The author presents a varied menu of ideas and experiences in many areas - in research, in diagnosis, and in psychotherapy, each using art media with patients of all ages. She integrates art, phenomenology and gestalt psychology, describing specific techniques and findings. Part I of the book lays out the theoretical foundations and the techniques; Part II addresses the formal components used in art therapy - line, shape and colour in their interrelated dynamics and discusses other aspects and modes of (...) symbolic expression found in clients' work. Part III looks at symbolic expression through the scribble, offering a system of classification, diagnostic possibilities and case studies of work with eating disorders. Part IV focuses on art expression for art therapy diagnostics, including a method for qualitative diagnostics, and a first full diagnostic battery for adolescents. Part V is devoted to Holocaust children's art expressions, highlighting the power of art expression in children under ultimate stress, the intensity of their inner experience, and its visualization in the structure of the pictures. The book is for art therapists and advanced students. It can be used as a textbook on phenomenological art therapy; for therapeutically-oriented art teachers, educators and social workers; and for practicing psychotherapists, to see that art is a source of expression demonstrating how a person is. (shrink)

An authoritative and accessible book by a qualified scientist, showing incredible proof of the mind-body connection. There is no longer any doubt that the way we think affects our bodies: countless scientific studies have shown this to be true. For former pharmaceutical scientist Dr David Hamilton, the testing of new drugs highlighted how profoundly the mind and body are connected. Time and time again, the control group of patients in drug trials improved at similar rates to those who actually received (...) the medicines. Astounded, Dr Hamilton decided to change the direction of his work to explore the relationship between the mind and the body. This bestselling acclaimed book was first published 10 years ago. In it, Dr Hamilton explores the effect of visualization, belief and positive thinking on the body, and shows how using our imagination and mental processes can stimulate our own defences and healing systems to combat disease, pain and illness. In this new edition, Dr Hamilton has added four new chapters to discuss the latest cutting-edge information and extraordinary new techniques. These include using imagery to stimulate the immune system - a method that can benefit cancer patients undergoing conventional treatment - effectively using the mind to speed up rehabilitation from stroke, and powerful visualization strategies to help facilitate recovery from injury and illness. (shrink)

Embark on a visual journey of self-discovery. In Beaming, Marilyne Verschueren-the artist behind internet sensation @beamingdesign-presents 100 expansive visuals designed to stimulate your mind and awaken your intuition. Messages of hope, resilience, and joy are incorporated into radiant art, with each image offering the reader an opportunity for deep contemplation and introspection. Powerful imagery is paired with 25 guided exercises for mindfulness, journaling, and breathwork to deepen your interactive experience. Full of warmth and positive energy, Beaming is an exquisite companion (...) and a stirring call to follow your truth. (shrink)

Without taking a position on the overall justification of anti-doping regulations, I analyse the possible justification of Therapeutic Use Exemptions from such rules. TUEs are a creative way to prevent the unfair exclusion of athletes with a chronic condition, and they have the potential to be the least bad option. But they cannot be competitively neutral. Their justification must rest, instead, on the relevance of intentions to permissibility. I illustrate this by means of a set of thought experiments in (...) which only an athlete’s intentions vary. I argue that the Doctrine of Double Effect sheds some light on TUEs and illustrate this by applying different readings of the DDE to the thought experiment. This underpins a justification of anti-doping exemptions very different from the approach adopted by the World Anti-Doping Agency. I argue for three changes to bring TUEs in line with this understanding: rewriting of the regulations, transparency, and a greater role for athletes in determining what exemptions are allowed, and when. (shrink)

In spite of Stein and Glasier's justifiable conclusion that initial optimism concerning the immediate clinical applicability of neural transplantation was premature, there exists much experimental evidence to support the potential for incorporating this procedure into a therapeutic arsenal in the future. To realize this potential will require continued evolution of our knowledge at multiple levels of the clinical and basic neurosciences.

Introduction: Despite being considered as a contravention under some countries’ legislation, the therapeutic use of Cannabis sativa has been growing in Brazil, due to the promising results observed in many pathologies. Such a scenario has fostered the need to deepen discussions on the subject and possibly revise legislation governing the substance use and access. Objectives: Identify the types of stigma related to the therapeutic use of Cannabis and describe the strategies people use to overcome stigma. Methods: This integrative (...) review was carried out in the databases PubMed, Scopus, CINAHL, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library, with 565 articles being retrieved. Triads’ cross-check were done, first maintaining the “cannabis” and “therapeutic use” pair, added by “stigma,” “bioethics,” “ethics,” “social consequences,” and “legal consequences.” The final selection resulted in six articles. Ethical Consideration: However, the ethical issues that pervade and regulate decisions on this subject must be considered. Results: Different dimensions and types of stigma related to the therapeutic use of Cannabis have been identified. The bioethical principle of autonomy was an expression of citizenship and human rights, mitigating internal conflicts related to self-stigma and the effects of external stigma on the person’s life. Conclusion: It was possible to identify the types of stigma related to the therapeutic use of Cannabis is an internal dimension represented (self-stigma) and an external dimension, represented (social and structural stigmas) and to identify strategies adopted to face this stigma: skills training group for users, elaboration of laws and specific programs to clarify the therapeutic use of Cannabis with a greater social scope, and support for family members. Thus, contributing to the building of people’s autonomy in a broader context of decision-making autonomy and executive autonomy will provide the development of people’s capacity to perform complex tasks of self-management and, consequently, to continue promoting and preserving their decision-making process and their capacity to plan and perform tasks associated with managing their lives and their treatments. (shrink)

