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Objective. The purpose of this narrative review paper was to review the state and development of the field of donor gametes in Kazakhstan, compare its legislative and technical capabilities with other countries and identify key steps towards the establishment of a unified register of donor gametes in the Republic. Materials and Methods. The narrative review paper conducted an analysis of scientific publications and legal documents to examine the implementation of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART), focusing on Donor Sexual Gametes (DSG), globally. It utilized medical publications from 2019 to 2023, legal acts, and recommendations from global health organizations to analyze eligibility criteria, legal regulations, and the social aspects of ART across different regions. Results. In Kazakhstan, ART is regulated by legislation, with DSG procedures governed by age limits, medical screening, and restrictions on the number of children born from donated gametes. Worldwide, practices vary, but there is growing interest in establishing a unified register of reproductive donor material to enhance transparency and accountability. However, legal gaps and ethical considerations must be addressed. Conclusion. The study identifies gaps in Kazakhstan's legislation compared to Western countries, emphasizing the necessity for enhanced legal rights for donors and recipients, including options for anonymity. Ethical concerns highlight the importance of confidentiality and data security in accessing the donor registry. Overall, implementing such a register promises to enhance transparency, safety, and accountability in reproductive medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Methods Consumer and Community Involvement Results Conclusion While the adoption of strengths‐based approaches to supporting autistic adolescents is growing in popularity, the application of this approach to a digital arts mentoring program has yet to be explored. This study reports on the core elements contributing to the success of a community digital arts mentoring program for autistic adolescents from the mentors' perspective. This paper presents an in‐depth exploration of mentors' experiences, comprising a component of a broader line of research investigating a digital arts mentoring program for autistic adolescents emphasising positive youth development.The digital arts mentoring program spanned 20 weeks across two Australian school terms and was attended by two groups of autistic adolescents (N = 18) aged between 11 and 17 years. A qualitative approach was utilised in exploring the perspective of their mentors (N = 6). Qualitative data were collected at the end of each school term for each group with the mentors using an interpretive phenomenological approach and Colaizzi's seven‐step analysis method. Thirteen individual interviews were conducted with six mentors.This research was conducted with a disability arts provider to provide a digital arts mentoring program to autistic adolescents. The mentors employed have lived experience with disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety.Five primary themes emerged from the data: positive connections, mentor knowledge and experience, mentoring approaches, autism education, program organisation, resources and environment. Subthemes underpinned the primary themes related to positive connections (three subthemes), mentoring approaches (four subthemes) and program organisation, resources and environment (three subthemes).The findings suggest that prior experience, sufficient training, a supportive environment and a flexible and adaptable approach were essential for success. Understanding the core elements of a strengths‐based digital arts program in occupational therapy provides a comprehensive framework for utilising clients' inherent strengths and creativity as therapeutic tool, creating an empowering environment, fostering meaningful outcomes for clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, the public sector is interested in incorporating the arts into community development and service delivery. At the same time, scholars recognise the benefits of artists as co-creators in collaboration with government and nonprofits to solve public sector and societal issues. Despite growing attentiveness, gaps remain in the organizing structures, implementation, outcomes, and value of arts-based residencies in the governmental context. This paper builds upon existing knowledge of artists as co-creators to develop the potentiality of artists-in-residence with government. We undertake a conceptual analysis of literature in order to position artists as co-creators, advance nonprofit organizations as essential contributors and capacity builders, and provide a multi-actor model to build understanding and application. Ultimately, this research aims to advance understanding, impact, and practical adoption of successful artist-in-residence models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The Posterior Fossa Society, an international multidisciplinary group, hosted its first global meeting designed to share the current state of the evidence across the multidisciplinary elements of pediatric post-operative cerebellar mutism syndrome (pCMS). The agenda included keynote talks from world-leading speakers, compelling abstract presentations and engaging discussions led by members of the PFS special interest groups. Methods: This paper is a synopsis of the first global meeting, a 3-day program held in Liverpool, England, UK, in September 2022. Results: Topics included nosology, patient and family experience, cerebellar modulation of cognition, and cerebellar cognitive affective syndrome. In addition, updates from large-scale studies were shared as well as abstracts across neuroradiology, neurosurgery, diagnosis/scoring, ataxia, and rehabilitation. Conclusions: Based on data-driven evidence and discussions, each special interest group created research priorities to target before the second global meeting, in the spring of 2024. