Effects of Simulated Microgravity and Hypergravity Conditions on Arm Movements in Normogravity

The human sensorimotor control has evolved in the Earth’s environment where all movement is influenced by the gravitational force. Changes in this environmental force can severely impact the performance of arm movements which can be detrimental in completing certain tasks such as piloting or controlling complex vehicles. For this reason, subjects that are required to perform such tasks undergo extensive training procedures in order to minimize the chances of failure. We investigated whether local gravity simulation of altered gravitational conditions on the arm would lead to changes in kinematic parameters comparable to the full-body experience of microgravity and hypergravity onboard a parabolic flight. To see if this would be a feasible approach for on-ground training of arm reaching movements in altered gravity conditions we developed a robotic device that was able to apply forces at the wrist in order to simulate micro- or hypergravity conditions for the arm while subjects performed pointing movements on a touch screen. We analyzed and compared the results of several kinematic parameters along with muscle activity using this system with data of the same subjects being fully exposed to microgravity and hypergravity conditions on a parabolic flight. Both in our simulation and in-flight, we observed a significant increase in movement durations in microgravity conditions and increased velocities in hypergravity for upward movements. Additionally, we noted a reduced accuracy of pointing both in-flight and in our simulation. These promising results suggest, that locally simulated altered gravity can elicit similar changes in some movement characteristics for arm reaching movements. This could potentially be exploited as a means of developing devices such as exoskeletons to aid in training individuals prior to undertaking tasks in changed gravitational conditions.

Developmental Disability: Families and Functioning in Child and Adolescence

The WHO's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) provides an integrated framework for health for everyone. Several aspects of this approach to health allow us to see people's lives in a richer and more holistic manner than has traditionally been the case based on diagnosis alone. These features include the positive language (emphasizing in particular “activity,” “participation,” and “personal factors”); the interconnections of the parts of this “dynamic system,” in which every component can influence every other one; and the formal inclusion of “contextual factors”—personal and environmental—that are otherwise too easy to take for granted and then ignore. This paper addresses the “environmental” dimension of the ICF framework—specifically referring to “family” as the central environmental force in the lives of children and adolescents. The perspectives of the author are those of a developmental pediatrician, whose career has focused on children with conditions that challenge their development, and their families. Lessons learned from a lifetime of work—including teaching and research as well as clinical services—are offered. Particular emphases will be on (i) the importance of focusing on the family in a non-judgmental “family-centered” way; (ii) how conceptual ideas about child (and family) development and parenting are as important as technical approaches to intervention; and (iii) how the ICF framework “allows”—indeed encourages—such a focus to have value and importance equal to the best of biomedical interventions. Examples from current research will illustrate how these ideas can be implemented.

Media and Responsibility for Their Effects: Instrumental vs. Environmental Views

From the perspective of media ecology, this paper explores the question of responsibility for the effects that media have on society. To explain these media effects, two approaches are singled out. (1) The instrumental approach assumes that a medium works as a tool used by a user for a purpose. (2) The environmental approach focuses on the capacity of a medium to become an environmental force that reshapes both the habitat and the inhabitants. The instrumental approach to media, when taken too broadly and without an understanding of its limits, leads to conspiracy theories and inadequate social and political assessments. The more advanced and sophisticated environmental approach allows for an adequate understanding of media evolution and its effects but does not comply with the traditional legal notions of guilt and responsibility for actions, as there is no jurisdictional human or institutional agency when environmental forces are in play. After charting the distinction between the instrumental and environmental views of media, the paper focused on how the instrumental effects of media turn into environmental effects. The purpose of the paper is to develop and offer a media ecological apparatus for possible further juridical discussions regarding the regulation of the networking society.

Firm receptivity regarding marketplace vs political ties

PurposePrior research has examined the sociopolitical force as simply a part of all types of environmental pressures, yet we argue that this force calls for a unique examination of marketing's role in firm responses to sociopolitical pressures. Understanding the degree to which firms attempt to manage forces and pressures in the external business environment is key to understanding marketing's role in impeding vs aiding public policy initiatives, and is the problem this research investigates.Design/methodology/approachUsing structural equation modeling, data from 71 firms demonstrate that managing the sociopolitical force is, in fact, distinct from managing the other four market-based forces – consumer demand, supplier power, competition and technological shifts. Managing the sociopolitical force is shown to require fundamentally different skills and resources.FindingsResults suggest that firm sociopolitical receptivity drives attempts to influence this unique external business environmental force, in turn limiting marketplace sociopolitical receptivity. Furthermore, attempts to influence such a unique force relies on resource-light marketing resources, which limits resource-heavy marketing.Originality/valueManaging a political force with marketplace ramifications involves strategy that utilizes marketing, but is driven by relationships with social and political agents. This is truly an environmental management concept distinct from the management of the other four market-based forces. The analysis in this study demonstrates that managing another environmental force (i.e. competition force) involves different receptivity influences and marketing tactic outcomes.

