Therapeutic Activities among Residents with Dementia at a Nursing Home

The researcher conducted this study through analyzed data from qualitative, semi-structured interviews with an interdisciplinary team at a nursing home. All participants had experience working with residents with dementia that participated in therapeutic activities at the nursing home. The major themes that emerged from the data analysis include: a) staff perspective of meaningful therapeutic activities for residents with dementia, b) therapeutic activities contribute to mood improvement, c) therapeutic activities stimulate the mind, d) therapeutic activities impact stress and anxiety, e) room for improvement of therapeutic activities, f) therapeutic activities allow residents with dementia to grow, g) motivation of residents to participate and engage and, h) improved quality of life. The findings provided beneficial information through staff members’ perspective about how therapeutic activities can contribute to the well-being of residents with dementia which assisted the researcher in examining ways that these findings can assist in implications for additional social work research

Therapeutic Activities among Residents with Dementia at a Nursing Home

The researcher conducted this study through analyzed data from qualitative, semi-structured interviews with an interdisciplinary team at a nursing home. All participants had experience working with residents with dementia that participated in therapeutic activities at the nursing home. The major themes that emerged from the data analysis include: a) staff perspective of meaningful therapeutic activities for residents with dementia, b) therapeutic activities contribute to mood improvement, c) therapeutic activities stimulate the mind, d) therapeutic activities impact stress and anxiety, e) room for improvement of therapeutic activities, f) therapeutic activities allow residents with dementia to grow, g) motivation of residents to participate and engage and, h) improved quality of life. The findings provided beneficial information through staff members’ perspective about how therapeutic activities can contribute to the well-being of residents with dementia which assisted the researcher in examining ways that these findings can assist in implications for additional social work research

Power line clearings : suitable habitat for semi-natural grassland species?

Owing to land-use changes, abandoning and intensification of agriculture, semi-natural grasslands are becoming increasingly scarce all over Europe. As a consequence many of the species associated with these habitats have become rare or threatened. Power line clearings are in general viewed as a negative disturbance in forest landscapes. On the other hand, it has been suggested that power line clearings, road verges, and similar human-made landscape elements can act as replacement habitat for semi-natural grassland species. We carried out a large-scale field experiment in power line clearings intersecting boreal forests. All the clearings had a history of management where all woody vegetation was cut every 5-10 years and all biomass was left to decay on site. We selected 19 sites in the main power line grid in southeast Norway. Three different treatments were applied on each site: 1) Cut: All woody vegetation was cut and the cut biomass removed 2) Cut + Remove: all woody vegetation was cut and left to decay on site 3) Uncut: uncut control. We investigated the total species richness of vascular plants in the field layer and richness of semi-natural grassland species (this group also contains species from open forest) in the different treatments. We also investigated which factors affected total species richness and richness of semi-natural grasslands species in the power line clearings. Treatments Cut and Cut + Remove had significantly higher species richness than Uncut. Increasing landscape fragmentation within a 1 km radius from the treatment plots had a significant positive effect on both total species richness and richness of semi-natural grassland species. There was no difference among treatments the first year after the vegetation was cut for either total species richness, or richness of semi-natural grassland species. In the second and third year after cutting, however there was a significantly higher species richness in 4 the treatments Cut and Cut + Remove when compared to treatment Uncut for both total species richness and semi-natural grassland species. We could not conclude that power line clearings can be a replacement habitat for semi- natural grassland species based on the species found in the clearings. However power line clearings can possibly act as a supplementary habitat and thereby mitigate loss of semi-natural grassland species. In cases where the power line clearings intersect species poor, dense forest managed for timber production they will probably contribute to increased species richness on a local scale and possibly mimic open forest.M-N