The few people familiar with the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus generally have a low opinion of it. It's easy to see why: the dialogue is a mish-mash of Platonic, Epicurean and Cynic arguments against the fear of death, seemingly tossed together with no regard whatsoever for their consistency. As Furley notes, the Axiochus appears to be horribly confused. Whereas in the Apology Socrates argues that death is either annihilation or a relocation of the soul, and is a blessing either way, "the (...) Socrates of the Axiochus wants to have it both ways": death is both annihilation and a release of the soul from the body into a better realm. This may be used to construct a valid argument for the conclusion that death is not evil, but at the expense of having a contradiction as one of its premises. But D. S. Hutchinson has recently proposed that these inconsistencies shouldn't surprise us if we view the Axiochus as "an unconventional version of a very conventional genre--the consolation letter." In this paper I expand on Hutchinson's brief suggestion and argue that the Axiochus can be rehabilitated by paying attention to its genre. Although the Axiochus does display many similarities to the consolation letter, the shift from letter to dialogue does--pace Hutchinson--significantly affect what's going on. Within the dialogue, Socrates behaves toward Axiochus in a way similar to the way the author of a consolation letter behaves towards the letter's reader: he is willing to use inconsistent arguments, borrowed from any source, in order to soothe the patient. However, in depicting this type of consolatory relationship between Socrates and Axiochus, the dialogue itself is not aiming at consoling its readers. Instead, it should be seen as displaying for the reader's consideration a certain type of consolatory argumentative practice. -/- Socrates notes that Axiochus is "very much in need of consolation" (365a), and he uses any means necessary to accomplish this task. Socrates exhibits many ways in which he is willing to sacrifice argumentative hygiene for the sake of therapeutic effectiveness. These include: -/- * Use of arguments with inconsistent premises, presented in propria persona. * Appeals to emotion * Tailoring arguments to the audience. * Presenting invalid arguments so as to induce unjustified but comforting beliefs. * Evasion. In these respects, I think that Socrates' argumentative practice is best compared to PH III 280-1, where Sextus Empiricus says that the skeptic will deliberately use logically weak arguments as long as they work. Dorothy Tarrant claims that what links the Socrates of the Axiochus to Socrates as he appears elsewhere in the Platonic corpus is his evident care for the welfare of his interlocutor's psyche. But this concern takes a quite different form in the Axiochus than it usually does. As with Sextus, psychic therapy in the Axiochus involves relief from pain. The primary difference between them is that Socrates, unlike Sextus, is not aiming at producing epochê in his patient. (shrink)

Therapeutic practice with stem cells even if not yet realistic has open a cautious optimism among scientists. The mechanism controlling cell differentiation into cell types are not known in details yet. Exists real danger to influence wrongly the public opinion.

Studying via the Internet using information tools is a common activity for students in higher education. With students accessing their subject material via the Internet, studies have shown that students have difficulty understanding the complete purpose of an assessment which leads to poor information search practices. The selection of relevant information for particular learning assessments is the topic of this paper as it describes a case study that focuses on the information tool use of a small group of participants and (...) is a continuation of similar research studies. The study and discussed research findings point to the benefit of students use of a visualisation tool to provide relevant learning cues and to transition to improved engagement with online assessment. (shrink)

Psychotherapy with the use of psychedelic substances, including psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), ketamine, and 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), has demonstrated promise in treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, addiction, and treatment-resistant depression. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PP) represents a unique psychopharmacological model that leverages the profound effects of the psychedelic experience. That experience is characterized by strong dependency on two key factors: participant mindset and the therapeutic environment. As such, therapeutic models that utilize psychedelics reflect the need for careful design (...) that promotes an open, flexible, trusting mindset and a supportive setting. To meet this need, the PP model is increasingly supplemented by auxiliary methods, including meditation, relaxation, visualization or spiritual practices. We suggest virtual reality (VR) as a full-spectrum tool able to capitalize on and catalyze the innately therapeutic aspects of the psychedelic experience, such as detachment from familiar reality, alteration of self-experience, augmentation of sensory perception and induction of mystical-type experiences. This is facilitated by VR’s evidenced capacity to: aid relaxation and reduce anxiety; buffer from external stimuli; promote a mindful presence; train the mind to achieve altered states of consciousness (ASC); evoke mystical states; enhance therapeutic alliance and encourage self-efficacy. While these unique VR features appear promising, VR’s potential role in PP remains speculative due to lack of empirical evidence on the combined use of VR and PP. Given the increased commercial interest in this synergy there is an urgent need to evaluate this approach. We suggest specific VR models and their role within PP protocols to inspire future direction in scientific research, and provide a list of potential disadvantages, side effects and limitations that need to be carefully considered. These include sensory overstimulation, cyber-sickness, triggering memories of past traumatic events as well as distracting from the inner experience or strongly influencing its contents. A balanced, evidence-based approach may provide continuity across all phases of treatment, support transition into and out of an ASC, deepen acute ASC experiences including mystical states and enrich the psychotherapeutic process of integration. We conclude that the potential application of VR in modulating psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy demands further exploration and an evidence-based approach to both design and implementation. (shrink)

The recent renaissance in research on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is showing great promise for the treatment of many psychiatric conditions. Interestingly, therapeutic outcomes for patients undergoing these treatments are predicted by the occurrence of a mystical experience—an experience characterised in part by a sense of profound meaning. This has led to hypotheses that psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is therapeutic because it enhances perception of meaning, and consequently leads to a meaning response. The putative mechanism of action of psychedelics as meaning enhancers (...) raises normative ethical questions as to whether it can be justified to pharmacologically increase the perception of meaning in order to heal patients. Using the perspectives of hedonistic moral theories, this paper argues that if psychedelics operate as meaning enhancers, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can be ethically justified. An anti-hedonistic objection is presented by applying Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine thought experiment to the case of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. However, it is argued that this objection falls short for two reasons. First, even if pleasure and pain are not the only consequences which have moral value they are not morally irrelevant, therefore, therapeutic meaning enhancement can still be justified in cases of extreme suffering. Second, it is possible that psychedelic states of consciousness do not represent a false reality, hence their therapeutic meaning enhancement is not problematic according to Nozick’s standards. (shrink)

The use of genetic technologies within the equine industries has become increasingly common since the horse genome was published in 2009 (Wade et al. 2009). Testing for genes coding for disease in...

