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This essay reconstructs an early chapter in the history of theorizing the diverse Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata literature of South Asia. Drawing upon the tenth-century literary theorist Kuntaka’s discussions of the Udāttarāghava, Uttararāmacarita, Veṇīsaṃhāra, Kirātārjunīya, and Abhijñānaśākuntala—all Sanskrit poetic (kāvya) compositions that depict stories from the Rāmāyaṇa or the Mahābhārata—I show how, in Kuntaka’s understanding, these works repair certain narrative inconsistencies and ethical ambiguities in the epics themselves. Building on the foundation laid by his predecessor, Ānandavardhana, Kuntaka illuminates the various layers of meaning that a work of literature can encompass. He shows that the epics’ different narrative layers send conflicting messages about proper conduct. He suggests, moreover, that an audience experiences a kāvya retelling of an epic story as a layered entity—a layer of epic narrative beneath a layer of kāvya—and argues that an awareness of these layers can contribute to the audience’s ethical self-cultivation. Kuntaka’s theory of retelling (truly re-telling: telling again, purposefully, and differently from a previous accepted telling) represents an important theoretical account of the relationships between South Asia’s many Rāmāyaṇas and many Mahābhāratas.

In the Covid-19 pandemic, being older means being in a special focus: Probabilities for severe infections and mortality rise with increasing age and protective measures for this population group have been increased. This was accompanied by public discourse that portrayed older adults stereotypically as vulnerable and frail but also highlighted the hardships younger people have to endure to protect them. Given the possibly detrimental effects of ageism on individuals and societies, we were interested in older adults’ perception of ageism in the Corona-crisis and its relation to their health and well-being. Furthermore, we were interested in subjective aging variables as moderators in the ageism–health relationship. In June 2020, N = 611 independently living people aged 60 + from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg were recruited via a survey research institute and interviewed online or by phone. They reported on perceived ageism in different contexts, their life satisfaction, subjective health, subjective age and self-perceptions of aging. Depending on context, ageism was perceived by around 20% of participants, and overall negatively related to subjective health and life satisfaction after the onset of the pandemic. Moderated hierarchical regressions showed that a younger subjective age buffered the negative effect of ageism on subjective health, while perceiving aging as social loss increased its effect on life satisfaction. We discuss the importance of addressing and reducing ageism (not only) in times of crisis and the consequences for individuals and societies.

This paper presents the results of archaeological fieldwork conducted at the request of elders from Barunga, a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, Australia. The aim of the project was to use archaeological methods to help people from the community relocate and identify each person buried in the Barunga Graveyard and to develop a system where this information would not be forgotten. In the past, the location of burials and the identities of the buried have been known only through memory, as well as repeat visits to the graveyard. Overcrowding within the graveyard has made this practice difficult. To add to this problem, the vast majority of graves of Aboriginal people in remote Northern Territory communities are not recorded in any register. While there is a legislative requirement for a burial register to be kept in non-Aboriginal communities, this has not been a requirement for those within Aboriginal communities. Instead, families must rely on the memories of those in attendance at the burial, and in time the remembering generation also dies and the identities of people in these graves become more and more blurred. This makes it difficult to mourn properly, or to care for that person by caring for their grave. During our fieldwork, we located 175 graves, and we identified 85 individuals. Of those that could be identified, 29 were identified by an associated plaque or headstone, and 56 were identified through oral histories that were recorded during several field visits with elders from the community. Beyond the archaeological results of this research, we found there is an opportunity to build sustainable development in this community that would see local people employed to locate and identify currently unidentified burials. Drawing on comparative cases from other countries such as India, this study addresses the challenge identified by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) (2015) introducing cultural heritage into the sustainable development agenda. Retrieved February 19, 2020, from http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/culture-and-development/hangzhou-congress/introducing-cultural-heritage-into-the-sustainable-development-agenda/ ), to identify the concrete actions needed to integrate cultural heritage conservation and promotion into the sustainable development debate.

Digital transformation is fundamentally changing the business landscape. It is also affecting the roles of top managers within firms. Our survey of more than 160 senior managers in Europe suggests that digitalization, rather than encouraging more decentralized forms of management, will lead to an expanded role for headquarters and further empowerment of top managers. While acknowledging the benefits of the digital transformation, in this Executive Digest we identify five key challenges for newly empowered top managers and offer solutions for these digitalization traps., Security: staffonly

Complementing Nielsen and colleagues’ (2020) analysis of methodological trends in the Journal of International Business Studies over the past 50 years, we examine similar data on methods published in a wider range of leading international business (IB) journals. Our analysis shows a clear decline of studies based on primary data relative to secondary data, and a persistently low level of individual-level studies among the growing body of research using secondary data across all IB journals considered. We discuss the main mechanisms driving these trends and identify the problems of IB’s increasing exposure to the risks inherent in secondary data. We also discuss the implications related to neglecting individual-level data for theory advancement in IB, such as a disregard for novel secondary data opportunities at the individual level and the risk of reduced theoretical pluralism. In doing so, we substantially extend the debate initiated by Nielsen and colleagues (2020).

