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... of this page please turn JavaScript on. Feature: Migraine Headaches Straight Talk About Migraines, Cindy McCain Speaks Out Past Issues / Fall 2015 ... my forehead." When did you first start getting migraines, and how long did it take you to ...

Introduction to Python for CMF Authority Users

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Pritchett-Sheats, Lori A.

This talk is a very broad over view of Python that highlights key features in the language used in the Common Model Framework (CMF). I assume that the audience has some programming experience in a shell scripting language (C shell, Bash, PERL) or other high level language (C/C++/ Fortran). The talk will cover Python data types, classes (objects) and basic programming constructs. The talk concludes with slides describing how I developed the basic classes for a TITANS homework assignment.

Talking and Thinking about Qualitative Research

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ellis, Carolyn; Bochner, Arthur; Denzin, Norman; Lincoln, Yvonna; Morse, Janice; Pelias, Ronald; Richardson, Laurel

2008-01-01

This script comes from an edited transcript of a session titled "Talking and Thinking About Qualitative Research," which was part of the 2006 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on May 4-6, 2006. This special session featured scholars informally responding to questions about their…

Teacher Talk in General and Special Education Elementary Classrooms

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hollo, Alexandra; Wehby, Joseph H.

2017-01-01

Teachers' oral language use may be an important factor in student achievement, particularly for students who struggle with language, learning, and behavior. This study examined features of teacher talk during whole-class instruction in 14 general education (GE) and 14 self-contained special education (SE) elementary classrooms that included…

Talking Stick. Volume 28, Number 6, July-August 2011

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2011-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/ February, March/April, May/ June, July/August, September/October, and November/ December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections, namely: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain…

Talking Stick. Volume 27, Number 3, January-February 2010

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2010-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain articles…

Talking Stick. Volume 29, Number 6, July-August 2012

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2012-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain…

Talking Stick. Volume 29, Number 2, November-December 2011

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2011-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain articles…

Talking Stick. Volume 29, Number 4, March-April 2012

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2012-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain articles…

Talking Stick. Volume 26, Number 6, July-August 2009

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2009-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain articles…

Talking Stick. Volume 27, Number 5, May-June 2010

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2010-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain articles…

Talking Stick. Volume 28, Number 5, May-June 2011

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2011-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections, namely: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain…

Talking Stick. Volume 28, Number 4, March-April 2011

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2011-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections, namely: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain…

Talking Stick. Volume 27, Number 4, March-April 2010

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2010-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain…

Talking Stick. Volume 29, Number 3, January-February 2012

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2012-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain articles…

Talking Stick. Volume 28, Number 2, November-December 2010

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2010-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections, namely: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections…

Talking Stick. Volume 27, Number 6, July-August 2010

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2010-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain articles…

Talking Stick. Volume 27, Number 1, September-October 2009

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baumann, James A., Ed.

2009-01-01

The "Talking Stick" is published bimonthly, six times a year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/December by the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Each issue is divided into three sections: Features, Columns, and Departments. These sections contain…

Hierarchical Data Formats (HDF) Update

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Pourmal, Elena

2017-01-01

In this presentation, we will talk about the latest releases of HDF4 and HDF5 software and tools, new features available in HDF5, and roadmap for the HDF software. We will also solicit feedback from the users of HDF data and HDF application developers on new features and new tools. The talk will cover: Difference between 1.8 and 1.10 releases and how and when to move to the latest release Features of the recent HDF5 1.8.19, 1.10.1 and HDF 4.2.13 Overview of HDF View 3.0 and other enhancements to tools Supported compilers and systems Open discussion of new requirements and wish list of the HDF features Compression library for interoperability with h5py and Pandas and better floating-point data compression.

"Eugenics talk" and the language of bioethics.

PubMed

Wilkinson, S

2008-06-01

In bioethical discussions of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and prenatal screening, accusations of eugenics are commonplace, as are counter-claims that talk of eugenics is misleading and unhelpful. This paper asks whether "eugenics talk", in this context, is legitimate and useful or something to be avoided. It also looks at the extent to which this linguistic question can be answered without first answering relevant substantive moral questions. Its main conclusion is that the best and most non-partisan argument for avoiding eugenics talk is the Autonomy Argument. According to this, eugenics talk per se is not wrong, but there is something wrong with using its emotive power as a means of circumventing people's critical-rational faculties. The Autonomy Argument does not, however, tell against eugenics talk when such language is used to shock people into critical-rational thought. These conclusions do not depend on unique features of eugenics: similar considerations apply to emotive language throughout bioethics.

Exploring the Framing of Animal Farming and Meat Consumption: On the Diversity of Topics Used and Qualitative Patterns in Selected Demographic Contexts

PubMed Central

van Woerkum, Cees M. J.

2018-01-01

Simple Summary In various contexts, people talk about the farming and consumption of animals using different arguments to construct and justify their (non-)acceptability. This paper reports on a qualitative research among consumers with different backgrounds in urban and rural areas in The Netherlands and Turkey. We present an elaborate methodology for qualitatively researching everyday-life talk about animal farming and meat consumption. We explain how we collected and organised topics people refer to, and looked at the possible relation of complete argumentations with the researched contexts. The resulting long list of topics includes animal welfare arguments, but shows that in everyday-life many others are used, such as health, taste, money, religion, and environmental impact. Our research indicates several ties between mentioned topics and the researched contexts—the most noticeable pattern being the difference between respondents in cities and rural areas. However, in contrast to what literature suggests, single contextual features, like country or gender, offered relatively little insight into the differences that showed up in the complete argumentations. This, we argue, does not imply that context does not matter, but rather that so many cultural and personal contextual aspects play a role that singular contextual features cannot sufficiently explain framing. Abstract In various contexts, people talk about animal farming and meat consumption using different arguments to construct and justify their (non-)acceptability. This article presents the results of an in-depth qualitative inquiry into the content of and contextual patterns in the everyday-life framing regarding this issue, performed among consumers in various settings in two extremes in the European sphere: the Netherlands and Turkey. We describe the methodological steps of collecting, coding, and organizing the variety of encountered framing topics, as well as our search for symbolic convergence in groups of consumers from different selected demographic contexts (country, urban-rural areas, gender, age, and education level). The framing of animal farming and meat consumption in everyday-life is not a simple one-issue rational display of facts; people referred to a vast range of topics in the categories knowledge, convictions, pronounced behaviour, values, norms, interests, and feelings. Looking at framing in relation to the researched demographic contexts, most patterns were found on the level of topics; symbolic convergence in lines of reasoning and composite framing was less prominent in groups based on single demographic contexts than anticipated. An explanation for this lies in the complexity of frame construction, happening in relation with multiple interdependent contextual features. PMID:29364860

Systematic Analysis and Prediction of In Situ Cross Talk of O-GlcNAcylation and Phosphorylation

PubMed Central

Li, Ao; Wang, Minghui

2015-01-01

Reversible posttranslational modification (PTM) plays a very important role in biological process by changing properties of proteins. As many proteins are multiply modified by PTMs, cross talk of PTMs is becoming an intriguing topic and draws much attention. Currently, lots of evidences suggest that the PTMs work together to accomplish a specific biological function. However, both the general principles and underlying mechanism of PTM crosstalk are elusive. In this study, by using large-scale datasets we performed evolutionary conservation analysis, gene ontology enrichment, motif extraction of proteins with cross talk of O-GlcNAcylation and phosphorylation cooccurring on the same residue. We found that proteins with in situ O-GlcNAc/Phos cross talk were significantly enriched in some specific gene ontology terms and no obvious evolutionary pressure was observed. Moreover, 3 functional motifs associated with O-GlcNAc/Phos sites were extracted. We further used sequence features and GO features to predict O-GlcNAc/Phos cross talk sites based on phosphorylated sites and O-GlcNAcylated sites separately by the use of SVM model. The AUC of classifier based on phosphorylated sites is 0.896 and the other classifier based on GlcNAcylated sites is 0.843. Both classifiers achieved a relatively better performance compared with other existing methods. PMID:26601103

Systematic Analysis and Prediction of In Situ Cross Talk of O-GlcNAcylation and Phosphorylation.

PubMed

Yao, Heming; Li, Ao; Wang, Minghui

2015-01-01

Reversible posttranslational modification (PTM) plays a very important role in biological process by changing properties of proteins. As many proteins are multiply modified by PTMs, cross talk of PTMs is becoming an intriguing topic and draws much attention. Currently, lots of evidences suggest that the PTMs work together to accomplish a specific biological function. However, both the general principles and underlying mechanism of PTM crosstalk are elusive. In this study, by using large-scale datasets we performed evolutionary conservation analysis, gene ontology enrichment, motif extraction of proteins with cross talk of O-GlcNAcylation and phosphorylation cooccurring on the same residue. We found that proteins with in situ O-GlcNAc/Phos cross talk were significantly enriched in some specific gene ontology terms and no obvious evolutionary pressure was observed. Moreover, 3 functional motifs associated with O-GlcNAc/Phos sites were extracted. We further used sequence features and GO features to predict O-GlcNAc/Phos cross talk sites based on phosphorylated sites and O-GlcNAcylated sites separately by the use of SVM model. The AUC of classifier based on phosphorylated sites is 0.896 and the other classifier based on GlcNAcylated sites is 0.843. Both classifiers achieved a relatively better performance compared with other existing methods.

"How Did That Make You Feel?": Influences of Gender and Parental Personality on Family Emotion Talk

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Manczak, Erika M.; Mangelsdorf, Sarah C.; McAdams, Dan P.; Wong, Maria S.; Schoppe-Sullivan, Sarah; Brown, Geoffrey L.

2016-01-01

Parent-child conversations about shared events may facilitate important aspects of psychosocial development through the family's references to emotions. Although past research has begun examining features of speakers and topics that predict emotion talk in these conversations, the potential contribution of personality traits has been overlooked.…

Task Types and Discursive Features: Mediating Role of Meta-Talk in Focus

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mohamadi, Zohre; Rahimpour, Massoud

2018-01-01

Exploring opportunities by which learners can internalize new knowledge and consolidate existing knowledge has long been a point of interest in English as a foreign language research. This study investigated how meta-talk opportunities on discourse markers created by four task types including text reconstruction, dictogloss, translation and jigsaw…

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Quinn, H

Before preparing this talk I asked our host Angel Lopez what he wanted from an opening talk---his response was that I should set the context for what follows, to get the audience to think about the future of this subfield of physics, and give some of my own opinions on this area of physics. So that is what this talk does. It highlights a biased selection of topics; there is much more in the week of lectures than I can cover in this introductory talk.

Switching auditory attention using spatial and non-spatial features recruits different cortical networks.

PubMed

Larson, Eric; Lee, Adrian K C

2014-01-01

Switching attention between different stimuli of interest based on particular task demands is important in many everyday settings. In audition in particular, switching attention between different speakers of interest that are talking concurrently is often necessary for effective communication. Recently, it has been shown by multiple studies that auditory selective attention suppresses the representation of unwanted streams in auditory cortical areas in favor of the target stream of interest. However, the neural processing that guides this selective attention process is not well understood. Here we investigated the cortical mechanisms involved in switching attention based on two different types of auditory features. By combining magneto- and electro-encephalography (M-EEG) with an anatomical MRI constraint, we examined the cortical dynamics involved in switching auditory attention based on either spatial or pitch features. We designed a paradigm where listeners were cued in the beginning of each trial to switch or maintain attention halfway through the presentation of concurrent target and masker streams. By allowing listeners time to switch during a gap in the continuous target and masker stimuli, we were able to isolate the mechanisms involved in endogenous, top-down attention switching. Our results show a double dissociation between the involvement of right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) and the left inferior parietal supramarginal part (LIPSP) in tasks requiring listeners to switch attention based on space and pitch features, respectively, suggesting that switching attention based on these features involves at least partially separate processes or behavioral strategies. © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Coordination and interpretation of vocal and visible resources: 'trail-off' conjunctions.

PubMed

Walker, Gareth

2012-03-01

The empirical focus of this paper is a conversational turn-taking phenomenon in which conjunctions produced immediately after a point of possible syntactic and pragmatic completion are treated by co-participants as points of possible completion and transition relevance. The data for this study are audio-video recordings of 5 unscripted face-to-face interactions involving native speakers of US English, yielding 28 'trail-off' conjunctions. Detailed sequential analysis of talk is combined with analysis of visible features (including gaze, posture, gesture and involvement with material objects) and technical phonetic analysis. A range of phonetic and visible features are shown to regularly co-occur in the production of 'trail-off' conjunctions. These features distinguish them from other conjunctions followed by the cessation of talk.

NASA at the Space & Science Festival

NASA Image and Video Library

2017-08-05

NASA Acting Chief Technologist Douglas Terrier gives a talk to teachers attending a professional development workshop held in tandem with the Intrepid Space & Science Festival, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2017 at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. The week-long festival featured talks, films and cutting-edge displays showcasing NASA technology. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Baby Talk as a Simplified Register. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, No. 9.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ferguson, Charles A.

Every speech community has a baby talk register (BT) of phonological, grammatical, and lexical features regarded as primarily appropriate for addressing young children and also for other displaced or extended uses. Much BT is analyzable as derived from normal adult speech (AS) by such simplifying processes as reduction, substitution, assimilation,…

A Metafunctional Analysis of the News "ROK, DPRK Agree to Defuse Tension after Talks" on China Daily

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Xu, Bo

2015-01-01

On the basis of the three metafunctions in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL): experiential, interpersonal and textual, the paper makes an analysis of the current news "ROK, DPRK Agree to Defuse Tension after Talks" on China Daily. The paper finds out that the political news has unique features in terms of experiential, interpersonal…

In vivo language intervention: unanticipated general effects.

PubMed

Hart, B; Risley, T R

1980-01-01

After observing the lack of generalization of language trained in highly structured training sessions using established behavior modification techniques, "incidental teaching" procedures were developed to change the use of specified language behaviors in the natural environment. This paper reports an analysis of the general changes in the language, other than that specifically targeted by the incidental teaching procedures, used by disadvantaged preschool children. The daily language samples of disadvantaged children involved in a previously reported experiment to increase compound sentence usage were reexamined and compared to comparable records of other disadvantaged children and of middle-class children of college parents in order to assess possible general effects of the intervention program. Whereas the language that both groups of comparison children used changed little across the preschool year, the amount of talking by the children in the experimental program increased markedly. Their use of more elaborate vocabulary and more elaborate sentences also increased in direct proportion to the increases in overall language use, such that both language use and language elaboration in the experimental group of children changed from a pattern simlar to the comparison group of disadvantaged children to a pattern similar to the comparison group of middleclass children. It is argued that some general features of the incidental teaching procedure--differentially attending to child overtures and responding relative to the child's selected topic (reinforcer)--contributed to the increase in overall language use beyond the specific language behavior targeted, and that this increase in the probability of children's talking itself resulted in the substantial increases in elaboration seen in the children's spontaneous language. Because, at least in children with fairly well-developed language repertoires, language use is contextually controlled, talking more involves talking in more varied and complex contexts, which inevitably produces the use of more elaborate language.

In vivo language intervention: unanticipated general effects.

PubMed Central

Hart, B; Risley, T R

1980-01-01

After observing the lack of generalization of language trained in highly structured training sessions using established behavior modification techniques, "incidental teaching" procedures were developed to change the use of specified language behaviors in the natural environment. This paper reports an analysis of the general changes in the language, other than that specifically targeted by the incidental teaching procedures, used by disadvantaged preschool children. The daily language samples of disadvantaged children involved in a previously reported experiment to increase compound sentence usage were reexamined and compared to comparable records of other disadvantaged children and of middle-class children of college parents in order to assess possible general effects of the intervention program. Whereas the language that both groups of comparison children used changed little across the preschool year, the amount of talking by the children in the experimental program increased markedly. Their use of more elaborate vocabulary and more elaborate sentences also increased in direct proportion to the increases in overall language use, such that both language use and language elaboration in the experimental group of children changed from a pattern simlar to the comparison group of disadvantaged children to a pattern similar to the comparison group of middleclass children. It is argued that some general features of the incidental teaching procedure--differentially attending to child overtures and responding relative to the child's selected topic (reinforcer)--contributed to the increase in overall language use beyond the specific language behavior targeted, and that this increase in the probability of children's talking itself resulted in the substantial increases in elaboration seen in the children's spontaneous language. Because, at least in children with fairly well-developed language repertoires, language use is contextually controlled, talking more involves talking in more varied and complex contexts, which inevitably produces the use of more elaborate language. PMID:7430003

Pathway cross-talk network analysis identifies critical pathways in neonatal sepsis.

PubMed

Meng, Yu-Xiu; Liu, Quan-Hong; Chen, Deng-Hong; Meng, Ying

2017-06-01

Despite advances in neonatal care, sepsis remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality in neonates worldwide. Pathway cross-talk analysis might contribute to the inference of the driving forces in bacterial sepsis and facilitate a better understanding of underlying pathogenesis of neonatal sepsis. This study aimed to explore the critical pathways associated with the progression of neonatal sepsis by the pathway cross-talk analysis. By integrating neonatal transcriptome data with known pathway data and protein-protein interaction data, we systematically uncovered the disease pathway cross-talks and constructed a disease pathway cross-talk network for neonatal sepsis. Then, attract method was employed to explore the dysregulated pathways associated with neonatal sepsis. To determine the critical pathways in neonatal sepsis, rank product (RP) algorithm, centrality analysis and impact factor (IF) were introduced sequentially, which synthetically considered the differential expression of genes and pathways, pathways cross-talks and pathway parameters in the network. The dysregulated pathways with the highest IF values as well as RP<0.01 were defined as critical pathways in neonatal sepsis. By integrating three kinds of data, only 6919 common genes were included to perform the pathway cross-talk analysis. By statistic analysis, a total of 1249 significant pathway cross-talks were selected to construct the pathway cross-talk network. Moreover, 47 dys-regulated pathways were identified via attract method, 20 pathways were identified under RP<0.01, and the top 10 pathways with the highest IF were also screened from the pathway cross-talk network. Among them, we selected 8 common pathways, i.e. critical pathways. In this study, we systematically tracked 8 critical pathways involved in neonatal sepsis by integrating attract method and pathway cross-talk network. These pathways might be responsible for the host response in infection, and of great value for advancing diagnosis and therapy of neonatal sepsis. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Guidelines for the planning and preparation of illustrated technical talks

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hubbard, H. H.

1975-01-01

Guidelines are presented for the preparation of illustrated talks which are audience oriented and which are aimed at the efficient transfer of technical information. Early decisions concerning the required number of slides are helpful in initial planning for a good quality talk. Detailed considerations are: the establishment of limited objectives, selection of appropriate slide material, development of a text which is well coordinated with the slides, and accurate timing.

