychological, and interpersonal benefits to engaging in kink. This study lastly found that internal stigma, external stigma, community issues, and interpersonal issues were the primary reported challenges for those engaging in kink. This research suggests that engaging in kink can lead to empowerment and self-actualization

Sparse Randomized Kaczmarz for Support Recovery of Jointly Sparse Corrupted Multiple Measurement Vectors

While single measurement vector (SMV) models have been widely studied in signal processing, there is a surging interest in addressing the multiple measurement vectors (MMV) problem. In the MMV setting, more than one measurement vector is available and the multiple signals to be recovered share some commonalities such as a common support. Applications in which MMV is a naturally occurring phenomenon include online streaming, medical imaging, and video recovery. This work presents a stochastic iterative algorithm for the support recovery of jointly sparse corrupted MMV. We present a variant of the Sparse Randomized Kaczmarz algorithm for corrupted MMV and compare our proposed method with an existing Kaczmarz type algorithm for MMV problems. We also showcase the usefulness of our approach in the online (streaming) setting and provide empirical evidence that suggests the robustness of the proposed method to the distribution of the corruption and the number of corruptions occurring.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Individual phenotypic variation reduces interaction strengths in a consumer–resource system

Natural populations often show variation in traits that can affect the strength of interspecific interactions. Interaction strengths in turn influence the fate of pairwise interacting populations and the stability of food webs. Understanding the mechanisms relating individual phenotypic variation to interaction strengths is thus central to assess how trait variation affects population and community dynamics. We incorporated nonheritable variation in attack rates and handling times into a classical consumer–resource model to investigate how variation may alter interaction strengths, population dynamics, species persistence, and invasiveness. We found that individual variation influences species persistence through its effect on interaction strengths. In many scenarios, interaction strengths decrease with variation, which in turn affects species coexistence and stability. Because environmental change alters the direction and strength of selection acting upon phenotypic traits, our results have implications for species coexistence in a context of habitat fragmentation, climate change, and the arrival of exotic species to native ecosystems

Determination of Odor Detection Threshold in the Göttingen Minipig

The aim of the study was to examine the ability of Göttingen minipigs to acquire an olfaction-based operant conditioning task and to determine the detection threshold for ethyl acetate and ethanol. We used an automated olfactometer developed for rodents to train and test 14 pigs. Odor sampling and reliable responding were obtained after three to fifteen 160-trial sessions. Successful transfer of the task from ethyl acetate to ethanol was achieved in 1–4 sessions. Detection threshold for ethyl acetate varied between 10−2% and 10−6% v/v and for ethanol between 0.1% and 5 × 10−6% v/v. The results provide evidence that minipigs can successfully acquire 2-odorant discrimination using a food-rewarded instrumental conditioning paradigm for testing olfactory function. This olfactory discrimination paradigm provides reliable measures of olfactory sensitivity and thereby enables detection of changes in olfaction in a porcine model of Alzheimer's disease currently being developed

Recruiting and retaining young adults in a weight gain prevention trial: Lessons learned from the CHOICES study

Young adults are at risk for weight gain but little is known about designing effective weight control trials for young adults or how to recruit and retain participants in these programs. The Choosing Healthy Options in College Environments and Settings (CHOICES) study evaluated the effectiveness of a weight gain prevention intervention for 2-year college students. We describe the methods used to recruit and retain the colleges and their students, describe the sample and discuss recommendations for future studies

Stroke survivors’ priorities for research related to life after stroke

Background - Stroke has transitioned from an untreatable, unpreventable disease to a highly treatable and preventable disease over recent decades, and the number of stroke survivors is expected to increase. The number is also foreseen to grow larger as a result of an aging population. With an escalating number of stroke survivors, research on how to improve life after stroke is needed. Aims - The primary aim was to determine which area of research related to life after stroke that stroke patients and their informal carers prioritized as being relevant and valuable. Methods - A cross-sectional study of all patients who had completed the 12 months of follow-up in the EFFECTS trial. In the questionnaire the stroke patients and their informal carers were asked to prioritize areas of research they considered important and valuable with respect to their life after stroke. Results - Of the 731 patients who were still alive after the 12 months-follow-up, 589 responded. The most prioritized areas of research were Balance and walking difficulties (290 (49%) responders) and Post-stroke fatigue (173 (29%) responders). Women answered the undefined alternative “other” more often than men (43 women (11%) versus 11 men (6%), p = .04). Younger patients prioritized Post-stroke fatigue to a higher extent (88 (45%) versus (22%), p Balance and walking difficulties (214 (54%) versus 76 (40%), p = .002) and Speech difficulties (38 (10%) versus 9 (5%), p = .045). Conclusions - Life after stroke is perceived differentely with aging. Future research should address strategies to face challenges such as imbalance and walking difficulties and post-stroke-fatigue

Sparsity and Incoherence in Compressive Sampling

We consider the problem of reconstructing a sparse signal $x^0\in\R^n$ from a limited number of linear measurements. Given $m$ randomly selected samples of $U x^0$, where $U$ is an orthonormal matrix, we show that $\ell_1$ minimization recovers $x^0$ exactly when the number of measurements exceeds $$m\geq \mathrm{Const}\cdot\mu^2(U)\cdot S\cdot\log n,$$ where $S$ is the number of nonzero components in $x^0$, and $\mu$ is the largest entry in $U$ properly normalized: $\mu(U) = \sqrt{n} \cdot \max_{k,j} |U_{k,j}|$. The smaller $\mu$, the fewer samples needed. The result holds for ``most'' sparse signals $x^0$ supported on a fixed (but arbitrary) set $T$. Given $T$, if the sign of $x^0$ for each nonzero entry on $T$ and the observed values of $Ux^0$ are drawn at random, the signal is recovered with overwhelming probability. Moreover, there is a sense in which this is nearly optimal since any method succeeding with the same probability would require just about this many samples