How did enslaved individuals use material culture to create a feeling of protection where they were coerced to live and labor? As a part of their home-making—their attempts to transform spaces of b...

This article reads Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem as an epic—that is, as “a poem including history” to use Pound’s formulation—that reconfigures the act of including history as a particularl...

COVID-19 has impacted on the experience of those who are grieving and on the work of those who support them. As a newly appointed bereavement chaplain for a community children’s team, I have reflected on the experiences of those I am working with, and on how my role has been impacted by COVID-19. This article looks at several areas where COVID-19 has affected grieving people, both parents and others. I also reflect on my own experience of working with them at this time, the distress this has caused me, and the values and creativity that are leading me forward.

The collection of papers represented in the Integrative Research Review responds to the question: How can we study children’s/youth’s out of school experiences to inform classroom practices? Using a variety of lenses to address the question, the authors consider how to understand, respond to, and serve children and youth in a variety of contexts. Duke explores a quasi-experimental design showing the potential impact on student achievement and motivation in schools that incorporate literacy practices from children’s lives outside of school compared to the traditional curriculum. Bloome and Faust take a philosophical approach to explore the languaging of the relationship between students’ out-of-school lives and classroom practices and its implications for the construction of personhood by examining one classroom event from a microethnographic discourse analysis perspective. García-Sánchez highlights the methodological features that allow linguistic anthropologists to make visible the agentive and innovative character of immigrant children’s communicative practices in a variety of learning situations. Drawing on the transliteracies approach, Stornaiuolo considers work with a group of young people to study multimodal composing and the development of school makerspaces in a 6-year partnership project with a local innovation high school. Alvermann discusses the papers, pointing out the affordances and challenges of each perspective.

Screenwriting pedagogy is a small but growing field of scholarly enquiry grappling with the challenges of a writing mode that demands a high level of creativity in order to render complex human experiences in a visual form bound by industrialized structures. Prominent screenwriters argue that engagement with unconscious thought is critical to achieving the high level of creativity required for this kind of writing. However, the unconscious remains a neglected area of enquiry in the fields of creativity and screenwriting research. This review of literature corrals existing research in both fields to synthesize insights for screenwriting and creative writing teachers on the engagement of unconscious thought as a means to enhance students’ creativity.

This paper examines the purpose of the Socratic case for the immortality of the soul as it is presented in Plato's Phaedo, considering the dialogue through four distinct lenses that show different ...

Purpose:\ud The rates of children looked after by local authorities in England have been rising for more than two decades. This study was conducted to determine what approaches local authorities have adopted that they perceive to be the most effective in preventing the need for children to come into care. It also considers how they evaluate these approaches and how they assess cost-effectiveness.\ud \ud Methods:\ud An online survey was distributed to leaders of children’s social services departments in England in 2018 (n = 152).\ud \ud Findings:\ud Sixty (39.5%) local authorities completed the survey. Respondents were asked to select up to three types of services or approaches they deemed most effective in preventing the need for children to come into care. The most popular was a whole-system approach selected by 81.7%, with Signs of Safety most commonly cited. This was followed by edge-of-care services (61.7%), early help (56.7%), family group conferences (43.3%), parenting programmes (18.3%), short break services (15.0%) and “other” services (20.0%). Local authorities who had experienced increases in the numbers of children in care were more likely to discuss approaches introduced relatively recently. Whole-system approaches and parenting programmes were the approaches most likely to have had independent evaluations. Whilst most local authorities reported the use of economic analysis methods as part of their evaluation, there was insufficient detail for a full assessment of cost-effectiveness.\ud \ud Originality:\ud This paper provides a description of contemporary attitudes amongst leaders of children’s services to approaches that aim to keep children out of care. It also describes approaches taken by local authorities to evaluation and assessing cost-effectiveness.

Evidence is sparse when it comes to the longitudinal impact of educational interventions on empathy among clinicians. Additionally, most available research on empathy is on medical trainee cohorts. We set out to study the impact of empathy and communication training on practicing clinicians’ self-reported empathy and whether it can be sustained over six months. An immersive curriculum was designed to teach empathy and communication skills, which entailed experiential learning with simulated encounters and didactics on the foundational elements of communication. Self-reported Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) was scored before and at two points (1–4 weeks and 6 months) after the training. Overall, clinicians’ mean self-empathy scores increased following the workshop and were sustained at six months. Specifically, the perspective taking domain of the empathy scale, which relates to cognitive empathy, showed the most responsiveness to educational interventions. Our analysis shows that a structured and immersive training curriculum centered on building communication and empathy skills has the potential to positively impact clinician empathy and sustain self-reported empathy scores among practicing clinicians.

