360 Video: A prototyping process for developing virtual reality interventions

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a promising technological intervention for anxiety disorders. However, there are no existing standards and best practices to evaluate the effectiveness of environments to achieve their intervention goals. The purpose of this study was to develop a VR intervention for student veterans with social anxiety disorder and test feasibility utilizing a three-stage development model. The development of a therapeutic VR environment may benefit from an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers from various fields of study. Utilizing three stages of prototyping with two virtual reality platforms, fully immersive video (n?=?6) and three-dimensional (3-D) immersive virtual reality (n?=?8), the research team designed an intervention for student veterans with social anxiety disorder, testing bio-reactivity of participants. Results of prototyping include user feedback validating increased stress levels and increased bio-reactivity specifically in galvanic skin response and heart rate elevation. Implications include the use of 360° video for prototyping 3-D virtual reality interventions.     

School choice's idealized premises and unfulfilled promises: How school markets simulate options,encourage decoupling and deception,and deepen disadvantages

In school choice systems, families choose among publicly funded schools, and schools compete for students and resources. Using neoinstitutionalist and relational inequality theories, our article reinterprets recent critical sociological and education research to show how such markets involve actors' enacting myths; these beliefs and their associated practices normalized white, privileged consumption as a basis for revamping public education as market exchanges between schools and families. Proponents argue that choice empowers individuals, focuses organizations on improving quality, and benefits society more broadly by reducing inequality and segregation. We argue that such school choice myths' excessive emphases on individual decision‐making and provider performance obscure the actual impacts of school choice systems upon people, organizations, and society. First, rather than enlarging alternatives that families can easily research, select, and (if needed) exit, school choice systems often simulate options, especially for disadvantaged populations. Second, rather than focusing schools' efforts on performance, innovation, and accountability, they can encourage organizational decoupling, homogeneity, and deception. Third, rather than reducing societal harms, they can deepen inequalities and alienation. Future research should examine both how markets are animated by bounded relationality—routines that enable them to form, maintain, and complete exchanges with organizations—and how activism can challenge marketization.     

The effects of traffic noise on tadpole behavior and development

Urban Ecosystems - Traffic noise is known to negatively affect many wildlife species by interfering with foraging behavior. Frogs often lay their eggs in roadside ditches because they are...     

Landscape Context Influences the Abundance and Richness of Native Lady Beetles Occupying Urban Vacant Land

Urban Ecosystems - Urban insect communities are structured by hierarchical filters including regional processes, human facilitation, and species interactions. We sought to inform future urban...     

Timing it right: Suspicious students,family bonds and becoming a woman in Quito,Ecuador

To improve access to education in Ecuador, state actors encourage parents and youth to think of girls’ emotional bonds to family as potential barriers to schooling. High schoolgirls and their mothers respond by synchronising their institutional and family responsibilities with the emotional norms of age grades such as ‘student youth’ and ‘mother’. Girls dedicated to embodying national progress find themselves trying to delay strong emotional commitments to family until after they have completed their schooling. Examining their construction as emotional suspects reveals the stakes of age expectations for female citizens in Ecuador.     

Social Workers’ Knowledge and Attitudes About Evidence-Based Practice: Differences Between Graduate Students,Educators, and Practitioners

Clinical Social Work Journal - The implementation of evidence-based practice (EBP) is increasingly being stressed as a responsibility of social work practitioners and social work educators....     

Do All Activities “Weigh” Equally? How Different Physical Activities Differ as Predictors of Weight

In Britain, it is recommended that, to stay healthy, adults should do 150 minutes of moderate‐intensity physical activity every week. The recommendations provided by the U.K. government, however, remain silent in regard to the type of activity that should be done. Using the annual Health Survey for England we compare how different types of physical activities predict a person's weight. In particular, we consider clinically measured body mass index and waist circumference. We document mean slopes emanating from ordinary least squares regressions with these measures as the dependent variables. We show that individuals who walk at a brisk or fast pace are more likely to have a lower weight when compared to individuals doing other activities. Additionally, we highlight that the association between physical activity and weight is stronger for females and individuals over the age of 50. Our overall conclusions are robust to a number of specifications.     

The household inventory as urban ‘theatre’ in late medieval Burgundy

In 1413 at the death of his wife Guillemot, Jean Aubert, a group of witnesses and a clerk of the local mayoralty met to value the possessions of their residence, resulting in an inventory full of notes and values on rooms and their objects. Within the existing historiography of the Burgundian Netherlands and its northern European neighbours, inventories and their objects tend to be analysed from two perspectives: the Burgundian court and the ‘consumer revolution’. Applying insights from Erving Goffman and Bruno Latour, this article suggests a third perspective should have priority: the urban ‘theatre’ within which objects were documented and placed. Therefore it sets up an alternate methodology which begins with the inventory to build a picture of the theatre (the urban context and residence), the actors (the Aubert family) and the audience (the witnesses of the inventory) to establish new insights into the operation of Burgundian power and the dynamics of the ‘consumer revolution’.