Speech-Language Pathologist Perspectives of the Implementation of Telepractice-Delivered Stuttering Treatment for School-Age Children

Purpose: The impact of stuttering can be significant, and effective treatment is critical. Despite evidence supporting direct treatment approaches for school-age children who stutter, a complex set of barriers can prevent access at school. One potential solution is telepractice. To date, however, there is no published evidence regarding the use of telepractice to deliver the Lidcombe Program within a school setting. Method: In this pilot study, a telepractice service was established and the perspectives of the five treating speech-language pathologists (SLPs) were evaluated before, during, and after the trial through focus groups and recorded telesupervision sessions. Results: An inductive and reflexive thematic analysis identified four main themes: (a) Understanding and managing technology is critical; (b) logistical considerations can be time-consuming and challenging; (c) preparation and support are essential; and (d) family engagement, acceptance, and independence with telepractice services can be facilitated by external support and coaching. Initially, the SLPs shared feelings of uncertainty, fear, and apprehension. Yet, despite this concern, the SLPs ultimately reported that telepractice can play an important role in their service. Conclusions: In order to maximize the potential value of telepractice, SLPs require training and support to (a) manage the technology and troubleshoot problems that invariably arise, (b) have the opportunity to watch demonstrations of the technology, and (c) clearly explain the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of the parent engaging in treatment. These findings have particular relevance now, as schools and support services navigate a COVID-safe delivery model for the indefinite future.

Thoughts on African Swine Fever Vaccines

African swine fever (ASF) is an acute viral hemorrhagic disease of domestic swine with mortality rates approaching 100%. Devastating ASF outbreaks and continuing epidemics starting in the Caucasus region and now in the Russian Federation, Europe, China, and other parts of Southeast Asia (2007 to date) highlight its significance. ASF strain Georgia-07 and its derivatives are now endemic in extensive regions of Europe and Asia and are “out of Africa” forever, a situation that poses a grave if not an existential threat to the swine industry worldwide. While our current concern is Georgia-07, other emerging ASFV strains will threaten for the indefinite future. Economic analysis indicates that an ASF outbreak in the U.S. would result in approximately $15 billion USD in losses, assuming the disease is rapidly controlled and the U.S. is able to reenter export markets within two years. ASF’s potential to spread and become endemic in new regions, its rapid and efficient transmission among pigs, and the relative stability of the causative agent ASF virus (ASFV) in the environment all provide significant challenges for disease control. Effective and robust methods, including vaccines for ASF response and recovery, are needed immediately.

Japan’s Suga will focus on structural reform

Significance All this and more will be necessary as he confronts entrenched interests embedded by decades of rarely interrupted Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) rule. Impacts It is now accepted that fiscal stimulus will continue into the indefinite future. With interest rates near zero and insufficient private demand, there will be little concern about deficits. ‘Digitalisation’ will be a major focus for Suga, creating opportunities for the IT sector.

The current state of Pleistocene Park, Russia (An experiment in the restoration of megafauna in a boreal environment)

Pleistocene Park is a protected area located near the Arctic Circle in the Eastern part of Russia. It was established by Sergey Zimov and his team in order to perform an experiment on the restoration of the environment that existed there during the Pleistocene period. It was expected that low-productivity boreal habitats would be replaced by highly-productive grasslands resembling African savanna. This experiment was launched in 1988, and its continuation is planned for the indefinite future. The territory of the park was surveyed recently and its actual state was characterized.

Interstellar Probe: The Next Step

<p>An “Interstellar Probe” to the nearby interstellar medium has been discussed in the scientific community for almost 60 years. The key concept has always been to depart from the Sun outward “as fast as possible.” Scientific goals have principally focused on heliospheric topics throughout multiple studies, with potential “bonus science” in both astrophysics and planetary science. The passages of Voyagers 1 and 2 into that medium have only raised multiple new questions, rather than “solving” the outstanding question of the interaction of the solar wind with the nearby interstellar medium. In particular, solar activity apparently continues to have an effect on nearby interstellar space, magnetic field changes in crossing from the heliosheath into the local medium are only in magnitude and not direction, and the three-dimensional structure of the energetic neutral atom (ENA) “ribbon” remains unknown. The power levels on the Voyagers continue to decrease toward the operational floor which is likely to be reached within the next five years, limiting the extent of our exploration, and ending heliophysics deep-space measurements beyond the asteroid belt for the indefinite future. The salient question for a dedicated mission is “What can the Interstellar Probe do that no other mission can do?” The answer requires an in-depth look at current capabilities for such a mission, e.g., solar system escape speed, data downlink bandwidth, and mission lifetime with science topics, technological readiness of mission and instrument concepts, and realistic mission costs. To provide technical input to the upcoming Solar and Space Physics Decadal Survey, NASA has contracted with the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) to execute a “First Pragmatic Interstellar Probe Mission Study.” The effort focuses on near-term engineering readiness (ready for launch by 2030) but also includes input regarding compelling science and associated required measurements and instrumentation, assuming that such a mission would commence during the next Decadal time period. This is not a Science Definition Team (SDT) exercise, but rather an assessment of possibilities. In that spirit, we continue to seek input from across the international space science community regarding potential science goals, measurements, instruments, and their implementation readiness in order to help inform the engineering team in support of a concept mission. We provide a status report on this ongoing effort.</p>