The copper mining city of of Alto Hospicio, Chile and GoodPath town, a factory city in China both seem to be archetypal neoliberal cities. They epitomize the circulation of goods, people, and ideas through their export-based economies, large migrant populations, and high penetration of Internet and social media use. Yet, we find that in migrants’ social media use, there are stark contrasts in the significance they place on their movement and the identities they form around these migrations. In China, factory workers take to the ‘online world’ to escape harsh realities and engage in identity formations that privilege cosmopolitan aspirations. In Chile, mining workers express the harshness of their lived reality, using social media to build identities around a sense of pride in their abrasive conditions. This comparative essay reveals how processes associated with neoliberal capitalism – including migrations of people, goods, and information, and the commodification of identities – is preconditioned by local contexts. We find that the processes of neoliberal capitalism sometimes yield starkly different consequences, even when local circumstances seem to be similar. This demonstrates that even as media (and particularly social media) connect people more closely, their effects are anything but homogenizing.

Grounded in interaction criticism, this article uses visual analysis to explore the performance techniques offered by the female-focused sex education platform OMGYes. Motivated to close a gendered orgasm gap, the site employs a range of methods designed to provide its users with techniques to achieve orgasm. Contextualizing the site within broader cultures of self-improvement, the article addresses the site's design practices in conjunction with the emergent neoliberal subjectivity of the (sexual) entrepreneur, implicating OMGYes in a postfeminist critique of retail activism as an individualized approach to empowerment.

This article provides a bookend to the collection and situates this Design Issues special issue “Design Inequalities” within the wider context of the studies of inequalities and design. Drawing on the theory of reflexivity as its guide, the article provides a narrative to processes of collating and editing a journal collection that draws into conversation two fields of research which rarely converge.

A significant part of hegemonic masculinity is proving one’s heterosexuality though sexual experiences. Peer pressure to conform is particularly acute for adolescent boys and young men. We analyze interviews with 87 boys in middle school, high school, and college about how their masculinity goals and subsequent achievement of those goals influence their navigation of pressure to engage in sexual relations with girls and women to “prove” themselves. Our findings show that, while boys and young men recognize dominant notions of hegemonic masculinity, most do not subscribe to those uncritically. Rather, they struggle to balance personal ideas about masculinity with consistent pressure from others to demonstrate their heterosexuality. As a result, they employ various strategies to negotiate such pressures, including avoidance, acceptance, and outright rejection of this particular expectation. These strategies, however, ultimately contribute to a broader gender culture among adolescents in which expectations and privileges associated with hegemonic masculinity that dominate U.S. culture remain largely unchallenged.

Purpose The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) provided funds to 25 universities in its service region for the establishment of student-managed investment funds (SMIF). The purpose of this paper is to examine the TVA Investment Challenge Program and its implementation at The University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM). Design/methodology/approach Each university has the freedom to structure the process for students to manage its investment fund as it chooses. This paper provides a description of the overall Investment Challenge Program and the specific Program at UTM. Findings The Investment Challenge Program is a valuable experiential learning opportunity for finance majors at UTM. Participating students enhance their portfolio management knowledge, their written and oral communication skills, and their employment opportunities. Research limitations/implications The paper is limited to TVA Portfolio guidelines and managerial style. Practical implications Faculty who supervise similar programs at other universities may be able to replicate some aspects of the program’s design. Originality/value The paper describes the TVA Investment Challenge, a unique program of SMIF. TVA provided funds to 25 universities with the stipulation that the student managers adhere to the same guidelines as TVA’s professional money managers. The university is a participant in the Program.

Recognizing the complex interplay between country music, lifestyle, and identity, and the disparate nature of these texts and their producers, we center our analysis of the politics of cont...