Since 2008 I have been closely following the conceptual/performance/video work of Daniel Peltz. Gently rendered through media installation, ethnographic, and performance strategies, Peltz’s work reverently and warmly engages the inner workings of social systems, leaving elegant rips and tears in any given socio/cultural quilt. He engages readymades (of social and media constructions) and uses what are identified as interruptionist/interventionist strategies to disrupt parts of an existing social system, thus allowing for something other to emerge. Like the stereoscope that requires two (...) identical images to create an illusion of a three-dimensional image, Peltz sometimes visualizes two separate elements to create an object or moment that requires space and depth to focus on its varied layers. They say your brain has to process and make meaningful sense out of all that visual information before it can accept the illusion. I say your brain has to do a similar thing when looking and seeing the divine, magical, and faithful (social) art making of Daniel Peltz. Daniel Peltz is Associate Professor of Film/Animation/Video at RISD. He divides his time between Rhode Island and Sweden and is currently at work on an exhibition at Botkyrka Konsthall, Stockholm opening February 2013 and a new project to be included in the IASKA: Spaced Biennial (Australia) in 2014. This interview took place on Skype and is part one of a two-part interview. Feliz Lucia Molina: Are you in Providence, RI? Daniel Peltz: I’m at my house in Providence. I’ve been back for six days teaching winter session at RISD and doing this workshop series—these investors’ drum circles with a group of wealth managers. a client of the firm, 2013, photo Shirin Adhami FLM: The wealth managers were all drumming together? DP: They were all drumming in response to the performance of their retirement portfolios. FLM: Is this part of the “Unrealized Gain/Loss” piece? DP: Yes, it’s part of a show I’m working on in Sweden. I can show you because it was just today. I’ll show you some of this. Lets see—share screen [click, click, click]. This is the room. I’ve been using the camera system that’s already installed in the conference rooms to record them. So the video is being recorded directly by the wealth management office’s tech staff. These are the people I worked with in the last workshop. This conference table is less wondrous. They’ve been learning to drum in response to their retirement portfolios. I started by bringing in my little bit of wealth for them to propose a management strategy, I came to the follow-up meeting with a counter proposal, which was this workshop. So they agreed to do this series of workshops instead of managing my wealth. FLM: Does everybody in the room manage your wealth? That’s kind of a lot of people. DP: That woman in the back there and Craig —they handle new client business. So when you come there with your wealth, they sit down with you and suggest to you how they would manage it. They’re very nice, responsible people. FLM: And where is this? DP: This is in Providence and the one I was showing you is in Waltham, where I was today. Then I’m going to Newport for the last one on Friday. So I will have done four of them. This is the group in Waltham that I just played with today. I played directly with the two groups in Providence and I’m working with an ethnomusicologist at Brown, Asha Tamarisa, who is facilitating the last two. She’s helped develop the workshop in terms of figuring out how to train a group to do this and thinking about the compositional challenges of working in response to retirement portfolio data. FLM: Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project. DP: I might even be able to play you a little of the audio I’ve also been working with a group of professional percussionists on what will become a quarterly public investors’ drum circle event. Their stuff was really nice, but I want you to hear what we sounded like in the workshops. They’ve all been recorded by the a/v system in the offices. We use a simple structure where the drummer investors interpret the sensation of gain or loss as embellishments to a base heartbeat rhythm. The group holds the heartbeat and, as each person experiences gain or loss, they embellish that rhythm. "Screensharing helps me to figure out tiny bits here and there about the project" FLM: Is the process all very spontaneous? DP: Its actually quite structured. We produce a custom stock ticker that shows the performance of their collective portfolios. In advance of the workshop each participant submits assets in their retirement portfolio. Then we make a stock ticker that shows the real-time performance of their assets so that they can respond to almost live data. FLM: Are they reading the stock ticker projected up on the screen in the room? Do people drum in correspondence to the visual live data of the performance of their assets? DP: Exactly. They’re looking at the stock ticker as opposed to each other, so it’s a slightly shifted drum circle. They’re looking at the ticker but they’re listening to each other—that’s what we’re practicing. For example, NVO—the price is 172.08 but it’s down -1.16 and as that moves across the screen, the person who’s retirement is invested in that asset starts to embellish when that arrow first appears, based on their experience of loss. They stop when it exits the screen and return to the heartbeat. You could have one ticker for each retirement portfolio, but the way the workshop is constructed is that we just isolate one asset from each person’s portfolio so that everyone in the group is represented in a single ticker. So they’re drumming and looking at the ticker, but they’re hearing each other experience gain and loss. We’ve removed direct visual engagement from the social structure of a drum circle but the oral engagement is still there. FLM: So they had their own sound interpretation of gain and loss? DP: Yeah and that part is quite spontaneous as you were saying. In some of the preparatory exercises we’ve been working to give the participants more strategies for interpreting the sensations of gain and loss. We’re trying to develop their capacity to embellish a heartbeat or base rhythm but I’m not invested in having a melodious result. I’m quite curious about what this kind of structure will result in without any desire for a particular result. FLM: For context, can you talk about the project you did a couple years ago in Bali, “Unrealized Gain/Loss” in relation to this current wealth management project? DP: The workshops I’ve been doing use a similar strategy to the other components in this project. It started in Indonesia on my sabbatical and I was really trying to understand where I was physically and where I was being on sabbatical—this kind of strange jubilee structure where every seventh year you’re supposed to renew your self. And it was around the time of the global financial crisis. I was on sabbatical for the global financial crisis. I remember watching my father, in particular, respond to the financial crisis by monitoring his retirement portfolio and trying to make sense of it. I realized on a visit to their home that he checked his retirement portfolio every single day and I was really struck by that because in some way our parents are mysteries to us as children, especially their moods. We know how important their moods are but we don’t know what governs them. And somehow it was like I’d figured it out, it’s the performance of the DOW! So I think there was something in that. Then I was in Indonesia and I had been drawn there by an interest in their highly ritualized Hindu culture, where so much of life is driven by a ceremonial calendar. I was interested in Bali as this predominantly Hindu pocket within a predominantly Islamic country and life there being organized by this ritual calendar functioning as a kind of resistance to the dominant global religion of free-market capitalism. So I started to explore that correlation between the ways in which this culture that I was living in was sort of “living for the afterlife” and this idea within certain segments of American society of “living for the afterwork life”. The idea that your wellbeing in the “afterwork life” is tied to forces that are unseen and largely beyond your control has strong similarities to many religious understandings of the universe. So I started to explore that and the crafts and materials that were around me were primarily Batik and percussion. Percussion is a huge part of daily life in Bali. These gamelan troupes were everywhere. And I also happened to be there for Nyepi, the day of silence, which is preceded by a very elaborate procession and construction of demonic statues. These were the things that were around me and I started studying Batik with one of the Batik artists there and also started a conversation with two master Batik artists, one who is American and her Indonesian husband. I developed these patterns that were based on symbols from the performance of my retirement portfolio and worked with the batik artists to produce two sarongs. d. peltz - 2012 In producing the designs, I treated the performance of my retirement portfolio since my arrival at RISD [7 years] as a significant interval and then I looked at the ways in which decisions are made within retirement portfolios as having an extension outwards from the individual assets that underlie the retirement portfolio, which are kind of like the base elements of the retirement world. Then there’s the allocation of your assets, which is a global way of understanding an individual according to typologies, which are often referred to in terms of risk—this notion of a ‘risk profile’. What type of ‘person’ you are is determined by your attitude towards risk, or potentiality, and I found that to be a really fascinating way of understanding the universe. I remember looking at the tabs in my retirement portfolio and finding this one for viewing ‘Unrealized Gain/Loss’ and that’s often how I work—is just going through the Cambridge Parking Code, for example, and finding this section of the code that was called ‘Crossing Non-Signalized Locations’ and just feeling “I can’t do any better than that,” you know? That’s what I was talking about in terms of ready-mades that exist in the social sphere. So I found that tab, actually, a long time ago, and I pulled it out of a journal when I was there [in Bali] working on these pieces and I wound up making these two sarongs and later on a series of porcelain vessels for holding one’s unrealized gains and losses. At the time, I knew that I wanted a performance to come out of them, but I wasn’t sure what it was. I was inspired very much by this sort of thing: Pulls out a TIAA-CREF brochure with a man in a suit seated at a table. This guy is probably an actor, and [the brochure] says “TIAA-Cref announces “Individual counseling sessions at the Rhode Island School of Design. Individual counseling sessions at no additional cost to you. You can discuss your personal financial situation with an experienced TIAA consultant on a confidential basis. We are available to help you discuss how to achieve your financial goals by investing in financial solutions such as mutual funds, brokerage, life insurance, and annuities...etc....What retirement benefits best fits your situation?” Often I encounter this and I think O.K., this is one way to prepare for the after-work life and it seems inadequate to me. But, I also find it really inspiring. I really like the visual language of it. I kind of want to be that man. I’d like to see if I could maybe buy his clothes. FLM: What it is about the man on the brochure that interests you? DP: He’s offering personalized objective advice and a detailed evaluation of everything you need to know and do. Who wouldn’t want that? But he’s also something of a contemporary priest or priestess, mediating between the unseen all-powerful universe of global capitalism and the common worker. So I started off developing Unrealized Gain/Loss directly from the charts that represent the performance of my retirement portfolio. Then I came home and I wanted to use those. I had this word in my journal “unrealized gain/loss vessel.” I had this notion of vessels that would contain unrealized gains and losses. That felt really important to me that they would have somewhere to go. I had been thinking a lot about altars and making offerings—that somehow this really fickle, massive, difficult-to-comprehend-universe of the financial world—that somehow it might be nice if you could making an offering to it. [In Bali] they made such beautiful elaborate offerings. So I studied offering making as well with one of the women there and she taught me some of the standard forms created by folding leaves and the significance of the floral arrangements. I started working in clay and then moved to porcelain and I made these unrealized gain/loss vessels. I made a few of them, they have holes on either side that you can’t get your fingers in. But something can go in there and something can go out of there. It’s a nice size for putting on an altar. Then I got this commission from Artists in Context who was interested in my doing something for this project “Artists Perspectives for the Nation” project. I proposed initiating these investors’ drum circles as a new public performance form. I’m interested in bringing together those two symbols—the symbol of the djembe and the drum circle. unrealized gain/loss vessel - d.peltz - 2012 FLM: I can imagine the public digital stock ticker performing like a soft fleeting stream of information, a kind of (meaningless) illusory comfort blanket. DP: In some way you have to understand its relevance outside of the obvious, right? Because the obvious is illogical. Nobody is actually using that data to day trade, for example. People aren’t sitting there with their computers watching the market data in Times Square or setting up an outdoor office and being like “OK it’s up 3 points or it’s up 1.56, trade! Ok now buy, Ok now sell!” That would be a kind of a nice performance, actually. But actual day traders would want more up to date data than that. To understand what that data is doing is really important. And that’s something I’ve realized—that I’m interested in a particular kind of data visualization, which is not about what data can tell people, but what data can tell people who are visualizing it. For example, in the Cambridge Project “Crossing Non-Signalized Locations” I was interested in the 10,000 excuses archive of data recording five years worth of excuses for why people thought they shouldn’t have received their parking ticket. I was not interested in making that excuse wall so that the public could see and