Short Script Research Articles

Use of Deep Neural Networks to Predict Obesity With Short Audio Recordings: Development and Usability Study.

The escalating global prevalence of obesity has necessitated the exploration of novel diagnostic approaches. Recent scientific inquiries have indicated potential alterations in voice characteristics associated with obesity, suggesting the feasibility of using voice as a noninvasive biomarker for obesity detection. This study aims to use deep neural networks to predict obesity status through the analysis of short audio recordings, investigating the relationship between vocal characteristics and obesity. A pilot study was conducted with 696 participants, using self-reported BMI to classify individuals into obesity and nonobesity groups. Audio recordings of participants reading a short script were transformed into spectrograms and analyzed using an adapted YOLOv8 model (Ultralytics). The model performance was evaluated using accuracy, recall, precision, and F1-scores. The adapted YOLOv8 model demonstrated a global accuracy of 0.70 and a macro F1-score of 0.65. It was more effective in identifying nonobesity (F1-score of 0.77) than obesity (F1-score of 0.53). This moderate level of accuracy highlights the potential and challenges in using vocal biomarkers for obesity detection. While the study shows promise in the field of voice-based medical diagnostics for obesity, it faces limitations such as reliance on self-reported BMI data and a small, homogenous sample size. These factors, coupled with variability in recording quality, necessitate further research with more robust methodologies and diverse samples to enhance the validity of this novel approach. The findings lay a foundational step for future investigations in using voice as a noninvasive biomarker for obesity detection.

Addressing water-health equity through biological engineering and theatre

For the past decade, RESEAU has been engaging with Indigenous and rural communities across Canada in pursuit of water-health equity. RESEAU consists of a team of engineers, community partners, industry groups, and government officials working together to develop innovative solutions for water-health in small communities. Over the last six years, RESEAU has partnered with the UBC Research-based Theatre Lab to develop Treading Water, a research-based theatre play that brings to life some of the rich stories discovered during these community collaborations. The play flows between the intersecting narratives of individuals in a community dealing with unsafe drinking water and explores the resulting challenges to their health and well-being. Water operators and their experiences are central in Treading Water, and the research-based play illustrates their pivotal role in the community. This article, like the theatre initiative described, aims to open conversations addressing water quality and health issues facing rural communities in the 21st century. The article shares the collaborative process of developing the play with the various partners, the short script, as well as feedback from a performer and an evaluator. Cover image: Boil water advisory lifted. Photo credit: RESEAU

Usability and Performance Testing of Pointcheck™: A Noninvasive Neutropenia Screening Device for Chemotherapy Outpatients

Usability and Performance Testing of Pointcheck™: A Noninvasive Neutropenia Screening Device for Chemotherapy Outpatients

Special Issue: Quo Vadis? (Where Are We Going?)

Biofeedback in its scientific format is a truly revolutionary development in the clinical sciences, and yet it strives to maintain its artistic background.How did we get here, and where are we going? A number of great thinkers contributed to the development of biofeedback in the past 100 years. They were helped along by the generally silent partners of technical development; mechanical, electrical, and electronic equipment; and other clinical technology.I once spoke with Dr. John Basmajian, the great pioneer of surface electromyography (SEMG) biofeedback at a conference. We were talking about a colleague's interests, and he laughed and said: “He is a poet.” We need more poets!Compared to other scientific fields, biofeedback pursues different streams related to different somatic components. At the same time, one can foresee when it will endeavor to develop hybrid fields such as muscle and neuro. Not long before I went to college in Montreal in 1965, the idea that the brain was “a black box” with no elasticity was still prevalent. We have evolved far in the past 50 years with the concept of neuroplasticity.When I first joined AAPB in the 1980s, the main interests of the meeting attendees were SEMG and neurofeedback. All the other fields were rather minor compared to these two.In the intervening years, most other fields have developed and taken over to a large extent. At present there is a great interest in heart rate variability (HRV) and mindfulness. The evolution continues and I'm fascinated to see what it will bring in the next few years. I predict hybrid developments with at least two somatic components involved.The authors in this issue of Biofeedback present a variety of scientific and clinical developments.Mari Swingle presents a masterful article in her field of neurofeedback. She truly has treaded along in this field for a respectable number of years. Many years ago, at an AAPB conference, Stu Donaldson introduced a young Mari Swingle to me and told me: “Watch her: She will become someone in this field!” It is due to her and other hard-working clinicians that the field of neurofeedback evolves and has a bright future.Jane Kaufman and her colleagues, Kathryn Stanton and Tiffany Ellsworth Lee, are occupational therapists and work in the field of pelvic floor biofeedback in treating incontinence. As the population ages, the number of people with incontinence increases, and SEMG biofeedback proves to be of great therapeutic value now, and it will be in the future. The article is a useful overview of the field as well as a very practical approach in the therapeutic value of this biofeedback technique.The field of ergonomics in sports performance is discussed by Drs. Filho, Aroni, Bagni, and Ellis. Golf is a highly relevant sport in our society. Putting requires serious attention on the part of the player. The authors present the fact that serious players are preparing themselves beforehand in terms of respiratory and heart rate control; however, the galvanic skin response (GSR) lags behind in terms of autonomic control. Biofeedback is probably an enhanced modality for teaching such control. This field awaits further development and attention.This issue of Biofeedback is dedicated to two old friends whose passing leaves a large empty space in my heart: Michael Thompson and Stu Donaldson. The two were stalwarts of the biofeedback community and will be missed.Their wives, Lynda and Mary, wrote a short script about the two great men. The scripts are included in this special issue.Someday, when one of us is chosen to write real biographies about the historic pillars of AAPB, we will learn and understand more fully the value of these pathfinders. They should smile on us and especially on the young generation, for biofeedback is alive, well, and has great contributors now and in the future.