The FMR1 gene in its premutation (PM) state has been linked to a range of clinical and subclinical phenotypes among FMR1 PM carriers, including some subclinical traits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study attempted to further characterize the phenotypic profile associated with the FMR1 PM by studying a battery of assessments examining clinical-behavioral traits, social-cognitive, and executive abilities in women carrying the FMR1 PM, and associations with FMR1-related variability. Participants included 152 female FMR1 PM carriers and 75 female controls who were similar in age and IQ, and screened for neuromotor impairments or signs of fragile X-associated tremor/ataxia syndrome. The phenotypic battery included assessments of ASD-related personality and language (i.e., pragmatic) traits, symptoms of anxiety and depression, four different social-cognitive tasks that tapped the ability to read internal states and emotions based on different cues (e.g., facial expressions, biological motion, and complex social scenes), and a measure of executive function. Results revealed a complex phenotypic profile among the PM carrier group, where subtle differences were observed in pragmatic language, executive function, and social-cognitive tasks that involved evaluating basic emotions and trustworthiness. The PM carrier group also showed elevated rates of ASD-related personality traits. In contrast, PM carriers performed similarly to controls on social-cognitive tasks that involved reliance on faces and biological motion. The PM group did not differ from controls on self-reported depression or anxiety symptoms. Using latent profile analysis, we observed three distinct subgroups of PM carriers who varied considerably in their performance across tasks. Among PM carriers, CGG repeat length was a significant predictor of pragmatic language violations. Results suggest a nuanced phenotypic profile characterized by subtle differences in select clinical-behavioral, social-cognitive, and executive abilities associated with the FMR1 PM in women.

Ageism in media and society has increased sharply during the Covid-19-crisis, with expected negative consequences for the health and well-being of older adults. The current study investigates whether perceived ageism during the crisis longitudinally affects how people perceive their own aging. In June 2020, N = 611 older adults from Luxembourg [aged 60–98 years, Mage(SD) = 69.92(6.97)] participated in a survey on their perception of the crisis. In October 2020, N = 523 participated in a second measurement occasion. Participants reported on perceived ageism during the crisis in different domains, their self-perceptions of aging and subjective age. In latent longitudinal regression models, we predicted views on aging at T2 with perceived ageism at T1, while controlling for baseline views on aging and covariates. Perceived ageism at T1 increased self-perceptions of aging as social loss and yielded a trend for physical decline, while there were no effects on subjective age and self-perceptions of aging as continued growth. Views on aging are powerful predictors of well-being and health outcomes in later life. Our data suggest that being the target of ageism during the crisis negatively affects older adults' self-perceptions of aging and this impact may be felt beyond the current crisis.

Life history variation is thought to be mainly a result of energetic trade-offs among fitness components; however, detecting these trade-offs in natural populations has yielded mixed results. Individual quality and environmental variation may mask expected relationships among fitness components because some higher quality individuals may be able to acquire more resources and invest more in all functions. Thus, life history variation may be more affected by variation in individual quality than varying strategies to resolve energetic trade-offs, e.g. costs of reproduction. Here, we investigated whether variation in female quality or costs of reproduction is a larger factor in shaping differences in life history trajectories by assessing the relationship between survival and individual reproductive performance using a 32-year longitudinal data set of repeated reproductive measurements from 273 individually marked, known-aged female grey seals (Halichoerus grypus) from the Sable Island breeding colony. We defined individual reproductive performance using two traits: reproductive frequency (a female’s probability of breeding) and provisioning performance (provisions given to young measured by offspring mass), computed using mixed effects models separately for (1) all reproductive events, and (2) an age-class specific reproductive investment. Individual differences contributed a large portion of the variance in reproductive traits, with individuals displaying a range in individual reproductive frequencies from 0.45 to 0.94, and a range of average pup weaning masses from 34.9 kg to 61.8 kg across their lifetime. We used a Cormack-Jolly-Seber open-population model to estimate the effect of these reproductive performance traits on adult survival probability. Our approach estimated a positive relationship between reproductive performance and survival, where individuals that consistently invest well in their offspring survive longer. The best supported model estimated survival as a function of age-class specific provisioning performance, where late-life performance was quite variable and had the greatest impact on survival, possibly indicating individual variation in senescence. There was no evidence to support a trade-off in reproductive performance and survival at the individual level. These results suggest that in grey seals, individual quality is a stronger driver in life history variation than varying strategies to mitigate trade-offs among fitness components.

This chapter describes the Community Health Worker Core Consensus (C3) Project carried out from 2014 to 2018. The focus of the C3 Project was to develop an updated contemporary list of CHW core roles and competencies (skills and qualities) common in the United States, using the National Community Health Advisor Study (NCHAS, 1994–1998) as a baseline. This chapter outlines the process of undertaking the Project and the methods incorporated to maximize CHW voice and leadership in the process. The chapter closes with a presentation of the C3 Project’s updated CHW core roles and competencies. Of those roles or areas of CHW scope of work, three were newly identified since the NCHAS. They are implementing individual and community assessments; conducting outreach; and participating in evaluation and research. These and the other seven roles named by the C3 Project serve as the foundation for the organization of the ten roles highlighted in this book. Skills newly identified or refined in the same time frame include individual and community assessment skills; outreach skills; professional skills and conduct; and evaluation and research skills. Finally, qualities embraced by the C3 Project are noted; these are based on previous research in the field. The most prominent is the quality of CHWs’ “connection to the community served.”

