Regular Encounters Research Articles

Fishers’ knowledge indicates that collective benefits outweigh the individual costs of coexisting with dolphins

Understanding interactions between small-scale fishers and endangered dolphins is crucial for informing coexistence strategies. We investigated the perceptions and encounters of 123 Amazonian fishers in the Tapajós River (Brazil) with two endangered freshwater dolphins, Sotalia fluviatilis and Inia geoffrensis. Furthermore, 51 fishers self-documented 2,013 fish landings over one year. All interviewed fishers reported regular encounters with dolphins during fishing activities, with landings and interviews showing a partial overlap in fish species caught by fishers and cited as consumed by dolphins. Fishers highlighted that only I. geoffrensis disrupts fishing activities, causing gillnet damage and stealing fish from nets. To avoid interaction, fishers refrain from fishing an average of 3.7 times per month, potentially leading to 14.8 to 18.5 % decrease in total fish harvest. Economic losses were reported by 63 fishers, totaling an estimated US$ 50.3 ± 30.1 per month per fisher, which is equivalent to three days of fishing income. The estimated bycatch of dolphins was 10 per year across the studied area (71 % from I. geoffrensis). While 86 fishers considered dolphins beneficial, 62 viewed them as harmful. Fishers who fish more frequently are more likely to consider dolphins “good”. The results revealed dolphins’ positive contribution to fisheries by reducing efforts and safeguarding fish, while causing harm through gillnet damage. Negative perceptions are linked to individual economic losses, while positive perceptions stem from perceived collective benefits. By emphasizing dolphins’ collective advantages in riverine communities, they can be a flagship species for conservation, leveraging their appeal and function as umbrella species for maintaining ecosystem functions, such as healthy fish stocks.

THE NUMBERS DYNAMICS OF ANATIDS (ANSERIFORMES, ANATIDAE, AVES) IN MODEL AREAS IN DAGESTAN, NORTHEASTERN CAUCASUS, RUSSIA

The numbers of waterfowl and shorebirds declining on a global scale is largely due to the reduction in wetland areas in the era of climate warming. Long-term monitoring data obtained in 1995–2020 in two Key Bird Areas of Russia of international importance, i.e. the Sulakskaya and Turalinskaya lagoons, the Republic of Dagestan, are presented, the transboundary populations of Anseriformes (Anatidae) taken as examples, Both model lagoons are located in one of Russia’s largest bottleneck places of the western Caspian flyways, where the fly routes of European and Asian migrants intersect. The Anseriformes model group, which includes 18 predominantly background species, was chosen based on their regular encounters during migration. According to the information on the ring returns obtained from the Research and Information Center for Bird Ringing at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution, Russian Academy of Sciences, a conditional outline of the generalized distribution range of Anseriformes was revealed, the faunogenetic basis of which is composed of widespread representatives of Arctic or Siberian fauna types. Based on all available data, including the information derived from literature sources, the geographic location both of populations and their regular migration areas was determined. The rating of 12 of all 18 study species was found to have significantly decreased, vs 2 that increased, and further 4 that remained stable. The resulting trends were synchronized with data available from literary sources on the same species of Anseriformes in their nesting areas. The coincidence of the corresponding trends with the distribution trends of the same anatid species in their nesting areas ensured the distance of distant populations of Anseriformes obtained along their flyways in the model lagoons to be correctly measured. This was found to correlate with the average monthly air temperatures in the autumn-winter period in the Primorskaya Lowland of Dagestan, 12 model species being associated with temperature fluctuations. The numbers of migratory populations of anatids in cold years are shown to lead to their increased migration in the study area, as a result the migration of migrants along the flight routes slowing down and their wintering places being changed. Correlation analysis showed a significant relation between the increased areas of Anseriformes wintering in the Caspian Sea with sea-level regression, in which the shallowing areas of marine waters limited the access of anatids to food resources (benthos). Three key factors determining the dynamics of a group of Anseriformes populations are discussed: hydroclimatic cycles, anthropogenic influence and foraging. A temporary ban on the hunting removal of 8 vulnerable species of anatids (the Greylag Goose, the Common Teal, the Garganey, the Gadwall, the Eurasian Wigeon, the Northern Pintail, the Northern Shoveler, and the Common Pochard) is proposed to be imposed in Siberia, Kazakhstan, the Urals Federal District, the Cis-Urals, the Volga region, and the Southern and North Caucasus federal districts until their populations become sufficiently restored.

