The Application of the Community Psychology Practice Competencies for Community Consulting Practice in the U.S.

This article describes many of the competencies used for consulting with communities in the United States. It includes a description of each competency, how each is used, and tips for developing them. The article begins with a definition of community psychology consulting and how it is different from business or other forms of consulting. The different levels of competence and the interdisciplinary nature of the competencies needed for working in communities are discussed. The article maintains that all community psychology consultants need expertise in foundational competencies such as sociocultural and cross- cultural competence and commitment to improving public welfare and social and racial justice. The extent to which community psychology consultants need expertise in other competencies, such as community program development and management, community and social change, and community research, depends upon the type of consulting practice they will have. There is considerable overlap in competencies required for community psychology practice and those required for social work, public health, public administration, and other fields. Therefore, community psychologists interested in pursuing a career in community consulting might take courses or get additional training in other fields

Language Constructs for Distributed Real-Time Consistency

In this paper, we present a model and language constructs for a distributed real-time system with the goal of allowing the structured specification of functional and timing constraints, along with explicit, early error recovery from timing faults. To do this, we draw on ideas from (non-distributed) real-time programming and distributed transaction-based systems [81]. A complete language is not specified; the constructs described are assumed to be embedded in a block-structured procedural host programming language such as C [9] or C++ [10] (our current preliminary implementation is in C). The model consists of resources, processes, and a global scheduler. Resources are abstractions that export operations to processes, and specify acceptable concurrency of operations to the scheduler. Processes manipulate resources using the exported operations, and specify synchronization and restrictions on concurrency (at the exported operation level) to the scheduler. Examples of the types of information given to the scheduler are that a set of operations should be performed simultaneously , or that a sequence of operations should be performed without interference by another process. The global scheduler embodies the entity or entities that schedule the CPU, memory, devices and other resources in the system. It performs preemptive scheduling of all resources based on dynamic priorities associated with the processes, preserves restrictions on concurrency stated by resources and processes, and is capable of giving guarantees to processes that they will receive resources during a specified future time interval. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In the next section, we present language constructs for an expression of timing constraints called temporal scopes, and described resources and processes. Section 3 describes what is required of the global scheduler to support these constructs, and what is entailed in guaranteeing functional consistency.\u27 We conclude in Section 4

The Application of the Community Psychology Practice Competencies for Community Consulting Practice in the U.S.

This article describes many of the competencies used for consulting with communities in the United States. It includes a description of each competency, how each is used, and tips for developing them. The article begins with a definition of community psychology consulting and how it is different from business or other forms of consulting. The different levels of competence and the interdisciplinary nature of the competencies needed for working in communities are discussed. The article maintains that all community psychology consultants need expertise in foundational competencies such as sociocultural and cross- cultural competence and commitment to improving public welfare and social and racial justice. The extent to which community psychology consultants need expertise in other competencies, such as community program development and management, community and social change, and community research, depends upon the type of consulting practice they will have. There is considerable overlap in competencies required for community psychology practice and those required for social work, public health, public administration, and other fields. Therefore, community psychologists interested in pursuing a career in community consulting might take courses or get additional training in other fields

Functional characterization of orbicularis oculi and extraocular muscles

The orbicularis oculi are the sphincter muscles of the eyelids and are involved in modulating facial expression. They differ from both limb and extraocular muscles (EOMs) in their histology and biochemistry. Weakness of the orbicularis oculi muscles is a feature of neuromuscular disorders affecting the neuromuscular junction, and weakness of facial muscles and ptosis have also been described in patients with mutations in the ryanodine receptor gene. Here, we investigate human orbicularis oculi muscles and find that they are functionally more similar to quadriceps than to EOMs in terms of excitation-contraction coupling components. In particular, they do not express the cardiac isoform of the dihydropyridine receptor, which we find to be highly expressed in EOMs where it is likely responsible for the large depolarization-induced calcium influx. We further show that human orbicularis oculi and EOMs express high levels of utrophin and low levels of dystrophin, whereas quadriceps express dystrophin and low levels of utrophin. The results of this study highlight the notion that myotubes obtained by explanting satellite cells from different muscles are not functionally identical and retain the physiological characteristics of their muscle of origin. Furthermore, our results indicate that sparing of facial and EOMs in patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy is the result of the higher levels of utrophin expression

Timed Atomic Commitment

In a large class of hard-real-time control applications, components execute concurrently on distributed nodes and must coordinate, under timing constraints, to perform the control task. As such, they perform a type of atomic commitment. Traditional atomic commitment differs, however, because there are no timing constraints; agreement is eventual. We therefore define timed atomic commitment (TAC) which requires the processes to be functionally consistent, but allows the outcome to include an exceptional state, indicating that timing constraints have been violated. We then present centralized and decentralized protocols to implement TAC and a high-level language construct that facilitates its use in distributed real-time programming

The Tiger Foundation: A Profile in Engaged Philanthropy

Tiger Management was one of the most successful hedge funds of the 1990s. But founder Julian Robertson also wanted to foster a lifelong commitment to giving back among his staff. So in 1990, he created Tiger Foundation with a unique dual mission: To provide financial support to the top nonprofit organizations serving New York City's neediest families;To encourage active, informed philanthropy among the staff at the firm The Foundation marries the rigor and analytics of the investment process to grantor/grantee relationships. Individual trustees not only pore over analytics compiled by Foundation staff, but also meet their grantees face to face and champion them at trustee meetings.The result is nothing short of transformative -- for the organizations Tiger funds and for the decision makers

\u3cem\u3eRTC\u3c/em\u3e: Language Support for Real-Time Concurrency

This paper presents language constructs for the expression of timing and concurrency requirements in distributed real-time programs. Our programming paradigm combines an object-based paradigm for the specification of shared resources, and a distributed transaction-based paradigm for the specification of application processes. Resources provide abstract views of shared system entities, such as devices and data structures. Each resource has a state and defines a set of actions that can be invoked by processes to examine or change its state. A resource also specifies scheduling constraints on the execution of its actions to ensure the maintenance of its state\u27s consistency. Processes access resources by invoking actions and express precedence, consistency. Processes access resources by invoking actions and express precedence, consistency and timing constraints on action invocations. The implementation of our language constructs with real-time scheduling and locking for concurrency control is also described

Modeling Reliable Distributed Real-Time Programs

A model for distributed hard real-time programs should incorporate real-time characteristics and be capable of analyzing time-related reliability issues. We introduce a model called the Real-Tie Selection/ Resolution (RT-SIR) Model with these capabilities and demonstrate it by example