Breathing appears to be so natural and organic that it hardly seems worth analyzing. Yet to inhabit an institution can mean having to learn to breathe in culturally distinct ways. This chapter presents the findings of an ethnographic study of 'learning to breath like a soldier' in the army. I focus on the processes by which the body is transformed and new disciplinary techniques are developed, and present the body as an alternative category of cultural analysis to a vision of military culture as the internalization of norms, values and beliefs that shape identities and provide cognitive frames for social action. Cultural patterning in the army is not an abstract intellectual process, but takes place at the level of the body as it engages in practical activity in the training environment, and becomes adapted to the military milieu.

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The objective of this project was to understand why and how some police officers and military personnel are more effective than others at managing civilian encounters without creating hostility -'Good Strangers' (GSs). We conducted cognitive task analysis (CTA) interviews with 17 US police officers and 24 US warfighters (Marines and Army soldiers). The interviews yielded a total of 38 incidents (17 police and 21 military), which we used to identify critical skills for functioning as GSs. These skills centred on having a sensemaking frame that established a professional identity as a GS -Someone who seeks opportunities to increase civilian trust in police/military. This frame requires skills in gaining voluntary compliance, building rapport, trading off security and other frames versus trust building, and taking the perspective of civilians. Practitioner pointsTo work effectively with civilians, police and military personnel need to use a Good Stranger frame, which casts each encounter as an opportunity to build trust. This GS frame requires skills such as trading off security to be seen as trustworthy, perspective taking, gaining rapport, gaining voluntary compliance rather than coercive compliance, and de-escalating tense situations. The GS frame may be surprisingly easy to acquire for some police and military; observation of role models and their effectiveness seems to be a powerful training opportunity. Other training leverage points involve peer pressure, becoming more effective at gaining civilian cooperation, and recognizing the problems created by failing to build trust.

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Background: Following severe trauma to the brain (whether internally generated by seizures, tumors or externally caused by collision with or penetration of objects) individuals may experience initial coma state followed by slow recovery and rehabilitation treatment. At present there is no objective biometric to track the daily progression of the person for extended periods of time.Objective: We introduce new analytical techniques to process data from physically wearable sensors and help track the longitudinal progression of motions and physiological states upon the brain trauma.Setting and Participant: The data used to illustrate the methods were collected at the hospital settings from a pregnant patient in coma state. The patient had brain trauma from a large debilitating seizure due to a large tumor in the right pre-frontal lobe.Main Measures: We registered the wrist motions and the surface-skin-temperature across several daily sessions in four consecutive months. A new statistical technique is introduced for personalized analyses of the rates of change of the stochastic signatures of these patterns.Results: We detected asymmetries in the wrists’ data that identified in the dominant limb critical points of change in physiological and motor control states. These patterns could blindly identify the time preceding the baby’s delivery by C-section when the patient systematically brought her hand to her abdominal area. Changes in temperature were sharp and accompanied by systematic changes in the statistics of the motions that rendered her dominant wrist’s micro-movements more systematically reliable and predictable than those of the non-dominant writst.Conclusions: The new analytics paired with wearable sensing technology may help track the day-by-day individual progression of a patient with post brain trauma in clinical settings and in the home environment.