ESM-Tools version 5.0: a modular infrastructure for stand-alone and coupled Earth system modelling (ESM)

Abstract. Earth system and climate modelling involves the simulation of processes on a wide range of scales and within and across various compartments of the Earth system. In practice, component models are often developed independently by different research groups, adapted by others to their special interests and then combined using a dedicated coupling software. This procedure not only leads to a strongly growing number of available versions of model components and coupled setups but also to model- and high-performance computing (HPC)-system-dependent ways of obtaining, configuring, building and operating them. Therefore, implementing these Earth system models (ESMs) can be challenging and extremely time consuming, especially for less experienced modellers or scientists aiming to use different ESMs as in the case of intercomparison projects. To assist researchers and modellers by reducing avoidable complexity, we developed the ESM-Tools software, which provides a standard way for downloading, configuring, compiling, running and monitoring different models on a variety of HPC systems. It should be noted that ESM-Tools is not a coupling software itself but a workflow and infrastructure management tool to provide access to increase usability of already existing components and coupled setups. As coupled ESMs are technically the more challenging tasks, we will focus on coupled setups, always implying that stand-alone models can benefit in the same way. With ESM-Tools, the user is only required to provide a short script consisting of only the experiment-specific definitions, while the software executes all the phases of a simulation in the correct order. The software, which is well documented and easy to install and use, currently supports four ocean models, three atmosphere models, two biogeochemistry models, an ice sheet model, an isostatic adjustment model, a hydrology model and a land-surface model. Compared to previous versions, ESM-Tools has lately been entirely recoded in a high-level programming language (Python) and provides researchers with an even more user-friendly interface for Earth system modelling. ESM-Tools was developed within the framework of the Advanced Earth System Model Capacity project, supported by the Helmholtz Association.

A Sleep Hygiene Intervention to Improve Sleep Quality for Hospitalized Patients

Poor sleep is a pervasive problem for hospitalized patients and can contribute to adverse health outcomes. We aimed to improve self-reported sleep for patients on a general medicine ward as measured by the Richards-Campbell Sleep Questionnaire (RCSQ) as well as the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) question addressing quietness at night. We utilized a non-pharmacologic sleep hygiene bundle composed of a short script with sleep hygiene prompts, such as whether patients would like the shades closed or the lights turned off, as well as a sleep package including an eye mask, earplugs, lavender scent pad, and non-caffeinated tea. Relaxing music was played at bedtime and signs promoting the importance of quietness at night were placed around the unit. Front-line champions were identified to aid with implementation. A total of 931 patients received the intervention. In a sample of surveyed patients, we observed an increase in the RCSQ global score from 6.0 (IQR 3.0-7.0) to 6.2 (IQR 4.0-7.8) from the pre- to post- intervention periods (p = 0.041), as well as increases in three of the five individual survey components. Additionally, HCAHPS "quietness at night" score increased on the unit from 34.1% pre-intervention to 42.5% post-intervention. A nonpharmacologic sleep hygiene protocol paired with provider education and use of champions was associated with modest improvements in patients' perceived sleep and unit HCAHPS scores.