A Difficult Passage to Navigate: From Asylum Story to Refugee Tale

This article draws on the results of a life writing initiative, ARENA (Archive of Refugee Encounter Narratives), developed at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. It involves students of English collaborating with refugees over periods of three months to write down the latter’s stories. Like other storytelling ventures spawned by the perceived European refugee crisis of 2015, ARENA aims to enable a better understanding of the situation of refugees in Europe than the dominant asylum discourse allows. To this end, students arrange regular encounters with participating refugees and encourage them to tell whatever they consider to be their stories. The texts the students craft from these exchanges capture not only the refugees’ stories but also their own experience of hearing them. I will examine the embodied act of narration thus recorded in the ARENA corpus and contest critical claims that, too indebted to the rigid veracity standards defining official refugee testimonials, refugee life writing is unable to augment new ways of thinking about refugee experience and forced migration at large. My argument is that such criticism does not apply where the dialogic nature of live telling is consciously experienced and given due expression in the life writing it eventually becomes.

Taxi Demand and Fare Prediction with Hybrid Models: Enhancing Efficiency and User Experience in City Transportation

An essential part of a city’s transportation infrastructure, taxis allow for regular encounters between drivers and customers. Nevertheless, there are issues with efficiency since there is an imbalance in the supply and demand for taxis. This study describes the creation of a platform that serves both customers and taxi drivers by offering immediate forecasts of demand and fare. Root mean squared error (RMSE) of 3.31 and a negative log-likelihood of −3.84, the long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM-RNN) with the mixture density network (MDN) is employed to forecast taxi demand. The best RMSE of 3.24 is obtained for fare prediction via an ensemble learning model that integrates linear regression (LR), ridge regression (RR), and multilayer perceptron (MLP). To ensure peak performance, the models are systematically created, implemented, trained, and improved. By integrating these models into a web application interface, the taxi service system offers a better overall user experience, which improves urban mobility.

A Sociolinguistics Analysis of Stereotypes in the Freedom Writers Movie

Stereotypes are viewed negatively since they indicate negative preconceptions about others. Hence, stereotypes are important to study because people might unknowingly employ stereotypes about others in regular encounters. Stereotypes are also found in many films, one of which is in the film "Freedom writer." The aims of this study are to analyze the categories of stereotypes that existed in the film Freedom Writer and to identify the functions of the stereotypes that are produced in the film. The researcher uses descriptive qualitative research. This research is a sociolinguistic approach of stereotypes occurring in the movie entitled Freedom Writers. The data is all utterances in the movie. The data analysis technique is carried out by employing sociolinguistics theory. The results of this study show that there are three categories of stereotypes occur: gender, race, and physical traits. The characters in Freedom Writers represent a diverse range of races, and their frequent interactions enable them to readily observe the different characteristics associated with their respective races. Consequently, due to the film's setting in a multicultural society, various stereotypes regarding race, with a particular emphasis on conflicts related to skin color, are prevalent. These stereotypes are influenced by cultural factors within this context.

Эмпатия и выгорание у представителей помогающих профессий

<p style="text-align: justify;">The present study is aimed at reviewing current researches on the relationship between empathy and burnout in helping professions. Traditionally, empathy is recognized as a core competence in this field. Occupational burnout in helping professionals is notable for its high levels and prevalence, as well as a variety of factors causing it, including specialists' regular encounters with negative emotions, sufferings and death of the recipients of their help (patients, clients etc.). The studies of the relationship between empathy and burnout were analyzed under one of the existing hypotheses: empathy promotes burnout; burnout reduces empathy; empathy prevents from burnout. This study considers phenomena specific to helping professions, such as secondary traumatization, compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction and emotional dissonance, as well as their association with burnout. The analysis suggests that all three hypotheses are relevant and that a more nuanced understanding of empathy is necessary to provide insight into its relationship to burnout. The problem of finding an association between empathy and burnout transforms into the one, concerning the quality (or level) of professional empathy, as well as the possibility and ability to regulate it.</p>

The Role of Title 1 Secondary School Athletic Trainers in the Primary and Patient-Centered Care of Low Socioeconomic Adolescents.

