An enquiry into psychotherapy training: challenges to developing a generic foundation year and links to clinical practice training

This document presents an action research enquiry into psychotherapy and counselling training within the context of a training institute. The starting point for the enquiry were the apparent gaps that exist in clinical practice training. Recognising that the commonly used training structure in psychotherapy and counselling training, which separates clinical practice, formal teaching and supervision, often leads to practice and training disparity raising ethical concerns, I aimed to use the enquiry to enhance the effectiveness of clinical training. I formulated two research questions: • Could a more generic psychotherapy training in the foundation year serve as a better preparation for clinical practice? • Would it be possible to develop an integrated structure between clinical practice, training and supervision? These questions led to developing the project in two parts: • An exploration of the feasibility ofa generic foundation year, and • The development of an internship component. The methodology I used was action research, particularly relevant to this enquiry because of the focus on developing practical knowledge through involvement with an organisational system. Another aspect of the enquiry was internal consultancy. As well as being a researcher, I acted as a consultant for the organisation I worked for. The organisational setting was the Metanoia Institute, a counselling and psychotherapy training institute based in London. The Metanoia Institute runs several courses in counselling and psychotherapy - Person Centred, Transactional Analysis, Gestalt and Integrative - as well as a Doctoral programme in psychotherapy in collaboration with Middlesex University. Middlesex University validates the academic programme at the Metanoia Institute, which leads to BA and MSc awards in counselling and psychotherapy. The Institute also contains an internal clinical placement for students - Metanoia Counselling and Psychotherapy Service (MCPS), which I manage. The Metanoia Institute sponsored the enquiry and acted as a principal collaborator throughout. The project shows how the process of enquiry initiated a dynamic of organisational change, highlighting systemic issues and challenges to the development of psychotherapy training, particularly in relation to generic training. The implementation of the findings became possible through focusing on internship, which became the central area for development within the project. The final outcome of the research has been used to develop an extensive pilot project, entailing restructuring of the training programme in one of the academic departments. As well as presenting the enquiry, this document discusses the theme of organisational change and suggests that it offers a lens through which issues of professional integration could be viewed from a systemic (organisational) perspective. Particular themes highlighted by the enquiry relate to: • Issues of culture and identity related to allegiance to a particular theoretical orientation • Factors related to the structure and funding of training organisations, and • The role of clinical practice in the process of professional integratio

Functional agro biodiversity in Dutch arable farming: results of a three year pilot

A pilot on 400 ha of Dutch arable farms during 2004-2007 perennial grassy field margins and functional annual flower strips were created on potato and wheat fields. Monitoring information on pests and natural enemies was directly communicated to the farmers to support pest management decisions. Due to the increasing numbers of natural enemies and the gradually reducing peak densities of aphids, the farmers could refrain from insecticide applications against aphids in these crops. The pilot has yielded great public awareness on possibilities for functional agro biodiversity in arable crops

A microsieve for leukocyte depletion of erythrocyte concentrates

A new ultra thin filtration membrane has been used for leukocyte removal from erythrocyte concentrates. This filtration membrane, an Aquamarijn Microsieve(R), has a high pore density and a narrow pore size distribution and shows good separation behaviour. The low surface roughness of the microsieve will contribute to the biocompatibility and will reduce cell rupture, in particular hemolysis, during filtration. In this paper a brief overview of the effects that occur during filtration will be given. Also the results of the experiments of leukocyte removal from erythrocyte concentrates will be discusse

Crew Rostering for the High Speed Train

At the time of writing we entered the final stage of implementing the crew rostering system Harmony CDR to facilitate the planning of catering crews on board of the Thalys, the High Speed Train connecting Paris, Cologne, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Geneva. Harmony CDR optimally supports the creation of crew rosters in two ways. Firstly, Harmony CDR contains a powerful algorithm to automatically generate a set of rosters, which is especially developed for this specific situation. As the user has some control over the objectives of the algorithm, several scenarios can be studied before a set of rosters is adopted. An important feature of the automatic roster generator is that it respects requirements, directives, and requests stemming from legal, union, and/or company regulations and/or from individual crew. Secondly, Harmony CDR provides user-interface data manipulation at various levels of detail. The user interface enables the planner to easily obtain many different views on the planning data and to manipulate the planning manually. So again, the planner gets optimal support from the system while he or she is still in control. Also, violating a requirement, directive, or request is detected and displayed, but can be accepted by the planner. In this paper we describe the crew rostering problem for the catering crews of the High Speed Train and the Harmony CDR solution in more detail.decision support systems;railways;crew rostering

Online Selection of CMA-ES Variants

In the field of evolutionary computation, one of the most challenging topics is algorithm selection. Knowing which heuristics to use for which optimization problem is key to obtaining high-quality solutions. We aim to extend this research topic by taking a first step towards a selection method for adaptive CMA-ES algorithms. We build upon the theoretical work done by van Rijn \textit{et al.} [PPSN'18], in which the potential of switching between different CMA-ES variants was quantified in the context of a modular CMA-ES framework. We demonstrate in this work that their proposed approach is not very reliable, in that implementing the suggested adaptive configurations does not yield the predicted performance gains. We propose a revised approach, which results in a more robust fit between predicted and actual performance. The adaptive CMA-ES approach obtains performance gains on 18 out of 24 tested functions of the BBOB benchmark, with stable advantages of up to 23\%. An analysis of module activation indicates which modules are most crucial for the different phases of optimizing each of the 24 benchmark problems. The module activation also suggests that additional gains are possible when including the (B)IPOP modules, which we have excluded for this present work.Comment: To appear at Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO'19) Appendix will be added in due tim

Algorithm selection on data streams

We explore the possibilities of meta-learning on data streams, in particular algorithm selection. In a first experiment we calculate the characteristics of a small sample of a data stream, and try to predict which classifier performs best on the entire stream. This yields promising results and interesting patterns. In a second experiment, we build a meta-classifier that predicts, based on measurable data characteristics in a window of the data stream, the best classifier for the next window. The results show that this meta-algorithm is very competitive with state of the art ensembles, such as OzaBag, OzaBoost and Leveraged Bagging. The results of all experiments are made publicly available in an online experiment database, for the purpose of verifiability, reproducibility and generalizability