understand this data. Inevitably the data will be seen by others but I was really interested in what the action of visualizing the data told those who were visualizing it. The parking attendants themselves were writing those excuses on the wall—I was interested in what that kind action of writing the excuses on the wall told them about the data. Similarly, I’m interested in designing a way to allow people to pass this data from the unseen universe of the market, through their own bodies, which happens through the merging of the drum and the stock ticker. I’m interested in those two also as symbols; the drum as this symbol of the earth, the body and a pagan counterculture, and the stock ticker referring to the ethereal world of global markets—bringing those two together and making them dependent. I’m often drawn to conceptual propositions that I become invested in testing in a sincere way—at first they often they sound humorous to others, but I have to remember that there is humor in them. I don’t sit around and laugh about these things. I stop finding them funny at all. I’m interested in the proposition that we could know something about the after-work life by drumming in response to our retirement portfolio. So then I become really interested in how to craft that into a viable performance form for myself and others. FLM: The aspect of using sound in “Unrealized Gain/Loss” as a way of embodying the information to the asset holder is really intriguing—using sound as a means of embodying the asset data. Was sound a medium that made sense to use immediately or were you considering other means of attempting to embody it? DP: Well I do use other mediums within the project like textile, ceramic, and batik patterns. I was first drawn to the history of Batik patterns as a socio-economic stratification system and the vessels as a way of embodying or manifesting this data of unrealized gain and loss. My first approach was to work with meditation actually—a meditation workshop with my colleagues. I was going to offer this “Unrealized Gain/Loss” workshop where you would explore the sensations of gain and loss by adapting the way yogi-nidra brings you into contact with your physical surroundings and stretches your perception. FLM: At Naropa University there are/were business & compassion workshops—a sort of mash-up of business and compassion and how compassion could be incorporated into a business model. This process and engagement of “embodying data” also has to do with “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” you created at the DNC in Denver in 2008. DP: That kind of appropriation and instrumentalization of spiritual practice could be disturbing and thus compelling as a strategy. For various reasons, I’ve come to be drawn to both the form of a quarterly public performance and the established performance form of a drum circle. Its something I’ve seen myself do before, that is to mess up a really good functional social system like a drum circle or karaoke. I remember I was developing language for the karaoke project and started calling it “Participatory Democracy and the Future of Karaoke” and one of my assistants on the project, who’s an incredible artist, said, “but don’t you think the future of karaoke is guitar hero?” and I realized that maybe he thought I was trying to improve the form. I’m just trying to get people to have this shifted embodied experience, I need to craft the performance context so that they can do that. In the case of the karaoke project, for example, what did I need in order to be able to do this [a person to stand up in front of a bar and deliver a karaoke speech]? I realized that the body is very vulnerable so I built a podium so that the speaker can feel secure enough to do this, otherwise you couldn’t get to this state achieved by passing these speeches through the body. Then I was, like, well you need to be able to practice the lyrics because you don’t know all the “songs” by heart, which became an insert to the massive track books carried by most karaoke VJs. And then sometimes the crowd in the bar isn’t there with me, so I needed to extract the voice of the crowd cheering from the original venue and I needed the local audience to cheer if they wanted to. I’m interested in both where the form succeeds and fails. In particular, one of the most interesting things is this auditory gap between the space where you are, the reduced scale of applause in your own little bar, and this grand scale of applause at the convention center where the speech was originally delivered. FLM: How did the concept of “Participatory Democracy Karaoke” come about and why did you use karaoke as a means of engaging what was happening at the DNC in 2008? DP: I was looking at a lot of different readymade media infrastructures within the city at the time. I was interested in the emergency broadcast systems and I developed a proposal to repurpose that system and karaoke became an important symbol because it was this populist form that was already engaged in exploring the sensation of celebrity but also visualizing the gap between ourselves and those with more power and influence. So it had this readymade capacity to play with power and celebrity and I felt like the Obama presidential campaign, the first one in particular, had some very curious overlaps with this culture of celebrity. Obama of course rose to power partly based on his oratory abilities and I was interested in how karaoke as a vehicle was so adept at offering people all that was left of authentic expression in a political speech. Managing a politician and constructing their identity is such a developed practice that it becomes, kind of automatically, a metaphor for the way that our own identities are constructed. Of course the Obama campaign was very hip and savvy and deploying this notion of grassroots. It was really pioneering in its use of social media and this deployment of notions of populism. I was interested at that time in the capacity of karaoke to track speech patterns, precise tempos of anyone’s delivery, and that to me was a way of thinking about what might be left of the authentic self. I was interested in karaoke’s capacity to extract that authentic component and offer it to others. So not just to stand up and be them, but to [literally] pass their speech patterns through your own body. A long time ago, it started to strike me as odd that one would make media at all. It struck me as a kind of un-contemporary way of going about making art in an age of media overflow. That logic extended into my thinking on delivery devices and installation as well. Why would one buy a screen or even set one up when there are so many out there? And the way in which these media displays function in karaoke bars and bars in general is very interesting to me. I’m drawn to this passive consumption of media where your primary social interaction is with the bartender or a few other individuals but these screens are around you and your attention is shifting back and forth between these spaces. So much political rhetoric is spoken to a half-listening audience. I was interested in what was happening in the slippage and that karaoke was a kind of slippage amplifier. So if you put people in a bar and they are delivering a Kucinich speech and Kucinich comes up on a screen then your getting a sound bite of Kucinich and an image of Kucinich and your friend is talking to you— FLM: A kind of magic takes place in that incongruency between sound and image and the karaoke participant who’s relaying the speech-text at the same time. DP: Exactly and there’s some kind of truth in that experience of reality. FLM: Yeah, there’s something uncanny about seeing the body close-up like that as though it can’t lie to you in that moment or context. It’s a weird moment of luminous clarity. The work you’ve done and all of what you’re saying about karaoke is so very interesting to me. Growing up, my dad and uncles sang karaoke a lot (and still do) and being first-generation Filipino American is a different cultural subtext entirely. I’m also seeing it from the position of witnessing family members who are carriers of these stories and songs. And seeing them cherish these Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley songs so much, I also see how their bodies are literal vessels of popular music that signifies something greater—it signifies their cultural and socioeconomic place in the world. The way that they cherish these American 1950s and 1960s pop songs is similar to having a certain kind of reverence for their spiritual faith or Catholicism. It’s a similar kind of care, focus, and attention exerted in karaoke and Catholicism—that these two structures and systems give something to focus on. Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Obama in Indiana — d. peltz — 2008 DP: Sure there something about the relationship we have to our candidate or the way we go about choosing a candidate, which is very similar to a deity or idol. I learned a lot about karaoke culture through this project. I’d never done karaoke. I’d never been interested in it as a form and then I travelled to Japan as part of the project when I made “Setsuko, Seiji and Hitoshi in Obama, Japan as Barack Obama in Indiana” and it was quite fascinating because my image of karaoke had always been this very public forum in a karaoke bar and then I discovered there’s this whole other world of karaoke where people even go on their own, they go and rent a room or cubicle and sing, or they go on a date—just the two of them go and sit in a room and do karaoke together. FLM: I’m interested in issues that take place within or as a result of specific karaoke culture(s). In the Philippines within the last several years there’s been occurring the “My Way Killings” phenomenon. Apparently baklas or gay men are employed by karaoke establishments to help “smooth over conflicts over karaoke singing”—these social forms of conduct, or lack thereof that arise out of the infrastructures of this social sport. In this one rural part of the Philippines there’s a village karaoke machine that the whole village shares—the Aeta indigenous people have an appointed “keeper” of the karaoke machine. I also see karaoke as a proxy to the confessional box in Catholicism where one goes to pour out their sins (minus the penance and redemption). The karaoke machine enables one to literally sing out whatever’s going on internally, but through highly saturated popular song lyrics. While karaoke is a public and social sport, it can also be a private one. Karaoke is a means of communion with each other. DP: Right, this preference for this kind of mediated communication. In Japan I was trying to organize people to work on this project and I was talking about throwing a party and they were like, well, we have to rent a karaoke machine because what else are we going to do? And I think its kind of serving that function of surrogacy—emotional surrogacy. FLM: And karaoke tools can be read as ritual tools—the magic mic that holds everything. There’s got to be some overlap at some point—between religious ceremony and devotion to the karaoke machine. DP: The way I designed the piece was so that it could slip right on top of the ready-made karaoke infrastructure. There was a flat-packed podium and it was made of a single sheet of plywood with no fasteners that slotted into itself. Those were sent out to a network of karaoke bars that I invited to become “karaoke convention centers.” The local VJs downloaded our custom-made, speech-extracted tracks that were designed to play on their existing equipment. In this sense the piece is a permanent installation. If you go to Denver today, some of the VJs still have the tracks in their library of offerings, the Ramones and Romney. It was this notion of re-purposing readymade infrastructure to create a distributable populist form. Obama was coming and the convention was in the Pepsi Center and 30,000 people were coming including 10,000 journalists. The impetus behind the larger art project that commissioned international artists to make works in Denver, was that local people weren’t going to have much access to this convention. It was like an invasion, the city was being descended upon, but if you lived a block away from the site, you had the same access as people in Zimbabwe&mash;30 second media bits excerpted from the speeches. So it seemed to me that the fundamental gesture was how do I take that signal, which was travelling out of the convention center, and create a local interruption? FLM: Is that what you mean by ‘intervention’? The term is frequently used to help describe your work. DP: It depends on the day. Around that karaoke project I had a conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko and he was proposing that maybe rather than intervention, we should consider the word interruption. Because intervention is kind of an overused term in the field of art and it has militaristic and therapeutic associations outside of the art context. Fundamentally, the idea of intervening speaks to the readymade social world as your primary material. So it’s basically suggesting a kind of subtractive process, which gets back to this question: what is the role of the contemporary media artist in a world that’s so saturated with media? You can’t work additively in a saturated field. If you want to make a visible mark you have to work subtractively. That’s what intervention is about to me, just another way of saying “to work subtractively.” FLM: So the interventions or interruptions aren’t necessarily adding or subtracting, but are they putting orange cones there? What are they doing exactly? DP: I think you’re right about that, they’re not really subtracting. They’re adding to the scope of possibility. I’ve been thinking (with this exhibition I’m mounting next month) about the work as explorations and expansions of social possibility. Maybe it’s more insertion. I started calling the pieces ‘insertions’ that I was making in Rejmyre—a small town in Sweden where I’ve been working for six years now. My favorite site to install there is the tourist bureau. I started calling the video pieces that I made for the tourist bureau, video insertions. This idea that you’re inserting something into the readymade media infrastructure of the world resonates with me. Insertion leverages a context, creating a possibility that the inserted object might be naturalized in the process — that someone can encounter my video in Rejmyre as tourist information. And then all of a sudden tourist information can include some American guy prostrating through town and it can include really bad relationship advice. Maybe insertion is a better word. tourist information – d. peltz 2009-present  . (shrink)

