Month: April 2024

Debunking majoritarian stories in the consulting room: Returning voice through accompaniment, witnessing, and counterstorytelling

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Abstract

The untold and unrecognized stories which socioculturally subjugated Americans live become embedded in their psyche-soma, disallowing them the status of full personhood and leading to what Fanny Brewster calls participation mystique. Oppression, trauma and the violence of colonialism, mundane as well as transgenerationally transmitted, spawn terror, fragmentation, despair, and chronic devaluation. Psychoanalysis has partaken and colluded in perpetuating, enacting and remaining silent around what critical race theory delineates as majoritarian stories, which are sovereign societal myths structurally cemented into the American caste system. Accompaniment and witnessing in the consulting room may return voice, power and integration to our societally subordinated patients, whereby they may claim and speak the truths of their personal counterstories. In order to help these patients become whole, this paper extends a bid for psychoanalysis to courageously undertake the personal work of recognizing its own socioculturally generated pain, shame and guilt, along with engaging in a mourning process. Psychic accessibility to witnessing necessarily must include recognition of patients’ cultural suffering in tandem with exquisitely experiencing the harsh realities of a society which has organized itself in unconscionable ways.

Equity in blood transfusion precision services

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Abstract

Background

Blood collection agencies are integrating precision medicine techniques to improve and individualise blood donor and recipient outcomes. These organisations have a role to play in ensuring equitable application of precision medicine technologies for both donors and transfusion recipients.

Body

Precision medicine techniques, including molecular genetic testing and next generation sequencing, have been integrated in transfusion services to improve blood typing and matching with the aim to reduce a variety of known transfusion complications. Internationally, priorities in transfusion research have aimed to optimise services through the use of precision medicine technologies and consider alternative uses of genomic information to personalise transfusion experiences for both recipients and donors. This has included focusing on the use of genomics when matching blood products for transfusion recipients, to personalise a blood donor’s donation type or frequency, and longitudinal donor research utilising blood donor biobanks.

Conclusion

Equity in precision services and research must be of highest importance for blood collection agencies to maintain public trust, especially when these organisations rely on volunteer donors to provide transfusion services. The investment in implementing equitable precision medicine services, including development of blood donor biobanks, has the potential to optimise and personalise services for both blood donors and transfusion recipients.

Mechanisms, detection and impacts of species redistributions under climate change

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Abstract

Shifts in species distributions are a common ecological response to climate change, and global temperature rise is often hypothesized as the primary driver. However, the directions and rates of distribution shifts are highly variable across species, systems, and studies, complicating efforts to manage and anticipate biodiversity responses to anthropogenic change. In this Review, we summarize approaches to documenting species range shifts, discuss why observed range shifts often do not match our expectations, and explore the impacts of species range shifts on nature and society. The majority (59%) of documented range shifts are directionally consistent with climate change, based on the BioShifts database of range shift observations. However, many observed species have not shifted or have shifted in directions opposite to temperature-based expectations. These lagging or expectation-contrary shifts might be explained by additional biotic or abiotic factors driving range shifts, including additional non-temperature climatic drivers, habitat characteristics, and species interactions, which are not normally considered in range shift documentations. Understanding and managing range shifts will require increasing and connecting observational biological data, generalizing range shift patterns across systems, and predicting shifts at management-relevant timescales.

On Pettit’s thought ascription to groups

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Abstract

A thought, taken as a propositional attitude or the content of psychological predicates such as believe, wish, desire, and hope, is ascribed to an entity with mental states. A thought is not only allegedly ascribed to particular non-mental things like computer and book, it is also ascribed to non-material things, linguistically in plural terms, e.g., plural pronouns (e.g., we, they), collective names or singular proper names (e.g., the United States), and proper names in plural form or general terms (e.g., the Microsoft, feminists). Plural terms are terms referring to groups of entities. The question is—what is it for a group to have a thought? Two main views are currently on centered stage—the literal view and the metaphorical view. This paper argues that the main argument supporting the literal view, in particular Pettit’s view, faces three main problems, namely, the problem of rule-following in propositional coawareness, the problem of an independent verifiability for group beliefs, and the problem of the indexical “we”-thought.

Determinants of Exposure Therapy Implementation in Clinical Practice for the Treatment of Anxiety, OCD, and PTSD: A Systematic Review

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Abstract

Exposure therapy (ET) forms a vital part of effective psychotherapy for anxiety-related presentations including anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and is often underutilised in clinical practice. Using the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF), this systematic review synthesised existing literature on the determinants of ET implementation for anxiety-related presentations and examined differences across presentations and developmental subgroups. Fifty-two eligible studies were assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, with 389 results (99%) mapped onto the TDF. Results suggested that clinicians’ negative beliefs about the consequences of ET were commonly associated with reduced implementation. It also appeared that whilst broad unspecified ET training may be related to improved implementation for anxiety disorders; greater implementation for complex presentations (i.e., PTSD) likely requires more specialised training involving practical components. A subset of domains (e.g., social/professional role and identity) accounted for most results, whilst some remain unexplored (i.e., optimism; reinforcement; memory, attention, and decision processes) or underexplored (i.e., behavioural regulation). Likewise, specific presentations and developmental subgroups (i.e., PTSD and adults) represented a greater proportion of results in the literature than others (i.e., OCD and youth). Future research exploring ET implementation, across specific presentations and developmental subgroups, would benefit from integrating implementation science frameworks to guide the development of targeted, comprehensive strategies to close the research-practice gap of ET for the treatment of anxiety-related presentations.