BLeak

Memory leaks in web applications are pervasive and difficult to debug. Leaks degrade responsiveness by increasing garbage collection costs and can even lead to browser tab crashes. Previous leak detection approaches designed for conventional applications are ineffective in the browser environment. Tracking down leaks currently requires intensive manual effort by web developers, which is often unsuccessful. This paper introduces BLEAK (Browser Leak debugger), the first system for automatically debugging memory leaks in web applications. BLEAK'S algorithms leverage the observation that in modern web applications, users often repeatedly return to the same (approximate) visual state (e.g., the inbox view in Gmail). Sustained growth between round trips is a strong indicator of a memory leak. To use BLEAK, a developer writes a short script (17-73 LOC on our benchmarks) to drive a web application in round trips to the same visual state. BLEAK then automatically generates a list of leaks found along with their root causes, ranked by return on investment. Guided by BLEAK, we identify and fix over 50 memory leaks in popular libraries and apps including Airbnb, AngularJS, Google Analytics, Google Maps SDK, and jQuery. BLEAK'S median precision is 100%; fixing the leaks it identifies reduces heap growth by an average of 94%, saving from 0.5MB to 8MB per round trip.

Toward Autonomy and Conditional Independence: A Standardized Script Improves Patient Acceptance of Surgical Trainee Roles

Progressive autonomy leading to conditional independence is necessary to achieve competence in surgical skills and decision making. Trust and transparency are ethical imperatives, but practices vary regarding the extent of disclosure of specific resident roles. We tested whether a standardized preoperative script would improve patient acceptance of resident involvement in perioperative care. Patients admitted to a resident-run acute care general surgery service between October 2017 and October 2018 were enrolled in an IRB-approved study. During the first half of the rotation (control), operative consent was obtained according to individual practice without specified explanation of resident roles. During the second half (intervention), the senior resident read a short semistructured script specifically explaining team roles and responsibilities, including the degree of resident independence and supervision by attendings. On postoperative day 3, patients completed a survey assessing understanding of their surgical care. Sixty-two patients under the care of 10 rotating chief residents were enrolled; 46 patients completed the survey, 23 in each arm (74% response rate). Ten patients in the control arm (43%) compared to only 3 (13%) in the intervention arm indicated that residents should not be allowed to perform portions of operations (odds ratio 4.94, p = 0.047). Patients in the intervention arm felt that care team roles were more adequately explained to them before their operation (p = 0.002). There was no difference in the number of patients naming a resident as "their doctor." Use of a short script specifying resident roles improves patient acceptance of trainee participation in perioperative care.

Toward Autonomy and Conditional Independence: A Standardized Script Improves Patient Acceptance of Surgical Trainee Roles

Background Progressive autonomy leading to conditional independence is necessary to achieve competence in surgical skills and decision making. Trust and transparency are ethical imperatives, but practices vary regarding the extent of disclosure of specific resident roles. We tested whether a standardized preoperative script would improve patient acceptance of resident involvement in perioperative care. Methods Patients admitted to a resident-run acute care general surgery service between October 2017 and October 2018 were enrolled in an IRB-approved study. During the first half of the rotation (control), operative consent was obtained according to individual practice without specified explanation of resident roles. During the second half (intervention), the senior resident read a short semistructured script specifically explaining team roles and responsibilities, including the degree of resident independence and supervision by attendings. On postoperative day 3, patients completed a survey assessing understanding of surgical care. Results Sixty-two patients under the care of 10 rotating chief residents were enrolled; 46 patients completed the survey, 23 in each arm (74% response rate). Ten patients in the control arm (43%) compared to only 3 (13%) in the intervention arm indicated that residents should not be allowed to perform portions of operations (odds ratio 4.94, p = 0.047). Patients in the intervention arm felt that care team roles were more adequately explained to them before operation (p = 0.002). There was no difference in the number of patients naming a resident as their doctor. Conclusions Use of a short script specifying resident roles improves patient acceptance of trainee participation in perioperative care.