Minoritetsspråklige elever i spesialundervisning : elevperspektiver

Minoritetsspråklige elever er overrepresentert i spesialundervisning. Spesialundervisning er ment å være en spesielt tilpasset opplæring gitt til elever som vurderes å ikke ville ha tilstrekkelig utbytte av ordinær undervisning. Spesialundervisning skal gi elevene økt læringsutbytte med utgangspunkt i en individuelt tilpasset opplæringsplan. Imidlertid møter spesialundervisningen kritikk både på det sosiale og faglige plan. I denne avhandlingen har jeg anlagt et barneperspektiv på spesialundervisning. Jeg anser det som viktig å snakke med primærbrukerne av det pedagogiske tilbudet når man skal forsøke å forstå virkningen av det. Jeg undersøker hvordan fire minoritetsspråklige elever i Osloskolen opplever spesialundervisning. Avhandlingen er en fenomenologisk studie, hvor jeg gjennom kvalitativ observasjon og semi-strukturerte intervjuer, har intervjuet fire elever gjentatte ganger over en periode på tre kvart år. Mine problemstillinger er: I. Hvordan opplever elevene spesialundervisningen og det faglige utbyttet? II. Hvilken betydning tillegges elevenes sosiokulturelle forutsetninger i spesialundervisningen? Resultatene viser at ingen av elevene vet hva spesialundervisning er eller hvorfor de får spesialundervisning. Elevene opplever svakt læringsutbytte og ser spesialundervisningen som lite meningsfull. De opplever det faglige nivået i spesialundervisningen som for lavt. Samtlige savner samarbeid som arbeidsform innenfor spesialundervisningen. Elevene får spesialundervisning i fag de liker godt. De liker ikke å få segregert undervisning og ønsker fortrinnsvis å være i klassen. Spesialundervisningen har en disiplinerende effekt. Resultatene viser at spesialundervisningen tar lite hensyn til elevenes sosiokulturelle forutsetninger; elevenes flerspråklige kompetanse og transnasjonale erfaringer. Dette er i sterk kontrast til sosiokulturell læringsteori og en økologisk metafor for litterasitet, som anlegger et holistisk perspektiv på læring. Å legge til grunn elevenes sosiokulturelle forutsetninger er et viktig premiss for læring og utvikling. Basert på denne studien vil jeg argumentere for at det er behov for å la barns stemmer komme til uttrykk i forskning som gjelder pedagogiske og utdanningsrelaterte avgjørelser, og ta elevene med i avgjørelser som gjelder deres læring og utvikling.Pupils of minority languages are overrepresented in special education. Special education is intended to be specially designed training, given to students who are considered not to benefit adequately from regular education. Special education is intended to provide students with better learning outcomes based on an individual education plan. However, special education is criticized both at a social and academic level. This thesis applies a child’s perspective on special education. Speaking to the primary users of the educational program is considered important when trying to understand the impact of it. The thesis examines how four pupils of minority languages in Oslo experience special education. The dissertation is a phenomenological study, with qualitative observations and semi-structured interviews with four pupils interviewed repeatedly over a period of nine months. The research questions are: I. How do pupils of minority languages experience special education and its learning outcome? II. Of what importance are the students’ socio-cultural conditions in special education? The results show that none of the students know why they receive special education or what special education is. The pupils experience the academic level in special education to be too low. They perceive this education to lack cooperative learning. The pupils receive special education in subjects that they like. They do not like to be in segregated education and prefer to be in class. Special education has a disciplinary effect. The results show that special education takes little account of the socio-cultural conditions of the pupils, their multilingual skills and transnational experiences. This is in stark contrast to the socio-cultural learning theory and an ecological metaphor for literacy, which adopts a holistic approach to learning, and recognizes the importance of socio-cultural conditions of the pupil for learning and development. Based on this study, I will argue that there is a need for children’s voices to be expressed in research relating to educational decisions, and to take account of their point of view in decisions regarding their learning and development.Master i flerkulturell og internasjonal utdannin

Finding Race Conditions in Erlang with Quick Check and PULSE

We address the problem of testing and debugging concurrent, distributed Erlang applications. In concurrent programs, race conditions are a common class of bugs and are very hard to find in practice. Traditional unit testing is normally unable to help finding all race conditions, because their occurrence depends so much on timing. Therefore, race conditions are often found during system testing, where due to the vast amount of code under test, it is often hard to diagnose the error resulting from race conditions. We present three tools (Quick Check, PULSE, and a visualizer) that in combination can be used to test and debug concurrent programs in unit testing with a much better possibility of detecting race conditions. We evaluate our method on an industrial concurrent case study and illustrate how we find and analyze the race conditions

NorKorr - Norwegian Correspondences and Linked Open Data

Poster presentation at the conference Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 2019, København, 06.02. - 08.03.19, arranged by Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries (http://dig-hum-nord.eu/).The National Library of Norway has a substantial amount of private historical correspondences in its holdings,1 many of which are scholarly edited and published, either in printed editions or in digital form. In addition, other Norwegian cultural heritage institutions, like the Munch Museum,2 but also the university libraries of the Arctic University of Norway3 and the University of Bergen4 and the Gunnerus Library at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology,5 hold significant collections of letters and are preparing digital editions of letters and correspondences of key figures of Norwegian public and academic life. Yet, all these correspondence projects lead a solitary existence – hidden either in editions of single authors or as digitized collections or individual pieces on institutional servers. As a dialogical genre by nature, the full potential of letters and other correspondance material lies in the connection of the individuals writing and receiving letters, postcards, and telegrams – at a specific time and from and to a specific place. But because the collections of letters and individual pieces of a correspondence are historically distributed wide and far in regards to geography and institution, there rarely exist links between them. Thus research on correspondence networks that existed in Norway, the Nordic Countries - and beyond, to Europe and the rest of the world - as well as research on the letter as the main means of written communication for centuries is almost impossible. The project Norwegian Correspondences (NorKorr, from Norwegian "Norske korrespondanser") aims to link these individual letters and similar materials not only to each other but to correspondences in entire Norway, Europe and beyond by use of the CorrespSearch infrastructure. CorrespSearch is both an infrastructure for connecting correspondences accross editions and collections and a web service that aggregates specific correspondence metadata from digital and printed scholarly editions.6 These data can be easily searched via the CorrespSearch web interface or queried via their open API. By integrating Norwegian correspondences in the corpus of letters that already exists on CorrespSearch, they will become for the first time visible as part of a greater international network of letters and allow for a macroscopic view on the correspondence networks that existed throughout the centuries

Effects of hydroxyurea on CNV induction in the mouse germline

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146452/1/em22233.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146452/2/em22233_am.pd

Sentinel-based Surveillance of Coyotes to Detect Bovine Tuberculosis, Michigan

Coyotes could be used as sentinels to detect Mycobacterium bovis in the wild