Use of the imagination is a key aspect of successful psychotherapeutic treatments. Psychotherapy helps clients get in touch with, awaken, and learn to trust their creative inner life, while therapists use their imaginations to mentalise the suffering other and to trace the unconscious stirrings evoked by the intimacy of the consulting room. Working from this premise, in _The Therapeutic Imagination_ _Jeremy Holmes_ argues unashamedly that literate therapists make better therapists. Drawing on psychoanalytic and literary traditions both classical and contemporary, (...) Part I shows how poetry and novels help foster therapists’ understanding of their own imagination-in-action, anatomised into five phases: attachment, reverie, logos, action and reflection. Part II uses the contrast between secure and insecure narrative styles in attachment theory and relates these to literary storytelling and the transformational aspects of therapy. Part III uses literary accounts to illuminate the psychiatric conditions of narcissism, anxiety, splitting and bereavement. Based on Forster’s motto, ‘Only Connect’, Part IV argues, with the help of poetic examples, that a psychiatry shorn of psychodynamic creativity is impoverished and fails to serve its patients. Clearly and elegantly written, and drawing on the author’s deep knowledge of psychoanalysis and attachment theory and a lifetime of clinical experience, _Holmes _convincingly links the literary and psychoanalytic canon. _The Therapeutic Imagination _is a compelling and insightful work that will strike chords for therapists, counsellors, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and psychologists. (shrink)