Athletic trainers (ATs) provide regular encounters with a healthcare provider for many Title 1 student-athletes with healthcare access and quality barriers. Thus, they are uniquely positioned to serve as a student-athletes' first point of contact for general medical concerns. This study aimed to describe ATs' experiences providing primary care for Title 1 student-athletes. This qualitative design employing an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) approach used in-depth, virtual focus groups to examine the experiences of ATs practicing at Title 1 secondary schools. The findings reveal that ATs were called upon to evaluate, treat, and, when necessary, refer student-athletes with general medical conditions. However, Title 1 ATs encountered numerous complex social determinants of health (SDoH) preventing efficient and effective referral to specialty healthcare providers. Thus, ATs ultimately felt their most important roles in the primary care of low socioeconomic adolescents were as caregivers who mitigated avoidable healthcare barriers in addition to coordinators of integrated care that assisted student-athletes and their families with navigating the healthcare system. Title I ATs need to be aware of the SDoH affecting their student-athletes and the ability of those SDoH to affect health outcomes as well as overall student-athlete health and well-being.

Food safety regulation: Perspectives of food service operators in the cape coast metropolis

Global reports since the 2000s suggest that food safety is an important public health concern that attracts the attention of governments, food producers and consumers. Governments all over the world try to prioritise the safety of their food because it is a major driver of food security. Nonetheless, foodborne illnesses continue to occur daily basis. Ghana has a legal framework, institutions and agencies at different levels of government for food safety management. Yet, Cape Coast in the Central Region grapples with foodborne related diseases, thus identified by UNICEF as a hotspot for foodborne related outbreaks. This study set out to explore the views and familiarity of food service operators on the regulation of their operations. Three hundred food service operators from the 16 communities were selected using purposive sampling method for the study. The findings showed that food service operators had functional knowledge of the rules and regulations, just about enough to guide their daily operations. Regulators were generally perceived to be friendly and accommodating but inadequate and irregular in their supervisory roles. It was recommended that regulators should have regular encounter with food service operators to enhance compliance and achieve the food safety goal.

Familiars in a Strange Land

Familiars in a Strange Land

Heritable Cognitive Phenotypes Influence Appetitive Learning but not Extinction in Honey Bees.

Learning and attention allow animals to better navigate complex environments. While foraging, honey bees (Apis mellifera L.) learn several aspects of their foraging environment, such as color and odor of flowers, which likely begins to happen before they evaluate the quality of the food. If bees begin to evaluate quality before they taste food, and then learn the food is depleted, this may create a conflict in what the bee learns and remembers. Individual honey bees differ in their sensitivity to information, thus creating variation in how they learn or do not learn certain environmental stimuli. For example, foraging honey bees exhibit differences in latent inhibition (LI), a learning process through which regular encounter with a stimulus without a consequence such as food can later reduce conditioning to that stimulus. Here, we test whether bees from distinct selected LI genotypes learn differently if reinforced via just antennae or via both antennae + proboscis. We also evaluate whether learned information goes extinct at different rates in these distinct LI genetic lines. We find that high LI bees learned significantly better when they were reinforced both antenna + proboscis, while low LI and control bees learned similarly with the two reinforcement pathways. We also find no differences in the acquisition and extinction of learned information in high LI and low LI bees. Our work provides insight into how underlying cognition may influence how honey bees learn and value information, which may lead to differences in how individuals and colonies make foraging decisions.