Engaging English Learners Through Literature, Fairy Tales, and Drama

Use of literature in the English language classroom deepens student engagement, and fairy tales add magic to the mix. This article details the benefits of engaging English learners in literature and fairy tales, and explores how drama can be enlisted to further mine their riches. An educator’s case studies of language teaching through literature and drama projects are described, and the research question driving them highlighted: What is the impact of dramatizing literature on students’ engagement in novels and second language acquisition? Research on the effects of literature, drama, and the fairy tale genre on second language education is reviewed. Reading and acting out literature and fairy tales hones all four language skills while also enhancing the Seven Cs life skills: communication, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, commitment, compromise, and confidence. Adding the frame of project-based learning to the instructional strengths of literature and drama forms a strong pedagogical triangle for second language learning. Fairy tales are easily enacted. English educators and learners can download free fairy tale scripts and spice them with creative twists of their own creation or adapted from film and cartoon versions. Providing maximum student engagement, tales can be portrayed with minimum preparation. Using a few simple props and a short script, English learners can dramatize The Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, or Snow White in class with little practice. Engagement increases when teams act out tales on stage for an audience of family, friends, classmates, and educators. In fairy tale enactment projects, whether in class or on stage, students apply their multiple intelligences when choosing team roles: script-writing, acting, backstage, costumes, make-up, sound and lights, reporter, advertising, usher, writer’s corner, or stage managing. The article concludes with a list of engaging language activities for use with fairy tales, and a summary of the benefits of fairy tale enactments for English learners.

BLeak: automatically debugging memory leaks in web applications

Despite the presence of garbage collection in managed languages like JavaScript, memory leaks remain a serious problem. In the context of web applications, these leaks are especially pervasive and difficult to debug. Web application memory leaks can take many forms, including failing to dispose of unneeded event listeners, repeatedly injecting iframes and CSS files, and failing to call cleanup routines in third-party libraries. Leaks degrade responsiveness by increasing GC frequency and overhead, and can even lead to browser tab crashes by exhausting available memory. Because previous leak detection approaches designed for conventional C, C++ or Java applications are ineffective in the browser environment, tracking down leaks currently requires intensive manual effort by web developers. This paper introduces BLeak (Browser Leak debugger), the first system for automatically debugging memory leaks in web applications. BLeak's algorithms leverage the observation that in modern web applications, users often repeatedly return to the same (approximate) visual state (e.g., the inbox view in Gmail). Sustained growth between round trips is a strong indicator of a memory leak. To use BLeak, a developer writes a short script (17-73 LOC on our benchmarks) to drive a web application in round trips to the same visual state. BLeak then automatically generates a list of leaks found along with their root causes, ranked by return on investment. Guided by BLeak, we identify and fix over 50 memory leaks in popular libraries and apps including Airbnb, AngularJS, Google Analytics, Google Maps SDK, and jQuery. BLeak's median precision is 100%; fixing the leaks it identifies reduces heap growth by an average of 94%, saving from 0.5 MB to 8 MB per round trip. We believe BLeak's approach to be broadly applicable beyond web applications, including to GUI applications on desktop and mobile platforms.

Skip blocks: reusing execution history to accelerate web scripts

With more and more web scripting languages on offer, programmers have access to increasing language support for web scraping tasks. However, in our experiences collaborating with data scientists, we learned that two issues still plague long-running scraping scripts: i) When a network or website goes down mid-scrape, recovery sometimes requires restarting from the beginning, which users find frustratingly slow. ii) Websites do not offer atomic snapshots of their databases; they update their content so frequently that output data is cluttered with slight variations of the same information — e.g. , a tweet from profile 1 that is retweeted on profile 2 and scraped from both profiles, once with 52 responses then later with 53 responses. We introduce the skip block , a language construct that addresses both of these disparate problems. Programmers write lightweight annotations to indicate when the current object can be considered equivalent to a previously scraped object and direct the program to skip over the scraping actions in the block. The construct is hierarchical, so programs can skip over long or short script segments, allowing adaptive reuse of prior work. After network and server failures, skip blocks accelerate failure recovery by 7.9x on average. Even scripts that do not encounter failures benefit; because sites display redundant objects, skipping over them accelerates scraping by up to 2.1x. For longitudinal scraping tasks that aim to fetch only new objects, the second run exhibits an average speedup of 5.2x. Our small user study reveals that programmers can quickly produce skip block annotations.