In their article “Ethical Issues in Fecal Microbiota Transplantation in Practice,” Ma and colleagues (2017) raise a number of questions related to the development of fecal microbiota transplants (F...

Correspondence held in the collections of cultural institutions is an important resource for researchers, including historians, biographers, and social scientists. Email has been the dominant form of correspondence for the last 30 years and email archives are now being acquired by cultural institutions as a valuable resource for their collections. There are challenges in collecting, preserving and providing access to email archives, as with all born-digital materials, but also challenges in using email archives as a researcher. One tool that can (...) help researchers use an email archive is visualisation. Visualisation has been applied to email for a long period of time but there has been little research into the visualisation needs of researchers using email archives. The preliminary outcomes of a research project investigating the needs of researchers suggests that visualisations will be useful to the researcher, who is always under the pressure of limited time, to work efficiently with the email archive. Artificial intelligence (AI) can play a role in preparing the email archive for visualisation. However, the research outcomes suggest that visualisations will be viewed cautiously by researchers who want time with the actual email archive to develop their research and they are unlikely to trust visualisations alone. The use of AI in the production of visualisations has the potential to add further barriers to researchers’ level of trust. (shrink)

Background: The use of therapeutic untruths raises a number of ethical issues, which have begun to be explored to some extent, particularly in dementia care services, where their use has been found to be high. Little is known, however, about their use by health professionals working in learning disability services. Research question: The study aimed to explore the frequency of use of therapeutic untruths by student learning disability nurses, and by their colleagues; how effective the students perceived them (...) to be as a means of responding to behaviours that challenge; and their level of comfort with using them. Research design: A correlational design was used to gather data from an online version of the Best Interest Scale, adapted for a learning disability context. Participants were 30 learning disability student nurses studying at a university in the North-East of England. Ethical considerations: The study was reviewed and received ethical approval from the first author’s university ethics committee. Findings: Overall, 96% of participants reported using therapeutic untruths. ‘Omission’ was the most frequently used type of therapeutic untruths, the most effective and the type that the students felt most comfortable using. Frequency of use of therapeutic untruths correlated significantly and positively with perceived effectiveness and the level of comfort that the students felt when using them, for all types of therapeutic untruths. Conclusion: The use of therapeutic untruths by the student nurses was consistent with that found in research in dementia care services in the United Kingdom and abroad. Further research to explore the generalisability of the results to the wider context of learning disability services is needed. The study highlights that there may be a need for more formal guidance and educational input to student nurses in the use of therapeutic untruths with people with a learning disability. (shrink)

Combined oral contraceptives have been demonstrated to have significant benefits for the treatment and prevention of disease. These medications also are associated with untoward health effects, and they may be directly contraceptive. Prescribers and users must compare and weigh the intended beneficial health effects against foreseeable but unintended possible adverse effects in their decisions to prescribe and use. Additionally, those who intend to abide by Catholic teachings must consider prohibitions against contraception. Ethical judgments concerning both health benefits and contraception are (...) approached in this essay through an overview of the therapeutic, prophylactic, untoward, and contraceptive effects of COC and discussion of magisterial and traditional Catholic teachings from natural law. Discerning through the principle of double effect, proportionate reason, and evidence gathered from the sciences, medical and moral conclusions are drawn that we believe to be fully compliant with good medicine and Catholic teaching. (shrink)

In the Peruvian Amazon, tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) is considered a master plant and is the main curing tool of local healers. Among its several medicinal uses, we find drinking tobacco juice with the purpose of purging in order to heal on a physical, mental, and spiritual level. This specific practice is part of the addiction treatment protocol developed at Takiwasi Center. The goal of this investigation was to focus on the effects of the tobacco purge as reported by therapists at (...) Takiwasi and to elaborate its relevance within the context of addiction treatment. In order to obtain information on this topic, we performed research fieldwork based on a participant-observation approach, and retrospective data analysis on information from interviews conducted by psychotherapists with patients. As alleged effects of the tobacco purge, therapists reported that patients experienced feelings of mental clarity with the greatest frequency (n = 80), followed by noteworthy physical effects including discomfort and intoxication (n = 63). An effect on sleep and dreams was also common (n = 36) and many found the experience directly related to addiction treatment and the desire to consume substances (n = 20). (shrink)

Road accidents have increased rapidly in recent years for a variety of reasons. Analyzing and visualizing road accidents through heatmaps can help improve policies for their prevention by informing about areas with a high-risk of road accidents. The purpose of this research is to build a model for the analysis and visualization of road accidents through heatmaps. Information about road accidents is extracted from the news of the main online media portals through scripts in the Python language and Web (...) Scraping techniques. From the extraction of about 30,000 articles from news portals for one year, only 829 were selected in the end that provided information about road accidents. As a result, and contribution of this research, a corpus was built with the geographic coordinates of road accidents and on this data our model was applied for the analysis and visualization of high-risk areas of road accidents using heatmaps. The visualization of heatmaps was done through a Python script, where it was applied to the geographic coordinates of road accidents. (shrink)