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does our food for thought come virtually from the internet? When we take a long view, the instant stroke of a keyboard pales in comparison to the centuries-old evolution of real food harvesting and the generation and exchange of ideas, which have resulted in creative capital. The vernacular architecture of the agricultural built environment has almost dematerialized in its transition from the ancient pre-industrial era to the post-truth world, to become almost only an imagined concept. The symbology of the common threshing terrace of a Portuguese remote mountain village can now be found in multiple spaces of the urban realm, including in the metaphor of a community arts incubator's modus operandi in Albany, New York (USA). How has the concept of food for thought developed and materialized? How has it evolved? And what are some of the expected ways it might be utilized in the future? The purpose of the paper is to trace the evolution of this concept and its elements via the BLC Framework. The methodology employs a time analysis of approximately three centuries to distinguish three distinct evolutionary phases: (i) the pre-industrial era, (ii) the industrial era, and (iii) the information-driven era. The key finding is an up-to-date discussion of the food for thought concept in two distinct geographical worlds and three-time eras, as well as a set of lessons learned according to a protest poem and a rock song. The results are presented in the form of five lessons learned with implications for public policy: the first two lessons pertain to issues of procedural justice as encapsulated in the anonymous 'The Goose' poem, while the last three result from a discussion of selected verses in Nick Cave's 'Fable of the Brown Ape' rock song. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the movie The War Is Over (La guerre est finie—France/Sweden, 1966, directed by Alain Resnais and a screenplay by Jorge Semprún). The idea is to point out a possible sociological discussion on exile, mobilizing the notion of mental images. The methodological approach is an internal analysis of the film to allow for the elaboration of sociological considerations along with the expressive elements of the film construction. To do so, we shall focus on the "leaps" within the movie's narrative order, in which a main character (Diego) anticipates, through imagination, a series of sequences and events that might or might not have occurred. To discuss the notion of mental images and their relationship with the imaginary, the theoretical reference will be Cornelius Castoriadis' book The Imaginary Institution of Society. This article will benefit from the discussions in the presentations about the film both at meetings in Brazil and at the last ISA Congress 2023 (International Sociological Association—Research Committee 37—Sociology of Arts). This text is one of the results of research supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few years, numerous art initiatives have addressed the subject of migration and sought to voice an alternative to the predominant images diffused in the mainstream media. This article starts from the premise that the role of the arts in challenging dominant narratives of migration is too often taken for granted and argues for the need for a critical examination of the conditions and modalities through which arts can engage with a key societal debate like migration that has become so divisive on a global scale. Drawing on the notion of art worlds established in the sociology of the arts, we argue it is essential to move beyond a romanticized figure of the enlightened creator and consider the embeddedness of art in a complex network of production and diffusion, which greatly influences the nature of the meanings produced and their reception. The article focuses on the “Afghanistan, My Love” exhibition organized by the Aga Khan Museum of Toronto, Canada, in the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, which led to a significant surge of media coverage and the start of a dedicated scheme for the resettlement of Afghan nationals who collaborated with the Canadian Government due to Canada’s active involvement in the conflict. By employing a multi-modal methodology that includes textual and visual social semiotic analysis along with key stakeholder interviews, the paper examines under what conditions art can participate in (re)shaping representations of migration. Drawing from this case study, the article proposes to differentiate between “reframing” and “counter-narrating” to understand the distinct modalities through which the arts can engage with and seek to challenge representations of migration. While reframing seeks to implicitly change perceptions by offering complex portrayals of migrant experiences, counter-narrating introduces explicit alternative discourses. Less than intended to shift underlying structural representations, the latter approach seeks to ignite a collective process and generate empathy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text-conditioned image synthesis methods such as DALLE-2, IMAGEN, and Stable Diffusion are gaining strong attention from deep learning and art communities recently. Meanwhile, Image-to-Image (Img2Img) synthesis applications that emerged from the pioneering Neural Style Transfer (NST) approach have swiftly transitioned towards the feed-forward Automatic Style Transfer (AST) methods, due to numerous constraints inherent in the former method, including inconsistent synthesis outcomes and sluggish optimization-based synthesis process. However, NST holds significant potential yet remains relatively underexplored within this research domain. In this paper, we revisited the original NST method and uncovered its potential to attain image quality comparable to the AST synthesis methods across a diverse range of artistic styles. We propose a two-stage Feature-guided Style Transfer (FeaST) which consists (a) pre-stylization step called Sketching to address the poor initialization issue, and (b) Finetuning to guide the synthesis process based on high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) guidance channels. By addressing the issues of inconsistent synthesis and slow convergence inherent in the original method, FeaST unlocks the full capabilities of NST and significantly enhances its efficiency. [Display omitted] • We revisit the Neural Style Transfer (NST) framework for high-fidelity art generation. • We proposed a feature-guided reconstruction based on separated guidance channels for high and low-frequency feature regions to solve slow convergence issues. • We proposed a pre-stylization step called Sketching which improved the image synthesis time by a six-order magnitude. • We experimented a set of optimal weighting factors in feature-guided reconstruction for consistent results over wide variety of styles and contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]