Recent results in visual servoing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chaumette, François

2008-06-01

Visual servoing techniques consist in using the data provided by a vision sensor in order to control the motions of a dynamic system. Such systems are usually robot arms, mobile robots, aerial robots,… but can also be virtual robots for applications in computer animation, or even a virtual camera for applications in computer vision and augmented reality. A large variety of positioning tasks, or mobile target tracking, can be implemented by controlling from one to all the degrees of freedom of the system. Whatever the sensor configuration, which can vary from one on-board camera on the robot end-effector to several free-standing cameras, a set of visual features has to be selected at best from the image measurements available, allowing to control the degrees of freedom desired. A control law has also to be designed so that these visual features reach a desired value, defining a correct realization of the task. With a vision sensor providing 2D measurements, potential visual features are numerous, since as well 2D data (coordinates of feature points in the image, moments, …) as 3D data provided by a localization algorithm exploiting the extracted 2D measurements can be considered. It is also possible to combine 2D and 3D visual features to take the advantages of each approach while avoiding their respective drawbacks. From the selected visual features, the behavior of the system will have particular properties as for stability, robustness with respect to noise or to calibration errors, robot 3D trajectory, etc. The talk will present the main basic aspects of visual servoing, as well as technical advances obtained recently in the field inside the Lagadic group at INRIA/INRISA Rennes. Several application results will be also described.

Hospital staff corridor conversations: work in passing.

PubMed

González-Martínez, Esther; Bangerter, Adrian; Lê Van, Kim; Navarro, Cécile

2016-03-01

First, to document the prevalence of corridor occupations and conversations among the staff of a hospital clinic, and their main features. Second, to examine the activities accomplished through corridor conversations and their interactional organization. Despite extensive research on mobility in hospital work, we still know fairly little about the prevalence and features of hospital staff corridor conversations and how they are organized. We conducted a study combining descriptive statistical analysis and multimodal conversation analysis of video recordings of staff corridor practices in a hospital outpatient clinic in Switzerland. In 2012, we collected 59 hours of video recordings in a corridor of a hospital clinic. We coded and statistically analysed the footage that showed the clinic staff exclusively. We also performed qualitative multimodal conversation analysis on a selection of the recorded staff conversations. Corridor occupations by the clinic staff are frequent and brief and rarely involve stops. Talk events (which include self-talk, face-to-face conversations and telephone conversations) during occupations are also brief and mobile, overwhelmingly focus on professional topics and are particularly frequent when two or more staff members occupy the corridor. The conversations present several interactional configurations and comprise an array of activities consequential to the provision of care and work organization. These practices are related to the fluid work organization of a spatially distributed team in a fast-paced, multitasking environment and should be taken into consideration in any undertaking aimed at improving hospital units' functioning. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Body Talk: Body Image Commentary on Queerty.com.

PubMed

Schwartz, Joseph; Grimm, Josh

2016-08-01

In this study, we conducted a content analysis of 243 photographic images of men published on the gay male-oriented blog Queerty.com. We also analyzed 435 user-generated comments from a randomly selected 1-year sample. Focusing on images' body types, we found that the range of body types featured on the blog was quite narrow-the vast majority of images had very low levels of body fat and very high levels of muscularity. Users' body image-related comments typically endorsed and celebrated images; critiques of images were comparatively rare. Perspectives from objectification theory and social comparison theory suggest that the images and commentary found on the blog likely reinforce unhealthy body image in gay male communities.

Making sense of feedback experiences: a multi-school study of medical students' narratives.

PubMed

Urquhart, Lynn M; Rees, Charlotte E; Ker, Jean S

2014-02-01

Until recently, the perspective of students in the feedback process has been ignored, with strategies for improvement focusing on the tutor and feedback delivery. We employed an original narrative interviewing approach to explore how medical students make sense of their experiences of feedback. A qualitative design was adopted employing three individual and 10 group interviews to elicit narratives of feedback experiences from 53 medical students at three 5-year undergraduate programmes in the UK during 2011. Thematic analysis was undertaken of students' understandings of feedback and of their narratives of positive and negative experiences of feedback at medical school. In addition, thematic and discourse analysis of the linguistic and paralinguistic features of talk within the narratives was conducted. Students typically constructed feedback as a monologic process that happened 'to' them rather than 'with' them. They shared 352 distinct narratives of feedback experiences, which were rich in linguistic and paralinguistic features of talk. Through the analysis of the interplay between the 'whats' and 'hows' of student talk, i.e. emotion, pronominal and metaphoric talk and laughter, we were able to understand how students find meaning in their experiences. Students used laughter as a coping strategy, emotion talk as a means to convince the audience of the impact of feedback, pronominal and metaphoric talk to describe their relationship (often adversarial) with their feedback providers and to communicate feelings that they might otherwise struggle to articulate. This research extends current feedback literature by focusing on medical students' lived experiences of feedback and their emotional impact through narrative. We go on to discuss the educational implications of our findings and to make recommendations for improvement of the feedback process for students, tutors and for institutions. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Listening Skill Development through Massive Comprehensible Input.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kalivoda, Theodore B.

Foreign language listening comprehension instruction too often relies on brief selections read aloud or sporadic teacher talk interspersed with native language (NL) utterances, which fail to provide sustained listening practice. NL is overused for grammar-related talk, reducing target language exposure, encouraging translation, and hindering…

Meeting report for mobile DNA 2010.

PubMed

Chaconas, George; Craig, Nancy; Curcio, M Joan; Deininger, Prescott; Feschotte, Cedric; Levin, Henry; Rice, Phoebe A; Voytas, Daniel F

2010-08-24

An international conference on mobile DNA was held 24-28 April 2010 in Montreal, Canada. Sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology, the conference's goal was to bring together researchers from around the world who study transposition in diverse organisms using multiple experimental approaches. The meeting drew over 190 attendees and most contributed through poster presentations, invited talks and short talks selected from poster abstracts. The talks were organized into eight scientific sessions, which ranged in topic from the evolutionary dynamics of mobile genetic elements to transposition reaction mechanisms. Here we present highlights from the platform sessions with a focus on talks presented by the invited speakers.

Funding Proposal for EDISON’20 Conference Buffalo, New York, 07/17 - 07/21, 2017

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Bird, Jonathan

EDISON’20 – The 20th International Conference on Electron Dynamics in Semiconductors, Optoe- lectronics and Nanostructures – was held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Buffalo, NY from July 17 – 21, 2017. The technical focus of this conference was on the fundamental physics and applications of nonequilibrium classical and quantum carrier dynamics in semiconductors, optoelectronic de- vices, and nanostructures. This five-day, single-session conference featured a program consisting of some 15 invited talks, given by internationally-renowned academics from the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Their keynote presentations covered topics including: terahertz phenomena in semiconductors; quantum transport in novel two-dimensional semiconductors; topological insulators; mesoscopicmore » phenomena in semiconductors, and; semiconductor spintronics. The invited papers were supplemented by some 30 contributed talks, selected from almost 120 abstracts submitted in response to the conference’s call for papers, and by two poster sessions that each consisted of close to 40 different reports. This critical mass in terms of scientific content ensured a highly vibrant conference, in which leaders in the field had the opportunity to interact closely with early-career scientists.« less

New Ground Based facilities in QSO research; The GTC

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rodriguez Espinosa, J. M.

New ground based observing opportunities are becoming, or about to become, available to astronomers for QSO research. These, combined with state of the art focal plane instruments, provide unprecedented sensitivity for detecting faint surface brightness features. During the talk I will take the liberty of talking about one of these new large telescope facilities currently being built in Spain, and will discuss some of the advantages for QSO research offered by these new facilities.

Self-Advocacy. Feature Issue.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hayden, Mary F., Ed.; Ward, Nancy, Ed.

1994-01-01

This feature issue newsletter looks at issues the self-advocacy movement is raising and the contributions it is making to the lives of people with developmental disabilities. Articles by self-advocates and advisors to self-advocacy organizations talk about their self-advocacy experiences, barriers to self-advocacy, and ways to support it. Primary…

Physics To Go: an Outreach Digital Library

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lee, Edward V.

2006-12-01

Physics to Go, part of the NSF-funded ComPADRE digital library, is a collection of websites for informal physics learning. This talk will present Physics To Go’s homepage features, show how these features are created, how resources are identified, and how Physics To Go complements other physics outreach websites.

Talk Show Viewing Motives: Does Gender Make a Difference?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cress, Stacy L.; Rapert, Kevin D.

A study explored the relationship between gender and talk show viewing motives. Students (109) from 6 randomly selected introductory communication classes in a midwestern university, 30 people belonging to a non-traditional student organization called "Oasis," and 8 residents of a retirement home were given Rubin's instrument to assess…

Membrane traffic and synaptic cross-talk during host cell entry by Trypanosoma cruzi.

PubMed

Butler, Claire E; Tyler, Kevin M

2012-09-01

It is widely accepted that Trypanosoma cruzi can exploit the natural exocytic response of the host to cell damage, utilizing host cell lysosomes as important effectors. It is, though, increasingly clear that the parasite also exploits endocytic mechanisms which allow for incorporation of plasma membrane into the parasitophorous vacuole. Further, that these endocytic mechanisms are involved in cross-talk with the exocytic machinery, in the recycling of vesicles and in the manipulation of the cytoskeleton. Here we review the mechanisms by which T. cruzi exploits features of the exocytic and endocytic pathways in epithelial and endothelial cells and the evidence for cross-talk between these pathways. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Anticipatory other-completion of augmentative and alternative communication talk: a conversation analysis study.

PubMed

Bloch, Steven

2011-01-01

The study described here investigates the practice of anticipatory completion of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) utterances in progress. The aims were to identify and analyse features of this practice as they occur in natural conversation between a person using an AAC system and a family member. The methods and principles of Conversation Analysis (CA) were used to video record conversations between people with progressive neurological diseases and a progressive speech disorder (dysarthria) and their family members. Key features of interaction were identified and extracts transcribed. Four extracts of talk between a man with motor neurone disease/amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and his mother are presented here. Anticipatory completion of AAC utterances is intimately related to the sequential context in which such utterances occur. Difficulties can arise from topic shifts, understanding the intended action of an AAC word in progress and in recognising the possible end point an utterance. The analysis highlights the importance of understanding how AAC talk works in everyday interaction. The role of co-participants is particularly important here. These results may have implications for both AAC software design and clinical intervention.

“Eugenics talk” and the language of bioethics

PubMed Central

Wilkinson, S

2008-01-01

In bioethical discussions of preimplantation genetic diagnosis and prenatal screening, accusations of eugenics are commonplace, as are counter-claims that talk of eugenics is misleading and unhelpful. This paper asks whether “eugenics talk”, in this context, is legitimate and useful or something to be avoided. It also looks at the extent to which this linguistic question can be answered without first answering relevant substantive moral questions. Its main conclusion is that the best and most non-partisan argument for avoiding eugenics talk is the Autonomy Argument. According to this, eugenics talk per se is not wrong, but there is something wrong with using its emotive power as a means of circumventing people’s critical–rational faculties. The Autonomy Argument does not, however, tell against eugenics talk when such language is used to shock people into critical–rational thought. These conclusions do not depend on unique features of eugenics: similar considerations apply to emotive language throughout bioethics. PMID:18511622

Digital Talking Books: Planning for the Future.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cookson, John; Cylke, Frank Kurt; Dixon, Judith; Fistick, Robert E.; Fitzpatrick, Vicki; Kormann, Wells B.; Moodie, Michael M.; Redmond, Linda; Thuronyi, George

This report describes the plans of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) to convert their talking books service to a digitally based audio system. The NLS program selects and produces full-length books and magazines in braille and on recorded disc and cassettes and distributes them to a cooperating network of…

Selective Capture of CWAs and Containment of Their Neutralization Byproducts by Porous Frameworks Presenting Self-Amplifying and Self-Regulating Reactivities

DTIC Science & Technology

2013-02-04

Intl. Symposium on Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry, June 2010, Nara, Japan (Plenary talk). O. M. Yaghi, Zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, 5th...International Zeolite Membrane Meeting, May 2010, Loutraki, Greece (Plenary talk). O. M. Yaghi, Reticular chemistry and its applications to clean energy

Dialogic Teaching: Talk in Service of a Dialogic Stance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Boyd, Maureen Patricia; Markarian, William C.

2011-01-01

We consider what it means to be a dialogic teacher as characterized by Paulo Freire and Robin Alexander, and utilizing discourse analysis, we explicate how one elementary teacher's talk reflects these characteristics. We provide context for and analysis of a seven-minute discussion selected as a cumulative achievement the focal nine-year-olds are…

Children's Narrative Structure: How Do Japanese Children Talk About Their Own Stories?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Minami, Masahiko

The conversational narratives of 17 Japanese children aged 5 to 9 were analyzed using stanza analysis. Three distinctive features emerged: (1) the narratives are exceptionally succinct; (2) they are usually free-standing collections of three experiences; and (3) stanzas almost always consist of three lines. These features reflect the basic…

Storybooks aren't just for fun: narrative and non-narrative picture books foster equal amounts of generic language during mother-toddler book sharing

PubMed Central

Nyhout, Angela; O'Neill, Daniela K.

2014-01-01

Parents and children encounter a variety of animals and objects in the early picture books they share, but little is known about how the context in which these entities are presented influences talk about them. The present study investigated how the presence or absence of a visual narrative context influences mothers' tendency to refer to animals as individual characters or as members of a kind when sharing picture books with their toddlers (mean age 21.3 months). Mother-child dyads shared both a narrative and a non-narrative book, each featuring six animals and matched in terms of length and quantity of text. Mothers made more specific (individual-referring) statements about animals in the narrative books, whereas they provided more labels for animals in the non-narrative books. But, of most interest, the frequency and proportion of mothers' use of generic (kind-referring) utterances did not differ across the two different types of books. Further coding of the content of the utterances revealed that mothers provided more story-specific descriptions of states and actions of the animals when sharing narrative books and more physical descriptions of animals when sharing non-narrative books. However, the two books did not differ in terms of their elicitation of natural facts about the animals. Overall, although the two types of books encouraged different types of talk from mothers, they stimulated generic language and talk about natural facts to an equal degree. Implications for learning from picture storybooks and book genre selection in classrooms and home reading are discussed. PMID:24795675

Storybooks aren't just for fun: narrative and non-narrative picture books foster equal amounts of generic language during mother-toddler book sharing.

PubMed

Nyhout, Angela; O'Neill, Daniela K

2014-01-01

Parents and children encounter a variety of animals and objects in the early picture books they share, but little is known about how the context in which these entities are presented influences talk about them. The present study investigated how the presence or absence of a visual narrative context influences mothers' tendency to refer to animals as individual characters or as members of a kind when sharing picture books with their toddlers (mean age 21.3 months). Mother-child dyads shared both a narrative and a non-narrative book, each featuring six animals and matched in terms of length and quantity of text. Mothers made more specific (individual-referring) statements about animals in the narrative books, whereas they provided more labels for animals in the non-narrative books. But, of most interest, the frequency and proportion of mothers' use of generic (kind-referring) utterances did not differ across the two different types of books. Further coding of the content of the utterances revealed that mothers provided more story-specific descriptions of states and actions of the animals when sharing narrative books and more physical descriptions of animals when sharing non-narrative books. However, the two books did not differ in terms of their elicitation of natural facts about the animals. Overall, although the two types of books encouraged different types of talk from mothers, they stimulated generic language and talk about natural facts to an equal degree. Implications for learning from picture storybooks and book genre selection in classrooms and home reading are discussed.

Gating of a pH-sensitive K(2P) potassium channel by an electrostatic effect of basic sensor residues on the selectivity filter.

PubMed

Zúñiga, Leandro; Márquez, Valeria; González-Nilo, Fernando D; Chipot, Christophe; Cid, L Pablo; Sepúlveda, Francisco V; Niemeyer, María Isabel

2011-01-25

K(+) channels share common selectivity characteristics but exhibit a wide diversity in how they are gated open. Leak K(2P) K(+) channels TASK-2, TALK-1 and TALK-2 are gated open by extracellular alkalinization. The mechanism for this alkalinization-dependent gating has been proposed to be the neutralization of the side chain of a single arginine (lysine in TALK-2) residue near the pore of TASK-2, which occurs with the unusual pK(a) of 8.0. We now corroborate this hypothesis by transplanting the TASK-2 extracellular pH (pH(o)) sensor in the background of a pH(o)-insensitive TASK-3 channel, which leads to the restitution of pH(o)-gating. Using a concatenated channel approach, we also demonstrate that for TASK-2 to open, pH(o) sensors must be neutralized in each of the two subunits forming these dimeric channels with no apparent cross-talk between the sensors. These results are consistent with adaptive biasing force analysis of K(+) permeation using a model selectivity filter in wild-type and mutated channels. The underlying free-energy profiles confirm that either a doubly or a singly charged pH(o) sensor is sufficient to abolish ion flow. Atomic detail of the associated mechanism reveals that, rather than a collapse of the pore, as proposed for other K(2P) channels gated at the selectivity filter, an increased height of the energetic barriers for ion translocation accounts for channel blockade at acid pH(o). Our data, therefore, strongly suggest that a cycle of protonation/deprotonation of pH(o)-sensing arginine 224 side chain gates the TASK-2 channel by electrostatically tuning the conformational stability of its selectivity filter.

Gating of a pH-Sensitive K2P Potassium Channel by an Electrostatic Effect of Basic Sensor Residues on the Selectivity Filter

PubMed Central

Zúñiga, Leandro; Márquez, Valeria; González-Nilo, Fernando D.; Chipot, Christophe; Cid, L. Pablo; Sepúlveda, Francisco V.; Niemeyer, María Isabel

2011-01-01

K+ channels share common selectivity characteristics but exhibit a wide diversity in how they are gated open. Leak K2P K+ channels TASK-2, TALK-1 and TALK-2 are gated open by extracellular alkalinization. The mechanism for this alkalinization-dependent gating has been proposed to be the neutralization of the side chain of a single arginine (lysine in TALK-2) residue near the pore of TASK-2, which occurs with the unusual pKa of 8.0. We now corroborate this hypothesis by transplanting the TASK-2 extracellular pH (pHo) sensor in the background of a pHo-insensitive TASK-3 channel, which leads to the restitution of pHo-gating. Using a concatenated channel approach, we also demonstrate that for TASK-2 to open, pHo sensors must be neutralized in each of the two subunits forming these dimeric channels with no apparent cross-talk between the sensors. These results are consistent with adaptive biasing force analysis of K+ permeation using a model selectivity filter in wild-type and mutated channels. The underlying free-energy profiles confirm that either a doubly or a singly charged pHo sensor is sufficient to abolish ion flow. Atomic detail of the associated mechanism reveals that, rather than a collapse of the pore, as proposed for other K2P channels gated at the selectivity filter, an increased height of the energetic barriers for ion translocation accounts for channel blockade at acid pHo. Our data, therefore, strongly suggest that a cycle of protonation/deprotonation of pHo-sensing arginine 224 side chain gates the TASK-2 channel by electrostatically tuning the conformational stability of its selectivity filter. PMID:21283586

EDITORIAL: Selected papers from the 11th International Workshop on Micro and Nanotechnology for Power Generation and Energy Conversion Applications (PowerMEMS 2011) Selected papers from the 11th International Workshop on Micro and Nanotechnology for Power Generation and Energy Conversion Applications (PowerMEMS 2011)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cho, Young-Ho

2012-09-01

This special section of Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering features papers selected from the 11th International Workshop on Micro and Nanotechnology for Power Generation and Energy Conversion Applications (PowerMEMS 2011), held at Sejong Hotel in Seoul, Korea during 15-18 November 2011. Since the first PowerMEMS workshop held in Sendai, Japan in 2000, the workshop has developed as the premier forum for reporting research results in micro and nanotechnology for power generation, energy conversion, harvesting and processing applications, including in-depth technical issues on nanostructures and materials for small-scale high-density energy and thermal management. Potential PowerMEMS applications cover not only portable power devices for consumer electronics and remote sensors, but also micro engines, impulsive thrusters and fuel cells for systems ranging from the nanometer to the millimeter scale. The 2011 technical program consists of 1 plenary talk, 4 invited talks and 118 contributed presentations. The 48 oral and 70 poster presentations, selected by 27 Technical Program Committee Members from 131 submitted abstracts, have stimulated lively discussion maximizing the interaction between participants. Among them, this special section includes 9 papers covering micro-scale power generators, energy converters, harvesters, thrusters and thermal coolers. Finally, we are grateful to the members of the International Steering Committee, the Technical Program Committee, and the Local Organizing Committee for their efforts and contributions to PowerMEMS 2011. We also thank the two companies Samsung Electro-Mechanics and LG Elite for technical tour arrangements. Special thanks go to Dr Ian Forbes, the editorial staff of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, as well as to the staff of IOP Publishing for making this special section possible.