Responsibility as an Ethical Value

The individual thinking of each of us causes many of us to give up the utopian dreams of the human mastery over living conditions and the exercise of a new responsibility, in accordance with our new powers. Our ethical responsibility and our fateful ontological choice is to do what is necessary to ensure the continued, worldly integrity of mankind and it's continuity in an indefinite future, to ensure a good continuation of life between communities or even in the relations between the states of the world. We point out as a first example the ecological crisis and the moral crisis of transforming ecological behavior into a habit when humanity needs resources to survive. However, it is necessary to give recognition to researchers who claim that traditional systems of ethics do not have the resources to cope with our unprecedented technological powers, and the effort of all to fill the philosophical void but also the real, tangible and practically proven part of ethics with an "ethics of responsibility", it is something other than a simple daily habit.

Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India

This article theorizes the colonial problem of peoplehood that Indian anticolonial thinkers grappled with in their attempts to conceptualize self-rule, or swaraj. British colonial rule drew its legitimacy from a developmentalist conception of the colonized people as backward and disunited. The discourse of “underdeveloped” colonial peoplehood rendered the Indian people “unfit” for self-government, suspending their sovereignty to an indefinite future. The concept of swaraj would be born with the rejection of deferred colonial self-government. Yet the persistence of the developmentalist figuration of the people generated a crisis of sovereign authorization. The pre-Gandhian swaraj theorists would be faced with the not-yet claimable figure of the people at the very moment of disavowing the British claim to rule. Recovering this underappreciated pre-Gandhian history of the concept of swaraj and reinterpreting its Gandhian moment, this article offers a new reading of Gandhi's theory of moral self-rule. In so doing, it demonstrates how the history of swaraj helps trace the colonial career of popular sovereignty.

Responsibility and the Ethics of Ecological Restoration

This paper argues that the concept of responsibility can andshould ground an ethics of ecological restoration. It starts with WilliamJordan’s concept of restoration, namely the creation of mutually beneficialhuman-nature relationships. It builds a concept of responsibility using theworks of Hans Jonas and Martin Drenthen, understood as a correlate ofour technological capacity, as well as a relationship to the possibility ofmeaningfulness today and in the indefinite future. It is argued that we areresponsible in a deep sense for engaging in projects of restoration in orderto ensure the survival of embodied meaningfulness in the world.

Technology and ethics

Only within the modern period have philosophers made a direct and sustained study of ethics and technology. Their work follows two philosophical traditions, each marked by distinct styles: the Continental or phenomenological tradition, and the Anglo-American or analytical tradition. Hans Jonas (1979) articulated one of the basic premises of Continental approaches when he argued for technology as a special subject of ethics: because technology has fundamentally transformed the human condition, generating problems of global magnitude extending into the indefinite future, it calls for a new approach to ethics. Jonas’ basic premise is expressed variously in the works of Karl Marx, Max Scheler, José Ortega y Gasset, Martin Heidegger and others. Work within the Anglo-American tradition tends not to deal with technology as a whole but to be organized around particular technologies, such as computing, engineering, and medical and biological sciences. It draws on concepts and principles of traditional ethical theory at least as a starting point for analyses. Although each of the technologies has a unique set of problems, certain themes, such as responsibility, risk, equity and autonomy, are common to almost all. Social scientists have also raised important issues for the field of ethics and technology. Their work has yielded two dominant schools of thought: technological determinism and social constructivism.

Year of Drama

This chapter details Ernst Kantorowicz's life after the Nazis took power in Germany in the winter of 1933. His situation as a Jewish professor became precarious. In Frankfurt, the Nazis moved to take control of the university. The university Senate met to discuss ways of forcing out Jewish faculty members. To this end, it requested that Kantorowicz take an immediate leave of absence for the sake of “avoiding disruptions of his classes.” In a draft of a response dated April 3, addressed to the dean of the philosophical faculty for forwarding to the newly installed Nazi commissar for education in the province of Hesse, Kantorowicz requested the suspension of his professorship for the indefinite future albeit with continuing pay.