Human Intestinal Microbiome and the Immune System: The Role of Probiotics in Shaping an Immune System Unsusceptible to COVID-19 Infection

—Today, the human gastrointestinal microbiota (HGM) is seen as an organ that orchestrates the activity of all other organs and systems (namely the brain) and one that plays a major role in maintaining homeostasis of the host organism. A remarkable ability of the HGM as a key player in the development of a normal immune system is its ability to recognize stress signals in its environment, e.g., triggers by viruses and other pathogenic microorganisms, and to react accordingly. SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19 disease, represents an unfamiliar type of virus to the human organism due to a lack of regular encounters between them over the course of evolution. This is one possible explanation of the disproportionate response of both innate and acquired immune systems seen in many people. In this review, we analyze certain immunomodulatory aspects of the HGM. We also assess the state of research in the field of next-generation probiotics, such as pharmacbiotics and postbiotics, and their potential use for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. The range of symptoms typical of COVID-19 infection is presented in a concise form. The impact of COVID-19 infection on various organs and systems will be examined in future studies. Nevertheless, although we are in the early stages of the pandemic, we can still predict that COVID-19 will have a large impact of on the incidence of tuberculosis and depression in various populations around the world. The HGM, depending on whether it is normal or dysfunctional (dysbiosis), can be an important predictor of the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines. These factors need to be taken into account, and, perhaps, a set of measures for the rehabilitation of certain groups of the population should be adopted. These measures should include the development of next-generation pharmacbiotics (psychobiotics, probiotics exhibiting antioxidant properties, immunobiotics), as well as specialized functional foods.

Communication via motion – Suitability of automated vehicle movements to negotiate the right of way in road bottleneck scenarios

The introduction of automated vehicles (AVs) into urban areas initially leads to mixed traffic, consisting of AVs, human drivers, and vulnerable road users. Since the AV's passenger is no longer actively involved in the driving task, there may be changes in the interaction between AVs and surrounding human road users. Therefore, it is essential for an AV to behave in a comprehensible manner in order to maintain or even enhance traffic efficiency and traffic safety. This work investigates the interaction of an AV and a simultaneously oncoming human driver at road bottlenecks due to double-parked vehicles on both sides of the road. Based on findings derived from AV-pedestrian interaction, comfort limits in terms of driving dynamics, and traffic observations, we designed nine AV movements to either yield the right of way or to insist on it by varying the AV's speed (maintain speed, one-step deceleration, two-step deceleration) and its lateral offset (no offset, close offset, distant offset). The different vehicle movements were evaluated with 34 participants in a driving simulator study. The results show participants' shorter passing times, fewer crashes, and significantly higher ratings of the AV's communication if the AV movement contained a lateral offset. In addition to the regular encounters, we analyzed the controllability of an automation failure and its aftereffect on participants' trust in AVs. The experience of the automation failure reduced the trust rating significantly. From the results we conclude that the AV should communicate the right of way not only via speed adjustments but also via the performance of a lateral offset to enhance traffic efficiency and safety. Moreover, a change in the AV's maneuver due to an automation failure must be avoided since it is not controllable by the human driver.

Between industry labs and audience formation: Film festivals and the transformation of the field of film production in Chile

In the last ten years, the field of film production in Chile has been considerably transformed, showing an exceptional increase in local production, a growing professionalization and wider international recognition. Chilean film festivals have played a pivotal role in this change, both as sociocultural hubs that promote regular encounters and exchanges among filmmakers, and also by fostering a local cinematographic culture among film audiences. This article is based on a multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Chilean field between 2010 and 2018, including participant observation and in-depth interviews with festival organizers and participants. It analyzes the major transformations seen in Chilean film festivals, from relatively informal showcases for local cinephiles and hangouts for filmmakers to professionalized “industrial” hubs and nodes for project development, education and “audience formation”. These developments are linked to diverse changes in a Chilean cultural policy that considers national cinema as a creative industry, while they also reflect the global trend of film festivals toward a “business model”. The Chilean case shows how festivals can articulate new, at times contradictory, modes of film practice, serving to reconfigure a local field of cultural production.

Vaccination in Older Adults: The When and Where

Despite the well-understood benefits of vaccination in older adults, national rates still fall below public health targets, especially among certain racial and ethnic groups. Recent scholarship examining healthcare use patterns in adults revealed that health care providers miss several opportunities to provide vaccination during regular healthcare encounters, including Medicare annual wellness visits. Several barriers to older adult vaccination have been identified, including lack of patient and provider understanding of the importance of vaccination, financial barriers to vaccines covered under Medicare Part D, and patient hesitancy about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. Strategies to address these barriers will be discussed, including the use of national quality measures to strengthen incentives for adult vaccination. Part of a symposium sponsored by the Health Behavior Change Interest Group.