Additive Manufacturing for Cost Efficient Production of Compact Ceramic Heat Exchangers and Recuperators

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Shulman, Holly; Ross, Nicole

2015-10-30

An additive manufacture technique known as laminated object manufacturing (LOM) was used to fabricate compact ceramic heat exchanger prototypes. LOM uses precision CO2 laser cutting of ceramic green tapes, which are then precision stacked to build a 3D object with fine internal features. Modeling was used to develop prototype designs and predict the thermal response, stress, and efficiency in the ceramic heat exchangers. Build testing and materials analyses were used to provide feedback for the design selection. During this development process, laminated object manufacturing protocols were established. This included laser optimization, strategies for fine feature integrity, lamination fluid control, greenmore » handling, and firing profile. Three full size prototypes were fabricated using two different designs. One prototype was selected for performance testing. During testing, cross talk leakage prevented the application of a high pressure differential, however, the prototype was successful at withstanding the high temperature operating conditions (1300 °F). In addition, analysis showed that the bulk of the part did not have cracks or leakage issues. This led to the development of a module method for next generation LOM heat exchangers. A scale-up cost analysis showed that given a purpose built LOM system, these ceramic heat exchangers would be affordable for the applications.« less

Science Return from Alpha Centauri and Proxima B

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Belikov, Ruslan

2017-01-01

I will talk about the science that can be accomplished by observing the Alpha Centauri system with a variety of space telescope missions or a fly-by mission, including measurements of the planet properties such as size, temperature, rotation period, taking the spectrum of its atmosphere, imaging features like continents, and assessing its habitability. I will also talk about potential measurements of relativistic effects that would occur with a flyby that is a significant fraction of the speed of light.

The Effect of Talking Story Books on Saudi Young EFL Learners' Reading Comprehension

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alsamadani, Hashem Ahmed

2017-01-01

The current research study investigated the effects of talking story books on Saudi young EFL learners' reading comprehension skills. A sample of Saudi-young-EFL learners were randomly selected and divided into two groups: an experimental group (40 students) and a control group (39 students). Students of both groups took a pre reading…

Talk the Talk: Learner-Generated Podcasts as Catalysts for Knowledge Creation

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lee, Mark J. W.; McLoughlin, Catherine; Chan, Anthony

2008-01-01

Podcasting allows audio content from one or more user-selected feeds or channels to be automatically downloaded to one's computer as it becomes available, then later transferred to a portable player for consumption at a convenient time and place. It is enjoying phenomenal growth in mainstream society, alongside other Web 2.0 technologies that…

Experiences of Students with Visual Impairments in Adoption of Digital Talking Textbooks: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hussin, Ahamad

2013-01-01

Assistive technology devices have become essential tools for students with visual impairments. In 2009, the Malaysian Ministry of Education introduced Digital Talking Textbooks (DTTs) for selected subjects to facilitate learning. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore, describe, and interpret the experiences of students with visual…

Teachers' Report of Strategies Used to Facilitate Language Development in Students with Hearing Loss

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Handley, Candace Michele

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study was to identify the extent to which teachers of the deaf report using four identified language facilitation strategies: recasting, extension, responsivity, and self-talk/parallel talk. Participants self-selected in response to an advertisement on a state-wide listserv and to the state's residential school internal news.…

Reliability on ISS Talk Outline

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Misiora, Mike

2015-01-01

1. Overview of ISS 2. Space Environment and it effects a. Radiation b. Microgravity 3. How we ensure reliability a. Requirements b. Component Selection i. Note: I plan to stay away from talk about Rad Hardened components and talk about why we use older processors because they are less susceptible to SEUs. c. Testing d. Redundancy / Failure Tolerance e. Sparing strategies 4. Operational Examples a. Multiple MDM Failures on 6A due to hard drive failure In general, my plan is to only talk about data that is currently available via normal internet sources to ensure that I stay away from any topics that would be Export Controlled, ITAR, or NDA-controlled. The operational example has been well-reported on in the media and those are the details that I plan to cover. Additionally I am not planning on using any slides or showing any photos during the talk.

Selective attention to the mouth is associated with expressive language skills in monolingual and bilingual infants.

PubMed

Tsang, Tawny; Atagi, Natsuki; Johnson, Scott P

2018-05-01

Infants increasingly attend to the mouths of others during the latter half of the first postnatal year, and individual differences in selective attention to talking mouths during infancy predict verbal skills during toddlerhood. There is some evidence suggesting that trajectories in mouth-looking vary by early language environment, in particular monolingual or bilingual language exposure, which may have differential consequences in developing sensitivity to the communicative and social affordances of the face. Here, we evaluated whether 6- to 12-month-olds' mouth-looking is related to skills associated with concurrent social communicative development-including early language functioning and emotion discriminability. We found that attention to the mouth of a talking face increased with age but that mouth-looking was more strongly associated with concurrent expressive language skills than chronological age for both monolingual and bilingual infants. Mouth-looking was not related to emotion discrimination. These data suggest that selective attention to a talking mouth may be one important mechanism by which infants learn language regardless of home language environment. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Selective attention to the mouth is associated with expressive language skills in monolingual and bilingual infants

PubMed Central

Tsang, Tawny; Atagi, Natsuki; Johnson, Scott P.

2018-01-01

Infants increasingly attend to the mouths of others during the latter half of the first postnatal year, and individual differences in selective attention to talking mouths during infancy predict verbal skills during toddlerhood. There is some evidence suggesting that trajectories in mouth-looking vary by early language environment, in particular monolingual or bilingual language exposure, which may have differential consequences in developing sensitivity to the communicative and social affordances of the face. Here, we evaluated whether 6- to 12-month-olds’ mouth-looking is related to skills associated with concurrent social communicative development—including early language functioning and emotion discriminability. We found that attention to the mouth of a talking face increased with age but that mouth-looking was more strongly associated with concurrent expressive language skills than chronological age for both monolingual and bilingual infants. Mouth-looking was not related to emotion discrimination. These data suggest that selective attention to a talking mouth may be one important mechanism by which infants learn language regardless of home language environment. PMID:29406126

Developing an Approach for Comparing Students' Multimodal Text Creations: A Case Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Levy, Mike; Kimber, Kay

2009-01-01

Classroom teachers routinely make judgments on the quality of their students' work based on their recognition of how effectively the student has assembled key features of the genre or the medium. Yet how readily can teachers talk about the features of student-created multimodal texts in ways that can improve learning and performance? This article…

Selected Interviews with Doug Lowy

Cancer.gov

In these selected interviews, Douglas R. Lowy, M.D., Deputy Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), talks with media and scientific institutions about basic science, clinical research, and the work of NCI.

Exercising on a budget

MedlinePlus

... this page: //medlineplus.gov/ency/patientinstructions/000762.htm Exercising on a budget To use the sharing features ... make sure you are walking fast enough to benefit your health. If you can talk, but not ...

Inquiry Learning: Is Your Selection Policy Ready?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Friese, Elizabeth E. G.

2008-01-01

This article talks about selection policy and provides suggestions on how library media specialists can update their selection policies to provide an atmosphere that facilitate inquiry. The selection policy is meant to ensure that the collection meets the needs of the school community as comprehensively and effectively as possible. Instead of…

The usefulness of monitoring sleep talking for the diagnosis of Dementia with Lewy bodies.

PubMed

Honda, Kazuki; Hashimoto, Mamoru; Yatabe, Yusuke; Kaneda, Keiichiro; Yuki, Seiji; Ogawa, Yusuke; Matsuzaki, Shiho; Tsuyuguchi, Atsuko; Tanaka, Hibiki; Kashiwagi, Hiroko; Hasegawa, Noriko; Ishikawa, Tomohisa; Ikeda, Manabu

2013-05-01

Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) is the second most common type of neurodegenerative dementia. It is frequently difficult to differentiate DLB from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other types of dementia. This study examined the usefulness of monitoring sleep talking for the diagnosis of DLB. A total of 317 patients with dementia were selected from a consecutive series at the Dementia Clinic of Kumamoto University Hospital. Diagnostic categories consisted of probable DLB (n = 55), probable AD (n = 191), frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) (n = 16), vascular dementia (VaD) (n = 18), and other/unspecified dementia (n = 37). We evaluated sleep talking in all dementia patients and normal elderly subjects (n = 32) using an originally designed sleep talking questionnaire. Sleep talking occurred most frequently in the DLB group (61.8%), followed by the VaD group (33.3%), other/unspecified dementia group (27.0%), AD group (18.8%), FTLD group (12.5%), and normal elderly subjects group (6.3%). The prevalence of sleep talking in the DLB group was significantly higher than in other groups, except in the VaD group. The sleep talking yielded high specificity (81.2%) and some sensitivity (61.8%) for the differential diagnosis of DLB from AD. Furthermore, loud sleep talking may improve the specificity (96.9%). For the differentiation of DLB from all other dementia types, the specificity of sleep talking and loud sleep talking was also high (79.4% and 95.8% respectively). Assessing sleep talking, especially the volume of sleep talking, may be useful in the clinical discrimination of DLB from not only AD but also from all other types of dementia.

Negotiating 'depression' in primary care: a qualitative study.

PubMed

McPherson, Susan; Armstrong, David

2009-10-01

Psychiatry has provided primary care physicians with tools for recognising and labelling mild, moderate or severe 'depression'. General practitioners (GPs) in the UK have been guided to manage depression within primary care and to prescribe anti-depressants as a first-line treatment. The present study aimed to examine how GPs would construct 'depression' when asked to talk about those anomalous patients for whom the medical frontline treatment did not appear to be effective. Twenty purposively selected GPs were asked in an interview to talk about their experience and management of patients with depression who did not respond to anti-depressants. GPs initially struggled to identify a group, but then began to construct a category of person with a pre-medicalised status characterised by various deviant features such as unpleasant characters and personalities, manipulative tendencies, people with entrenched social problems unable to fit in with other people and relate to people normally. GPs also responded in non-medical ways including feeling unsympathetic, breaking confidentiality and prescribing social interventions. In effect, in the absence of an effective medical treatment, depression appeared to become demedicalised. The implications of this process are discussed in relation to patients' subsequent access or lack of access to services and the way in which these findings highlight the processes by which medicine frames disease.

Smartphone App for Voice Disorders

MedlinePlus

... on. Feature: Taste, Smell, Hearing, Language, Voice, Balance Smartphone App for Voice Disorders Past Issues / Fall 2013 ... developed a mobile monitoring device that relies on smartphone technology to gather a week's worth of talking, ...

Vacation health care

MedlinePlus

... page: //medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001937.htm Vacation health care To use the sharing features on this page, ... and help you avoid problems. Talk to your health care provider or visit a travel clinic 4 to ...

Using the RPE-Talk Scale to Individualize Physical Activity for Students

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nye, Susan B.; Todd, M. Kent

2013-01-01

For some students, self-selecting a pace during exercise may not provide enough of a physical challenge. Others push themselves so hard that they tire out before they can experience the benefits of exercise. In order to improve self-monitoring of exercise intensity, a variety of tools using the perception of effort and the ability to talk while…

Research in Second Language Acquisition: Selected Papers of the Los Angeles Second Language Acquisition Research Forum. Issues In Second Language Research.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scarcella, Robin C., Ed.; Krashen, Stephen D., Ed.

The following papers are included: (1) "The Theoretical and Practical Relevance of Simple Codes in Second Language Acquisition" (Krashen); (2) "Talking to Foreigners versus Talking to Children: Similarities and Differences" (Freed); (3) "The Levertov Machine" (Stevick); (4) "Acquiring a Second Language when You're Not the Underdog" (Edelsky and…

Editorial to NIM-B

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McDaniel, Floyd Del; Doyle, Barney L.; Glass, Gary; Wang, Yongqiang; Antolak, Arlyn

2018-01-01

This special issue of Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section B: Beam Interactions with Materials and Atoms contains 7 selected papers that were presented at the 24th International Conference on the Application of Accelerators in Research and Industry (CAARI 2016). This conference was held in Fort Worth, Texas, USA, October 30 - November 4, 2016 and the Worthington Renaissance Hotel. CAARI 2016 had 5 plenary sessions, 79 oral sessions, 2 poster sessions, 401 presentations (10 plenary talks, 165 invited talks, 154 contributed talks, and 72 poster presentations), and 434 attendees (76 of which were students and 14 were accompanying persons) from 32 countries.

Crafting your Elevator Pitch: Key Features of an Elevator Speech to Help You Reach the Top Floor

EPA Science Inventory

You never know when you will end up talking to someone who will end up helping to shape your career. Many of these chance meetings are brief and when you only get 2-3 minutes to make your case everything that you say has to count. This presentation will cover the key features o...

PREFACE: 21st International Conference on Laser Spectroscopy - ICOLS 2013

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Budker, Dmitry; Häffner, Hartmut; Müller, Holger

2013-12-01

The 21st International Conference on Laser Spectroscopy (ICOLS) took place at Berkeley, California on 9-14 June 2013. Following the tradition of previous meetings in this series, the conference featured about thirty invited talks broadly covering this burgeoning field of science that refuses to show any sign of saturation after more than half a century of continuous boom. In addition to the invited talks, there were two informative poster sessions, where the more than 300 ICOLS participants had an opportunity to exchange the latest scientific news and ideas while enjoying the gorgeous view of the San Francisco Bay from the vista of the Claremont Hotel, the meeting's venue. The heights of the cultural program of the meeting were excursions to several of the Bay Area gems (including the Lick observatory), as well as the conference banquet where the participants were treated to addresses by an inventor of the laser Professor Charles H Townes, a nonlinear optics pioneer Professor Erwin L Hahn, and one of the previous ICOLS chairs Professor Y R Shen. While the field of Laser Spectroscopy and the series of the bi-annual ICOLS meetings are as 'healthy' as one could imagine, the same cannot be said about the concept of published conference proceedings. With new ways to publish scientific articles and preprints, submitting papers to conference proceedings seems to be rapidly losing popularity. For this meeting, the great interest in attendance and opportunities to present is sharply contrasted with a somewhat sluggish response to the call for submission of the proceedings papers. The present collection represents a dozen or so contributions from the 'hero' invited speakers, to whom we are deeply grateful for submitting their work. We hope that this selection will faithfully convey to the readers the excitement of modern laser spectroscopy. In addition to these papers, we draw the reader's attention to the audio recordings and selected viewgraphs from the invited talks, and videos of the reception and banquet presentations available at the conference web site https://icols.berkeley.edu/. On behalf of the organizing and program committees, Berkeley, October 2013 Dmitry Budker, Hartmut Häffner, and Holger Müller

The Future of the Andrew File System

ScienceCinema

Brashear, Drrick; Altman, Jeffry

2018-05-25

The talk will discuss the ten operational capabilities that have made AFS unique in the distributed file system space and how these capabilities are being expanded upon to meet the needs of the 21st century. Derrick Brashear and Jeffrey Altman will present a technical road map of new features and technical innovations that are under development by the OpenAFS community and Your File System, Inc. funded by a U.S. Department of Energy Small Business Innovative Research grant. The talk will end with a comparison of AFS to its modern days competitors.

KSC-2013-3530

NASA Image and Video Library

2013-09-11

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Director Robert Cabana opens KSC Talks 2013 in the KSC Training Auditorium on the second day of the KSC Innovation Expo. KSC Talks featured a series of speakers that collectively took the audience on a journey through innovation, from inspiration to application and beyond. The variety of topics presented encouraged the audience to become “Ready for Anything,” to learn how to “Train and un-train Your Brain for Innovation,” and to discover how to “Change the Possible,” among others. Photo credit: NASA/Cory Huston

The Future of the Andrew File System

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Brashear, Drrick; Altman, Jeffry

2011-02-23

The talk will discuss the ten operational capabilities that have made AFS unique in the distributed file system space and how these capabilities are being expanded upon to meet the needs of the 21st century. Derrick Brashear and Jeffrey Altman will present a technical road map of new features and technical innovations that are under development by the OpenAFS community and Your File System, Inc. funded by a U.S. Department of Energy Small Business Innovative Research grant. The talk will end with a comparison of AFS to its modern days competitors.

Evaluation of a training programme to induct medical students in delivering public health talks

PubMed Central

Tan, Ngiap Chuan; Mitesh, Shah; Koh, Yi Ling Eileen; Ang, Seng Bin; Chan, Hian Hui Vincent; How, Choon How; Tay, Ee Guan; Hwang, Siew Wai

2017-01-01

INTRODUCTION It is uncommon for medical students to deliver public health talks as part of their medical education curriculum. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a novel training programme that required medical students to deliver public health talks during their family medicine (FM) clerkship in a Singapore primary care institution. METHODS The FM faculty staff guided teams of third-year medical students to select appropriate topics for health talks that were to be conducted at designated polyclinics. The talks were video-recorded and appraised for clarity, content and delivery. The appraisal was done by the student’s peers and assigned faculty staff. The audience was surveyed to determine their satisfaction level and understanding of the talks. The students also self-rated the effectiveness of this new teaching activity. RESULTS A total of 120 medical students completed a questionnaire to rate the effectiveness of the new teaching activity. 85.8% of the students felt confident about the delivery of their talks, 95.8% reported having learnt how to deliver talks and 92.5% perceived this new training modality as useful in their medical education. Based on the results of the audience survey, the speakers were perceived as knowledgeable (53.1%), confident (51.3%) and professional (39.0%). Assessment of 15 video-recorded talks showed satisfactory delivery of the talks by the students. CONCLUSION The majority of the students reported a favourable overall learning experience under this new training programme. This finding is supported by the positive feedback garnered from the audience, peers of the medical students and the faculty staff. PMID:26891745

Former WWII Fighter Pilot Finds New Home Near Family

MedlinePlus

... Navigation Bar Home Current Issue Past Issues Feature: Senior Living Former WWII Fighter Pilot Finds New Home ... in Kalispell, Mont. Advice On a Move to Senior Living: Investigate your new surroundings. Talk to those ...

