Title: Reliability of Child SCAT 3 Component Scores in Children at Rest and Following Exercise Author Names: Jeff Billeck, BPE, CAT(C)1, Mike Ellis, MD2, Jeff Leiter, PhD2, Joanne Parsons, PhD, BPT3. Jason Peeler, PhD, CAT(C)4 Problem: A lack of research exists regarding the test-retest reliability of the Child Sport Concussion Assessment Tool 3 (Child SCAT 3) in healthy non-concussed adolescent females in both baseline and post-exercise settings. Method: This study consisted of two testing sessions. Within each session the Child Sport Concussion Assessment Tool 3 (Child SCAT 3) was administered once prior to exercise and once after a bout of exercise. Results: Individual component scores displayed a wide range of reliability and response stability values. A positive correlation existed within one session, between child symptom scores and slower rates of heart rate recovery after exercise. Conclusions: Overall, the Child SCAT 3 appears to be a moderately reliable assessment tool when used to evaluate uninjured female children. However, further research is required to clarify the exact sources of method error within individual Child SCAT 3 component scores. / May 2016

Student Number : 0418258G - MA dissertation - School of Literature and Language Studies - Faculty of Humanities / I chose Bessie Head’s work not only because her life is poignantly expressed in her writing, but also to endeavour as far as possible to fill the lacunae in her novella The Cardinals. Much of my inspiration is derived from the semi-autobiographical elements in her narrative and the way it culminates in the characters Johnny, Ruby and Mouse. Exploration of this unusual triumvirate provides many challenges and I will strive to do it justice. Writing a sequel to The Cardinals is also my personal contribution towards a process of postcolonial healing and a tribute to the literary legacy so generously left to us by a woman who rose from her adverse origins to become a legend in her own time. In my view Bessie Head invents the protagonist Johnny in The Cardinals in representation of the father she never knew. In writing the sequel I give this mythical man a pedigree and political recognition. By recreating the male protagonist in the sequel, I pay special tribute to Bessie Head as a fiction writer and as a courageous woman who battled with demons throughout her life. Adversity did not sway her from her determination to write. She was alienated by her mother’s family who failed to offer her moral support, let alone anything else. The sequel explores the inner and outer dimensions of the lives of the protagonists and recollects the injustices from South Africa’s political past. It is impossible for any story based in that time not to be political, or as political as I am able to make it within the limitations of my personal observations and experience. I give Johnny a family name. I chose the name of De Meillon to provide him with an authentic history. In researching family names of early Cape settlers I came across a Henry De Meillon, who lived in the Cape from 1823 where he farmed, and where, in his leisure time he produced memorable works of art, which are on display in a Cape gallery. I thought he would be an ideal ancestor for the fictional character, Johnny. The original Henry De Meillon married a Dutch woman called Johanna and in the text I suggest that Johnny’s given name is derived from this source. To limit the sequel to eight chapters I do not make mention of the slave families who toiled in the De Meillon vineyards to cultivate selected vines and perhaps interbred with the De Meillons and took the name as their own, some of them possibly entitled to it as direct De Meillon descendents, and some not. Although they are excluded from the text, I submit a family tree to help assemble a family history that is entirely fictional except for the original De Meillon couple. Any events thereafter are invented and bear no truth to any De Meillon descendants that may be alive at this time. The sequel’s main focus is on a child secretly born of mixed parentage in a colour conscious South Africa of the late 1930s, coinciding with Bessie Head’s own birth. The sequel expands on the communist phobia that gripped an apartheid society of the 1960s, borrowing from the communist family in The Cardinals who befriended Charlotte Smith and accepted her into their home. It provided her with opportunities to expand her knowledge and develop a social conscience (Head 1993: p 11). The story is about Coloured people, but I prefer to write about them as people and not as members of a specific race group. The notion that Ruby was white is subverted by the following sentence that appears in The Cardinals: “He looked at the two dark wings of her eyebrows and the smooth stillness of her dark brown face, ‘Where did you grow up?’ he asked” (Head 1993: p 52). She said she grew up on a farm and Johnny tells her that he grew up in a slum. Ruby’s frantic plea when she encounters Johnny on the lonely stretch of beach is: “Love me! Love me! Love me!” (Head 1993: p 52). I interpret this as Bessie Head’s plea for love and acceptance and the desire for family. I see it as a feverish search for a true identity. I also see it as her intense wish for the insecurities of her life to be swept away by a black knight on a white horse, the black knight being ‘Johnny’ who represents not only the father, but the white/black in juxtaposition with Bessie Head’s own hybrid heritage. In writing a sequel to the novella, I give the characters the recognition and the social status that Bessie Head herself deserved. She died too soon and in her short lifetime