Enhancing the Alternative Cellular Energy (ACE) Pathway with KELEA Activated Water as Therapy for Infectious Diseases

: Many infectious diseases have yet to be conquered by modern medicine. This is generally attributed to both a failure of the immune system and the lack of an effective anti-microbial pharmaceutical. Infections can be regarded as a competitive process between the microbe and the host for cellular energy-generated resources. Cells obtain energy not only from the metabolism of food but also from the alternative cellular energy (ACE) pathway. This pathway utilizes an environmental force termed KELEA (kinetic energy limiting electrostatic attraction), which provides an added kinetic/chemical energy to the body’s fluids. The ACE pathway can be enhanced through the use of KELEA activated water, which is currently available under different names from several sources. Enhancing the body’s ACE pathway, including the use of a wearable waterceutical, provides a novel means of potentially increasing the body’s resistance against all infectious diseases.

The Environmental Movement as a Factor in the Development of Civil Society in Uzbekistan

The globalization of environmental problems, the changed political situation, and the new social and environmental experience of the Republic of Uzbekistan and its interaction with other, mainly neighboring, countries, compel us to comprehend the environmental activity of the people of Uzbekistan. The article analyzes the national model of the civil society of the republic, its conditioning by the historical and sociocultural characteristics of the country, by traditional values and by mental and behavioral characteristics, and universal mechanisms of adaptation to the natural and social environment, which together generally influenced the formation and development of the environmental movement in the republic. The processes of formation and the modern dynamics of the environmental movement in Uzbekistan and its particular characteristics are being studied. We analyzed activities aimed at adapting to an unpredictable future, the ability to develop a variety of socioecological practices, the ability to implement flexible communication strategies, create an information space related to environmental issues, their introduction into the daily life of society and its gradual transformation into a significant political and environmental force. The article also analyzes the experience of the Western environmental movement, which could contribute to the development of the environmental movement in Uzbekistan and its greater social sustainability, including through the involvement of more resources and new participants. The uniqueness of the sociocultural conditions in Uzbekistan, focusing on national identity and at the same time relying on a new technological base and on the social innovations that determined the characteristics of the local movement, allows us to discuss the Uzbek model of the environmental movement as a clearly expressed independent sociocultural phenomenon which deserves close attention and further in-depth study.

Exploring the Contradiction of Extractive Populism Between Domestic and International Politics in Ecuador

Chapter 6 focuses on polycentric pluralism, mostly at the international and national levels, sidelining vulnerability as a principal cause of environmental attitudes. After briefly introducing rationales behind the interaction between international and domestic policy positions, we show that while there is consensus among Ecuadorians that foreign extractive interests are threats to the Amazon, Ecuadorians are divided along party lines regarding the government’s pursuit of extraction, illustrating the political—rather than cultural—nature of the extractive debate in Ecuador. The upshot is that the Correa administration tried but failed to maintain both its international and domestic images as an environmental force, funding discretionary programs (including “green” ones) through oil drilling. Furthermore, consistent with our argument that polycentric pluralism has been the form that interest articulation takes, variations in approval of policies are more readily explained by cleavages defined by vulnerability and political party affiliation rather than by ethnic identity.

Irregular Wave and Current Loads on a Fish Farm System

Accurate calculation of the design mooring loads on an aquaculture fish farm mooring system is often a difficult task. The fish farm system has a large horizontal extension with variable environmental conditions across the entire structure. In addition, the drag loads on the fish nets are thought to be the governing environmental force. This means that the mean position of the fish farm is a function of the mean of the fluid particle velocity squared, where the fluid particle velocity must be taken as the sum of current and wave induced fluid particle velocities. Additional offsets will be slowly varying, where the response time will depend on the total mooring stiffness. The magnitudes depend on the height and length on wave groups in the irregular sea state. The paper presents simulations of the response of such a system to a set of combined irregular waves and current conditions. The response evolution in time is discussed as well as parameters affecting the maximum responses in the systems (displacements and loads). Finally, the resulting loads on the fish farm in irregular waves are compared to loads obtained in equivalent regular waves, as this is an often used engineering practice when analyzing the response and mooring loads of a fish farm.

THE HYDE WE LIVE IN: STEVENSON, EVOLUTION, AND THE ANTHROPOGENIC FOG

In multiple entries in his notebooks, Robert Louis Stevenson pauses to consider the failure of scientific language to communicate the abstractions that undergird its theoretical models of natural processes. In failing to make the operations of the physical world speak, materialist discourse suffers from a terminological disorder. His diagnosis is sweeping and acerbic: “Scientific language like most other language is extremely unsatisfactory” (“Note Book” 300). In what follows I will argue that over the course of several key essays of the 1880s and his most famous work of fiction, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Stevenson aims to redress the fundamental abstraction of the most prominent materialist doctrine of his day, Darwinian evolutionary theory, rendering it viscerally communicable in the figure of Hyde, who represents both the individual organism subject to the pervasive modifying forces of speciation and the embodiment, in a single yet fluctuating corporeal entity, of those very forces. Further to this, I will propose that in imagining Hyde's genesis at the laboratory table (the result of Jekyll's incursions into nature) and in placing Hyde in symbiosis with the London fog (the admixture of natural forces and human intervention in the form of the burning of fossil fuels), Strange Case can be added to the body of literature that hails the dawning of the Anthropocene, famously defined by Paul Crutzen as the “human-dominated geological epoch supplementing the Holocene” in which the human has become “a major environmental force” (23). The figure of Hyde thus manifests evolutionary forces in all their teeming presence while also harkening the new forms of subjectivity emerging from our catastrophic agency in the present era – one in which the human has become, in the words of Dipesh Chakrabarty, a “geophysical force” (13).