Providing direct services centers on health-related services that are delivered in person or face-to-face and involves providing basic screening tests and basic services as well as meeting basic needs. The two authorship teams included describe ways Community Health Representatives (CHRs), Community Health Aides (CHAs), and Primary Dental Health Aides (PDHAs) are engaged in providing direct services. The lack of access to oral health care is of particular concern in Alaska, where a large proportion of the population are Alaska Native and live in the state’s 200 remote villages that are reachable only by boat, snowmobile, or bush plane. The Alaska team presents the Alaska Dental Health Aide Program (DHA program) and describes the training, work, and impact of PDHAs, who provide dental education and preventive dentistry services to their community members. The CHR team provides information on the roles, scope of work, and impacts of CHRs that primarily work in Native American communities on reservations and near reservations lands. Their stories share insight and information on the distinctive work of the culturally immersed roles of CHRs in various Southwest Tribes and Pueblos as they work to provide high-quality, culturally appropriate, clinically guided health, wellness, and social services. The diversity of tribal communities and the unique approaches CHRs take in providing services are highlighted.

This article derives from a collaborative higher education project, conceptualised, and implemented by academics from seven South African universities. These academics are members of the South African Teaching Advancement at University (TAU) Fellowship. The project has its roots in the Department of Higher Education’s National Framework for Enhancing Academics as University Teachers, which identifies six leverage points or ‘imperatives for action’, one of which is the imperative to develop expectations (attributes) of academics in their role as university teachers. TAU Fellows engaged in the collaborative enquiry over a period of three years, appropriating a conceptual framework posited by Henry Giroux, of teachers as transformative intellectuals. In this article, each author reflects on his/her own scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) endeavours, which provided the conceptual tools to illuminate what for them and the group, are valuable professional attributes. The metaphor of the Baobab tree is appropriated to signify ‘rhizomatic thinking’, which portrays teaching as subconscious, subversive, non-linear, multi-directional, serendipitous, esoteric, dynamic, unbounded, unpredictable, adaptive, and non-hierarchical. This SoTL enquiry enabled the TAU group to unveil and declare their professional attributes as they made public their praxis. The attributes include academics as imbued with the capacity for critical thinking and actively promoting critical thinking amongst their students; as active learning mediators; as responsive, innovative, and relevant curriculum designers; and as engaged professionals. Appreciation of the article is enhanced when the reader first views this video https://youtu.be/yoA9guMut-8.

New technological developments allow for an increase in data generation. There is a parallel increase in business intelligence systems. As a result, numerous operational reports are continuously developed to measure operational performance. Many studies state that data-driven reporting aids valuable decision-making. However, reports need to be evaluated to identify the extent of their impact on operations. This paper provides a review of current evaluation methods, which shows that user surveys are most commonly used. These surveys are limited, as they only indicate reporting quality. Little has been done to quantify the impact of reporting. In this paper, an evaluation method is developed that assesses both the qualitative and quantitative impacts of operational reports. This method is then applied to water management and energy management reporting case studies in the mining industry. The quantitative impact ranged from R0.5-million to R7.3-million and from R0.3-million to R65.0-million for the two case studies respectively. Nuwe tegnologiese ontwikkelinge maak voorsiening vir 'n toename in die generering van data. Daar is 'n parallelle toename in sake-intelligensie stelsels. As gevolg hiervan word talle operasionele verslae deurlopend ontwikkel om bedryfsvertoning te evalueer. Baie studies noem dat data-gedrewe verslaggewing waardevolle besluitneming bevorder. Verslae moet egter evalueer word om die omvang van hul impak op bedrywighede te bepaal. Hierdie artikel gee n oorsig van huidige evalueringsmetodes, wat toon dat gebruikersopnames die meeste gebruik word. Hierdie opnames is beperk, aangesien dit slegs die gehalte van verslae aandui. Daar is min gedoen om die impak van verslaggewing te kwantifiseer. In hierdie artikel word n evalueringsmetode ontwikkel wat die kwalitatiewe en kwantitatiewe impak van operasionele verslae beoordeel. Hierdie metode word dan op gevallestudies van die bestuur van water en energie in die mynbedryf toegepas. Die kwantitatiewe impak het gewissel van R0.5 miljoen tot R7.3 miljoen en van R0.3 miljoen tot R65.0 miljoen onderskeidelik vir die twee gevallestudies.