she was deprived of the benefits her writing started generating towards the end of her life. I hope to give insight into that era of the novella from the perspective of someone born of mixed parentage and the poverty and hardships suffered in the ‘African’ context. I also want the characters to transcend Africa and move abroad into an environment other than South Africa to escape the persecution of the apartheid conditioning. I would like to ensure that they enjoy the sense of freedom that was their birthright in the country of their forebears. I regard the writing of the sequel as bringing finality to a story that seems incomplete. There is scope for setting the protagonists on the path to fulfilling what I see as Bessie Head’s secret dreams of a life she perhaps wanted for herself and her son. Eilersen and MacKenzie’s biographies of her hint that she preferred a simple uncomplicated rural life. It could be that she wanted everything and settled for nothing, the primitive conditions of her home in Botswana being evidence of this. She lived simply without modern conveniences, placing herself on an equal footing with the living conditions of thousands of families who live in Africa. In writing a sequel to her novella, I hope to peel away the surface layers of a woman whose written words went beyond the ordinary and to reveal within the unfathomable depths of her psyche the clever, loving, seething, beautiful, frightened, but angered human being whose hatred could be fierce and whose love overwhelming. In the sequel these aspects emerge in certain characteristics present in Johnny and Mouse. It culminates in their incestuously-spawned daughter, the Ruby doppelganger: Jewel. Margaret Daymond in her introduction to The Cardinals argues that the novella “is not only expressive of complex fears and angers” but that there is a haunting beauty in its many love stories; in addition there is treachery and deception in Mouse’s orders to find a wheel chair for an old lady in desperate need of one (1993: p xiv). It projects newspaper reporting of noble deeds as deception that promotes the newspaper’s image through a fabricated tale. In her role as a reporter Bessie Head may have come face to face with contrived acts of compassion that were falsely represented. In view of the semiautobiographical nature of The Cardinals it is quite possible that Bessie Head herself experienced this kind of false reporting. The subject of incest in the novella could be a representation of Bessie Head’s disregard for the laws of a rigid Calvinist government. The possibility of forbidden love may have haunted her throughout her life, but especially so at the age of twenty-five when she wrote The Cardinals. Daymond maintains that Bessie Head gives the impression that her protagonists, although they were unwittingly blood-related, had a right to pursue their love. The boundaries of a blood-tie relationship was so deeply embedded in Bessie Head’s instincts that they emerged in her writing of The Cardinals in the intimacies of an older man and a young girl in representation of Bessie Head herself. She could have become entangled in a relationship with someone who was actually her father, and she would not have known. There is much speculation in literary circles as to who her father may have been. The assumption that he was a race-horse stable hand has not been proven. I am convinced that Bessie Head researchers will eventually uncover all the hidden facts of her life.

This study investigates the nature of social reproduction in single-black-womanheaded families in post-apartheid South Africa, through an ethnographic case study in Bophelong Township in Gauteng. The study focuses on the two coterminous aspects of social reproduction: the physical reproduction of labour power and the reproduction of social relations of the mode of production as such, in this case capitalism. The study included a socio-economic survey, participatory observation and in-depth interviews with woman-heads over a period of four years. After a preliminary analysis, the data concerning the woman-headed family form was organised into three generations, the Grandmothers, the Mothers and the Daughters. The conclusions are however tentative given that this was a qualitative study based on a particular type of woman-headed family, one sample in one township in South Africa. The internal variations within this family form expressed the woman-heads’ concrete lived experience, biography and social agency; and are moments of a single totality. While black women’s location is informed by many social determinations that intersect and deepen their oppression as woman-heads, they are cast into leadership roles and directly mediate relations within their families, with males, with family kin, with communities and society. The woman-heads find themselves in contradictory positions within patriarchal society, given their own socialization, the daily struggle to reproduce children physically and the need to transcend traditional patriarchal social relations, including the challenge to appropriate egalitarian forms of leadership and avoid becoming proxies for patriarchy. Despite daily struggles for survival, woman-headed families are important social spaces for struggles for egalitarian family arrangements, including those concerning sons and traditional culture, historically the domain of men. However, it is necessary that the struggles within the family are anchored and supported by the struggles for egalitarianism within society as a whole. In particular this means struggles anchored and supported by a radical, grassroots and dynamic women’s movement.

