Blue Flags Research Articles

Early Patient Screening and Intervention to Address Individual-Level Occupational Factors (“Blue Flags”) in Back Disability

To develop a consensus plan for research and practice to encourage routine clinician screening of occupational factors associated with long-term back disability. A 3-day conference workshop including 21 leading researchers and clinicians (the "Decade of the Flags Working Group") was held to review the scientific evidence concerning clinical, occupational, and policy factors in back disability and the development of feasible assessment and intervention strategies. The Working Group identified seven workplace variables to include in early screening by clinicians: physical job demands, ability to modify work, job stress, workplace social support or dysfunction, job satisfaction, expectation for resuming work, and fear of re-injury. Five evaluation criteria for screening methods were established: reliability, predictive performance, feasibility, acceptability, and congruence with plausible interventions. An optimal screening method might include a stepped combination of questionnaire, interview, and worksite visit. Future research directions include improving available assessment methods, adopting simpler and more uniform conceptual frameworks, and tying screening results to plausible interventions. There is a clear indication that occupational factors influence back disability, but to expand clinician practices in this area will require that patient screening methods show greater conceptual clarity, feasibility, and linkages to viable options for intervention.

GREEN SEA - ACHIEVING BLUE FLAGS IN WALES.

Dwr Cymru's bathing water clean-up programme was originally designed to achieve the mandatory standards of the EU bathing water directive using long sea outfalls and minimum treatment levels. However, customer consultation indicated that full treatment, preferably with disinfection, was favoured and this became company policy, later extended to incorporate the achievement of Blue Flag standards. In 1996 Green Sea was launched to deliver further improvements through a joint programme of locating and eliminating the pollution sources. This paper explains how Green Sea is pursuing its aim of achieving both guideline compliance at all designated beaches and 50 Blue Flags in Wales.

Ecological product declaration rather than “green” symbol schemes

The travel business and environmental protection organizations have long been looking for an award system for environmentally compatible and socially responsible tourism — a so‐called “green” seal of approval (cf. Touristik Management 11/91, p 60). So far, people have come up with imaginative creations like green suitcases, silver thistles, blue angels or blue flags designed to give an ecological “all clear” to individual beaches, hotels, holiday areas, tour operators or entire package holidays. Rather than add to this confusing jungle of “green” symbols, Hansruedi Mller and Roman Mezzasalma, two Berne University tourism researchers, put forward the idea of better ecological declarations for tourism products.

A Tsonga Initiation

(TOP) 1. A COURT MUSICIAN PLAYS A XIZAMBI FRICTION BOW AT THE MEETING OF THE CHIEF'S COUNCIL HELD TO CONFIRM THE WOMEN'S DECISION TO BEGIN THE KHOMBA. (BOTTOM) 2. A GIRL INITIATE PLAYS A XIPENDANA BRACED BOW ON HER WAY TO THE ASSEMBLY POINT. The Tsonga are a Bantu-speaking people of southeastern Africa, numbering about 1,200,000 in Mozambique and 700,000 in the Northern Transvaal. They are famous among neighboring tribes for the emphasis they place upon the maintenance of their folklore tradition, an important part of which is mime, music, and dance. Toward the end of a two-year (1968-70) period spent studying the various Tsonga art forms, the author was unusually fortunate in gaining entrance to the girls' secret initiation rites held at the river's edge, and in tape-recording and photographing the musical events there. Infertility and infant mortality are high in Tsongaland, and the secret rites are thought to provide protection against barrenness caused by witchcraft. Invoked in these rites are fertility-associated visions (water, snakes), the hearing of supernatural voices, music/color synethesia, and other hallucinogenic experiences. All of these result from a combination of the ingestion of a plant drug called Datura fastuosa (known as Jimson weed in California), fast rhythmic drumming at basic brain wave frequencies, hyperventilation through energetic dancing, hypersuggestibility due to the leader's strong urgings, and the culturally-patterned motivations, expectations, and attitudes possessed by the girl-novices. In the secret river-rites, know as khomba, nubile Tsonga girl-novices, schoolmothers (the previous year's graduates), and the supervisor wear blue-dyed salempores, wave blue flags, and paint their faces blue. This color is considered significant because the harmless, bluish-green snakes (Dendrophis subcarinatus, called xihundze locally) which live under the eaves of Tsonga huts are thought to be ancestor-spirits, and because bluish-green patterns (mavalavala rihlaza) are expected to be experienced as part of the drug's effects. The march to the river bank starts out from the village plaza, after an initial ceremonial beer-drink at which the elders debate the time, length, and place of the rites. Three large carved wooden hemispherical tingoma drums are played at the assembly beer-drink. After the decisions are made here, the men hold a special meeting of the Chief's council in order to confirm and/or modify the decisions (Fig. 1). Girl-novices on their way to the assembly point often play musical instruments as they go (Fig. 2). The procession to the river takes the form of hierarchical lines, with the supervisor followed by the drummers followed by the schoolmothers followed by the novices, all singing special assembly and departure songs containing fertility connotations and references to marriage and in-lawship (initiation is a passport to marriage). On the way, the procession stops to perform various dances, including one in which the girls blow whistles and wave hatchets (Fig. 3),

