New Zealand Guidelines for cyanobacteria in recreational fresh waters: Interim Guidelines

This document is divided into four main sections, plus 14 appendices. Section 1. Introduction provides an overview of the purpose and status of the document as well as advice on who should use it. Section 2. Framework provides a background to the overall guidelines approach, recommendations on agency roles and responsibilities, and information on the condition of use of this document. Section 3. Guidelines describes the recommended three-tier monitoring and action sequence for planktonic and benthic cyanobacteria. Section 4. Sampling provides advice on sampling planktonic and benthic cyanobacteria. The appendices give further background information and include templates for data collection and reporting, including: • background information on known cyanotoxins and their distribution in New Zealand • information on the derivation of guideline values • photographs of typical bloom events • a list of biovolumes for common New Zealand cyanobacteria • templates for field assessments • suggested media releases and warning sign templates. A glossary provides definitions for abbreviations and terms used in these guidelines

Impulse

https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/coe_impulse/1044/thumbnail.jp

Crommet Creek Conservation Area Management Plan

The Crommet Creek Conservation Area comprises the largest block of natural lands in the immediate Great Bay watershed, and in New Hampshire’s North Atlantic Coast Ecoregion. It includes the entire watershed of two tidal creeks that flow directly into the Great Bay Estuary. The area has been identified by the Great Bay Resource Protection Partnership as a protection priority due to the size of the natural area; the diversity of habitats and wildlife it supports; and it’s integral role in protecting the regional water quality and resources within the Great Bay Estuary. The Conservation Area includes headwater wetlands, and the entire spectrum of freshwater and estuarine wetland and aquatic communities along both Lubberland and Crommet creeks. The Great Bay is a shallow inland tidal estuary of national importance for migratory birds. The Great Bay supports 29 species of waterfowl, 27 species of shorebirds, 13 species of wading birds, osprey and bald eagle. The Estuary is unique in that it is recessed 9 miles from the ocean along the Piscataqua River. Although development is increasing in the watershed, it remains one of the more healthy and viable estuarine ecosystems on the North Atlantic coast

The Subject-centered Integrative Learning Model: A New Model for Teaching Occupational Therapy’s Distinct Value

The concept of occupation-centered education has been used to describe what programs do when they infuse occupation throughout an occupational therapy curriculum. In describing occupation-centered education, educators often describe the strategies they use to help students learn occupation, including courses about occupation, direct experience with occupation, cases and questions that connect biomedical sciences and health conditions to occupation, assignments that require students to infuse occupation into therapy, curriculum threads related to occupation, and many others. While each of these strategies is important, no conceptual model exists that defines occupation-centered education, elaborates its concepts and principles, and guides the development of curriculum and instructional strategies, uniting them within a whole theoretical approach to teaching occupational therapy. Research has consequently demonstrated that occupation can remain hidden and implied in these and similar teaching and learning strategies. Further, the number of topics students must learn continues to explode and many are not profession-specific. Thus, students and educators alike need a learning framework that helps them intentionally relate multi-disciplinary topics to the distinct value of occupational therapy. The Subject-centered Integrative Learning Model (SCIL-OT) is a conceptual model that outlines the theoretical foundations, elements, and principles of occupation-centered education. This model thus offers a roadmap for curriculum and instructional design that seeks to place the concept of occupation at the center of all aspects of education

An Improved Planar Graph Product Structure Theorem

Dujmović, Joret, Micek, Morin, Ueckerdt and Wood [J. ACM 2020] proved that for every planar graph G there is a graph H with treewidth at most 8 and a path P such that G ⊆ H ⊠ P. We improve this result by replacing "treewidth at most 8" by "simple treewidth at most 6"

THE PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCES OF COUNSELLORS AND PSYCHOTHERAPISTS WHO EMPLOY THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES OF COMPASSION FOCUSED THERAPY: AN INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

This thesis was funded via a Graduate Teaching Assistant role with the College of Health and Social Care. This facilaited research within the college in on the theme of compassion.This research examined the personal and professional experiences of counsellors and psychotherapists who employ the principles and practices of Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT). The research was developed due to anecdotal accounts from counsellors and psychotherapists (and personal experience) that suggested that working with CFT significantly influenced their personal and professional lives. This research focused on a holistic understanding, examining how therapists made sense of CFT in their personal and professional life. The holistic focus is based on systemic theories. However, in this case, rather than looking at systems from a family therapy perspective, the focus here is on what happens in the therapy room is an interweaving of both the client/patient and therapists' experiences, including physiological, cognitive, emotional, organisational, and socio-political influences. Current research in counselling and psychotherapy is focused on patient/client outcomes; it is argued that understanding therapists is just as important as understanding the clients/patients since therapists are a significant part of the therapeutic intervention. Since CFT is a relatively recent psychotherapeutic intervention, the aim is for the research into therapists can develop at the same time as research into clients/patients. The research used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The sample was 10 counsellors/psychotherapists who use the principles and practice of CFT in their personal and professional lives. The method of data collection was the diary/interview method. Thematic analysis was also used to analyse specific questions at the end of the diary and interview. Seven themes were discussed: Experience of using the principles and practices of CFT in professional life; Using CFT to engage with disempowerment, injustice, and abuse; blocks to compassion in clinical work; CBT CFT and other approaches; Experience of using the principles and practices of CFT in personal life; personal blocks to compassion and the importance of time as a block or support to compassion. This research found that psychotherapists' personal and professional experiences are complex and multi-dimensional. They include complex interactions and awareness that are internal to the therapist involving physiological, cognitive, and emotional responses that are ever-changing in response to environmental factors. Experiences also involve external interactions with patients/clients, supervisors, colleagues, other professionals, and the socio-political influences that shape personal and professional life. This research identifies several implications for practice, policy, education, and research. Time was a significant theme. The importance of sufficient time to reflect on practice, personal and professional development impacts the quality of service development and delivery. The importance of developing organisational and practice cultures of equity diversity and inclusion to facilitate the development of compassion was another significant implication. Concerning therapists’ education, explicit focus on the debates around integration and writing to enhance reflective practice. The implications for future research reflect the need to move away from methodological tribalism.College of Health and Social Care University of Derb

Adaptive sampling in context-aware systems: a machine learning approach

As computing systems become ever more pervasive, there is an increasing need for them to understand and adapt to the state of the environment around them: that is, their context. This understanding comes with considerable reliance on a range of sensors. However, portable devices are also very constrained in terms of power, and hence the amount of sensing must be minimised. In this paper, we present a machine learning architecture for context awareness which is designed to balance the sampling rates (and hence energy consumption) of individual sensors with the significance of the input from that sensor. This significance is based on predictions of the likely next context. The architecture is implemented using a selected range of user contexts from a collected data set. Simulation results show reliable context identification results. The proposed architecture is shown to significantly reduce the energy requirements of the sensors with minimal loss of accuracy in context identification