Thesis advisor: Stephanie Berzin / In industrial organizational psychology, there is a well-established link between worker job satisfaction and worker engagement in their job. Similarly, research has found an association between a parent’s satisfaction with their child’s education services and a parent’s level of involvement in their child’s education. Levels of family involvement in their child’s education as early as preschool have been correlated with positive academic and behavioral outcomes throughout childhood. This line of research posits that families who are satisfied with their child’s education services are more likely to be involved in their child’s education and, consequentially, their children are more likely to have positive academic and behavioral outcomes. According to the theories proposed by industrial organization psychology and education research, this dissertation explores the potential links between satisfaction and involvement in Head Start services among U.S. born and immigrant families. To begin to understand the potential connection between satisfaction with services, engagement in services and the unique experiences of the immigrant communities in Head Start, this collection of three studies seeks to employ a mix of primary quantitative data and secondary quantitative data to examine satisfaction with and involvement in services among U.S. born and immigrant families in Head Start. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social work.

Virtual reality (VR) headsets are becoming more common and will require evolving input mechanisms to support a growing range of applications. Because VR devices require users to wear head-mounted displays, there are accomodations that must be made in order to support specific input devices. One such device, a keyboard, serves as a useful tool for text entry. Many users will require assistance towards using a keyboard when wearing a head-mounted display. Developers have explored new mechanisms to overcome the challenges of text-entry for virtual reality. Several games have toyed with the idea of using motion controllers to provide a text entry mechanism, however few investigations have made on how to assist users in using a physical keyboard while wearing a head-mounted display. As an alternative to controller based text input, I propose that a software tool could facilitate the use of a physical keyboard in virtual reality. Using computer vision, a user€™s hands could be projected into the virtual world. With the ability to see the location of their hands relative to the keyboard, users will be able to type despite the obstruction caused by the head-mounted display (HMD). The viability of this approach was tested and the tool released as a plugin for the Unity development platform. The potential uses for the plugin go beyond text entry, and the project can be expanded to include many physical input devices.

Gaze direction and head rotation are powerful cues that inform humans about another person's attention, intentions and even emotion. Previous research has focused on understanding how people make judgements about individual faces in direct view. However in everyday life, people are often presented with groups of faces and need to judge where the attention of that group is directed, such as in group conversations or when giving presentations. This thesis presents research whose aim is to better understand how gaze direction and head rotation are perceived in the visual periphery and in groups. First, observers' perception of gaze deviation in the visual periphery was tested, using psychophysical methods and modelling. The results showed that observers' ability to judge gaze perception is severely limited, and that observers' judgements are severely biased by head rotation in the visual periphery. Second, observers' ability to perceive the average gaze or head direction of a group of spatially distributed faces was investigated. This was done using equivalent noise analysis, a technique which gives estimates for observers' internal noise (how certain they are in their judgements of any individual face) and their effective sample size (how many faces they are able to combine into their average). The findings revealed that head rotation was averaged with less uncertainty and greater effective sample size than gaze deviation, suggesting that observers can more precisely and efficiently pool information about head rotation than gaze. Finally, averaging of heads and gaze stimuli presented in temporal sequences was analysed using the same equivalent noise technique and compared to spatial averaging. In sequences, the differences in processing between head and gaze direction disappear, suggesting that poor peripheral perception of gaze is the limit on our averaging of gaze cues.

