Preventing Gender-Based Homelessness in Canada During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond: The Need to Account for Violence Against Women

The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to increases in intimate partner violence (IPV), a leading cause of women's homelessness. Although the Canadian Government provided emergency funding to the violence against women and housing and homelessness sectors in response to COVID-19, Canada lacks a national legislative and funding framework to support coordinated prevention efforts. We review the context of IPV and homelessness among women and international policy exemplars. We then propose several starting points for developing a Canadian strategic framework, including adopting inclusive definitions of IPV and homelessness as well as evaluating a broad continuum of IPV-housing options and intersectoral partnership models.

A platform for deep sequence-activity mapping and engineering antimicrobial peptides

Developing potent antimicrobials, and platforms for their study and engineering, is critical as antibiotic resistance grows. A high-throughput method to quantify antimicrobial peptide and protein (AMP) activity across a broad continuum can elucidate sequence-activity landscapes and identify potent mutants. We developed a platform to perform sequence-activity mapping of AMPs via depletion (SAMP-Dep): a bacterial host culture is transformed with an AMP mutant library, induced to express AMPs, grown, and deep sequenced to quantify mutant frequency. The slope of mutant growth rate versus induction level indicates potency. Using SAMP-Dep, we screened 170,000 mutants of oncocin, a proline-rich AMP, for intracellular activity against Escherichia coli. Clonal validation of 36 mutants supported SAMP-Dep sensitivity and accuracy. The efficiency and accuracy of SAMP-Dep enabled mapping the oncocin sequence-activity space with remarkable detail and scale and guided focused, successful synthetic peptide library design, yielding a mutant with two-fold enhancement in both intracellular and extracellular activity.

From guidance to counseling. Theoretical achievements and research areas of sub-discipline

Guidance can be considered on a broad continuum - from the daily activities of friendly people to specialised institutional activities. If we call guidance a practical activity related to providing help, counseling is called a scientific discipline, the theory of guidance. The article presents the history of the formation of counseling and the paradigms, currents and theoretical concepts and counseling as a scientific discipline. Attempts to describe this process can be made from various theoretical and methodological positions, using regularities taken from various scientific disciplines.

Validating the Level of Personality Functioning Scale: We don’t use multimethod research designs

Overreliance on mono-method approaches in research is an issue that compromises increases to measurement validity, confining the utility of our instruments (Bornstein, 2015a; Natoli, in press a). Multimethod approaches, however, often yield more comprehensive and precise data (Ganellen, 2007). Accordingly, multimethod research designs must be utilized when developing and refining measures of personality to make certain that these instruments are truly psychometrically sound. The Level of Personality Functioning Scale (LPFS; APA, 2013) was introduced in DSM-5 and offered to clinicians as a tool to assist in personality disorder diagnosis and to serve as a general tool for measuring personality functioning on a broad continuum. Since its introduction, myriad studies have evaluated the LPFS’s psychometric properties. But at what frequency were mono-method research designs used in studies that purportedly contribute to, or document, this instrument’s psychometric properties? This systematic review demonstrates the lack of multimethod research designs used to evaluate the LPFS’s construct validity. Findings are discussed with regard to the need for multimethod research assessing the psychometric properties of the LPFS and other measures of personality; future directions for doing so are proposed and the unique opportunity offered by the LPFS to initiate a shift in the common practice of instrument validation is acknowledged.

Stage Props and Shakespeare’s Comedies

While they might seem like ‘toys’ or ‘trifles’, stage properties in Shakespeare’s comedies subtly unsettle the relationship between human subject and non-human object. Even such seemingly innocuous comedic props as letters (in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love’s Labour’s Lost) and rings (in The Merchant of Venice) can be given incommensurate weight by the comic plot. Drawing on both semiotic and phenomenological accounts of stage props as well as the synthesis of these approaches in the work of Erika Lin and Andrew Sofer, this essay explores the broad continuum between the comically disruptive misdirected letter and absent, irreplaceable objects like Shylock’s turquoise ring and demonstrates just how rigorously Shakespeare’s comic props test our investment in comedic narrative and the comic resolution.

A continuum of measures of validity for research in the making fields

With the growth of “making” doctorates in design-related fields comes the need to define how dissertations in these fields achieve doctoral robustness. This paper first suggests that this new category of doctoral degree is justifiable from a historical point of view. A brief survey of how the PhD emerged in the European tradition, and its trajectory through the centuries, reveals there have been previous changes in the areas of study deemed worthy of doctoral distinction. On this view, we can justify awarding doctorates in the “making” fields, from art to architecture, on historical grounds. The aspect that has remained constant through the years, however, is that the doctoral degree signifies inclusion in a community of learners and, in turn, doctoral learning has positively impacted human community in general. Making doctorates should therefore not be so unique and exclusive that they separate themselves from the historic community-building role doctorates have played. The second part of this paper suggests a way towards this inclusivity. This paper proposes a “continuum of measures of research validity” to help researchers (and evaluators) in making doctorates anchor their research logic in measures that have roots in scientific method. The continuum is purposefully broad, beginning with standard measures of scientific research, but stretching those measures all the way to fictive constructions. Within this broad continuum, dissertations in the making fields can comfortably fall within the scope of doctoral research using expanded definitions for measures of validity. The paper concludes with four recommendations for candidates in the making fields, for the committees that guide them, and for the emerging community of making doctoral research as a whole.

Isolated sub-30-as pulse generation from few-cycle spatially inhomogeneous laser pulses

We investigate theoretically the high-order harmonic generation from few-cycle spatially inhomogeneous laser pulses. It is found that the cutoff of the high-order harmonic spectrum extends dramatically compared with that from homogeneous pulse. With proper inhomogeneous parameters, a broad continuum spectrum appears, from which an isolated attosecond pulse with duration less than 30as could be obtained without any phase compensation. The duration of generated attosecond pulse is not sensitive to the variation of the carrier-envelop phase of the driver field, which may be beneficial to the realization in experiment.

Human Psychology (fitrah) from Islamic Perspective

Education is crucial for all mankind. It is achieved to perfect all aspects of human’s life and to attain perfection in one’s life. To achieve true education, one must keep knowledge on the philosophy and objectives of education put forth by different religions and civilization but more importantly as stipulated in the Al-Quran and Sunnah. These sources help in the operative formulation of generating the complete growth of individual with integrated, balanced, and collective personality. The principal task of education is, to nurture the personal growth of a human being. It is through this development of the individual and the preservation and transmission of culture that both the individual and society attains a quality of life. A good man is not necessarily a complete man. No one can be stared as a complete human because there is no end to the growth of human personality. A wide knowledge of many subjects helps in the growth of personality (psychology) provided a man knows how to modify behavior and knows how knowledge and actions are integrated into a broad, total framework of life. This issue has been taken into hand to provide an insight from Islamic perspective for a broad continuum of personality development or what in contemporary era is called human psychology. An analytical approach is adopted to search the sources which contain information related to human nature in order to justify that religion has a strong voice to help humans to cognize the role of Islamic Psychology in human development.