Objective There are both opportunities and challenges with the implementation of oral health value-based care (OHVBC). To tackle concerns and advance conversation, a symposium was convened with subject matter experts to develop a gap analysis and capture insights into professional readiness for value-based care design. Methods The symposium was convened as a private event for 46 participants over the course of one and a half days in December 2019. Thematic analyses utilized the OHVBC Readiness Framework (DentaQuest Partnership, 2019) to further codify conversations as part of the gap-analysis process. Poll Everywhere, a text messaging application that allows participants to answer questions in real time, was also employed to solicit responses. Results Attendees of the symposium felt that OHVBC would have a large portion of market share within the next 10 years. A qualitative assessment of multiple table discussions determined that the participants developed more consensus around themes for the current state and the future-desired state than the action-planning needed to close the gap between the two. This may relate to individual ideology, and the siloed environment is still prevalent in the oral health realm. In a postsymposium survey, respondent attendees did not perceive that COVID-19 would delay or negatively impact the adoption of OHVBC and may result in accelerating its utilization. Conclusion The oral health community is experiencing multiple drivers to adopt more OHVBC within business and care models. However, there is still a lack of uniformity on how to execute this delivery model.

Congregational studies: A rapidly developing field of study. Congregational studies are not so simple to define. This may be related to the relative novelty of the discipline, but also to the variety of people who practise it and the equally wide range of angles to the field. The purpose of this article is to look at various stages in the development of the field of congregational studies in the South African context, and more specifically within the Dutch Reformed Church over the past 50 years. The phases can be described as follows: the initial church-building phase, followed by the phase where the dynamics and identity of faith communities came into focus, and then by a phase in which the focus shifted to congregational studies specifically within the African context and greater focus on the empirical investigation of congregations in the form of various modes of congregational analysis, as well as the advent of a missional approach to congregations. A further and ever-evolving phase is the move towards a more aesthetic perspective of the field, known as a theo-dramatic approach. Together with the last phase, we just entered what I would call the post- COVID-19 phase. One can see massive changes in congregational ministry since the COVID-19 virus started to spread in South Africa. Overnight, ministers and church boards had to adapt to online modes of being and doing church and I am very sure this will be an enormous shift. In future we will certainly speak about church before and after COVID-19. Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article looks at congregational studies from a historical perspective and reaches the conclusion that it is still a relatively young and developing discipline that can benefit from an aesthetical approach to the field. This challenges the traditional perspective that congregational studies are only interested in the analysis of congregations. This scientific approach strengthens newer hermeneutical interpretations of congregations. The fields involved are congregational studies, sociology and ethnography through the lens of critical qualitative research.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: This article reviews the importance of postoperative delirium, focusing on the older surgical population, and summarizes the best-practice guidelines about postoperative delirium prevention and treatment which have been published within the last several years. We also describe our local experience with implementing a perioperative delirium risk stratification and prevention pathway, and review implementation science principles which others may find useful as they move toward risk stratification and prevention in their own institutions. RECENT FINDINGS: There are few areas of consensus, backed by strong experimental data, in postoperative delirium best-practice guidelines. Most guidelines recommend preoperative cognitive screening, nonpharmacologic delirium prevention measures, and avoidance of deliriogenic medications. The field of implementation science offers strategies for closing the evidence-practice gap, which we supplement with lessons learned from our own experience implementing a perioperative delirium risk stratification and prevention pathway. SUMMARY: Postoperative delirium continues to be a serious perioperative complication commonly experienced by older adults. Growing appreciation of its prognostic implications and evidence behind multidisciplinary, collaborative, and focused prevention strategies rooted in implementation science have prompted several major groups to issue consensus guidelines. Adopting best practices postoperative delirium risk stratification and prevention pathways will improve perioperative care for older adults.

Objective To assess quantitative perfusion of intra‐ and extraocular regions of interest (ROIs) in conscious, healthy dogs utilizing contrast‐enhanced ultrasonography (CEUS); to compare varying enhancement with the first and second bolus injection and in the right and left eye; and to determine the most appropriate examination time. Procedures Gray scale ultrasonography and contrast harmonic imaging using sulfur hexafluoride were performed randomly assigned in both eyes in 10 university‐owned beagles. Perfusion parameters including slope time, time to peak (TTP), peak intensity (PI), and area under the curve (AUC) were measured at individually drawn ROIs (retrobulbar cone = ROI 1, choroid‐retina complex = ROI 2, medial = ROI 3, and lateral anterior uvea = ROI 4). Results Time‐intensity curve parameters revealed no significant differences in eyes examined by the first or second bolus injection (P > 0.05) or in the right or left eye (P > 0.05). Pooled data from all eyes were analyzed. Peak intensity of ROI 2 was significantly higher compared to all other ROIs (P 0.05). Ratios relative to different ROI sizes showed fastest enhancement in the retrobulbar cone and most intense perfusion in the anterior uveal regions. The first minute after contrast injection provided the highest diagnostic value. Conclusion Quantitative perfusion in nondiseased canine eyes revealed consistent parameters. Application of standardized CEUS protocols may be a promising diagnostic tool to differentiate ocular lesions.