Broccoli head rot is a destructive disease found in most broccoli production areas. The main pathogen is the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens. P. fluorescens 5064, which was first isolated from an infected broccoli head in SE Scotland, produces biosurfactants that are important for bacterial establishment on the plant surface prior to causing disease in broccoli. Preliminary experiments performed in this study showed that biosurfactant production in P. fluorescens 5064 was cell density dependent, which is a typical characteristic of the quorum sensing mechanism. Quorum sensing is a bacterial communication mechanism, which controls a number of key processes in growth, reproduction and virulence via signalling molecules (quorum sensing signal) in many gram-negative bacteria. One aim of this study was to determine if biosurfactant production in P. fluorescens 5064 is controlled via quorum sensing. To do this, 35 surfactant-minus Tn5 mutants of P. fluorescens 5064 were screened for their abilities to produce a quorum sensing signal. Six of these biosurfactant-deficient mutants showed a large reduction in quorum sensing signal production. In one mutant 6423, which contains a single Tn5 insertion, the production of the quorum sensing signal was almost eliminated. Addition of quorum sensing signal, either synthetic or extracted from wild type P. fluorescens 5064, was able to restore biosurfactant production in mutant 6423. This strongly suggests that quorum sensing regulates biosurfactant production in P. fluorescens 5064. Attempts were made to clone and sequence the Tn5 disrupted gene in mutant 6423, but the identity of the gene remains inconclusive. The quorum sensing signal in wild type P. fluorescens 5064 was identified in this study by High Pressure Liquid Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry as N-3-hydroxyoctanoyl-homoserine lactone, which has been shown by other researchers to be present in P. fluorescens strain 2-79, but not in the strains F113, 7-14 and NCIMB 10586. The discovery that biosurfactant production in P. fluorescens 5064 is regulated by quorum sensing opens up a possibility for novel control of broccoli head rot. Although only the control of biosurfactant production by quorum sensing was examined in this study, it is possible that other virulence factors, such as pectic enzyme production, are also controlled by quorum sensing as in other pathogenic bacteria. By blocking the quorum sensing system, the pathogenic P. fluorescens that use this mechanism to control virulence could potentially be rendered avirulent. In greenhouse pathogenicity tests, a quorum sensing signal-degrading bacterium, Bacillus sp. A24, was evaluated for biocontrol of head rot disease caused by P. fluorescens 5064 on broccoli. However, the Bacillus sp. A24 showed only limited control effects, despite its strong quorum sensing signal-degrading ability towards the pathogen in vitro. A subsequent test proved that Bacillus sp. A24 is a surfactant producer itself and this could explain its ineffectiveness in disease control. When screening the quorum sensing signals of the 35 biosurfactant mutants, mutant 6418 was found to produce a potent antibiotic-like compound. This was identified by thin-layer chromatography as pyrrolnitrin. Unlike wild-type P. fluorescens 5064, mutant 6418 has lost its ability to produce virulence factors and is thus non-pathogenic. It was therefore of interest to determine if mutant 6418 could be used as a biocontrol agent to control broccoli head rot disease. In greenhouse pathogenicity tests, mutant 6418 significantly reduced disease by 41 %. The practical application of this research to bacterial disease control – via the manipulation of quorum sensing to inhibit virulence gene expression – is discussed.