The Cairnsmore of Carsphairn Igneous Complex

I. Introduction The Cairnsmore of Carsphairn plutonic mass occurs in the north-eastern corner of sheet 8 and adjacent sheets of the Geological Survey 1-inch map of Scotland. It is the smallest of the four large plutonic masses intruded into the Lower Palæozoic rocks of south-western Scotland. The complex has been injected into the Arenig, Glenkiln, and Hartfell beds represented by well-marked conglomerates and pebbly grits, blue greywackes, blue flags, and dark shales. The plutonic rocks occupy a roughly triangular area a little over three miles in width and extending nearly 2½ miles from north to south. The country occupied by the complex is essentially the Cairnsmore mass (2612 feet). The “granite” just fringes Dunool (1758 feet), Beninner (2328 feet), Moorbrock (2136 feet), and Black Shoulder (2257 feet). Hitherto no detailed work has been done on the igneous rocks. The Carsphairn “granite’ was referred to briefly in “The Silurian Rocks of Britain” (Teall, 1899). No microscopical descriptions were published, although the mass was known to include a number of distinguishable types. II. The Plutonic Rocks The intrusion consists of at least four well-defined plutonic rocks. There is a small central mass of granite, surrounded first by a finer grained granite-tonalite hybrid and then by a tonalite, and finally there is an outer heterogeneous area of much varied character. The acid hybrid between the granite and the tonalite forms a continous and comparatively wide outcrop. The tonalite also occurs in a continous ring broadening towards the north, where it is in contact

On Some Sections in the Lower Palæozoic Rocks of the Craven District

The sections to be described are of great interest, as showing an unconformity at the base of the May Hill beds in Prof. Sedgwick’s native district of Craven. The principal section at Austwick has been described by Prof. Hughes, and an unconformity described as existing there, (Geol Mag., Vol. iv, No. 8. ) but an opportunity occurred in the earlier part of this year of more definitely determining the age of the beds just above the unconformity. At Austwick Beck, (Fig. 1.) the Bala beds (1) are seen in a tributary stream, to be unconformably overlain by a coarse conglomerate, (2) as described by Prof. Hughes, interbedded with thin, black, apparently unfossiliferous shales; the whole reaching a thickness of several feet. Above these is a gradual passage, into black shales, (3) which are also seen in the main stream. They are there overlaid by a thin band of hard blue mudstone, a few inches thick, with calcareous nodules, and containing numerous fossils, among which are:— Petraia. Illaenus. Phacops elegans, Bœck and Sars. Leptaena quinquecostata, Mc.Coy. Above these are pale green shales, a few feet in thickness, apparently unfossiliferous. They are surmounted by pale blue flags, (6) containing Monograptus priodon and Monograptus vomerinus, and these by the Austwick grits (7) above which are various alternations of grits and flags. At Crummack Beck Head, near the last described section, the Bala beds are seen overlain by a similar conglomerate, again with an unconformable junction. Both this conglomerate and that at Austwick Beck consist ...