In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Belgian dancer Akarova created performances that contemporary artists alternately termed “music architecture,” “living geometry,” and “pure plastics.” This chapter follows Akarova’s production during the years of the Belgian avant-garde movement “plastique pure” and its champion journal, 7 Arts (1922–1929), when Akarova’s dance helped to expand the scope of an isolated Belgian avant-garde by offering the country’s first abstract artists a glimpse of a utilitarian, applied art that could be embodied and felt, offering a model of kinesthetic activation and self-projection into the spaces of art.

As a moving art, cinema was linked to dance from its earliest moments and, like dance, held an idealized position for artists of the avant-garde, from the serpentine dance films of Edison and the Lumière brothers to the abstract cinema of the interwar avant-garde. At either end, whether filming a dancing body or creating abstract montages, cinema strove to express, not a new formal image on the flat screen but the dancing effects (and affects) of motion itself. This chapter follows a series of early twentieth-century artistic engagements with cinematic abstraction. Despite varying levels of formal abstraction and representational imagery, these films are no longer concerned with reproducing a world to look upon but now an environment to look through with kinesthetic sensation and desire. In a particularly rich case, Germaine Dulac, outwardly indebted to the dance of Loïe Fuller, became her successor in choreographic cinema, engaging the multisensory body through the medium of abstraction.

In the final decade of the nineteenth century, the serpentine dancer Loïe Fuller made her debut in Paris just as painters of the symbolist movement began to make first steps toward abstraction. In this chapter, works of art and decoration by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Nabis painters are linked to Fuller’s dance. With its repetitive, continuous motions and shifting perceptual cues, the serpentine dance allowed viewers a prolonged grasp of the sensation of watching Fuller’s transitory movement. In a similar effort, symbolist artists wove flat and patterned surfaces and serpentine lines, hindering visual rest and creating a springboard for abstract sensations of movement. Innovations in both media offered a formal and material web through which motion was sensed and caught by perception. This prolongment of form and feeling expresses the heart of the dialectics of the modern experience, balancing in a single sensation Baudelaire’s fleeting and eternal.

Gaining access to higher education (HE) is a serious concern for refugees. Although studies on the integration and success of refugees in HE are scarce, the challenges associated with this issue as...

This article makes two contributions to the insurance literature by studying optimal insurance policy indemnity schedules with policyholders’ limited liability and background risk. First, generalizing a prominent approach by Huberman, Mayers, and Smith (1983), it is shown that a welfare subsidy in the case of a ruinous loss may make the insurance premium “overly fair” for nonbankrupting losses and full insurance for this event becomes optimal. Second, introducing correlated background risk into this limited liability framework relativizes or even turns results by Doherty and Schlesinger (1983) as to the impact of background risk on optimal coverage into its opposite.

Although studies generally find evidence of a Phillips curve‐type relationship in South Africa, uncertainty remains about the relevance of the model over a relatively long sample period, and whether conventional output gap measures are suitable proxies for demand pressure. This paper reviews research which shows that the Phillips curve model prevails over an extended sample, provided that the benchmark specifications include major structural changes in the balance‐of‐payments and labour market, and account for shifts in the root causes of inflation. When this is done, a linear specification with an output gap in levels correctly predicts the non‐trended inflation pattern over the period 1971(Q1)–1984(Q4), whereas a piecewise concave curve with an output gap in growth rates accurately forecasts the decelerating inflation pattern during 1986(Q1)–2001(Q2). A novel feature of the concave model is that it remains statistically robust and structurally stable when it is estimated until 2015(Q4). The concave model imparts a disinflationary bias, which suggests that monetary policy should be more expansionary during downswing phases of the business cycle and neutral during upswing phases. The analysis also considers how the shape of the Phillips curve might change if the balance‐of‐payments constraint on demand is relaxed in a significant way.

Disengagement of U.S. leadership in recent years has not only emboldened the world's worst actors, it has enabled the emergence of non-state groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) to threaten a new and ominous trend in international affairs—the pursuit of sovereign authority by transnational violent-extremists. Amending both the Clausewitzian “remarkable trinity” to explicitly encompass non-state actors in war and the balance-of-power praxis of Talleyrand to one favoring dynamic repair of failed and failing states in diplomacy, the Doctrine of Contingent Sovereignty proposed in this article provides the requisite tools for bolstering legitimacy of weakened states while simultaneously affording the necessary freedom-of-action for the United States to secure its vital national interests. Analogous to the Monroe Doctrine of the nineteenth-century, which put putative expansionist powers on notice, this new doctrine asserts that the privilege of sovereignty remains contingent upon adherence to accepted international norms of behavior.