Textuality for Play Script Analysis

Texture is the basis for unity and semantic interdependence within text. Any text that lacks texture would be isolated sentences that have no relationship to each other. Robert De Beaugrande and Wolfgang U. Dressler defined a text as a “communicative occurrence which meets seven standards of textuality”–Cohesion, Coherence, Intentionality, Acceptability, Informativity, Situationality and Intertextuality, without any of which the text will not be communicative. This study is to use textuality as a method of analysis of Bertolt Brecht’s short play text, “A Case of Betrayal”, second playlet in 〈Fear and Misery of the Third Reich〉 that is one of Bertolt Brecht’s most famous plays and the first of his openly anti-Nazi works. I try to use ‘Cohesion & Coherence’ as main tools for analysis of the Brecht’s short play script in this study. Directors, actors, and stage designers must read play scripts with special attention using imaginary for stage, because play scripts are not only as texts for reading but also as scripts for being staged. Every single theater work process based on drama includes the course of reading and analysis. Actors and directors have to prepare grounds to support characters’ acting and director’s work & design on the analyzed result. It would be a effective method for theatrical people to use textuality as a tool of play script analysis in the course of rehearsal.

A Dynamic Platform for Developing 3D Facial Avatars in a Networked Virtual Environment

Avatar facial expression and animation in 3D collaborative virtual environment (CVE) systems are reconstructed through a complex manipulation of muscles, bones, and wrinkles in 3D space. The need for a fast and easy reconstruction approach has emerged in the recent years due to its application in various domains: 3D disaster management, virtual shopping, and military training. In this work we proposed a new script language based on atomic parametric action to easily produce real-time facial animation. To minimize use of the game engine, we introduced script-based component where the user introduces simple short script fragments to feed the engine with a new animation on the fly. During runtime, when an embedded animation is required, an xml file is created and injected into the game engine without stopping or restarting the engine. The resulting animation method preserves the real-time performance because the modification occurs not through the modification of the 3D code that describes the CVE and its objects but rather through modification of the action scenario that rules when an animation happens or might happen in that specific situation.

The Alter Ego Workshop: A Cognitive Exercise

The Alter Ego Workshop:A Cognitive Exercise Josephine Anstey (bio) 1. Introduction Click for larger view View full resolution We all show and hide different aspects of ourselves to different groups and in different situations. Who pops out to have dinner with friends, to obey our grandmother, greet co-workers at the boss’s funeral, or when we are uncertain and lost in an unfamiliar place? Big, anonymous cities, the World Wide Web, travelling, all give people the opportunity to live parallel lives with completely alternate selves. But most of us squash and suppress whole personalities just so we can go about our daily routines. Physicists working on the Theory of Everything propose seven or eight extra dimensions coiled up within the three or four we know. Can we agree that we have alter egos coiled inside, us? Can we give them some room to come out and play? 2. Making Your Alter Ego Click for larger view View full resolution The first step, if you choose to take it, is to make an avatar of your alter ego(s): a material representation of your imprisoned self(ves). a). Gather Materials–a peg doll, cloth, pipe cleaners, wool, crayons. * b). Gather Tools–scissors, glue. c). Gather Yourself–rested, fed. d). Go to: http://www.creamcityreview.com/ io-main The audio file supports a meditative frame of mind allowing your alter ego to flow from your fingers into your avatar without self-censorship. * Other materials can be used, clay, balloons, straw, papier mache, a face drawn on your finger, etc. [End Page 46] 3. Getting to Know Your Alter Ego Click for larger view View full resolution When you have finished making your alter ego, spend some time getting to know yourself. Do you have a name? Are you shy, angry, greedy, flamboyant? Are you two years old? Are you omnipotent? Are you pregnant? Talk out loud. Walk about. What are you feeling? How would you act under pressure? How would you act if tempted? How would you act in love? 4. Playing with Your Alter Ego Click for larger view View full resolution Studies have shown that of all cognitive-breakout exercises, melodrama best supports the process of inhabiting, and unfolding diverse alter egos. Therefore the next step in this cognitive exercise is a guided exploration that takes the form of a melodrama in three acts. Your alter ego is invited to take part in three improvisations that trace the interrelationships of three characters. Love, compassion, repulsion, depression, and some of their attendant difficulties, are explored as your avatar serially steps into the mind of each character. Working through emotion, and the stories that emotion precipitate, helps us consolidate personality. However, the aim of the exercise is not to form a complete alternate self, but to understand that emotional response and judgment is tied more to context than personality; that self in this erea* is a language-based and very malleable construction. * Erea is a portmanteau word combining era (time) and area (space) [End Page 47] 5. Registering for the Melodrama Click for larger view View full resolution If you choose to take part in the melodrama you will need to register for a partner. Your partner is another Alter Ego Workshop participant, whose avatar will be acting opposite your own in real-time improvisations enabled by video-chat. To prepare for each act, read the short preamble that sets the scene. Online your avatars will be assigned roles and you will be given a short script to start the improvisation process. Then let your avatar unfold the scene. Register here for Alter Ego Workshop partner: http://impcon.org/?page_id=420 Warning: This is not a risk-free enterprise; self-image, identity and self-confidence are at stake, not only your own, but that of your partner. We consider that the avatars are necessary buffers for both of you. Although the complete loss of your normal narrative selves is extremely unlikely, it is a condition that may bring difficult consequences in this erea.* * See the case study The Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart, William Morrow, 1971 [End Page 48] Josephine Anstey Josephine Anstey’s career has been concept and project...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Teaching the Middle Ages on Film: Visual Narrative and the Historical Record