Master of Dental Surgery / History has recorded the antiquity of serious infections in the region of the head and neck. Today, our community still experiences major life-threatening infections in these anatomical locations, which pose significant management difficulties to the oral and maxillofacial surgeon. The aim of this thesis is to review the aetiology, diagnosis and treatment of some bacterial infections involving structures of the head and neck. Such infections may spread, causing serious complications with severe morbidity and occasionally death. This theses deals only with infections of bacterial origin and does not attempt to cover viral, or fungal agents or the chronic specific diseases of tuberculosis and syphilis, and makes no attempt to address the old question of focal infection. The literature review relates especially to Ludwig’s Angina which was first described so dramatically in 1836. To this day it remains as a clinically potentially lethal disease despite the progress of modern medicine. Numerous descriptions in the literature warn of the rapid appearance of symptoms and the danger of respiratory obstruction when management of the airway is not satisfactorily undertaken. Both odontogenic and non-odontogenic causes of orofacial and neck infections are reviewed. Odontogenic problems are given special emphasis as they are now of major concern. The significance of the potential fascial spaces in the face and neck which allow the spread of dental infections is also highlighter. A thorough knowledge of these anatomical relationships is still of the utmost importance to the surgeon if he is to be successful in treatment. The principle of surgical drainage of pus is as important in 1990 as it was 150 years ago. The biological basis for the onset and progress of such fulminating infections in the head and neck region is still poorly understood. One constant need is that the bacteria, both aerobic and anaerobic, be correctly identified. Microbiological techniques are constantly improving and provide an important adjuvant investigation, which then allows the surgeon to provide the most appropriate antimicrobial therapy. Principal to the many aspects of treatment is the ability to maintain the airway of the patient and to provide the depth of anaesthesia necessary to undertake the required surgery. Major bacterial orofacial infections may have severe local and far-reaching systemic effects. Such complications are discussed in all their ramifications. It should be realised that the presentation of these patients at a late stage, when complications have already supervened, may make diagnosis difficult. There is always a necessity to ensure that the underlying cause of the disease is accurately defined and that complication are not allowed to progress further. Finally, a retrospective study of the management of 90 patients with major bacterial orofacial infections who have been treated at Westmead Hospital is presented. The outcome of this study of some major bacterial orofacial infections of the head and neck is the need to stress the importance of urgent surgical management and maintenance of the airway, together with the microbiological determination of the causative organisms and their sensitivities, so that other than empirical antibiotics can be instituted early. This must be combined with an upgrading of the patients’ medical and dental status. It was demonstrated that, in the majority of these patients, ignorance and fear combined with a lack of routine dental care resulted in major infections arising from relatively simple odontogenic causes such as dental caries, periodontal disease and pericoronal infection related to impacted teeth. Without doubt, the immediate care of these patients demanded intensive management. However, it is important to recognise that dental education forms an integral part not only of the recovery programme for the afflicted patient, but also as a community health preventive measure of profound significance.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the efficacy of a memory and metamemory training program on memory performance and metamemory judgement accuracy in adults with a closed head injury. A multiple baseline across subjects design was used with six subjects. All subjects were seen at least two years post-injury. Training included general metamemory information about the nature of memory, use of a specific memory strategy to assist verbal recall (to Preview, Question, Read, State and Test- PQRST), specific metamemory information about the strategy, and a self instruction procedure (WTSC- What is the task, Select a strategy to use, Try out strategy, Check to evaluate strategy effectiveness). During the training period all subjects recalled greater than fifty percent of paragraph ideas while using PQRST. Follow-up tests showed that five of the six subjects maintained recall levels but a gradual decrease in slope was observed over eight weeks post-training. Tests of recall, recognition and metamemory judgements on Sentence and Action Tasks were used to evaluate generalisation of training. Two subjects showed improved recall and two subjects showed improved recognition performance. In addition, four subjects demonstrated greater metamemory judgement accuracy about recognition performance following training. Improved performance post-training was also observed for three subjects on the Rivermead Behavioral Memory Test and the Logical Memory subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised, greater than that expected for repeated testing. Several factors were identified as having a role in subjects’ ability to benefit from training.

Using an existing data set comprised of 368 individuals newly diagnosed with cancers of the head and neck, we investigated the predictive validity of the Head and Neck Patient Symptom Checklist (HNSC) by comparing scores on the HNSC to scores on the Patient-Generated Symptom Global Assessment (PG-SGA), and by examining the ability of HNSC scores and four demographic variables to predict dietary intake, weight loss, and functional capacity. HNSC sensitivity (0.79 0.98), specificity (0.99 1.00), positive predictive value (92% 100%), and negative predictive value (94% - 100%) were excellent. Pain, loss of appetite and difficulty swallowing predicted 82% of reduced dietary intake. Advanced tumor stage, loss of appetite and difficulty swallowing predicted 79% of weight loss. Loss of appetite, difficulty swallowing, feeling full and lack of energy predicted 78% of reduced functional capacity. The HNSC appears to be valid and could aid with early symptom identification, intervention and improved outcomes.