Counselor educator workload and burnout in the era of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic brought disruption to teaching and other aspects of workload in higher education. The current study sampled 126 counselor educators about workload, compassion satisfaction, burnout, and job satisfaction. Results indicated that faculty workload and administrative responsibilities increased for counselor educators during the pandemic without adequate compensation or support.     

False negativity to carbohydrate-deficient transferrin and drugs: a clinical case

Introduction:

In this work we report on the possible effect of the medical therapy on CDT concentration in a chronic alcohol abuser, with known medical history (July 2007 – April 2012) and alcohol abuse confirmed by relatives.

Case history:

At the end of 2007, patient displayed the following laboratory results: AST 137 U/L, ALT 120 U/L, GGT 434 U/L, MCV 101 fL and CDT 3.3%. On December 2007, after double coronary artery bypass surgery, he began a pharmacological treatment with amlodipine, perindopril, atorvastatin, isosorbide mononitrate, carvedilol, ticlopidine and pantoprazole. In the next months, until may 2011, the patient resumed alcohol abuse, as confirmed by relatives; however, CDT values were repeatedly found negative (0.8% and 1.1%) despite elevated transaminases and GGT, concurrent elevated ethyl glucuronide concentration (> 50 mg/L) and blood alcohol concentration (> 1 g/L). Alcohol consumption still continued despite increasing disulfiram doses ordered by an Alcohol Rehab Center. On May 2011, the patient was transferred to a private medical center where he currently lives.

Conclusions:

This study suggests the possibility that a medical therapy including different drugs may hamper the identification of chronic alcohol abusers by CDT.     

Anatomical societies find new ways to come together in a post-Covid world

The world has been turned upside down by a global health emergency caused by the Covid-19. Given the high contagiousness of the virus and the need to contain its spread, social distancing rules, self-isolation policies, and geographical lockdowns have been enforced globally. Over the pandemic emergency the majority of the planned in-person meetings and congresses of national and international anatomical societies have been postponed or canceled. It is unclear what the future holds, but times of crisis often present possibilities for re-thinking old ways to achieve a more critical approach. It has become increasingly clear that traditional in-person congress formats of scientific societies need to be reevaluated. Over the past year and a half, two types of congressional modalities have been trialed to address the challenge of the pandemic as far as scientific meetings are concerned: the fully virtual congress, in which case the conference program is live streamed to all of the attendees, and the hybrid congress, in which case some of the attendees physically participate at the congress's venue while others interact via a virtual platform. The current study set out to investigate the technical difficulties, social challenges, costs and sustainability, logistics and management issues linked to holding various types of congresses in the post-Covid world. Anatomical societies throughout the world are actively striving to reshape their response to the current global emergency and to uncover new types of conference modalities in the effort to keep scientific exchange alive and flourishing in the post-Covid era.     

Young children category learning: a training study

From an integrative approach, this work focuses on the role of conceptual mechanisms, such as comparison and conceptual-based inference, and sociopragmatic support in young children's taxonomic categorization. “Experiment 1” assessed whether 3-, 4-, and 6-year-old children succeed in detecting taxonomic relations on their own. A clear developmental trend was found: 6-year-olds succeeded, whereas 4- and 3-year-olds relied primarily on perceptually based categories. “Experiment 2” assessed if 3-year-olds are able to change their perceptual response into a taxonomic categorization as a function of the co-occurrence of contingent category information and feedback in an interactive process with an adult (experimenter). A pretest–posttest training study compared 3-year-olds' performance in four conditions: comparison, conceptual-based, information-only, and feedback-only. A perceptual–totaxonomic shift was found only in the comparison and conceptual-based training groups. Children who only received either category information or corrective feedback did not make such a shift. The results show that social interaction with supportive adults is a mechanism that drives conceptual understanding in early childhood.     

Divide to connect: Reorganization through R&D unit spinout as linking context of intra-corporate networks

The paper examines the formation of clique-spanning ties in intra-corporate co-invention networks, by focusing on the impact of R&D unit spinouts. Using data on thirty-one spinouts in eight large U.S. information and communication technology corporations, we show that the reorganization of R&D units through corporate spinouts is associated with an increase in the extent to which inventors employed in the unit collaborate with inventors located in other cliques within the corporate co-invention network. Interestingly, the spinout effect spills over to all members of the clique of spun-out inventors, also including those who remain with the parent firm. The interpretation of these empirical findings, grounded on existing theories and on the views of inventors and executives involved in the reorganization events, suggests that corporate spinouts generate a shock in intra-corporate research collaboration dynamics, which loosens clique lock-in effects and contributes to reset cliques’ boundaries in the intra-corporate research network.     

Does sensorimotor training improve the static balance of young volleyball players?

The aim of this investigation is to assess the effectiveness of a 6-week balance training (BT) protocol, integrated in regular training sessions, on postural sway of young female volleyball players (n = 26, age 13.0 +/- 0.2 years) divided into two groups (intervention and control; 13 per group). Trials were performed for bipedal and unipedal stance conditions before and after the BT protocol, using a pressure platform to collect center-of-pressure (COP) time series that were processed to calculate sway area, COP path length, and maximum displacement range in anteroposterior and mediolateral directions. The intervention group exhibited smaller sway areas in eyes closed conditions (intervention = 42.76 mm2, control = 67.60 mm2; p < 0.05) and Romberg quotients (intervention = 1.11 mm, control = 1.82 mm) in bipedal stance, while all the other parameters were unaffected. BT also reduced sway area (intervention = 122.70 mm2, control = 187.18 mm2) and anteroposterior COP displacements (intervention = 20.18 mm, control = 22.38 mm) of the non-dominant limb for single-leg stance. No significant change was found for the dominant limb. Although it is possible to hypothesize a beneficial effect of BT on young athletes, further investigations are required to clarify its actual effect on balance performance with respect to normal volleyball training.