A comparatively new medium, film can be used for a range of discussions about the ways in which history is recorded, edited, shaped, and remembered; it is also useful for teaching contemporary interpretation of older literatures. Like historical fiction – or works of art more generally – movies with historical themes are most productively studied in their broader contexts, alongside, and in conjunction with, written sources. The classroom provides a perfect venue for such study. While reading and analyzing older texts, students can also be taught to read films for their authenticity, their accuracy or inaccuracy of detail in portraying the past, and for effective (or ineffective) use of purposeful or intentional anachronism, among other approaches. Film enhances the study of texts; careful reading of texts may, in turn, lead to more critical evaluation of film.

The "chemical imbalance" explanation for depression: Origins, lay endorsement, and clinical implications.

When a client asks whether her or his depression is caused by a chemical imbalance, how do you respond? Depression is regularly depicted in popular media as resulting from a “chemical imbalance” and this depiction raises a number of interesting questions for practicing clinicians. How accurate is the chemical imbalance explanation for depression? How widely do laypersons agree with the explanation, and how do they interpret the explanation? We discuss the origins, accuracy, and transmittal (e.g., via direct-to-consumer advertising) of the chemical imbalance explanation for depression. We next present results from a group case study examining lay endorsement and interpretation of the explanation. Finally, we discuss clinical implications and present a short script for educating clients concerning “chemical imbalances” in depression.

The Convergence Potentials of Collaboration & Adaptation: A Case Study in Progress

The Convergence Potentials of Collaboration & Adaptation: A Case Study in Progress

Almonds and Cherries

Brigitte was a non-traditional student?a poUte way of saying she was thirty and not twenty-one, Uke the rest of the kids in her Florida film program. She was also single, ch?dless, and possibly a lesbian, though she wasn't com pletely sure yet. She had unique feelings for her Intermediate F?m Production professor, Shirley Mayer, who was openly gay and struck Brigitte as a sort of absent-minded type who needed looking after. Mostly Brigitte thought things Uke it would be nice to do Shirley Mayer's laundry, or help her with her taxes. Occasionally she imagined kissing Shirley Mayer, but only occasionally, for it was a Uttle overwhelming to feel so pleased by something so unfamiUar. It was Brigitte's idea to explore her burgeoning sexuaUty on film that autumn. A recent bra shopping trip had inspired her to write a sensual short script about a customer and the sales associate helping her, all of which would take place in a dressing room. (A minimal number of locations, Shirley Mayer had instructed the class, would be cheaper and less strenuous in terms of moving equipment.) Brigitte turned in the requisite treatment for 36C only to get it back from Shirley Mayer unmarked and with a note at the top saying to please see her. What is this? Shirley Mayer asked Brigitte during office hours that after noon. She was sitting at her desk holding Brigitte's treatment, which she had quickly re-read before posing the question. Shirley Mayer was a pink-faced blond in a styhsh gray suit with black buttons, who never, ever removed her jacket. It's my script, Brigitte said. She shifted in her seat and recrossed her legs, feeUng suddenly underdressed in jeans. Jesus, Shirley Mayer said. You too. Me too? Shirley Mayer handed Brigitte back her treatment. The whole class is writing about being gay, she said. We'll screen these films for the parents at the end of the year, and I'll get fired for converting you all. I'm not converted, Brigitte said, immediately wishing she could take it back. Well, that's a reUef, Shirley Mayer snapped.