Transparency in data visualization is an essential ingredient for scientific communication. The traditional approach of visualizing continuous quantitative data solely in the form of summary statistics has repeatedly been criticized for not revealing the underlying raw data distribution. Remarkably, however, systematic and easy-to-use solutions for raw data visualization using the most commonly reported statistical software package for data analysis, IBM SPSS Statistics, are missing. Here, a comprehensive collection of more than 100 SPSS syntax files and an SPSS dataset (...) template is presented and made freely available that allow the creation of transparent graphs for one-sample designs, for one- and two-factorial between-subject designs, for selected one- and two-factorial within-subject designs as well as for selected two-factorial mixed designs and, with some creativity, even beyond. Depending on graph type, raw data can be displayed along with standard measures of central tendency and dispersion. The free-to-use syntax can also be modified to match with individual needs. A variety of example applications of syntax are illustrated in a tutorial-like fashion along with fictitious datasets accompanying this contribution. The syntax collection is hoped to provide researchers, students, teachers, and others working with SPSS a valuable tool to move towards more transparency in data visualization. (shrink)

Biomedical ontologies not only capture a wealth of biological knowledge but also provide a representational system to support the integration and retrieval of biological information that shed light...

Traditional navigation visualization utilizes two-dimensional. maps for road guidance or arrow symbols for turn by turn information. While the advantage of map views is supposed to be the inherent understanding of the surroundings, often these schematic line-drawing bird's eye views are rather confusing than helpful because they cannot provide an overview and an appropriate level of detail in an area of interest at the same time, i.e. the user is forced to change between different resolutions. In this paper we (...) describe a 3D visualization system for vehicle navigation that overcomes these shortcomings by providing a realistic and perspective 3D view of the environment. (shrink)

Use of videogames (VGs) is almost ubiquitous in preadolescents’ and adolescents’everyday life. One of the most intriguing research topic about positive effects of VG use is about the domain of visuospatial competencies. Previous research show that training with videogames enables children and adolescents to improve their scores in visuospatial tests (such as mental rotation of shapes and cubes), and that such training could overcome gender differences in these domains. Our study aimed at (1) verifying the positive effects of videogame use (...) in the visuospatial domain both for male and female adolescents and preadolescents and (2) verifying whether the visualization style (2D or isometric 3D) of the VG has an influence about the positive effects of gaming. Six measures of visuospatial competency were administered to 318 preadolescents (mean of age = 13.94 years, range 10-18) prior and after a 3-day training with 2D and 3D Tetris. Results indicate that (1) gaming on the whole has slight positive effects both for males and females in enhancing visuospatial competencies, at least in the short term, and (2) it seems that participants who used the videogame with 2D graphics obtained greater improvements in the mental rotation domain while the participants who used the videogame with 3D gobtained greater improvements in the spatial visualization domain. However, a general learning effect between T1 and T2 was measured, which was found regardless of Experimental condition, indicating that the effect of training with videogames can be less relevant than expected. (shrink)

This paper explores the development of the chemical table as a tool designed for chemical information visualization. It uses a historical context to investigate the purpose of chemical tables and charts, analyzing them from the perspective of theory of tables, cartography, and design. It suggests reasons why the two-dimensional periodic table remains the de facto standard for chemical information display.

The act of understanding is at the heart of all scientific activity; without it any ostensibly scientific activity is as sterile as that of a high school student substituting numbers into a formula. Ordinary language often uses visual metaphors in connection with understanding. When we finally understand what someone is trying to point out to us, we exclaim: “I see!” When someone really understands a subject matter, we say that she has “insight”. There appears to be a link between (...) class='Hi'>visualization and understanding, and between visualizability and intelligibility. This applies in science no less than in daily life: visualization is regarded as a useful means of achieving scientific understanding, even in the .. (shrink)

The concept of attractors is considered critical in the study of dynamical systems as they represent the set of states that a system gravitates toward. However, it is generally difficult to analyze attractors in complex systems due to multiple reasons including chaos, high-dimensionality, and stochasticity. This paper explores a novel approach to analyzing attractors in complex systems by utilizing networks to represent phase spaces. We accomplish this by discretizing phase space and defining node associations with attractors by finding sink strongly (...) connected components within these networks. Moreover, the network representation of phase space facilitates the use of well-established techniques of network analysis to study the phase space of a complex system. We show the latter by introducing a new node-based metric called attractivity which can be used in conjunction with the SSCC as they are highly correlated. We demonstrate the proposed method by applying it to several chaotic dynamical systems and a large-scale agent-based social simulation model. (shrink)

Susan A. Salladay; Should Christians Use Therapeutic Touch?, Christian bioethics: Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality, Volume 8, Issue 1, 1 January 2002.

In written and spoken communications, figures of speech (e.g., metaphors and synecdoche) are often used as an aid to help convey abstract or less tangible concepts. However, the benefits of using rhetorical illustrations or embellishments in visualization have so far been inconclusive. In this work, we report an empirical study to evaluate hypotheses that visual embellishments may aid memorization, visual search and concept comprehension. One major departure from related experiments in the literature is that we make use of a (...) dual-task methodology in our experiment. This design offers an abstraction of typical situations where viewers do not have their full attention focused on visualization (e.g., in meetings and lectures). The secondary task introduces “divided attention”, and makes the effects of visual embellishments more observable. In addition, it also serves as additional masking in memory-based trials. The results of this study show that visual embellishments can help participants better remember the information depicted in visualization. On the other hand, visual embellishments can have a negative impact on the speed of visual search. The results show a complex pattern as to the benefits of visual embellishments in helping participants grasp key concepts from visualization. (shrink)

In written and spoken communications, metaphors are often used as an aid to help convey abstract or less tangible concepts. However, the benefits of using visual metaphors in visualization have so far been inconclusive. In this work, we report an empirical study to evaluate hypotheses that visual metaphors may aid memorization, visual search and concept comprehension. One major departure from previous metaphor-related experiments in the literature is that we make use of a dual-task methodology in our experiment. This design (...) offers an abstraction of typical situations where viewers do not have their full attention focused on visualization (e.g., in meetings and classes). The use of the secondary task introduces “divided attention”, and makes the effects of visual metaphors more observable. In addition, it also serves as additional masking in memory-based trials. The results of this study show that visual metaphors can help participants better remember the information depicted in visualization. On the other hand, visual metaphors can have a negative impact on the speed of visual search. The results also show a complex pattern as to the benefits of visual metaphors in helping participants grasp key concepts from visualization. (shrink)