Overview of smartphone applications for sleep analysis.

PubMed

Ong, Adrian A; Gillespie, M Boyd

2016-03-01

To review and assess the current selection of sleep analysis smartphone applications (apps) available for download. The iOS and Google Play mobile app store were searched for sleep analysis apps targeted for consumer use. Alarm clock, sleep-aid, snoring and sleep-talking recorder, fitness tracker apps, and apps geared towards health professionals were excluded. App information and features were obtained from in-store descriptions, and the app developer website. A total of 51 unique sleep apps in both iOS and Google Play stores were included. The apps were rated 3.8/5 in both stores, and had an average price of $1.12 in the iOS store and $0.58 in the Google Play store. >65% of sleep apps report on sleep structure, including duration, time awake, and time in light/deep sleep, while reporting of REM was limited. The availability of extra features was variable, ranging from 4% to 73% of apps. There are a variety of sleep analysis apps with a range of functionality. The apps with the most reviews from the each store are featured. Many apps provide data on sleep structure; however the algorithms are not validated by scientific literature or studies. Since patients may inquire about their sleep habits from these apps, it is necessary for physicians to be aware of the most common apps and the features offered and their limitations in order to properly counsel patients.

Finding Fingerprints of Selection in Poplar Genomes

ScienceCinema

Tuskan, Gerald

2018-05-30

Jerry Tuskan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the DOE JGI talks about poplar trees as models for selective adaptation to an environment. This video complements a study published ahead online August 24, 2014 in Nature Genetics.

ECBS & ICBS 2015 Joint Meeting: Bringing Chemistry to Life.

PubMed

Varon Silva, Daniel

2016-03-15

The European Chemical Biology Society (ECBS) and the International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS) recently organized a joint meeting in Berlin. This meeting had more than 250 participants. Four keynote lectures were given by Timothy Mitchison, David Tirrell, Carolyn Bertozzi and Jason Chin; in addition there were 13 invited speakers, 20 selected oral talks and 30 talks selected from 90 posters. The meeting was divided into six topics: chemoproteomics, epigenetics, conjugates for target delivering, anti-infectives, molecular imaging and probing the structure, and function of post-translational modifications. The highlights of the meeting are presented in this report. © 2016 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

PhD Crisis Discourse: A Critical Approach to the Framing of the Problem and Some Australian "Solutions"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cuthbert, Denise; Molla, Tebeje

2015-01-01

A feature of HE reform discourse is the tendency to construct the rationale for reform in terms of averting calamity and risk. We refer to this risk talk as "crisis discourse." This study examines the formulation of PhD crisis discourse internationally and in Australia. We find that a key feature of PhD crisis discourse is that…

A smart-phone application and a companion website for the improvement of the communication skills of children with autism: clinical rationale, technical development and preliminary results.

PubMed

De Leo, Gianluca; Gonzales, Carol H; Battagiri, Padmaja; Leroy, Gondy

2011-08-01

Autism is a complex neurobiological disorder that is part of a group of disorders known as autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Today, one in 150 individuals is diagnosed with autism. Lack of social interaction and problems with communication are the main characteristics displayed by children with ASD. The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) is a communication system where children exchange visual symbols as a form of communication. The visual symbols are laminated pictures stored in a binder. We have designed, developed and are currently testing a software application, called PixTalk which works on any Windows Mobile Smart-phone. Teachers and caregivers can access a web site and select from an online library the images to be downloaded on to the Smart-phone. Children can browse and select images to express their intentions, desires, and emotions using PixTalk. Case study results indicate that PixTalk can be used as part of ongoing therapy.

Telecommunications in the High School.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bowen, John

1997-01-01

Talks about the creation of a Web site that generates news and features related to teens and their concerns in Lakewood, Ohio. Shows how a feasible course in online journalism grew from the original idea. Describes the course. (PA)

Virtual Observatory Science Applications

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

McGlynn, Tom

2005-01-01

Many Virtual-Observatory-based applications are now available to astronomers for use in their research. These span data discovery, access, visualization and analysis. Tools can quickly gather and organize information from sites around the world to help in planning a response to a gamma-ray burst, help users pick filters to isolate a desired feature, make an average template for z=2 AGN, select sources based upon information in many catalogs, or correlate massive distributed databases. Using VO protocols, the reach of existing software tools and packages can be greatly extended, allowing users to find and access remote information almost as conveniently as local data. The talk highlights just a few of the tools available to scientists, describes how both large and small scale projects can use existing tools, and previews some of the new capabilities that will be available in the next few years.

"Thou Map of Woe, That Dost Talk in Signs": The Speaker-Listener Dialogue of Poetry and the Practice of Selecting Poems for Poetry Therapy.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reed, M. Ann

1999-01-01

Argues that Lavinia of "Titus Andronicus" is Shakespeare's metaphor for the wounds of division between spoken and written word, who talks in signs, and is both poet and agent of healing: the poem's capacity to sustain the passion of rapture and its capacity to shape a house of consciousness for the particular movement within the…

[Where is Iowa History?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ruth, Amy, Ed.

1995-01-01

This issue of "The Goldfinch" focuses on Iowa history. The booklet is divided into two sections. Section 1, "Features," contains the following: (1) "Looking for History"; (2) "Talking History"; (3) "Climbing the Family Tree"; (4) "Tribal Storytelling"; (5) "News About You"; (6)…

NCI intramural research highlighted at 2014 AACR meeting

Cancer.gov

This year’s American Association for Cancer Research meeting featured plenary talks by two NCI scientists, Steven Rosenberg, M.D., and Louis Staudt, M.D., Ph.D., that highlighted the challenges in developing varied and potentially synergistic treatments f

Distinguishing between casual talk and academic talk beginning in the preschool years: an important consideration for speech-language pathologists.

PubMed

van Kleeck, Anne

2014-11-01

The need for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to consider an academic talk (AT) register in addition to an everyday casual talk (CT) register of oral language with children beginning in the preschool years is presented, the AT and CT registers are distinguished in a comprehensive manner, ideas regarding AT language assessment are proposed, and suggestions for fostering children's skills with the AT register are offered. Extant research and scholarship from a wide variety of disciplines are integrated and organized. The author discusses the role of the SLP in supporting AT skills beginning in the preschool years and the added risk of difficulties with the AT register for children with language impairment who are from diverse backgrounds. Two broad categories-social-interactive and cognitive-that give rise to linguistic features that differentiate between the CT and AT registers are deduced from extant scholarship. SLPs should consider children's competence with the AT register as they work to prepare preschoolers and older children for the language demands of school.

Student use of narrative and paradigmatic forms of talk in elementary science conversations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kurth, Lori A.; Kidd, Raymond; Gardner, Roberta; Smith, Edward L.

2002-11-01

The purpose of this work was to examine and characterize student use of narrative and paradigmatic expression in elementary science discourse. This interpretive study occurred over a 2-year period in a professional development school with a largely international population. This analysis focused on the narrative and paradigmatic modes of expression used by combined first-second- and second-grade students in a semistructured, fairly autonomous, whole-class conversational format. Students demonstrated competence with both modes of talk at the beginning of the year. Over time, students moved toward more paradigmatic talk, but narrative examples continued to be key components of the science conversations. Topically, students used narrative more often for life sciences and paradigmatic talk for physical sciences. For gender there were no qualitative differences in narrative or paradigmatic expression. However, boys obtained more opportunities to practice their use of both discourse forms by either receiving more speaking turns or expressing more language features per turn. These conversations show that narrative and paradigmatic modes in science need not be in opposition but can, in fact, be used together in complementary ways that are mutually enhancing.

KSC-2013-3531

NASA Image and Video Library

2013-09-11

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA chief technologist Mason Peck addresses the audience in the KSC Training Auditorium at KSC Talks 2013 on the second day of the KSC Innovation Expo. KSC Talks featured a series of speakers that collectively took the audience on a journey through innovation, from inspiration to application and beyond. The variety of topics presented encouraged the audience to become “Ready for Anything,” to learn how to “Train and un-train Your Brain for Innovation,” and to discover how to “Change the Possible,” among others. Photo credit: NASA/Cory Huston

KSC-2013-3532

NASA Image and Video Library

2013-09-11

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA chief technologist Mason Peck engages the audience in the KSC Training Auditorium at KSC Talks 2013 on the second day of the KSC Innovation Expo. KSC Talks featured a series of speakers that collectively took the audience on a journey through innovation, from inspiration to application and beyond. The variety of topics presented encouraged the audience to become “Ready for Anything,” to learn how to “Train and un-train Your Brain for Innovation,” and to discover how to “Change the Possible,” among others. Photo credit: NASA/Cory Huston

Treatment of selective mutism: focus on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

PubMed

Kaakeh, Yaman; Stumpf, Janice L

2008-02-01

Abstract Selective mutism is a pediatric psychiatric disorder that occurs when a child consistently fails to speak in specific situations in which speaking is expected, such as at school and social gatherings, but speaks appropriately in other settings. Selective mutism often is diagnosed when a child starts school and does not talk to teachers or peers, but talks to family members at home; the condition is frequently accompanied by anxiety and shyness. Although the underlying etiology of the condition remains unclear, psychotherapy is the preferred initial treatment, with the support of parents and teachers. If the child does not respond to psychotherapy, addition of pharmacologic treatment should be considered, depending on the severity of symptoms and presence of other illnesses. Although data are limited to case reports and trials with small patient populations and short follow-up periods, some patients with selective mutism respond to therapy with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). Fluoxetine is the most studied SSRI as treatment for the condition, although further investigation is required to determine the optimal dosage and duration of therapy.

Case Studies of Interactive Whole-Class Teaching in Primary Science: Communicative approach and pedagogic purposes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McMahon, Kendra

2012-07-01

By developing two case studies of expert teaching in action, this study aimed to develop knowledge of talk in whole-class teaching in UK primary science lessons and understand this in relation to both the teachers' interpretations and sociocultural theoretical frameworks. Lessons were observed and video-recorded and the teachers engaged in video-stimulated-reflective dialogue to capture participants' reflections upon their own pedagogic purposes and interactions in the classroom. The analytic framework was developed at three levels: sequence of lessons, lesson, and episode. For each episode, the 'communicative approach' and teaching purposes were recorded. Transcripts were developed for fine grain analysis of selected episodes and a quantitative analysis was undertaken of the use of communicative approaches. Findings exemplify how different communicative approaches were used by the case-study teachers for different pedagogical purposes at different points in the sequence of lessons, contributing to primary teachers' repertoire for planning and practice. The initial elicitation of children's ideas can be understood as pooling them to enhance multivoicedness and develop a shared resource for future dialogues. Whole-class talk can support univocality by rehearsing procedural knowledge and exploring the meanings of scientific terminology. Identifying salient features of phenomena in the context of the whole-class marks them as significant as shared knowledge but valuing other observations extends the multivoicedness of the discourse.

Successes and Problems of Conventional Breakdown Theory of Sprites

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pasko, V. P.

2004-12-01

Sprite phenomenon is one of the most frequently observed forms of transient luminous events occurring at mesospheric/lower ionospheric altitudes, which is directly related to the lightning activity in underlying thunderstorms [Sentman et al., GRL, 22, 1205, 1995]. In this talk we will provide overview of conventional breakdown theory of sprites, which is build on original ideas advanced by C.T.R. Wilson [Wilson, Proc. Phys. Soc. Lond., 37, 32D, 1925]. We will discuss similarity properties of electrical discharges as a function of gas pressure and a selected set of results of recent laboratory studies of filamentary channels of ionization (termed streamers) [e.g., van Veldhuizen et al., IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci., 30, 162, 2002; Yi and Williams, J. Phys. D. Appl. Phys., 35, 205, 2002], which are directly applicable for understanding of high spatial resolution imagery of sprites revealing many internal filamentary features with transverse spatial scales ranging from tens to a few hundreds of meters [Gerken and Inan, JASTP, 65, 567, 2003]. The specific set of features, which can be successfully explained by existing conventional theory of sprites and which we will discuss in this talk, include: (1) sprite halos [Barrington-Leigh et al., 106, 1741, 2001]; (2) the observed diffuse and streamer regions of sprites [Pasko and Stenbaek-Nielsen, GRL, 29, 1440, doi:10.1029/2001GL014241, 2002]; (3) the observed ELF radiation from sprites [Cummer et al., GRL, 25, 1281, 1998; Pasko et al., GRL, 25, 3493, 1998]; (4) the observed spatial transverse scales of streamers in sprites; (5) the observed high-speed vertical development of sprites; and (6) the detections of short bursts of blue emissions from sprites (see [Liu and Pasko, JGR, 109, A04301, doi:10.1029/2003JA010064, 2004] for experimental references and recent modeling results pertaining to items (4), (5) and (6)). The talk will be concluded with a discussion of a set of unsolved problems in exiting sprite theory, which include: (1) the initiation of sprite streamers in low applied electric fields; (2) the minimum fields required for propagation of sprite streamers; (3) the branching mechanisms of sprite streamers; (4) the neutral gas heating in sprites; (5) the thermal runaway electrons associated with sprite streamers.

SOFIA Update and Science Vision

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Smith, Kimberly

2017-01-01

I will present an overview of the SOFIA program, its science vision and upcoming plans for the observatory. The talk will feature several scientific highlights since full operations, along with summaries of planned science observations for this coming year, platform enhancements and new instrumentation.

Doing Local History.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ohrn, Deborah Gore, Ed.

1992-01-01

This theme issue contains articles about the importance of learning local history. The lead article includes historical information about three Iowa cities: Council Bluffs, Waterloo, and Jefferson. Other features in this issue are entitled: "Iowa Kids Talk,""Digging Into Local History,""Goldie's Top Ten News Stories";…

Reporting and Reacting: Concurrent Responses to Reported Speech.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Holt, Elizabeth

2000-01-01

Uses conversation analysis to investigate reported speech in talk-in-interaction. Beginning with an examination of direct and indirect reported speech, the article highlights some of the design features of the former, and the sequential environments in which it occurs. (Author/VWL)

Different Strokes for Different Folks: Visual Presentation Design between Disciplines

PubMed Central

Gomez, Steven R.; Jianu, Radu; Ziemkiewicz, Caroline; Guo, Hua; Laidlaw, David H.

2015-01-01

We present an ethnographic study of design differences in visual presentations between academic disciplines. Characterizing design conventions between users and data domains is an important step in developing hypotheses, tools, and design guidelines for information visualization. In this paper, disciplines are compared at a coarse scale between four groups of fields: social, natural, and formal sciences; and the humanities. Two commonplace presentation types were analyzed: electronic slideshows and whiteboard “chalk talks”. We found design differences in slideshows using two methods – coding and comparing manually-selected features, like charts and diagrams, and an image-based analysis using PCA called eigenslides. In whiteboard talks with controlled topics, we observed design behaviors, including using representations and formalisms from a participant’s own discipline, that suggest authors might benefit from novel assistive tools for designing presentations. Based on these findings, we discuss opportunities for visualization ethnography and human-centered authoring tools for visual information. PMID:26357149

Astronomy on Tap: science engagement in the pub

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Livermore, Rachael C.; Silverman, Jeffrey Michael

2015-08-01

Astronomy on Tap is a series of free lectures by astronomers in the pub, aimed at disseminating the latest research to the public in an informal setting. Started in New York City in 2013, Astronomy on Tap has now expanded to seven cities across North and South America. Organized by local astronomers, each event features talks by astronomers from local institutions or visitors, or others whose professions or hobbies intersect with astronomy, along with games and opportunities for the public to interact with professional astronomers. The largest Astronomy on Tap events are in Austin, Texas, attracting over 150 people each month, which consists of populations outside of the self-selected groups that might be reached by more formal EPO activities. The organisers of Astronomy on Tap in Austin (AoTATX) will discuss the impact of and feedback from all of the locations, and present information on setting up new satellite locations.

Selective Mutism: Phenomenological Characteristics.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ford, Mary Ann; Sladeczek, Ingrid E.; Carlson, John; Kratochwill, Thomas R.

1998-01-01

To explore factors related to selective mutism (SM), a survey of persons (N=153, including 135 children) with SM was undertaken. Three theoretical assumptions are supported: (1) variant talking behaviors prior to identification of SM; (2) link between SM and social anxiety; (3) potential link between temperament and SM. (EMK)

The ``cinquefoil" resistive/Hall measurement geometry

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Koon, Daniel W.

2000-03-01

This talk begins by analyzing the charge transport weighting functions -- the sensitivity of resistive and Hall measurements to local macroscopic inhomogeneities -- of bridge-shaped transport specimens. As expected, such measurements sample only that region of the specimen between the central voltage electrodes, in the limit of narrow current channels connected by even narrower arms to the voltage electrodes. The bridge geometry has a few advantages over the van der Pauw cloverleaf geometry -- including ease in zeroing out the null-field Hall voltage -- but also some disadvantages. The talk concludes with an analysis of a hybrid geometry, the “cinquefoil” or five-leafed clover, which combines the best features of both.

Controlling material reactivity using architecture

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sullivan, Kyle; Zhu, Cheng; Duoss, Eric; Durban, Matt; Gash, Alex; Golobic, Alexandra; Grapes, Michael; Kuntz, Joshua; Spadaccini, Christopher; Kolesky, David; Lewis, Jennifer; LLNL Team; Harvard University Team

Thermites are mixtures of a metal fuel with a metal oxide as the oxidizer. The reactivity of such materials can be tailored through careful selection of a variety of parameters, and can range from very slow burns to rapid deflagrations when using nanoparticles. However, in some cases diminishing returns have been observed as the particle size is reduced. 3D printing is a rapidly emerging field, which offers the capability of printing architected parts; for example parts with controlled internal feature sizes and geometries. In this work, we investigated whether such features could be utilized to gain additional control of the reactivity. This talk introduces several new methods for preparing thermite samples with controlled architectures using direct 3D printing, deposition, and/or casting. Additionally, we demonstrate that 3D printing can be used to tailor the convective and/or advective energy transport during a deflagration, thus enhancing or retarding the reaction. The results are promising in that they give researchers additional ways to control the energy release rate, without defaulting to the classic approach of changing the formulation. This work was performed under the auspices of the U. S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. LLNL-ABS-708525.

Teaching About the Epistemology of Science in Upper Secondary Schools: An Analysis of Teachers' Classroom Talk

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ryder, Jim; Leach, John

2008-02-01

We begin by drawing upon the available literature to identify four characteristics of teacher talk likely to support student learning about the epistemology of science: making appropriate statements about the epistemology of science in the classroom, linking the epistemology of science with specific science concepts, stating and justifying learning aims, and working with students’ ideas. These characteristics are then used in an analysis of the classroom talk of seven teachers as they use published resources for teaching about the epistemology of science for the first time. By focusing on teachers’ initial classroom experiences of using these published resources we identify feasible starting points for professional development activities likely to support these teachers in developing their expertise in this challenging area of teaching. Lessons focused on a specific aspect of the epistemology of science (the development of theoretical models) contextualised within two content areas: electromagnetism and cell membrane structure. Our analysis shows that none of these teachers made clearly inappropriate statements about the epistemology of science in the classroom. However, expertise related to the remaining three characteristics of teacher talk varied between teachers. For example, some teachers used a range of approaches to working with students’ ideas during whole class talk (e.g. asking students to justify their ideas and challenging students’ views) whereas for other teachers students’ ideas were not a strong feature of classroom discourse.