Death Caf\xe9s for prevention of burnout in intensive care unit employees: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial (STOPTHEBURN)

BackgroundBurnout is an occupational syndrome that leads to mental health problems, job turnover, and patient safety events. Those caring for critically ill patients are especially susceptible due to high patient mortality, long hours, and regular encounters with trauma and ethical issues. Interventions to prevent burnout in this population are needed. Preliminary studies suggest debriefing sessions may reduce burnout. This study aims to assess whether participation in regular debriefing can prevent burnout in intensive care unit (ICU) clinicians.MethodsA randomized controlled trial will be conducted in two large academic medical centers. Two hundred ICU clinicians will be recruited with target enrollment of 100 physicians and 100 non-physicians (nurses, pharmacists, therapists). Participants must have worked in the ICU for the equivalent of at least 1 full time work week in the preceding 4 weeks. Enrolled subjects will be randomized to virtually attend biweekly debriefing sessions facilitated by a psychotherapist for 3 months or to a control arm without sessions. Our debriefs are modeled after Death Cafés, which are informal discussions focusing on death, dying, loss, grief, and illness. These sessions allow for reflection on distressing events and offer community and collaboration among hospital employees outside of work.The primary outcome is clinician burnout as measured by the Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) Score. Secondary outcomes include depression and anxiety, as measured by the Patient Health Questionnaire 8 (PHQ-8) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale (GAD-7), respectively. Questionnaires will be administered prior to the intervention, at 1 month, at 3 months, and at 6 months after enrollment. These values will be compared between groups temporally. Qualitative feedback will also be collected and analyzed.DiscussionWith ICU clinician burnout rates exceeding 50%, Death Café debriefing sessions may prove to be an effective tool to avert this debilitating syndrome. With COVID-19 limiting social interactions and overloading ICUs worldwide, the virtual administration of the Death Café for ICU clinicians provides an innovative strategy to potentially mitigate burnout in this vulnerable population.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT04347811. Registered on 15 April 2020

Effects Of Rubber Plantation Policy On Water Resources And Landuse Change In The Northeastern Region Of Thailand

The Thai government launched Phase 3 of its Rubber Plantation Project in 2011 aiming to expand the total area of new plantations to 128,000 ha. The northeastern region contains the largest areas for new rubber plantation areas, yet it is known to have unfertile areas and regular encounters with water scarcity during summer. This leads to research questions as to how the policy affects land and water use in the country. This study shows that the water requirement of rubber trees is 14,221 m 3 /ha/year which is higher than that of other local crops (e.g., rice, cassava, sugarcane, and corn). Thus, irrigation systems must be utilized during certain months. The land use changes from the cultivation of edible crops to rubber do not threaten the amount of food available for domestic consumption since Thailand generally exports more of its crops than it consumes. From this policy, total rubber yield would increase to 742 M kg and rice, corn, and cassava would disappear about 1613 M kg (24% of the total amount of rice exported in 2012), 7837 M kg, 8926 M kg, respectively.The government should provide a better plan on crop water requirements suitable for each region and knowledge on increasing crop-per-drop efficiency to all farmers.

Multi-Vehicle Simulation in Urban Automated Driving: Technical Implementation and Added Benefit

This article investigates the simultaneous interaction between an automated vehicle (AV) and its passenger, and between the same AV and a human driver of another vehicle. For this purpose, we have implemented a multi-vehicle simulation consisting of two driving simulators, one for the AV and one for the manual vehicle. The considered scenario is a road bottleneck with a double-parked vehicle either on one side of the road or on both sides of the road where an AV and a simultaneously oncoming human driver negotiate the right of way. The AV communicates to its passenger via the internal automation human–machine interface (HMI) and it concurrently displays the right of way to the human driver via an external HMI. In addition to the regular encounters, this paper analyzes the effect of an automation failure, where the AV first communicates to yield the right of way and then changes its strategy and passes through the bottleneck first despite oncoming traffic. The research questions the study aims to answer are what methods should be used for the implementation of multi-vehicle simulations with one AV, and if there is an added benefit of this multi-vehicle simulation compared to single-driver simulator studies. The results show an acceptable synchronicity for using traffic lights as basic synchronization and a distance control as the detail synchronization method. The participants had similar passing times in the multi-vehicle simulation compared to a previously conducted single-driver simulation. Moreover, there was a lower crash rate in the multi-vehicle simulation during the automation failure. Concluding the results, the proposed method seems to be an appropriate solution to implement multi-vehicle simulation with one AV. Additionally, multi-vehicle simulation offers a benefit if more than one human affects the interaction within a scenario.

