Acadia University

This paper explores the postcolonial impacts on Palestinian School Counselling Professional Identities (SCPI), examining how school counsellors perceive their roles and responsibilities in a settler-colonial context characterized by historical power gaps and ongoing political violence. Deploying postcolonial theories and discourse analysis, I analyzed semi-structured interviews with 21 Palestinian school counsellors who work in Palestinian schools in Israel and follow the Israeli school counselling regulations. The findings revealed that Palestinian SCPIs are structured on an intersection between resistance and internalized oppression, reflecting professional attitudes and practices that may reproduce colonial oppression or empower students through counselling interventions. The results also reveal that the current Palestinian SCPIs stretch back to an ongoing history of Israeli negligence policies towards Palestinian minority and the lack of multicultural competencies in counselling trainings. Although focused on the Palestinian context, this study is relevant to mental health professions in the global south and Indigenous communities, highlighting the significant impacts of political contexts on mental health professions. The study also invites international mental health practitioners and researchers to reassess ethical roles and responsibilities in oppressive and politicized spaces and asymmetric power.

The increased prevalence of ticks and tick-borne diseases, combined with health concerns about synthetic repellents, has prompted research into natural alternatives. Products applied to fabric have become more popular, and currently, permethrin is the only active ingredient used in fabric-applied repellents, although consumer use is restricted in Canada. We evaluated the repellency of Citriodiol (lemon eucalyptus essential oil) alone and delivered in a novel fabric spray formulation (AtlanTick Fabric Spray) against Ixodes scapularis and Dermacentor variabilis ticks. Citriodiol oil exhibited overall repellency against I. scapularis nymphs across all concentrations, and none differed significantly from DEET 25% (v/v). In horizontal assays, Citriodiol at 10% v/v (chronic assay) repelled more than 90% of nymphs up to 4 h. When delivered in a fabric spray formulation, it was more effective at repelling ticks overall. In the Y-tube assays, square assays, and human trials, the AtlanTick Fabric Spray applied on different fabric types repelled female adults of both tick species. Repellency reached 100% in square arena trials for up to 3 d post-treatment (cotton) and remained above 70% at 2 wk against I. scapularis across all fabric types. In human trials, repellency remained above 95% for up to 1 wk post-treatment for I. scapularis. For D. variabilis, repellency remained above 95% on all fabric types for 3 d post-treatment but declined after 7 d on synthetic fabrics. The new fabric spray offers an innovative alternative to permethrin-based fabric spray products for repelling ticks and reducing the spread of tick-borne diseases.

This paper presents an embedded platform for local image classification using the NM500 neuromorphic chip on a NeuroShield connected to a PYNQ-Z2 board. The system performs fully on-device training and inference on the MNIST dataset, achieving 95.17% accuracy with only 4,032 hardware neurons compared to the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\sim 8,000$</tex> used in the reference benchmark. Operating autonomously without a host processor, it delivers real-time performance with a 7.46 ms inference latency <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$(134 \text{img} / \mathrm{s})$</tex> and consumes under 2 W. These results show that compact NM500-based designs can provide accurate, low-power, and fully embedded intelligence for edge applications.

This article examines relationships between federal government funding and reported spending by charities on what the Canada Revenue Agency defined as “political activities” over the period 2003–2017. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many charities in Canada see dependence on government funding by other charities as a factor that limits policy engagement. Comparative research generally suggests that government funding is positively associated with policy engagement by charities, but also that it channels charities away from outsider or contentious forms of advocacy toward less confrontational, insider strategies. The CRA data on political activities analyzed here adds important insights because it tracks outsider advocacy involving public calls to action, which government funding is expected to constrain. This analysis finds that charities with federal funding were more likely to report political activities than those with no federal funding, but only to a point and with important differences based on the size of charities.