Sustained multiplicity in everyday cholesterol reduction: repertoires and practices in talk about 'healthy living'.

PubMed

Will, Catherine M; Weiner, Kate

2014-02-01

This article is concerned with talk about and the practices of healthy living in relation to cholesterol reduction. It draws on qualitative interviews with 89 people who are current or former users of either cholesterol-lowering functional foods or statins for cardiovascular risk reduction. Focusing on data about everyday activities including food preparation, shopping and exercise, we illustrate four repertoires that feature in talk about cholesterol reduction (health, pleasure, sociality and pragmatism). Using Gilbert and Mulkay's notion of a 'reconciliation device', we suggest ways in which apparently contradictory repertoires are combined (for example, through talk about moderation) or kept apart. We suggest that, in contrast to the interactiveness of the repertoires of health and pleasure, a pragmatic repertoire concerning food provisioning, storage and cooking as well as the realities of exercise, appears distinct from talk about health and is relatively inert. Finally we consider the implications of these discursive patterns for daily practices. Our data suggest there is little emphasis on coherence in people's practices and illustrate the significance of temporal, spatial and social distribution in allowing people to pursue different priorities in their everyday lives. Rather than the calculated trade-offs of earlier medical sociology we draw on Mol to foreground the possibility of sustained multiplicity in daily practices. © 2014 The Authors. Sociology of Health & Illness © 2014 Foundation for the Sociology of Health & Illness/John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

ALMA Observing Strategies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Biggs, Andy

2018-03-01

The ALMA Observing Tool (OT) is a Java-based tool used to prepare ALMA observations. In this talk, I highlight the particular features relevant to setting up single dish observations when these are needed to observe sources where the largest angular scale requires the addition of the total power antennas.

NASA at the Space & Science Festival

NASA Image and Video Library

2017-08-05

NASA exhibits line Pier 86 during the Intrepid Space & Science Festival, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2017 held at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. The week-long festival featured talks, films and cutting-edge displays showcasing NASA technology. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Two Forms of Spoken Repetition in a Girl with Autism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stribling, Penny; Rae, John; Dickerson, Paul

2007-01-01

Background: The talk of persons with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) often features distinctive forms of repetition (echophenomena). Although often characterized as meaningless or inappropriate, there is evidence that such practices can sometimes have communicative functions. Aims: To investigate the interactional organization of repetition…

Fractions, trees and unfinished business

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shraiman, Boris

In this talk, mourning the loss of a teacher and a dear friend, I would like to share some unfinished thoughts loosely connecting - via Farey fraction trees - Kadanoff's study of universality of quasi-periodic route to chaos with the effort to understand universal features of genealogical trees.

When to Intervene in Selective Mutism: The Multimodal Treatment of a Case of Persistent Selective Mutism.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Powell, Shawn; Dalley, Mahlono

1995-01-01

An identification and treatment model differentiating transient mutism from persistent selective mutism is proposed. The case study of a six-year-old girl is presented, who was treated with a multimodal approach combining behavioral techniques with play therapy and family involvement. At posttreatment and follow-up, she was talking in a manner…

Can You See Me Now?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Raths, David

2013-01-01

Ten years ago, integrating videoconferencing into a college course required considerable effort on the part of the instructor and IT support staff. Today, video- and web-conferencing tools are more sophisticated. Distance education has morphed from audio- and videocassettes featuring talking heads to a more interactive experience with greater…

Stories in Conversation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hofer, Roberta Senner

Although conversational stories within one individual's corpus share the same structure, they have features that set them apart from one another. Based on the stories' general characteristics and the way they function in ongoing talk, they can be identified as: (1) durable personal experience narratives (PENs), which are often repeated during the…

NASA at the Space & Science Festival

NASA Image and Video Library

2017-08-05

NASA exhibits under white tents line Pier 86 during the Intrepid Space & Science Festival, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2017 held at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. The week-long festival featured talks, films and cutting-edge displays showcasing NASA technology. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Talking to Students: Metadiscourse in Introductory Coursebooks.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hyland, Ken

1999-01-01

Explores role of college textbooks in students' acquisition of special disciplinary literacy, focusing on use of metadiscourse as manifestation of writer's linguistic and rhetorical presence in a text. Features are compared from 21 textbook extracts in microbiology, marketing, and applied linguistics with similar corpus of research articles,…

NASA at the Space & Science Festival

NASA Image and Video Library

2017-08-05

Signage points the way to NASA exhibits at the Intrepid Space & Science Festival, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2017 held at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. The week-long festival featured talks, films and cutting-edge displays showcasing NASA technology. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Aerospace Medicine Talk

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Williams, Richard S.

2015-01-01

The presentation is next Sunday, May 10th. It will be to the Civil Aviation Medical Association, for 2 hours at Disney World in Orlando. It is a high level talk on space medicine, including history, the role of my office, human health risks of space flight, general aspects of space medicine practice, human health risk management (including integrated activities of medical operations and the Human Research Program, and thoughts concerning health risks for long duration exploration class space missions. No proprietary data or material will be used, all is readily available in the public sector. There is also a short (30 min) talk on Monday at the CAMA lunch. There we will describe the Visual Impairment and Intracranial Pressure syndrome, with possible etiologies and plans for research (already selected studies). Again, nothing proprietary will be discussed.

NCLB's Trix Not for Kids

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schroeder, Ken

2004-01-01

In this article, the author talks about a provision that President Bush put the near end of his "No Child Left Behind" Act, forcing school districts to share with military recruiters the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of all high school juniors and seniors. Here, the author features the National Network Opposing the…

Locker Room Talk.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fickes, Michael

1999-01-01

Examines the trends in college and university sports and recreation center locker rooms as envisioned by a specialist. Features of the modern locker room and the different levels of locker room design are explained. Final comments discuss whether college and university facility managers are inclined to move to high-end locker rooms. (GR)

DefenseLink Feature:

Science.gov Websites

Democracies President George W. Bush shakes hands with President Stjepan Mesic of Croatia during arrival today. Story NATO Members Debate Direction of Alliance President George W. Bush talks with Defense . Story Bush Pushes NATO To Accept Balkan Nations President George W. Bush emphasizes a point as he

Creating a Nation of Innovators. A Brief Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fluellen, Jerry E., Jr.

2011-01-01

The Learning and Brain Conference for 2011 featured talks on a handful of themes including creativity, technology, education tomorrow, five minds for the future and innovation. Of these, innovation took center stage. Tony Wagner's opening plenary session became the conference prologue, examining innovation from several perspectives including seven…

Inflationary Cosmology: Is Our Universe Part of a Multiverse?

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Guth, Alan

2008-11-06

In this talk, Guth explains the inflationary theory and reviews the features that make it scientifically plausible. In addition, he discusses the biggest mystery in cosmology: Why is the value of the cosmological constant, sometimes called the "anti-gravity" effect, so remarkably small compared to theoretical expectations?

Nonverbal Expression in Autism of Asperger Type.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tantam, Digby; And Others

1993-01-01

Two experiments evaluated the social interactions of 15 Asperger-type autistic subjects with either normal or schizoid control subjects. Asperger subjects tended to avoid gazing at the interviewer when the interviewer was talking. Results suggest that a lifelong absence of gaze response to social clues including speech may explain some features of…

Temperature-Dependent Refractive Index of Cleartran® ZnS to Cryogenic Temperatures

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Leviton, Doug; Frey, Brad

2013-01-01

First, let's talk about the CHARMS facility at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center: Cryogenic, High-Accuracy Refraction Measuring System (CHARMS); design features for highest accuracy and precision; technologies we rely on; data products and examples; optical materials for which we've measured cryogenic refractive index.

Adventures in Nonfiction: Talking with Penny Colman.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Journal of Children's Literature, 2002

2002-01-01

Presents a "conversation" with Penny Colman (adapted from her remarks at a panel discussion at a recent convention). Considers that nonfiction is dominated by male writers, especially for young adults and adults, and by true stories that feature boys and men. Discusses her exploration of the world of nonfiction by women. (SG)

Ban the Book Report: Promoting Frequent and Enthusiastic Reading

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Foster, Graham

2012-01-01

Teachers recognize that frequent independent reading increases student knowledge on a wide range of topics, enhances vocabulary, and improves comprehension. "Ban the Book Report" inspires teachers to go beyond narrow and analytical book reports by exploring the potential of book talks, alternate book covers, identifying features of informational…

The Language of Man. Book 5.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Littell, Joseph Fletcher, Ed.

This textbook part of "The Language of Man" series, is intended for use in grade 11 and above. Its four sections, each of which contains several articles, deal with body language, developing vocabulary, the dialects of English (including features on New England, Midwestern, and Southern speech, Yiddish, Kentucky speech, the talk of the…

A phenomenological model of the glasma and photon production

DOE PAGES

McLerran, Larry

2014-12-01

There have been many talks at this meeting concerning the Color Glass Condensate[1]-[5] and the Glasma[6]-[13], so I will not present an extended review the subject in this talk. I will concentrate here on providing a simplified description of the evolution of the Glasma. The Glasma is a strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma. It is not thermalized. It is produced very shortly after the collision of two nuclei, thought of as sheets of Color Glass Condensate, and evolves into the Thermalized Quark Gluon Plasma. The Glasma is strongly interacting because the gluon distributions are over occupied, and this overoccupation enhancesmore » the interaction strength due to Bose coherence. There may or may not be a Bose condensate of gluons in the Glasma, but this interesting feature will not be the subject of this talk[14]-[22]. In fact, I will ignore the possibility of such condensation when I analyze the Glasma, although the result I present may be generalized to the case where condensation is present.« less

Studying Military Community Health, Well-being, and Discourse through the Social Media Lens

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Pavalanathan, Umashanthi; Datla, Vivek V.; Volkova, Svitlana

Social media can provide a resource for characterizing communities and targeted populations through activities and content shared online. For instance, studying the armed forces‚Äô use of social media may provide insights into their health and wellbeing. In this paper, we address three broad research questions: (1) How do military populations use social media? (2) What topics do military users discuss in social media? (3) Do military users talk about health and well-being differently than civilians? Military Twitter users were identified through keywords in the profile description of users who posted geotagged tweets at military installations. These military tweets were comparedmore » with the tweets from remaining population. Our analysis indicate that military users talk more about military related responsibilities and events, whereas non-military users talk more about school, work, and leisure activities. A significant difference in online content generated by both populations was identified, involving sentiment, health, language, and social media features.« less

Linguistic Flexibility Modulates Speech Planning for Causative Motion Events: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Mandarin and English

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zheng, Chun

2017-01-01

Producing a sensible utterance requires speakers to select conceptual content, lexical items, and syntactic structures almost instantaneously during speech planning. Each language offers its speakers flexibility in the selection of lexical and syntactic options to talk about the same scenarios involving movement. Languages also vary typologically…

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Tuskan, Gerald

Jerry Tuskan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the DOE JGI talks about poplar trees as models for selective adaptation to an environment. This video complements a study published ahead online August 24, 2014 in Nature Genetics.

RAPID and DDS

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Utz, Hans Heinrich

2011-01-01

This talk gives an overview of the the Robot Applications Programmers Interface Delegate (RAPID) as well as the distributed systems middleware Data Distribution Service (DDS). DDS is an open software standard, RAPID is cleared for open-source release under NOSA. RAPID specifies data-structures and semantics for high-level telemetry published by NASA robotic software. These data-structures are supported by multiple robotic platforms at Johnson Space Center (JSC), Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Ames Research Center (ARC), providing high-level interoperability between those platforms. DDS is used as the middleware for data transfer. The feature set of the middleware heavily influences the design decision made in the RAPID specification. So it is appropriate to discuss both in this introductory talk.

Defining the Essentials for the Foreign Language Classroom. Selected Papers from the 1989 Central States Conference.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McAlpine, Dave, Ed.; And Others

Selected papers from the 1989 Central State Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages include the following: "From Talk to Action: An Essential for Curricular Change" (June K. Phillips); "Comprehensible Input for Intermediate Foreign Language Students via Video" (Tracy David Terrell); "Developing Extensive Reading Skills: The Transition to…

Afraid To Be Heard: The Selectively Mute Child.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Longo, Sharon L.

2001-01-01

Presents facts about selective mutism, an anxiety disorder believed to be caused by low levels of serotonin in the brain, discussing its effects on school children, explaining how to get the necessary help (e.g., talking to health professionals and becoming educated about the disorder), and noting what parents can do (e.g., help raise the child's…

Teachers Talking about Teaching and School: Collaboration and Reflective Practice via Critical Friends Groups

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kuh, Lisa P.

2016-01-01

Reflective practice has potentially positive effects on an organization's capacity to focus on student learning and teaching practices. In an effort to comply with policy and provide teachers with opportunities to reflect on their practice, districts, schools, and teachers have turned to various models that feature collaborative experiences. One…

Talking It Through: Collaborative Dialogue and Second Language Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ammar, Ahlem; Hassan, Rania Mohamed

2018-01-01

This quasi-experimental study examined the potential benefits of zero-error dictation, a teaching technique based on dialogue-driven dictation, and the extent to which target linguistic features and proficiency levels mediated its effects on second language (L2) learners' accurate use of French grammatical morphology. Seventy-nine learners of L2…

Authors, Authors, Authors

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Harvey, Carl A., II; Kaplan, Allison G.

2007-01-01

This article features some of the programs offered in the Reno conference. Two of the preconferences at Reno will focus on children's literature. Judy Freeman will talk about some of the current and future trends for books for younger readers. She will share a plethora of some of the best picture books and chapter books. Ruth Cox Clark will take…

You're a What? Solar Photovoltaic Installer

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Torpey, Elka Maria

2009-01-01

This article talks about solar photovoltaic (PV) installer and features Rebekah Hren, a solar PV installer who puts solar panels on roofs and in other sunny places to turn the sun's power into electricity. Hren enjoys promoting renewable energy, in part because it's an emerging field. In solar PV systems, solar cells--devices that convert sunlight…

HDF Update

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Pourmal, Elena

2016-01-01

The HDF Group maintains and evolves HDF software used by NASA ESDIS program to manage remote sense data. In this talk we will discuss new features of HDF (Virtual Datasets, Single writerMultiple reader access, Community supported HDF5 compression filters) that address storage and IO performance requirements of the applications that work with the ESDIS data products.

NASA at the Space & Science Festival

NASA Image and Video Library

2017-08-05

An inflatable scale model of the SLS rocket is seen on Pier 86 during the Intrepid Space & Science Festival, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2017 held at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City. The week-long festival featured talks, films and cutting-edge displays showcasing NASA technology. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Changing the Image of School Lunch: Arizona Meets the Marketing Challenge.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morrison, Shelley B.

1988-01-01

Arizona's Future for Child Nutrition organization hired a professional public relations and advertising agency to increase student participation in school lunches. After, the opinions and needs of students were researched, and the agency launched a campaign that featured radio advertising, television and radio talk shows, and press coverage, with…

Untangling the Mother Knot: Some Thoughts on Parents, Children and Philosophers of Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suissa, Judith

2006-01-01

Although children and parents often feature in philosophical literature on education, the nature of the parent-child relationship remains occluded by the language of rights, duties and entitlements. Likewise, talk of "parenting" in popular literature and culture implies that being a parent is primarily about performing tasks. Drawing on popular…

Interactions among Future Study Abroad Students: Exploring Potential Intercultural Learning Sequences

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Borghetti, C.; Beaven, A.; Pugliese, R.

2015-01-01

The study presented in this article aims to explore if and how intercultural learning may take place in students' class interaction. It is grounded in the assumption that interculturality is not a clear-cut feature inherent to interactions occurring when individuals with presumed different linguistic and cultural/national backgrounds talk to each…

Expectancies and Motivations to Attend an Informal Science Lecture Series

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

AbiGhannam, Niveen; Kahlor, LeeAnn; Dudo, Anthony; Liang, Ming-Ching; Rosenthal, Sonny; Banner, Jay L.

2016-01-01

This study explored the expectancies and motivations that prompt audiences to attend a university science lecture series. The series features talks by science experts from the host campus and around the USA. Each lecture typically attracts between 300 and 600 attendees, including middle and high school student groups, university students, and…

You're a What? Voice Actor

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Liming, Drew

2009-01-01

This article talks about voice actors and features Tony Oliver, a professional voice actor. Voice actors help to bring one's favorite cartoon and video game characters to life. They also do voice-overs for radio and television commercials and movie trailers. These actors use the sound of their voice to sell a character's emotions--or an advertised…

Giving the Left Somewhere to Go

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nelson, Michael

2007-01-01

This article talks about a new film entitled "An Unreasonable Man" that features the political activist Ralph Nader. The film rightly claims to be a documentary, but as the title hints, it's also a suspense movie. The film's first sequence briefly recounts Nader's much-maligned independent campaign for president in 2004. Although it shows him…

A Modest Proposal for Improving the Education of Reading Teachers. Technical Report No. 487.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Anderson, Richard C.; And Others

A gap exists between talk about teaching that is featured in most preservice teacher education and the working knowledge and problem-solving expertise that characterize skilled teaching. This gap exists because typical teacher training does not embody the principles of modeling, coaching, scaffolding, articulation, and reflection. Three methods…

The Borders of Historical Empathy: Students Encounter the Holocaust through Film

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Metzger, Scott Alan

2012-01-01

This case study explores potential educational tensions in historical empathy for learning about emotionally difficult topics through lessons that use dramatic feature films (movies). It investigates one case of historical empathy in the classroom by analyzing what a high-school teacher and her students do and talk about in class. The observed…

Neural Correlates of Perceptual Narrowing in Cross-Species Face-Voice Matching

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grossmann, Tobias; Missana, Manuela; Friederici, Angela D.; Ghazanfar, Asif A.

2012-01-01

Integrating the multisensory features of talking faces is critical to learning and extracting coherent meaning from social signals. While we know much about the development of these capacities at the behavioral level, we know very little about the underlying neural processes. One prominent behavioral milestone of these capacities is the perceptual…

Access to a Schoolwide Thinking Curriculum: Leadership Challenges and Solutions.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morocco, Catherine Cobb; Walker, Andrea; Lewis, Leslie R.

2003-01-01

This article discusses how an urban middle school designed to reflect a Schools for Thought model has demonstrated that urban schools can achieve excellent results on statewide testing for all students, including those with disabilities. Key school features are highlighted, including the use of "cross-talk" to stimulate discussion and student…

Meeting the Reading Challenges of Science Textbooks in the Primary Grades

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bryce, Nadine

2011-01-01

Four primary grade teachers overcame challenges of textbook-based science reading through a focus on reading strategies and an emphasis on making meaning. Teachers used whole-class and small-group guided reading instruction to focus students on organizational and textual features of the science textbooks. They also used teacher-guided talk and…

Teacher Merit Pay: Is It a Good Idea?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clabaugh, Gary K.

