Biofield therapy has shown positive results over a broad range of pathology from preclinical research to human studies. However, biofield therapy investigation is limited by an inability to quantify the therapeutic effect. This study aimed to measure the effects Reiki had on mice intervertebral disc (IVD) cells compared with sham and to quantify Reiki by measuring photon emission. We treated mice IVD cells with ten-minute sessions of either Reiki or sham on three successive days. During treatment, we placed the cells in a specifically constructed box with an installed photomultiplier tube (PMT). Reiki significantly increased the photon emission of the cells post-treatment compared with Reiki pre-treatment and sham (p less then 0.05). Real time PCR (RT PCR) showed an increase in collagen II and aggrecan (p less then 0.05).  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/talabostat.html  We present a means to quantify biofield therapy by measuring the post-treatment photon emission. We concurrently demonstrate Reiki's effect on the anabolic healing response.The COVID-19 pandemic does not herald a new social era. Rather, the mechanisms of dealing with the pandemic, as far as they can be identified at this point, bear testimony to the structural socio-economic and socio-political crisis that must be regarded as the signature of democratic capitalism. Nor should the prevailing crisis management be misunderstood as a "politics of life" which (at least temporarily) suspends the capitalist logic of accumulation and of profit as it is only certain lives that the governments of the democratic-capitalist industrialized countries are committed to saving and protecting. This means that any adoption of the life-coaching semantics of "crisis as an opportunity" should be treated with caution. However, for sociology itself the current circumstances could indeed offer an opportunity that is, if it would finally stop denying that its own practice is inextricably enmeshed in (trans-)formative social processes and is never unideological, nor value-free, nor politically neutral.The contribution begins by attempting to specify the corona crisis' essence and form by means of acceleration theory. In so doing, the diagnosis of a politically induced, objectively measurable deceleration is pivotal. In a second step, the social theoretical conclusions from this diagnosis are drawn in contrast to system theory on the one hand, and neomarxist approaches on the other. The focus is on the argument that the political reaction to SARS-CoV‑2 can neither be explained by reference to the principles of functional differentiation nor through the logic of securing political power or through capital accumulation. Following this line of thought, the article maps out the possibilities created by the crisis for societal path and system change, and outlines the role that sociology as a scientific discipline can and should play in this historical situation.I offer a philosophical examination and feminist queering of the social imaginaries of the dead - with specific reference to recent public disclosures about death in Ireland's Mother and Baby Homes - by looking at the issue of spectrality through the work of Jacques Derrida and others. What does it mean to respond to the dead, who, though temporarily forgotten, return to haunt us not as remembered human beings but as remnants or remainders? The normative distinctions between past and present; past, present and future; between living and non-living; absence and presence; and self and other are all made indistinct when displaced by a non-linear temporality. What differential is in play with respect to those who are grievable (in Judith Butler's terms) and the others who constitute what Giorgio Agamben calls bare life? The strategy of memorialising the re/discovered dead seems inadequate, and I outline an alternative hauntological ethics, as suggested by Derrida, and ask if there are queer social imaginaries that allow us to live well with the dead not because we give respect, but because death itself has been rethought. I close with some speculations arising from Deleuzian vitalism and Rosi Braidotti's optimistic claim that 'death frees us into life'.Teachers' skill in fostering students' engagement and limiting disruptive behavior is important for maintaining a safe, productive, and effective learning environment. Yet, teachers lacking specific training in classroom and behavior management continue to report high levels of stress and are more likely to leave the profession (Ingersoll, Merrill, et al., Seven trends The transformation of the teaching force, 2018; Zabel & Zabel, Journal of Special Education Leadership, 15(2), 67-73, 2002). Despite wide agreement from experts about the importance of developing classroom and behavior management skills, many teacher training programs do not require specified coursework or experiences to develop this skill set for teacher licensure or degree completion. In this article, we describe what we observe to be a disconnect between current requirements of teacher preparation programs, and the nature of adequate teacher training to appropriately manage and support student behavior. We argue that this disconnect currently contributes to a host of problematic outcomes observable in schools, including teacher attrition, racial disproportionality in discipline actions, and an overreliance on punitive and ineffective behavior support practices. We end our discussion with additional recommendations for improving teacher training and ensuring systems alignment.In environments with uncertain dynamics, synthesis of optimal control policies mandates exploration. The applicability of classical learning algorithms to real-world problems is often limited by the number of time steps required for learning the environment model. Given some local side information about the differences in transition probabilities of the states, potentially obtained from the agent's onboard sensors, we generalize the idea of indirect sampling for accelerated learning to propose an algorithm that balances between exploration and exploitation. We formalize this idea by introducing the notion of the value of information in the context of a Markov decision process with unknown transition probabilities, as a measure of the expected improvement in the agent's current estimate of transition probabilities by taking a particular action. By exploiting available local side information and maximizing the estimated value of learned information at each time step, we accelerate the learning process and subsequent synthesis of the optimal control policy.