Young refugees and locals living under the same roof: intercultural communal living as a catalyst for refugees\u2019 integration in European urban communities?

In various European cities urban authorities and local stakeholders are exploring ways to tackle challenges arising from recent refugee flows. A central concern is the social integration of refugees: how to connect this particular category of newcomers – and especially the most vulnerable ones – durably with local communities? In this article, we discuss an urban programme that offers young unaccompanied refugees (aged 17–23) cohabitation with young locals (aged 20–30) during a period of one to 2 years in Antwerp (Belgium) in small-scale collective housing units. The programme’s assumption is that this mixed, intercultural communal living will promote regular, informal and meaningful social encounters between refugees and locals, which in turn will strengthen the independence and social inclusion of the young refugees.In this article, we investigate the opportunities top-down organized intercultural communal living creates for refugee integration. We draw on interviews and observations collected among locals and refugees living together to gain insights into both groups of participants’ experiences with collective living and the actual social dynamics emerging in such a setting. Our findings suggest that intercultural communal living can be conceptualized as an environment where various informal forms of social support and mutual learning emerge. As such, we contribute to the conceptualization of the impact of intercultural communal living on newcomer integration.

Community Stakeholders' Perspectives on Intimate Partner Violence during Pregnancy-A Qualitative Study from Ethiopia.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) in pregnancy adversely affects the health of women and unborn children. To prevent this, the community responses, societal systems, and structures to support victims of IPV in pregnancy are vital. Objectives: to explore community stakeholders’ perspectives related to IPV in pregnancy in Jimma, Ethiopia, and if needed, create the knowledge base for interventions. Methods: using an exploratory design, this qualitative study had a maximum-variation (multiple spectrum sources) sampling strategy with 16 semi-structured interviews of purposively selected key informants representing different community institutions. Guided by Connell’s theory of gender and power, a content analysis of the translated interviews was conducted using Atlas.ti 7 software. Results: reconciliation between IPV victims and their abusers was the solution promoted by almost all the respondents. There was limited awareness of the adverse impacts IPV in pregnancy has on the health of the woman and the foetus. Despite regular encounters with victims, there is no organized or structured operational response to support IPV victims between the participating institutions. Conclusion: the potential danger of IPV for the mother or the unborn child was not well understood by the members of the studied Ethiopian community. Neither coordinated efforts to support IPV victims nor links among relevant agencies existed. The study demonstrated the dire need of coordinated practical action, changes in current socio-cultural norms, formal training and capacity building, awareness creation, clear intervention guidelines, and facilitation of support networks among relevant institutions in Ethiopian communities.

Representing Spaces, Performing Places: le strade di Londra nel romanzo Absolute Beginners (1958) di Colin MacInnes e nella sua versione cinematografica

This paper addresses life in London in the late 1950s portrayed by the musical film Absolute Beginners (1986) directed by Julien Temple and its fictional source, that is Colin MacInnes’ novel of the same name (1958). While the musical film has been criticized for its lack of character development and for its last-minute attack on racism, MacInnes’ Absolute Beginners was a successful novel. It tells the story about youth subcultures in postwar London and in this paper I will examine the way in which the City of London and its transformation is portrayed as a urban space/place where young people create and establish new places and spaces for themselves for their regular encounters. So, London as the setting becomes not just a background element but a driving force in the whole story. By seeking to understand London as a site of local encounter, global exchange, national significance, and social memory this paper aims at providing an analysis of the places and spaces both of the film musical and the novel which characters absorb the audience/reader and show the variety of human experience of the capital as seen through the eyes (and camera lens) of a nameless 18 year-old photographer.