2009-01-01

President Obama's education agenda, which unhappily seems to be George W. Bush's program squared, contains two major features that will impact teacher pay and working conditions. The first is that charter schools are to be promoted aggressively. The second is an insistence on teacher merit pay. In this article, the author talks about teacher merit…

Race, Talk, Opportunity Gaps, and Curriculum Shifts in (Teacher) Education

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Milner, H. Richard, IV

2017-01-01

Although race remains a controversial, yet pervasive, issue in society and education, practicing teachers may still grapple with whether race should be a central feature of curriculum and related instructional practices, and/or how race should be interrogated in the classroom. In this article, I discuss results from teacher survey data about their…

Evaluation of a speaker identification system with and without fusion using three databases in the presence of noise and handset effects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

S. Al-Kaltakchi, Musab T.; Woo, Wai L.; Dlay, Satnam; Chambers, Jonathon A.

2017-12-01

In this study, a speaker identification system is considered consisting of a feature extraction stage which utilizes both power normalized cepstral coefficients (PNCCs) and Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC). Normalization is applied by employing cepstral mean and variance normalization (CMVN) and feature warping (FW), together with acoustic modeling using a Gaussian mixture model-universal background model (GMM-UBM). The main contributions are comprehensive evaluations of the effect of both additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and non-stationary noise (NSN) (with and without a G.712 type handset) upon identification performance. In particular, three NSN types with varying signal to noise ratios (SNRs) were tested corresponding to street traffic, a bus interior, and a crowded talking environment. The performance evaluation also considered the effect of late fusion techniques based on score fusion, namely, mean, maximum, and linear weighted sum fusion. The databases employed were TIMIT, SITW, and NIST 2008; and 120 speakers were selected from each database to yield 3600 speech utterances. As recommendations from the study, mean fusion is found to yield overall best performance in terms of speaker identification accuracy (SIA) with noisy speech, whereas linear weighted sum fusion is overall best for original database recordings.

Partnering with consumers to develop and evaluate a Vietnamese Dementia Talking-Book to support low health literacy: a qualitative study incorporating codesign and participatory action research

PubMed Central

Goeman, Dianne; Michael, J; King, J; Luu, Huy; Emmanuel, Claire; Koch, S

2016-01-01

Objective The aim of the Vietnamese Dementia talking-book was to address low health literacy in older people of Vietnamese background living with dementia through the provision of an online resource to help individuals, their families and carers better understand and manage this condition and provide information about available dementia services. Design This qualitative study used codesign and participatory action research to develop and refine the talking-book in consultation with expert stakeholders, a consumer advocacy group and the Vietnamese community to assess its utility and ensure cultural and linguistic appropriateness and relevance. Participants 59 members of the Vietnamese community, 11 stakeholders from community health services and ethnic agencies, consumer advocacy groups and the research team participated in the codesign and refinement of the talking-book. 22 members of the Vietnamese community appraised the final product. Setting Vietnamese community planned activity groups in the Western, Northern and Southern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Results Our codesign study outlines the process required to develop a Vietnamese Dementia Talking-Book resource partnering with consumers and expert stakeholders to identify consumer need, selection of the content and appropriate language level, construction of the book, measuring acceptability of the talking-book, modification based on feedback and production and dissemination. Feedback on the final version of the talking-book revealed widespread consensus that the book enhanced the knowledge of members of the Vietnamese community in regard to understanding dementia and navigation and accessing of available services. Conclusions This free internationally available online Vietnamese Dementia Talking-Book facilitates improved dementia-related health literacy in the Vietnamese community. The book also serves as a tool to facilitate the provision of care to Vietnamese people living with memory loss by assisting health professional staff to develop relationships with Vietnamese clients, their families and carers in a culturally appropriate manner. PMID:27670516

Talk that talk: storytelling and analysis rooted in African American oral tradition.

PubMed

Banks-Wallace, JoAnne

2002-03-01

Stories are the foundation of qualitative research. However, the development of qualitative methods rooted in oral traditions remains largely unexplored by researchers. The contextual and historical influences on storytelling and storytaking are critical features of the African American oral tradition that are often ignored or minimized in qualitative research. Despite the complex and often contentious history of African Americans, their oral traditions have not been explored to reveal the depth of their lived experiences and the way those experiences inform their health concerns. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, dialogues about storytelling and storytaking are revisited and critiqued. Second, a comprehensive analytic process for gathering and interpreting stories rooted in African American oral tradition is outlined.

Scott Kelly Talks About His Year in Space

NASA Image and Video Library

2016-05-25

An agency wide All-Hands event on May 25 at NASA Headquarters featured Deputy Administrator Dava Newman and retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, reflecting on Kelly’s one-year mission aboard the International Space Station. The event, shown on NASA TV and the agency’s website, also featured video highlights of the mission and questions from employees watching at NASA centers around the country. During the unprecedented ISS mission, Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko of Roscosmos collected critical data on how the human body responds to long duration space flight.

Signatures of Fractional Exclusion Statistics in the Spectroscopy of Quantum Hall Droplets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cooper, Nigel

2015-05-01

One of the most dramatic features of strongly correlated phases is the emergence of quasiparticle excitations with unconventional quantum statistics. The archetypal example is the fractional, ``anyonic,'' quantum statistics predicted for quasiparticles of the fractional quantum Hall phases. While experiments on semiconductor devices have shown that these quasiparticles have fractional charges, a direct observation of the fractional statistics has remained lacking. In this talk I shall show how precision spectroscopy measurements of rotating droplets of ultracold atoms might be used to demonstrate the Haldane fractional exclusion statistics of quasiholes in the Laughlin state of bosons. The characteristic signatures appear in the single-particle excitation spectrum. I shall show that the transitions are governed by a ``many-body selection rule'' which allows one to relate the number of allowed transitions to the number of quasihole states. I shall illustrate the theory with numerically exact simulations of small numbers of particles. Work in collaboration with Steven H. Simon, and supported by the EPSRC and the Royal Society.

Bilingual Education in a Binational School: A Study of Equal Language Maintenance through Free Alternation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mackey, William Francis

This book describes the John F. Kennedy School in Berlin, which serves a community composed of families using German and English. It talks of the objectives and curriculum of the bilingual school, the manner of teacher selection and training, and the selection and preparation of materials. Included are appendixes which develop a typology of…

E-cigs . . . Are They Cool? Talking to Teens About E-Cigarettes.

PubMed

Modesto-Lowe, Vania; Alvarado, Camille

2017-09-01

Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes as they are commonly called, have gained wide acceptance among adolescents, especially those with sweet flavors such as bubble gum and cheesecake. Although health effects of e-cigarettes have not been well characterized, their use increases a teen's exposure to nicotine and may serve as a gateway to traditional cigarettes. This article outlines the basics of e-cigarettes and potential health hazards, followed by selected literature on teens' perceptions of e-cigarettes, as well as motivational interviewing strategies that can be used in talking to teens about using electronic cigarettes.

Bimanual cross-talk during reaching movements is primarily related to response selection, not the specification of motor parameters

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hazeltine, Eliot; Diedrichsen, Joern; Kennerley, Steven W.; Ivry, Richard B.

2003-01-01

Simultaneous reaching movements made with the two hands can show a considerable increase in reaction time (RT) when they differ in terms of direction or extent, compared to when the movements involve the same direction and extent. This cost has been attributed to cross-talk in the specification of the motor parameters for the two hands. However, a recent study [Diedrichsen, Hazeltine, Kennerley, & Ivry, (2001). Psychological Science, 12, 493-498] indicates that when reaching movements are cued by the onset of the target endpoint, no compatibility effects are observed. To determine why directly cued movements are immune from interference, we varied the stimulus onset asynchrony for the two movements and used different combinations of directly cued and symbolically cued movements. In two experiments, compatibility effects were only observed when both movements were symbolically cued. No difference was found between compatible and incompatible movements when both movements were directly cued or when one was directly cued and the other was symbolically cued. These results indicate that interference is not related to the specification of movement parameters but instead emerges from processes associated with response selection. Moreover, the data suggest that cross-talk, when present, primarily shortens the RT of the second movement on compatible trials rather than lengthening this RT on incompatible trials.

Cross-talk free selective reconstruction of individual objects from multiplexed optical field data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zea, Alejandro Velez; Barrera, John Fredy; Torroba, Roberto

2018-01-01

In this paper we present a data multiplexing method for simultaneous storage in a single package composed by several optical fields of tridimensional (3D) objects, and their individual cross-talk free retrieval. Optical field data are extracted from off axis Fourier holograms, and then sampled by multiplying them with random binary masks. The resulting sampled optical fields can be used to reconstruct the original objects. Sampling causes a loss of quality that can be controlled by the number of white pixels in the binary masks and by applying a padding procedure on the optical field data. This process can be performed using a different binary mask for each optical field, and then added to form a multiplexed package. With the adequate choice of sampling and padding, we can achieve a volume reduction in the multiplexed package over the addition of all individual optical fields. Moreover, the package can be multiplied by a binary mask to select a specific optical field, and after the reconstruction procedure, the corresponding 3D object is recovered without any cross-talk. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal for data compression with a comparison with discrete cosine transform filtering. Experimental results confirm the validity of our proposal.

MO-E-12A-01: Quantitative Imaging: Techniques, Applications, and Challenges

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Jackson, E; Jeraj, R; McNitt-Gray, M

The first symposium in the Quantitative Imaging Track focused on the introduction of quantitative imaging (QI) by illustrating the potential of QI in diagnostic and therapeutic applications in research and patient care, highlighting key challenges in implementation of such QI applications, and reviewing QI efforts of selected national and international agencies and organizations, including the FDA, NCI, NIST, and RSNA. This second QI symposium will focus more specifically on the techniques, applications, and challenges of QI. The first talk of the session will focus on modalityagnostic challenges of QI, beginning with challenges of the development and implementation of QI applicationsmore » in single-center, single-vendor settings and progressing to the challenges encountered in the most general setting of multi-center, multi-vendor settings. The subsequent three talks will focus on specific QI challenges and opportunities in the modalityspecific settings of CT, PET/CT, and MR. Each talk will provide information on modality-specific QI techniques, applications, and challenges, including current efforts focused on solutions to such challenges. Learning Objectives: Understand key general challenges of QI application development and implementation, regardless of modality. Understand selected QI techniques and applications in CT, PET/CT, and MR. Understand challenges, and potential solutions for such challenges, for the applications presented for each modality.« less

Las Cumbres Observatory Followup of Gravitational Waves - Part 3

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McCully, Curtis; Arcavi, Iair; Howell, D. Andrew

2018-01-01

Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) is a unique followup facility for gravitational-wave detections. It consists of 20 telescopes at 6 sites around the world, working as one robotic, dynamically scheduled global network. This has proven to be extremely useful for gravitational-wave followup during observing run 2 (O2). Given the robotic nature of our network, we are capable of receiving gravitational wave alerts, selecting and prioritizing galaxies to be observed in the localization region, and submitting the observations to the LCO scheduler - all within seconds. Observations can then begin within minutes. We will present our experience employing this strategy during O2, as well as the extensive followup data obtained for one of the triggers. This is talk 3 in a series of three talks (the details of the division of topics between these three talks is embargoed at the time of abstract submission).

Las Cumbres Observatory Followup of Gravitational Waves - Part 1

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Arcavi, Iair; Howell, D. Andrew; McCully, Curtis

2018-01-01

Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) is a unique followup facility for gravitational-wave detections. It consists of 20 telescopes at 6 sites around the world, working as one robotic, dynamically scheduled global network. This has proven to be extremely useful for gravitational-wave followup during observing run 2 (O2). Given the robotic nature of our network, we are capable of receiving gravitational wave alerts, selecting and prioritizing galaxies to be observed in the localization region, and submitting the observations to the LCO scheduler - all within seconds. Observations can then begin within minutes. We will present our experience employing this strategy during O2, as well as the extensive followup data obtained for one of the triggers. This is talk 1 in a series of three talks (the details of the division of topics between these three talks is embargoed at the time of abstract submission).

Las Cumbres Observatory Followup of Gravitational Waves - Part 2

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Howell, D. Andrew; Arcavi, Iair; McCully, Curtis

2018-01-01

Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) is a unique followup facility for gravitational-wave detections. It consists of 20 telescopes at 6 sites around the world, working as one robotic, dynamically scheduled global network. This has proven to be extremely useful for gravitational-wave followup during observing run 2 (O2). Given the robotic nature of our network, we are capable of receiving gravitational wave alerts, selecting and prioritizing galaxies to be observed in the localization region, and submitting the observations to the LCO scheduler - all within seconds. Observations can then begin within minutes. We will present our experience employing this strategy during O2, as well as the extensive followup data obtained for one of the triggers. This is talk 2 in a series of three talks (the details of the division of topics between these three talks is embargoed at the time of abstract submission).

Do cavies talk? The effect of anthropomorphic picture books on children's knowledge about animals.

PubMed

Ganea, Patricia A; Canfield, Caitlin F; Simons-Ghafari, Kadria; Chou, Tommy

2014-01-01

Many books for young children present animals in fantastical and unrealistic ways, such as wearing clothes, talking and engaging in human-like activities. This research examined whether anthropomorphism in children's books affects children's learning and conceptions of animals, by specifically assessing the impact of depictions (a bird wearing clothes and reading a book) and language (bird described as talking and as having human intentions). In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children saw picture books featuring realistic drawings of a novel animal. Half of the children also heard factual, realistic language, while the other half heard anthropomorphized language. In Study 2, we replicated the first study using anthropomorphic illustrations of real animals. The results show that the language used to describe animals in books has an effect on children's tendency to attribute human-like traits to animals, and that anthropomorphic storybooks affect younger children's learning of novel facts about animals. These results indicate that anthropomorphized animals in books may not only lead to less learning but also influence children's conceptual knowledge of animals.

[Comparison of two access portals of an employee assistance program at an insurance corporation targeted to reduce stress levels of employees].

PubMed

Burnus, M; Benner, V; Kirchner, D; Drabik, A; Stock, St

2012-03-01

Support programmes for stress reduction were offered independently in two departments (650 employees in total) of an insurance group. Both departments, referred to as comparison group 1 and 2 (CG1 and CG2), offered an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) featuring individual consultations. The employees were addressed through different channels of communication, such as staff meetings, superiors and email. In CG1, a staff adviser additionally called on all employees at their workplace and showed them a brief relaxing technique in order to raise awareness of stress reduction. By contacting employees personally it was also intended to reduce the inhibition threshold for the following individual talks. In CG2 individual talks were done face-to-face, whereas CG1 used telephone counselling. By using the new access channel with an additional personal contact at the workplace, an above average percentage of employees in CG1 could be motivated to participate in the following talks. The rate of participants was five times as high as in CG1, with lower costs for the consultation in each case.

Do cavies talk? The effect of anthropomorphic picture books on children's knowledge about animals

PubMed Central

Ganea, Patricia A.; Canfield, Caitlin F.; Simons-Ghafari, Kadria; Chou, Tommy

2013-01-01

Many books for young children present animals in fantastical and unrealistic ways, such as wearing clothes, talking and engaging in human-like activities. This research examined whether anthropomorphism in children's books affects children's learning and conceptions of animals, by specifically assessing the impact of depictions (a bird wearing clothes and reading a book) and language (bird described as talking and as having human intentions). In Study 1, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children saw picture books featuring realistic drawings of a novel animal. Half of the children also heard factual, realistic language, while the other half heard anthropomorphized language. In Study 2, we replicated the first study using anthropomorphic illustrations of real animals. The results show that the language used to describe animals in books has an effect on children's tendency to attribute human-like traits to animals, and that anthropomorphic storybooks affect younger children's learning of novel facts about animals. These results indicate that anthropomorphized animals in books may not only lead to less learning but also influence children's conceptual knowledge of animals. PMID:24782793

The Outsourcing of Health, Sport and Physical Educational Work: A State of Play

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Williams, Benjamin James; Hay, Peter James; Macdonald, Doune

2011-01-01

Background: The outsourcing of health, sport and physical educational (HSPE) work has been a feature of physical education (PE) "futures talk" for over 20 years. However, HSPE work outsourcing has been the focus of little empirical research and only occasional commentary. That small amount of empirical research that has been conducted…

Capturing Dynamic Presentation: Using Technology to Enhance the Chalk and the Talk

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Venema, Sven; Lodge, Jason M.

2013-01-01

Despite rapid changes in the ways in which university courses are being delivered, lectures have remained a common feature of many courses. The lecture is problematic for many reasons, not the least being that it does not encourage interaction. The current project attempted to address this problem by implementing "digital ink" into…

Talking Back to the Media Ideal: The Development and Validation of the Critical Processing of Beauty Images Scale

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Engeln-Maddox, Renee; Miller, Steven A.

2008-01-01

This article details the development of the Critical Processing of Beauty Images Scale (CPBI) and studies demonstrating the psychometric soundness of this measure. The CPBI measures women's tendency to engage in critical processing of media images featuring idealized female beauty. Three subscales were identified using exploratory factor analysis…

Children's Spatial Thinking: Does Talk about the Spatial World Matter?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pruden, Shannon M.; Levine, Susan C.; Huttenlocher, Janellen

2011-01-01

In this paper we examine the relations between parent spatial language input, children's own production of spatial language, and children's later spatial abilities. Using a longitudinal study design, we coded the use of spatial language (i.e. words describing the spatial features and properties of objects; e.g. big, tall, circle, curvy, edge) from…

Students' Talk about the Climate of Feedback Interventions in the Critique

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dannels, Deanna P.; Housley Gaffney, Amy L.; Martin, Kelly Norris

2011-01-01

Similar to many courses in communication, oral communication is central to the learning goals in the discipline of design. Design critiques, the primary communication activity in design classrooms, occur in every studio course multiple times. One key feature of the critique, as an oral genre, is the amount of time and emphasis placed on feedback.…

Diasporic memories: community, individuality, and creativity -- a life stories perspective.

PubMed

Chamberlain, Mary

2009-01-01

Can we talk of a collective, diasporic memory? I will argue that in the case of the African-Caribbean community, there are distinctive features -- such as the need to "tell" and the need to "connect" -- which suggests that this diasporic memory is framed through identifiable cultural templates, which distinguish it from the memories of migrants.

Diabetes among American Indians: Tribes Hope Traditional Methods Can Lead to a Healthier Future.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pember, Mary Annette

2002-01-01

American Indians are three times more likely than Whites to have type 2 diabetes. Research shows that lifestyle treatments improving diet and increasing exercise are more effective than medications at preventing and treating the disease. A program featuring talking circles and emotional and spiritual counseling by Native elders promotes a…

Who Is Not Sleeping with Whom? What's Not Being Talked about in HRD?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Trehan, Kiran

2004-01-01

Human resource development (HRD) occupies some interesting educational territory. Given the rapid pace of development and innovation in education and in the practice of HRD, coupled with alternative approaches to learning, a re-evaluation of HRD might be expected to be a prominent feature within discussions of the future practice of HRD. However,…

Talking about German Verb Particles Identified in Concordance Lines--From Spontaneous to Expert-Like Metatalk

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schaeffer-Lacroix, Eva

2016-01-01

Johns reports in his text "Kibbitzing one-to-ones" (1997) that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps apprentice writers to make progress in independent text revision. Expecting this progress to be based on the development of expert-like ways to observe language features, I integrated Johns' so-called kibbitzing…

Group motivational interviewing for adolescents: Change talk and alcohol and marijuana outcomes

PubMed Central

D’Amico, Elizabeth J.; Houck, Jon M.; Hunter, Sarah B.; Miles, Jeremy N.V.; Osilla, Karen Chan; Ewing, Brett A.