We conducted a quality improvement project to determine (1) what information providers and patients most wanted to learn about complementary and integrative health (CIH) therapies and (2) in what format they wanted to receive this information. The overall aim was to develop educational materials to facilitate the CIH therapy decision-making processes.We used mixed methods to iteratively pilot test and revise provider and patient educational materials on yoga and meditation. We conducted semistructured interviews with 11 medical providers and held seven focus groups and used feedback forms with 52 outpatients. We iteratively developed and tested three versions of both provider and patient materials. Activities were conducted at four Veterans Administration medical facilities (two large medical centers and two outpatient clinics).Patients want educational materials with clearly stated basic information about: (1) what mindfulness and yoga are, (2) what a yoga/meditation class entails and how classes can be modified to suit different abilities, (3) key benefits to health and wellness, and (4) how to find classes at the hospital/clinic. Diverse media (videos, handouts, pocket guides) appealed to different Veterans. Videos should depict patients speaking to patients and demonstrating the CIH therapy. Written materials should be one to three pages with colors, and images and messages targeting a variety of patients. Providers wanted a concise (one-page) sheet in black and white font with no images listing the scientific evidence for CIH therapies from high-impact journals, organized by either type of CIH or health condition to use during patient encounters, and including practical information about how to refer patients.Providers and patients want to learn more about CIH therapies, but want the information in succinct, targeted formats. The information learned and materials developed in this study can be used by others to educate patients and providers on CIH therapies.

This paper hypothesises that the saving rate and technological progress are interdependently determined by a common exogenous source, so that an exogenous shock to the saving rate determines long-run growth transitions. In an open-economy setting, the saving rate measures the quality of investment-led policies. The evidence shows that the down-break across South Africa’s ‘faster-growing’ regime (1952–1976) and ‘slower-growing’ regime (1977–2003) was caused by a negative shock to the saving rate that simultaneously led to a slowdown in the growth rate of technology via a structural decrease in the learning-by-doing parameter. The down-break results suggest that the saving rate is potentially an important policy variable to engineer a sustainable up-break. To assess this prediction with real data, the analysis looks at what happened in the post-2003 period (2004–2012). The results show that the up-break in the fixed investment rate was not matched by the saving rate, which implies that capital investment did not generate a faster rate of technological progress. The stylised facts suggest that a sustained increase in the total investment rate, which not only includes infrastructure investment, but also machinery and equipment investment and complementary foreign direct investment, may be an effective investment-led strategy to raise the economy’s growth rate on a sustainable basis.

This study examined the effects of (a) text presentation and (b) prior knowledge and language skill on finding information in financial documents. First, the participants filled out tests that measured their levels of vocabulary, reading skill, domain knowledge, and topic knowledge. Subsequently, they read an on-screen text on pension information in either a linear structure (“nonlayered”) or a hypertext structure (“layered”). Readers’ performance was measured by verbal scenario questions. No difference was found for text presentation. Language skill and domain knowledge were both important predictors for finding, whereas topic knowledge was not associated with readers’ performance at all. When differentiating between text presentation conditions, we found that domain knowledge only plays a role in the nonlayered condition, not in the layered condition. These results indicate that the set of skills needed to successfully read a document varies with both type of task and type of reading, confirming prior research.

This essay argues that corporeal sound, including the spoken voice and the auscultated heartbeat, can be understood as material rhetoric, and that material rhetoric, by extension, should be understood as both a force and a networked fluid. I illustrate this argument through the case study of abortion practices and policies, arguing that both mandated heartbeat auscultation and physician speech-and-display provisions represent the forceful fluidity of material rhetoric and demonstrate the power of such rhetoric to carve out networks of meaning. Through this networking, sound’s material role in defining autonomy takes on a powerful role in debates over fetal personhood.

This longitudinal study examined pragmatic language in boys and girls with Down syndrome (DS) at up to three time points, using parent report, standardized and direct assessments. We also explored relationships among theory of mind, executive function, nonverbal mental age, receptive and expressive vocabulary, grammatical complexity, and pragmatic competence. Controlling for cognitive and language abilities, children with DS demonstrated greater difficulty than younger typically developing controls on parent report and standardized assessments, but only girls with DS differed on direct assessments. Further, pragmatic skills of individuals with DS developed at a delayed rate relative to controls. Some sex-specific patterns of pragmatic impairments emerged. Theory of mind and executive function both correlated with pragmatic competence. Clinical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Like all those pictures of other countries, which are treated in imagological research, images of Germany are also complex, mediated by social history and historical experience, misunderstanding, misrepresentation and ideological assumptions. On the whole, these images represent the expectations and experiences of the observer even as they can truly be connected with the history, or social and cultural affairs, of the population. Thus, these images appear to be reversible figures that are simultaneously true and the products of subjective perception.