In order to solve problems, humans are able to synthesize apparently unrelated concepts, take advantage of serendipitous opportunities, hypothesize, invent, and engage in other similarly abstract and creative activities, primarily through the use of their visual systems. In _Scenario Visualization_, Robert Arp offers an evolutionary account of the unique human ability to solve nonroutine vision-related problems. He argues that by the close of the Pleistocene epoch, humans evolved a conscious creative problem-solving capacity, which he terms scenario visualization, that enabled (...) them to outlive other hominid species and populate the planet. Arp shows that the evidence for scenario visualization -- by which images are selected, integrated, and then transformed and projected into visual scenarios -- can be found in the kinds of complex tools our hominid ancestors invented in order to survive in the ever-changing environments of the Pleistocene world. Arp also argues that this conscious capacity shares an analogous affinity with neurobiological processes of selectivity and integration in the visual system, and that similar processes can be found in the activities of organisms in general. The evolution of these processes, he writes, helps account for the modern-day conscious ability of humans to use visual information to solve nonroutine problems creatively in their environments. Arp's account of scenario visualization and its emergence in evolutionary history suggests an answer to two basic questions asked by philosophers and biologists concerning human nature: why we are unique; and how we got that way. Robert Arp is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National Center for Biomedical Ontology. His areas of specialization include philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind. He is the author of numerous articles and the forthcoming An Integrated Approach to the Philosophy of Mind. (shrink)

Psychodrama is an effective psychotherapeutic model but interventions with adolescents require age-tailored techniques that maximize engagement and facilitate communication processes. This study describes a novel adaptation of a therapeutic mask technique to psychodrama with adolescents. Over the course of eight group sessions of psychodrama, five adolescents created their own mask and explored its therapeutic use. Their experiences were captured at the end of each session with the Helpful Aspects of Therapy form, and at the end of the study (...) with the Clinical Change Interview. Awareness/insight/self-understanding, empowerment and relief were the most significant aspects experienced by the adolescents, along with perceived increase of calmness and world connection, satisfaction in interpersonal communication and better emotional expression and regulation. The mask technique was experienced as a playful and engaging task that facilitated insight and interpersonal communication. Findings provide preliminary evidence on the clinical utility of mask-based psychodrama with adolescents. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss the relationship between mathematical intuition and mathematical visualization. I will argue that in order to investigate this relationship, it is necessary to consider mathematical activity as a complex phenomenon, which involves many different cognitive resources. I will focus on two kinds of danger in recurring to visualization and I will show that they are not a good reason to conclude that visualization is not reliable, if we consider its use in mathematical (...) practice. Then, I will give an example of mathematical reasoning with a figure, and show that both visualization and intuition are involved. I claim that mathematical intuition depends on background knowledge and expertise, and that it allows to see the generality of the conclusions obtained by means of visualization. (shrink)

Self-plagiarism, textual recycling and redundancy seemed to be controversial and unethical; however some questions about its definition are still open. The objective in this paper presented study was to use bibliometric analysis to synthesise and visualize the research literature production and derive a typology of self-plagiarism research. Five topics emerged: Self-plagiarism, Institutional self-plagiarism, Self-plagiarism and ICT, Self-plagiarism in academic writing, Self-plagiarism in science. The state of the art topics seem to be “social medium”, “virtual world”, “face book”, “sociomateriality”, “knowledge sharing”, (...) “open access”, “institutional repository”, “retraction” and “responsible conduct”. (shrink)

\noindent\textbf{Introduction} Online interventions hold great potential for Therapeutic Change Process Research (TCPR), a field that aims to relate in-therapeutic change processes to the outcomes of interventions. Online a client is treated essentially through the language their counsellor uses, therefore the verbal interaction contains many important ingredients that bring about change. TCPR faces two challenges: how to derive meaningful change processes from texts, and secondly, how to assess these complex, varied and multi-layered processes? We advocate the use text mining (...) and multi-level models (MLMs): the former offers tools and methods to discovers patterns in texts; the latter can analyse these change processes as outcomes that vary at multiple levels. \noindent\textbf{Method} We (re-)used the data from \cite{Lamers2015} because it includes outcomes and the complete online intervention for clients with mild depressive symptoms. We used text mining to obtain basic text-variables from e-mails, that we analysed through MLMs. \noindent\textbf{Results} We found that we could relate outcomes of interventions to variables containing text-information. We conclude that we can indeed bridge text mining and MLMs for TCPR as it was possible to relate text-information (obtained through text mining) to multi-levelled TCPR outcomes (using a MLM). \noindent\textbf{Discussion} Text mining can be helpful to obtain change processes, which is also the main challenge for TCPR. We showed how MLMs and text mining can be combined, but our proposition leaves open how to obtain the most relevant textual operationalization of TCPR concepts. That requires interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion. The future does look bright: based on our proof-of-concept study we conclude that MLMs and text mining can indeed advance TCPR. (shrink)

The case of Xiang as described by Jane Carroll is indeed disconcerting well beyond the immediately apparent factors contained within the article. While Xiang’s direct medical expenses are excessive and his inability to pay for those expenses and further support his noncustodial family seem to be the main issues up for debate, Xiang, however, is likely going to need much more psychosocial support if he is to regain his previous independent functionality or retain any aspect of a quality of life (...) whilst continuing his indefinitely isolated treatment. In this response, I briefly outline the probable effects of Xiang’s current situation on his social identity and mental health as well as a potential way that we can minimize these adverse effects. (shrink)

Therapeutic touch, a healing technique based upon the laying‐on of hands, has found wide acceptance in the nursing profession despite its lack of scientific plausibility. Its acceptance is indicative of a broad antiscientific trend in nursing. Adherents of this movement use the jargon of postmodern philosophy to justify their enthusiasm for a variety of mystically based techniques, citing such postmodern critics of science as Derrida and Michel Foucault as well as philosophical forerunners Heidegger and Husserl. Between 1997 and 1999, (...) 94 articles in nursing journals referred to postmodernism, according to a database search. This paper criticizes the postmodern movement for abandoning the biological underpinnings of nursing and for misreading philosophy in the service of an antiscientific world‐view. It is also suggested that nursing can retain its tradition of ‘caring’ without abandoning the scientific method. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBased on the case of Rosa, a nine‐year‐old girl who was denied a therapeutic abortion, this article analyzes the role played by the social in medical practice. For that purpose, it compares the different application of two similar pieces of legislation in Costa Rica, where both the practice of abortion and sterilization are restricted to the protection of health and life by the Penal Code. As a concept subject to interpretation, a broad conception of medical necessity could enable an (...) ample use of the therapeutic exception and a liberal use of both surgeries. The practice of therapeutic sterilization has been generalized in Costa Rica and has become the legitimate way to distribute contraceptive sterilization. In contrast, therapeutic abortion is very rarely practiced. The analysis carried out proposes that it is the difference in social acceptance of abortion and sterilization that explains the different use that doctors, as gatekeepers of social morality, make of medical necessity. (shrink)