2014-01-01

Objective Little is known about what may distinguish effective and ineffective group interventions. Group motivational interviewing (MI) is a promising intervention for adolescent alcohol and other drug (AOD) use; however, the mechanisms of change for group MI are unknown. One potential mechanism is change talk, which is client speech arguing for change. The present study describes the group process in adolescent group MI and effects of group-level change talk on individual alcohol and marijuana outcomes. Method We analyzed 129 group session audio recordings from a randomized clinical trial of adolescent group MI. Sequential coding was performed using the Motivational Interviewing Skill Code (MISC) and the CASAA Application for Coding Treatment Interactions (CACTI) software application. Outcomes included past-month intentions, frequency, and consequences of alcohol and marijuana use, motivation to change, and positive expectancies. Results Sequential analysis indicated that facilitator open-ended questions and reflections of change talk (CT) increased group CT. Group CT was then followed by more CT. Multilevel models accounting for rolling group enrollment revealed group CT was associated with decreased alcohol intentions, alcohol use and heavy drinking three months later; group sustain talk was associated with decreased motivation to change, increased intentions to use marijuana, and increased positive alcohol and marijuana expectancies. Conclusions Facilitator speech and peer responses each had effects on change and sustain talk in the group setting, which was then associated with individual changes. Selective reflection of CT in adolescent group MI is suggested as a strategy to manage group dynamics and increase behavioral change. PMID:25365779

A roadside study of observable driver distractions.

PubMed

Sullman, Mark J M; Prat, Francesc; Tasci, Duygu Kuzu

2015-01-01

This study investigated the prevalence of observable distractions while driving and the effect of drivers' characteristics and time-related variables on their prevalence. Using roadside observation, 2 independent observers collected data at 4 randomly selected locations in St. Albans, UK. Of the 10,984 drivers observed, 16.8% were engaged in a secondary task, with talking to passengers being the most common distraction (8.8%), followed by smoking (1.9%) and talking on a hands-free mobile phone (1.7%). An additional 1.0% were observed talking on a handheld phone, and the rest of the distractions (e.g., texting, drinking) were recorded in less than 1% of the drivers observed. Gender-related differences were found for a number of different distractions (i.e., talking to passengers, drinking, and handheld mobile phone conversations), but age emerged as a significant predictor for most secondary tasks, including talking to passengers, smoking, hands-free mobile phone use, handheld mobile phone use, texting/keying numbers, drinking, and engagement in any type of distraction (all distractions combined). The overall pattern for age was that middle-aged and older drivers were less likely to be distracted than younger drivers. This work provides further evidence of the relatively high rate of distracted driving in the UK. The findings clearly indicate that younger drivers are more likely to drive distracted, which probably contributes to their higher crash rates.

How Setswana Cultural Beliefs and Practices on Sexuality Affect Teachers' and Adolescents' Sexual Decisions, Practices, and Experiences as well as HIV/AIDS and STI Prevention in Select Botswanan Secondary Schools.

PubMed

Nleya, Paul T; Segale, Emelda

2015-01-01

The article reports on the aspects of a Botswana Ministry of Education and Skills Development (MoE & SD) HIV/AIDS Instructional Television (ITV) project modeled on a similar HIV/AIDS program implemented in Brazil. This Teacher Capacity Building Project (TCBP) in Botswana is in its initial years of implementation. Its overall goal is to contribute to the prevention and mitigation of the impact of HIV and AIDS by strengthening the capacity of the education and communication sectors to deliver interactive, distance HIV/AIDS education primarily to teachers so that they act as agents of behavior change among the in-school youth. One of the components of the TCBP program is a live teacher education television HIV/AIDS program called Talk Back program. Talk Back is a collaborative effort of the MoE & SD and the Botswana national television station. The Talk Back program involves development and implementation of weekly 1 hour live HIV/AIDS education interactive TV broadcasts for teachers. The development of the live programs is guided by a curriculum that provides a wide range of themes related to HIV/AIDS and education. This article reports the results of a survey of a sample of teachers and students at junior secondary schools and senior secondary schools, first, on their views and opinions regarding the Talk Back program as a TCBP. Second, how Setswana cultural beliefs, myths, and practices on sexuality affect teachers' and adolescents' sexual decisions, practices, and experiences as well as HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infection prevention. A questionnaire survey and focus group interviews were used as data collection instruments in selected secondary schools. The findings of the study suggest that the Talk Back program has not met much success as a TCBP. The findings further suggest that several myths, beliefs, misconceptions, and attitudes about HIV/AIDS exist among Botswana teachers and students and thus make it difficult for the Talk Back program to impart the HIV/AIDS message successfully. Therefore, there is a need for more stakeholders in HIV/AIDS education, where appropriate learning techniques are used, to bring about the desired behavioral change. © The Author(s) 2013.

Two forms of spoken repetition in a girl with autism.

PubMed

Stribling, Penny; Rae, John; Dickerson, Paul

2007-01-01

The talk of persons with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) often features distinctive forms of repetition (echophenomena). Although often characterized as meaningless or inappropriate, there is evidence that such practices can sometimes have communicative functions. To investigate the interactional organization of repetition practices found in the talk of an adolescent girl with an ASD. As part of a project examining the interactional practices of children with ASD, we video-recorded 6 hours of activity in a school classroom for severe learning difficulty (SLD) children. This paper considers instances of repeated talk produced by a class pupil, 'Helen'. The analysis involved assembling a collection of examples of the repeated talk which were then transcribed in detail. Conversation Analysis was used to explore the sequential contexts in which they occur and precisely how they are produced. Two forms of repetition occur very frequently in Helen's talk: first, repeats of turn-final lexical items from another speaker's immediately before talk (prior-turn repeats, a form of immediate echolalia), and second, repeats of the first item within a turn such that a turn is produced consisting entirely of repeated items (within-turn repeats). The latter appears to be a form of palilalia (repeats of one's own prior talk) that has not been widely reported in ASD. The prior turn repeats follow other speaker's initiating actions (e.g. questions) that are addressed specifically to Helen and make a response from her relevant. Helen apparently uses these to demonstrate that she has nevertheless heard, and is orienting to, that prior turn. Within-turn repeats are tied to and bounded by the accomplishment of non-vocal activities, e.g. handing an object to a co-participant, such that the repetitions cease when the object has reached its recipient. The two forms of repetition frequently co-occur to display on-going engagement with a recipient's prior turn. Although Helen has limited verbal resources she is more interactionally competent than this may initially suggest. We propose that these repetition practices may constitute an adaptation to interacting with a limited lexicon. We discuss the relevance of Conversational Analysis for understanding autistic children's pragmatic competence, and the implications for remediation and further research.

Quantum-enhanced feature selection with forward selection and backward elimination

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

He, Zhimin; Li, Lvzhou; Huang, Zhiming; Situ, Haozhen

2018-07-01

Feature selection is a well-known preprocessing technique in machine learning, which can remove irrelevant features to improve the generalization capability of a classifier and reduce training and inference time. However, feature selection is time-consuming, particularly for the applications those have thousands of features, such as image retrieval, text mining and microarray data analysis. It is crucial to accelerate the feature selection process. We propose a quantum version of wrapper-based feature selection, which converts a classical feature selection to its quantum counterpart. It is valuable for machine learning on quantum computer. In this paper, we focus on two popular kinds of feature selection methods, i.e., wrapper-based forward selection and backward elimination. The proposed feature selection algorithm can quadratically accelerate the classical one.

Tools for Observing our Universe

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wollack, Ed

2008-01-01

A selection of hands on demonstrations related to the detection of light will be presented to middle students. The primary emphasis of the talk will be on conveying how scientists use light to remotely observe and understand the properties of astrophysical systems.

Pre-surgical register of tobacco consumption.

PubMed

Gavilán, Eva; Moreno, Montse; Pérez, Àngels; Castellano, Yolanda; Fernández, Esteve; Martínez, Cristina

2018-03-24

Smoking cessation before surgery decreases the risk of complications. The aim of this study was to analyse the smoking register, associated variables and a short talk given to smokers in pre-surgical visits. Cross-sectional study. The pre-surgical records of 680 patients were assessed. We selected patient sociodemographic variables, surgical intervention characteristics, smoking status and consumption pattern. Logistic regression was used to study the variables association with smoking. A percentage of 97.2 of the pre-surgical records include information on tobacco consumption. Overall 20% of surgical patients are smokers. The probability of smoking is higher among men (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] 2.6, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.7-4.0) and≤60 years (aOR 5.4, 95% CI 3.2-9.1). None of the records had information regarding a short talk given to patients to give up smoking. Smoking consumption was prevalent, but the characterisation of a smoker's profile and short talk given to patient before surgery was practically nonexistent. Ensuring that patients who smokes receives a short talk to give up smoking before surgery is necessary. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier España, S.L.U. All rights reserved.

Talking about science: An interpretation of the effects of teacher talk in a high school science classroom

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Moje, Elizabeth B.

This paper builds on research in science education, secondary education, and sociolinguistics by arguing that high school classrooms can be considered speech communities in which language may be selectively used and imposed on students as a means of fostering academic speech community identification. To demonstrate the ways in which a high school teacher's language use may encourage subject area identification, the results of an interactionist analysis of data from a 2-year ethnographic study of one high school chemistry classroom are presented. Findings indicate that this teacher's uses of language fell into three related categories. These uses of language served to foster identification with the academic speech community of science. As a result of the teacher's talk about science according to these three patterns, students developed or reinforced particular views of science. In addition, talking about science in ways that fostered identity with the discipline promoted the teacher as expert and built classroom solidarity or community. These results are discussed in light of sociolinguistic research on classroom competence and of the assertions of science educators regarding social and ideologic implications of language use in science instruction.Received: 23 September 1993; Revised: 15 September 1994;

Neutralization of a single arginine residue gates open a two-pore domain, alkali-activated K+ channel

PubMed Central

Niemeyer, María Isabel; González-Nilo, Fernando D.; Zúñiga, Leandro; González, Wendy; Cid, L. Pablo; Sepúlveda, Francisco V.

2007-01-01

Potassium channels share a common selectivity filter that determines the conduction characteristics of the pore. Diversity in K+ channels is given by how they are gated open. TASK-2, TALK-1, and TALK-2 are two-pore region (2P) KCNK K+ channels gated open by extracellular alkalinization. We have explored the mechanism for this alkalinization-dependent gating using molecular simulation and site-directed mutagenesis followed by functional assay. We show that the side chain of a single arginine residue (R224) near the pore senses pH in TASK-2 with an unusual pKa of 8.0, a shift likely due to its hydrophobic environment. R224 would block the channel through an electrostatic effect on the pore, a situation relieved by its deprotonation by alkalinization. A lysine residue in TALK-2 fulfills the same role but with a largely unchanged pKa, which correlates with an environment that stabilizes its positive charge. In addition to suggesting unified alkaline pH-gating mechanisms within the TALK subfamily of channels, our results illustrate in a physiological context the principle that hydrophobic environment can drastically modulate the pKa of charged amino acids within a protein. PMID:17197424

Selective Attention Enhances Beta-Band Cortical Oscillation to Speech under “Cocktail-Party” Listening Conditions

PubMed Central

Gao, Yayue; Wang, Qian; Ding, Yu; Wang, Changming; Li, Haifeng; Wu, Xihong; Qu, Tianshu; Li, Liang

2017-01-01

Human listeners are able to selectively attend to target speech in a noisy environment with multiple-people talking. Using recordings of scalp electroencephalogram (EEG), this study investigated how selective attention facilitates the cortical representation of target speech under a simulated “cocktail-party” listening condition with speech-on-speech masking. The result shows that the cortical representation of target-speech signals under the multiple-people talking condition was specifically improved by selective attention relative to the non-selective-attention listening condition, and the beta-band activity was most strongly modulated by selective attention. Moreover, measured with the Granger Causality value, selective attention to the single target speech in the mixed-speech complex enhanced the following four causal connectivities for the beta-band oscillation: the ones (1) from site FT7 to the right motor area, (2) from the left frontal area to the right motor area, (3) from the central frontal area to the right motor area, and (4) from the central frontal area to the right frontal area. However, the selective-attention-induced change in beta-band causal connectivity from the central frontal area to the right motor area, but not other beta-band causal connectivities, was significantly correlated with the selective-attention-induced change in the cortical beta-band representation of target speech. These findings suggest that under the “cocktail-party” listening condition, the beta-band oscillation in EEGs to target speech is specifically facilitated by selective attention to the target speech that is embedded in the mixed-speech complex. The selective attention-induced unmasking of target speech may be associated with the improved beta-band functional connectivity from the central frontal area to the right motor area, suggesting a top-down attentional modulation of the speech-motor process. PMID:28239344

Selective Attention Enhances Beta-Band Cortical Oscillation to Speech under "Cocktail-Party" Listening Conditions.

PubMed

Gao, Yayue; Wang, Qian; Ding, Yu; Wang, Changming; Li, Haifeng; Wu, Xihong; Qu, Tianshu; Li, Liang

2017-01-01

Human listeners are able to selectively attend to target speech in a noisy environment with multiple-people talking. Using recordings of scalp electroencephalogram (EEG), this study investigated how selective attention facilitates the cortical representation of target speech under a simulated "cocktail-party" listening condition with speech-on-speech masking. The result shows that the cortical representation of target-speech signals under the multiple-people talking condition was specifically improved by selective attention relative to the non-selective-attention listening condition, and the beta-band activity was most strongly modulated by selective attention. Moreover, measured with the Granger Causality value, selective attention to the single target speech in the mixed-speech complex enhanced the following four causal connectivities for the beta-band oscillation: the ones (1) from site FT7 to the right motor area, (2) from the left frontal area to the right motor area, (3) from the central frontal area to the right motor area, and (4) from the central frontal area to the right frontal area. However, the selective-attention-induced change in beta-band causal connectivity from the central frontal area to the right motor area, but not other beta-band causal connectivities, was significantly correlated with the selective-attention-induced change in the cortical beta-band representation of target speech. These findings suggest that under the "cocktail-party" listening condition, the beta-band oscillation in EEGs to target speech is specifically facilitated by selective attention to the target speech that is embedded in the mixed-speech complex. The selective attention-induced unmasking of target speech may be associated with the improved beta-band functional connectivity from the central frontal area to the right motor area, suggesting a top-down attentional modulation of the speech-motor process.

Kennedy Space Center Director Update

NASA Image and Video Library

2014-03-06

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Community leaders, business executives, educators, and state and local government leaders were updated on NASA Kennedy Space Center programs and accomplishments during Center Director Bob Cabana’s Center Director Update at the Debus Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. An attendee talks with engineers Jason Hopkins and Lisa Lutz, at the Ground Systems Development and Operations display. Attendees talked with Cabana and other senior Kennedy managers and visited displays featuring updates on Kennedy programs and projects, including International Space Station, Commercial Crew, Ground System Development and Operations, Launch Services, Center Planning and Development, Technology, KSC Swamp Works and NASA Education. The morning concluded with a tour of the new Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the visitor complex. For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kennedy. Photo credit: NASA/Daniel Casper

Kennedy Space Center Director Update

NASA Image and Video Library

2014-03-06

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Community leaders, business executives, educators, and state and local government leaders were updated on NASA Kennedy Space Center programs and accomplishments during Center Director Bob Cabana’s Center Director Update at the Debus Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Rob Mueller, senior technologist, talks with attendees at the Swamp Works display. Attendees talked with Cabana and other senior Kennedy managers and visited displays featuring updates on Kennedy programs and projects, including International Space Station, Commercial Crew, Ground System Development and Operations, Launch Services, Center Planning and Development, Technology, KSC Swamp Works and NASA Education. The morning concluded with a tour of the new Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the visitor complex. For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kennedy. Photo credit: NASA/Daniel Casper

Kennedy Space Center Director Update

NASA Image and Video Library

2014-03-06

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Community leaders, business executives, educators, and state and local government leaders were updated on NASA Kennedy Space Center programs and accomplishments during Center Director Bob Cabana’s Center Director Update at the Debus Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. An attendee talks with Scott Thurston, Kennedy deputy of the spacecraft office at the Commercial Crew Program display. Attendees talked with Cabana and other senior Kennedy managers and visited displays featuring updates on Kennedy programs and projects, including International Space Station, Commercial Crew, Ground System Development and Operations, Launch Services, Center Planning and Development, Technology, KSC Swamp Works and NASA Education. The morning concluded with a tour of the new Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the visitor complex. For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kennedy. Photo credit: NASA/Daniel Casper

Kennedy Space Center Director Update

NASA Image and Video Library

2014-03-06

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Community leaders, business executives, educators, and state and local government leaders were updated on NASA Kennedy Space Center programs and accomplishments during Center Director Bob Cabana’s Center Director Update at the Debus Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Rob Mueller, a senior technologist, talks to an attendee about Kennedy’s Swamp Works Laboratory. Attendees talked with Cabana and other senior Kennedy managers and visited displays featuring updates on Kennedy programs and projects, including International Space Station, Commercial Crew, Ground System Development and Operations, Launch Services, Center Planning and Development, Technology, KSC Swamp Works and NASA Education. The morning concluded with a tour of the new Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the visitor complex. For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kennedy. Photo credit: NASA/Daniel Casper

Exploring the Framing of Animal Farming and Meat Consumption: On the Diversity of Topics Used and Qualitative Patterns in Selected Demographic Contexts.

PubMed

Nijland, Hanneke J; Aarts, Noelle; van Woerkum, Cees M J

2018-01-24

In various contexts, people talk about animal farming and meat consumption using different arguments to construct and justify their (non-)acceptability. This article presents the results of an in-depth qualitative inquiry into the content of and contextual patterns in the everyday-life framing regarding this issue, performed among consumers in various settings in two extremes in the European sphere: the Netherlands and Turkey. We describe the methodological steps of collecting, coding, and organizing the variety of encountered framing topics, as well as our search for symbolic convergence in groups of consumers from different selected demographic contexts (country, urban-rural areas, gender, age, and education level). The framing of animal farming and meat consumption in everyday-life is not a simple one-issue rational display of facts; people referred to a vast range of topics in the categories knowledge, convictions, pronounced behaviour, values, norms, interests, and feelings. Looking at framing in relation to the researched demographic contexts, most patterns were found on the level of topics; symbolic convergence in lines of reasoning and composite framing was less prominent in groups based on single demographic contexts than anticipated. An explanation for this lies in the complexity of frame construction, happening in relation with multiple interdependent contextual features.

Processing and representation of social communication sounds in the brainstem auditory system of bats

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pollak, George D.