Ecosystem services potential is declining across European capital metropolitan areas

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Abstract

Ecosystem services (ES) are essential to sustainable development at multiple spatial scales. Monitoring ES potential (ESP) at the metropolitan level is imperative to sustainable cities. We developed a procedure for long-term monitoring of metropolitan ESP dynamics, utilizing open-source land use land cover (LULC) data and the expert matrix method. We compared the ESP results of 38 European Capital Metropolitan Areas (ECMA) regarding biodiversity integrity, drinking water provision, flood protection, air quality, water purification, and recreation & tourism. Our results show significant declines in ESP across ECMA due to LULC alteration between 2006, 2012, and 2018. We found that ECMA in post-socialist European countries like Poland (Warszawa) have experienced high rates of land use transformation with a remarkable impact on ESP. Surprisingly, we found that Fennoscandinan ECMA, like Helsinki, Stockholm, and Oslo which lead the cumulative ESP ranking, faced the ESP reduction of the highest impact in recent years. The correlation analysis of ESP dynamics to urban expansion and population growth rates suggests that inattentive urbanization processes impact ESP more than population growth. We unveil the implications of our results to the EU and global level agendas like the European Nature Conservation Law and the Sustainable Development Goals.

ReScape: transforming coral-reefscape images for quantitative analysis

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Abstract

Ever since the first image of a coral reef was captured in 1885, people worldwide have been accumulating images of coral reefscapes that document the historic conditions of reefs. However, these innumerable reefscape images suffer from perspective distortion, which reduces the apparent size of distant taxa, rendering the images unusable for quantitative analysis of reef conditions. Here we solve this century-long distortion problem by developing a novel computer-vision algorithm, ReScape, which removes the perspective distortion from reefscape images by transforming them into top-down views, making them usable for quantitative analysis of reef conditions. In doing so, we demonstrate the first-ever ecological application and extension of inverse-perspective mapping—a foundational technique used in the autonomous-driving industry. The ReScape algorithm is composed of seven functions that (1) calibrate the camera lens, (2) remove the inherent lens-induced image distortions, (3) detect the scene’s horizon line, (4) remove the camera-roll angle, (5) detect the transformable reef area, (6) detect the scene’s perspective geometry, and (7) apply brute-force inverse-perspective mapping. The performance of the ReScape algorithm was evaluated by transforming the perspective of 125 reefscape images. Eighty-five percent of the images had no processing errors and of those, 95% were successfully transformed into top-down views. ReScape was validated by demonstrating that same-length transects, placed increasingly further from the camera, became the same length after transformation. The mission of the ReScape algorithm is to (i) unlock historical information about coral-reef conditions from previously unquantified periods and localities, (ii) enable citizen scientists and recreational photographers to contribute reefscape images to the scientific process, and (iii) provide a new survey technique that can rigorously assess relatively large areas of coral reefs, and other marine and even terrestrial ecosystems, worldwide. To facilitate this mission, we compiled the ReScape algorithm into a free, user-friendly App that does not require any coding experience. Equipped with the ReScape App, scientists can improve the management and prediction of the future of coral reefs by uncovering historical information from reefscape-image archives and by using reefscape images as a new, rapid survey method, opening a new era of coral-reef monitoring.

Reservoirs Response to Climate Change Under Medium Emission Scenario in Upper Krishna Basin, India Using Geospatial Inputs

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Abstract

Geospatial datasets are very much useful in carrying out hydrological modeling in distributed and semi-distributed models. Through modeling approach, this study is performed to study the impact of climate change on reservoir inflows in the upper Krishna sub-basin, India using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) climate dataset for the hydrological year (2021–2055) considering the base period as 1985–2020. Bias corrected Centre National de Recherches Meterolgiques (CNRM5) with Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP4.5) climate data are used in this study. Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) hydrological model is used for the study because of its ability to simulate hydrological processes by incorporating storage structures. The water storage structures in terms of Major reservoirs are incorporated using the VIC-Reservoir Representation module. The cascade effect of reservoirs is captured by considering the upstream reservoir's operational strategies and hydraulic particulars. The model performance in terms of R2, Nash Sutcliffe Efficiency (NSE) and Kling Gupta Efficiency (KGE) during the calibration period is found to be 0.91, 0.74, 0.74 and 0.95, 0.84, 0.86 during the validation period respectively in the baseline period. The future study period is divided into near (2021–2032), mid (2033–2044) and far (2045–2055) decade. The projected runoff coefficient varies 0.15–0.54 and the Evapotranspiration coefficient lies 0.32–0.72. It is found that the reservoir Almatti and Narayanpur receives a maximum inflow of 1926 m3/s and 2057 m3/s against the Long Term Average of 1577 m3/s and 2319 m3/s in the mid and far decadal periods respectively.