2003-10-01

While bats are best known for their abilities to orient and capture prey via echolocation, they are also highly social animals who use a rich repertoire of species-specific sounds for social communication. This talk explores how communication signals are progressively transformed and represented in the ascending auditory system. One principal transformation that distinguishes the inferior colliculus from lower nuclei is a change from processing that emphasizes response homogeneity among the neuronal population in each lower nucleus, to one that emphasizes heterogeneity and selectivity in the inferior colliculus. Collicular neurons are selective in that each neuron fails to respond to some, or even all calls, even though those calls have energy that encroaches upon their excitatory response regions, and are heterogeneous since each collicular neuron responds to a different subset of calls. The transformation from homogeneity to heterogeneity may largely be a consequence of the difference in the ways that the various excitatory and inhibitory inputs distribute along frequency contours in lower nuclei compared to the inferior colliculus. One important consequence is that those features endow the population in the inferior colliculus with the ability to respond to any signal with a unique and pronounced spatiotemporal pattern of activity. [Work supported by NIH Grant No. DC 00268.

Feature Selection for Chemical Sensor Arrays Using Mutual Information

PubMed Central

Wang, X. Rosalind; Lizier, Joseph T.; Nowotny, Thomas; Berna, Amalia Z.; Prokopenko, Mikhail; Trowell, Stephen C.

2014-01-01

We address the problem of feature selection for classifying a diverse set of chemicals using an array of metal oxide sensors. Our aim is to evaluate a filter approach to feature selection with reference to previous work, which used a wrapper approach on the same data set, and established best features and upper bounds on classification performance. We selected feature sets that exhibit the maximal mutual information with the identity of the chemicals. The selected features closely match those found to perform well in the previous study using a wrapper approach to conduct an exhaustive search of all permitted feature combinations. By comparing the classification performance of support vector machines (using features selected by mutual information) with the performance observed in the previous study, we found that while our approach does not always give the maximum possible classification performance, it always selects features that achieve classification performance approaching the optimum obtained by exhaustive search. We performed further classification using the selected feature set with some common classifiers and found that, for the selected features, Bayesian Networks gave the best performance. Finally, we compared the observed classification performances with the performance of classifiers using randomly selected features. We found that the selected features consistently outperformed randomly selected features for all tested classifiers. The mutual information filter approach is therefore a computationally efficient method for selecting near optimal features for chemical sensor arrays. PMID:24595058

Summary Report of Working Group 2: Computation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Stoltz, P. H.; Tsung, R. S.

2009-01-01

The working group on computation addressed three physics areas: (i) plasma-based accelerators (laser-driven and beam-driven), (ii) high gradient structure-based accelerators, and (iii) electron beam sources and transport [1]. Highlights of the talks in these areas included new models of breakdown on the microscopic scale, new three-dimensional multipacting calculations with both finite difference and finite element codes, and detailed comparisons of new electron gun models with standard models such as PARMELA. The group also addressed two areas of advances in computation: (i) new algorithms, including simulation in a Lorentz-boosted frame that can reduce computation time orders of magnitude, and (ii) new hardware architectures, like graphics processing units and Cell processors that promise dramatic increases in computing power. Highlights of the talks in these areas included results from the first large-scale parallel finite element particle-in-cell code (PIC), many order-of-magnitude speedup of, and details of porting the VPIC code to the Roadrunner supercomputer. The working group featured two plenary talks, one by Brian Albright of Los Alamos National Laboratory on the performance of the VPIC code on the Roadrunner supercomputer, and one by David Bruhwiler of Tech-X Corporation on recent advances in computation for advanced accelerators. Highlights of the talk by Albright included the first one trillion particle simulations, a sustained performance of 0.3 petaflops, and an eight times speedup of science calculations, including back-scatter in laser-plasma interaction. Highlights of the talk by Bruhwiler included simulations of 10 GeV accelerator laser wakefield stages including external injection, new developments in electromagnetic simulations of electron guns using finite difference and finite element approaches.

Summary Report of Working Group 2: Computation

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Stoltz, P. H.; Tsung, R. S.

2009-01-22

The working group on computation addressed three physics areas: (i) plasma-based accelerators (laser-driven and beam-driven), (ii) high gradient structure-based accelerators, and (iii) electron beam sources and transport [1]. Highlights of the talks in these areas included new models of breakdown on the microscopic scale, new three-dimensional multipacting calculations with both finite difference and finite element codes, and detailed comparisons of new electron gun models with standard models such as PARMELA. The group also addressed two areas of advances in computation: (i) new algorithms, including simulation in a Lorentz-boosted frame that can reduce computation time orders of magnitude, and (ii) newmore » hardware architectures, like graphics processing units and Cell processors that promise dramatic increases in computing power. Highlights of the talks in these areas included results from the first large-scale parallel finite element particle-in-cell code (PIC), many order-of-magnitude speedup of, and details of porting the VPIC code to the Roadrunner supercomputer. The working group featured two plenary talks, one by Brian Albright of Los Alamos National Laboratory on the performance of the VPIC code on the Roadrunner supercomputer, and one by David Bruhwiler of Tech-X Corporation on recent advances in computation for advanced accelerators. Highlights of the talk by Albright included the first one trillion particle simulations, a sustained performance of 0.3 petaflops, and an eight times speedup of science calculations, including back-scatter in laser-plasma interaction. Highlights of the talk by Bruhwiler included simulations of 10 GeV accelerator laser wakefield stages including external injection, new developments in electromagnetic simulations of electron guns using finite difference and finite element approaches.« less

Learning What To Say and When To Say It in the First Days in Preschool.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Martini, Mary

Noting that many instructional routines discourage complex thought and language, a study examined how teachers and children used language in the first 3 weeks in 3 preschools. Specifically it explored how teachers talk to children, what teachers ask children to do with language, and what children say in school. The language features of…

Begin with Love[R]. The First Three Months: Connecting with Your Child. [Videotape].

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

CIVITAS Initiative, Chicago, IL.

Hosted by Oprah Winfrey and featuring Dr. Kyle Pruett, this videotape focuses on new parents' relationship with their infant in the first 3 months of life. The 30-minute videotape begins with footage of infants during the newborn period and depicts parents talking about their emotional response to their infant's birth. The video focuses on…

Unearthing Metaphors: Figurativeness in Teacher-Child Talk about Soil and Related Matters

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pramling, Niklas

2010-01-01

This article reports an empirical study of an important but under-studied feature of learning practices with young children: the use of metaphors and other kinds of figurative language. The data consist of video-recordings of children (3-5 years old) and their teacher engaged in thematic work about soil. The analysis revealed that the teacher and…

Learning To Read with Private Pete & Sailor Sam in World War II.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sticht, Thomas G.

Since thousands of the men who entered military service during World War II were illiterate, the Army developed an "Army Reader," a four-part series featuring Private Pete, that led learners through literacy levels 1-4. Part 1 introduced Private Pete and talked about the things the men experienced when they entered the Army. Part 2…

The Pimp and the Happy Whore: "Doing Gender" in Film Talk in a School Setting

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Eriksson Barajas, Katarina

2010-01-01

The present paper concerns the use of film for eliciting discussions of fundamental values in an upper secondary school setting. In this case, "Lilya 4-ever", a feature film about sex trafficking, is used. The present paper contributes some empirical knowledge about how young people are "doing gender" in a natural setting--an…

Using Visible Speech to Train Perception and Production of Speech for Individuals with Hearing Loss.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Massaro, Dominic W.; Light, Joanna

2004-01-01

The main goal of this study was to implement a computer-animated talking head, Baldi, as a language tutor for speech perception and production for individuals with hearing loss. Baldi can speak slowly; illustrate articulation by making the skin transparent to reveal the tongue, teeth, and palate; and show supplementary articulatory features, such…

Scale invariance in biophysics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Stanley, H. Eugene

2000-06-01

In this general talk, we offer an overview of some problems of interest to biophysicists, medical physicists, and econophysicists. These include DNA sequences, brain plaques in Alzheimer patients, heartbeat intervals, and time series giving price fluctuations in economics. These problems have the common feature that they exhibit features that appear to be scale invariant. Particularly vexing is the problem that some of these scale invariant phenomena are not stationary-their statistical properties vary from one time interval to the next or form one position to the next. We will discuss methods, such as wavelet methods and multifractal methods, to cope with these problems. .

Nuclear physics with antiprotons

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Dover, C.B.

1984-01-01

Transparencies of an invited talk presented at the Nashville meeting of the American Physical Society, October 18-20, 1984, are included. Topics include: (1) Salient features of two-body N anti N interactions (N anti N reversible NN, annihilation mechanisms (quark models), and optical model phenomenology); (2) anti N-nucleus interactions - elastic, inelastic, etc. (new cross section data, optical potentials, signatures of spin-isospin dependence of N anti N force, and (anti p, p) reactions); and (3) anti N-nucleus annihilation processes (features of cascade or fluid dynamics calculations, searches for baryonium and other exotics, meson interferometry, and (anti p, NN) reactions. (WHK)

Learning to talk: A non-imitative account of the replication of phonetics by child learners

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Messum, Piers

2005-04-01

How is it that an English-speaking 5-year-old comes to: pronounce the vowel of seat to be longer than that of sit, but shorter than that of seed; say a multi-word phrase with stress-timed rhythm; aspirate the /p/s of pin, polite, and spin to different degrees? These are systematic features of English, and most people believe that a child replicates them by imitation. If so, he is paying attention to phonetic detail in adult speech that is not very significant linguistically, and then making the effort to reproduce it. With all the other communicative challenges he faces, how plausible is this? An alternative, non-imitative account of the replication of these features relies on two mechanisms: (1) emulation, and (2) the conditioning of articulatory activity by the developing characteristics of speech breathing. The phenomena above then become no more than expressions of how a child finds ways to warp his phonetic output in order to reconcile conflicting production demands. The criteria he uses to do this make the challenges both of learning to talk and then of managing the interaction of complex phonetic patterns considerably more straightforward than has been imagined.

Predictive Models for Semiconductor Device Design and Processing

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Meyyappan, Meyya; Arnold, James O. (Technical Monitor)

1998-01-01

The device feature size continues to be on a downward trend with a simultaneous upward trend in wafer size to 300 mm. Predictive models are needed more than ever before for this reason. At NASA Ames, a Device and Process Modeling effort has been initiated recently with a view to address these issues. Our activities cover sub-micron device physics, process and equipment modeling, computational chemistry and material science. This talk would outline these efforts and emphasize the interaction among various components. The device physics component is largely based on integrating quantum effects into device simulators. We have two parallel efforts, one based on a quantum mechanics approach and the second, a semiclassical hydrodynamics approach with quantum correction terms. Under the first approach, three different quantum simulators are being developed and compared: a nonequlibrium Green's function (NEGF) approach, Wigner function approach, and a density matrix approach. In this talk, results using various codes will be presented. Our process modeling work focuses primarily on epitaxy and etching using first-principles models coupling reactor level and wafer level features. For the latter, we are using a novel approach based on Level Set theory. Sample results from this effort will also be presented.

Commerical Crew Program (CCP) Astronauts Speak To Media

NASA Image and Video Library

2016-08-11

Astronauts selected to train for the flight tests of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program talked to members of the media at the News Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From left are astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken.

Commerical Crew Program (CCP) Astronauts Speak To Media

NASA Image and Video Library

2016-08-11

Astronauts selected to train for the flight tests of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program talked to members of the media at the News Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the discussion, astronaut Bob Behnken answers a question.

Commerical Crew Program (CCP) Astronauts Speak To Media

NASA Image and Video Library

2016-08-11

Astronauts selected to train for the flight tests of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program talked to members of the media at the News Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the discussion, astronaut Doug Hurley answers a question.

Rough sets and Laplacian score based cost-sensitive feature selection

PubMed Central

Yu, Shenglong

2018-01-01

Cost-sensitive feature selection learning is an important preprocessing step in machine learning and data mining. Recently, most existing cost-sensitive feature selection algorithms are heuristic algorithms, which evaluate the importance of each feature individually and select features one by one. Obviously, these algorithms do not consider the relationship among features. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for minimal cost feature selection called the rough sets and Laplacian score based cost-sensitive feature selection. The importance of each feature is evaluated by both rough sets and Laplacian score. Compared with heuristic algorithms, the proposed algorithm takes into consideration the relationship among features with locality preservation of Laplacian score. We select a feature subset with maximal feature importance and minimal cost when cost is undertaken in parallel, where the cost is given by three different distributions to simulate different applications. Different from existing cost-sensitive feature selection algorithms, our algorithm simultaneously selects out a predetermined number of “good” features. Extensive experimental results show that the approach is efficient and able to effectively obtain the minimum cost subset. In addition, the results of our method are more promising than the results of other cost-sensitive feature selection algorithms. PMID:29912884

Rough sets and Laplacian score based cost-sensitive feature selection.

PubMed

Yu, Shenglong; Zhao, Hong

2018-01-01

Cost-sensitive feature selection learning is an important preprocessing step in machine learning and data mining. Recently, most existing cost-sensitive feature selection algorithms are heuristic algorithms, which evaluate the importance of each feature individually and select features one by one. Obviously, these algorithms do not consider the relationship among features. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for minimal cost feature selection called the rough sets and Laplacian score based cost-sensitive feature selection. The importance of each feature is evaluated by both rough sets and Laplacian score. Compared with heuristic algorithms, the proposed algorithm takes into consideration the relationship among features with locality preservation of Laplacian score. We select a feature subset with maximal feature importance and minimal cost when cost is undertaken in parallel, where the cost is given by three different distributions to simulate different applications. Different from existing cost-sensitive feature selection algorithms, our algorithm simultaneously selects out a predetermined number of "good" features. Extensive experimental results show that the approach is efficient and able to effectively obtain the minimum cost subset. In addition, the results of our method are more promising than the results of other cost-sensitive feature selection algorithms.

Cavity-Mediated Coherent Coupling between Distant Quantum Dots

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nicolí, Giorgio; Ferguson, Michael Sven; Rössler, Clemens; Wolfertz, Alexander; Blatter, Gianni; Ihn, Thomas; Ensslin, Klaus; Reichl, Christian; Wegscheider, Werner; Zilberberg, Oded

2018-06-01

Scalable architectures for quantum information technologies require one to selectively couple long-distance qubits while suppressing environmental noise and cross talk. In semiconductor materials, the coherent coupling of a single spin on a quantum dot to a cavity hosting fermionic modes offers a new solution to this technological challenge. Here, we demonstrate coherent coupling between two spatially separated quantum dots using an electronic cavity design that takes advantage of whispering-gallery modes in a two-dimensional electron gas. The cavity-mediated, long-distance coupling effectively minimizes undesirable direct cross talk between the dots and defines a scalable architecture for all-electronic semiconductor-based quantum information processing.

The Role of Food Selection in Swedish Home Economics: The Educational Visions and Cultural Meaning.

PubMed

Höijer, Karin; Hjälmeskog, Karin; Fjellström, Christina

2014-01-01

This article explores foods talked about and chosen in the education of Swedish Home Economics as a relationship between structural processes and agency. Three data sets from observations and focus group interviews with teachers and students were analyzed for food classifications. These were related to a culinary triangle of contradictions, showing factors of identity, convenience and responsibility. Results show that foods talked about and chosen by teachers and students were reflections of dominant cultural values. Results also indicate that teachers had more agency than students, but that the choices they made were framed by educational visions and cultural values.

Partner Pronoun Use, Communal Coping, and Abstinence during Couple-Focused Intervention for Problematic Alcohol Use.

PubMed

Rentscher, Kelly E; Soriano, Emily C; Rohrbaugh, Michael J; Shoham, Varda; Mehl, Matthias R

2017-06-01

Communal coping-a process in which romantic partners view a problem as ours rather than yours or mine, and take collaborative action to address it -has emerged as an important predictor of health and treatment outcomes. In a study of partners' pronoun use prior to and during couple-focused alcohol interventions, we examined first-person plural (we-talk) and singular (I-talk) pronouns as linguistic markers of communal coping and behavioral predictors of treatment outcome. Thirty-three couples in which one partner abused alcohol were selected from a randomized control trial (N = 63) of couple-focused Cognitive-Behavioral or Family Systems Therapy if they had unambiguously successful or unsuccessful treatment outcomes (i.e., patient maintained abstinence for 30 days prior to treatment termination or had more than one heavy drinking day in the same period). Pronoun measures for each partner were obtained via computerized text analysis from transcripts of partners' speech, derived from a videotaped pretreatment interaction task and three subsequent therapy sessions. Spouse we-talk during the intervention (accounting for pretreatment we-talk), as an index of communal orientation, uniquely predicted successful treatment outcomes. In contrast, both patient and spouse I-talk during the intervention (accounting for pretreatment I-talk), as a marker of individualistic orientation, uniquely predicted unsuccessful outcomes, especially when distinguishing active and passive (I vs. me/my) pronoun forms. Results strengthen evidence for the prognostic significance of spouse behavior for patient health outcomes and for communal coping (indexed via pronoun use) as a potential mechanism of change in couple-focused interventions for health problems. © 2015 Family Process Institute.

Spreading Their Wings: Seven Hundred and Sixty-Seven Parents Talk about Their Children's Home and Early Childhood Education Experiences. A Report for the Ministry of Education.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lythe, Cathy

This telephone survey examined the early childhood education (ECE) experiences, home experiences, and home resources of near-5-year-olds in New Zealand, as identified by their parents. Participating were 767 New Zealand families in Wellington and Porirua, a sample selected to be comparable to those selected in other longitudinal studies. The main…

Collaborative knowledge acquisition for the design of context-aware alert systems.

PubMed

Joffe, Erel; Havakuk, Ofer; Herskovic, Jorge R; Patel, Vimla L; Bernstam, Elmer Victor

2012-01-01

To present a framework for combining implicit knowledge acquisition from multiple experts with machine learning and to evaluate this framework in the context of anemia alerts. Five internal medicine residents reviewed 18 anemia alerts, while 'talking aloud'. They identified features that were reviewed by two or more physicians to determine appropriate alert level, etiology and treatment recommendation. Based on these features, data were extracted from 100 randomly-selected anemia cases for a training set and an additional 82 cases for a test set. Two staff internists assigned an alert level, etiology and treatment recommendation before and after reviewing the entire electronic medical record. The training set of 118 cases (100 plus 18) and the test set of 82 cases were explored using RIDOR and JRip algorithms. The feature set was sufficient to assess 93% of anemia cases (intraclass correlation for alert level before and after review of the records by internists 1 and 2 were 0.92 and 0.95, respectively). High-precision classifiers were constructed to identify low-level alerts (precision p=0.87, recall R=0.4), iron deficiency (p=1.0, R=0.73), and anemia associated with kidney disease (p=0.87, R=0.77). It was possible to identify low-level alerts and several conditions commonly associated with chronic anemia. This approach may reduce the number of clinically unimportant alerts. The study was limited to anemia alerts. Furthermore, clinicians were aware of the study hypotheses potentially biasing their evaluation. Implicit knowledge acquisition, collaborative filtering and machine learning were combined automatically to induce clinically meaningful and precise decision rules.

What we talk about when we talk about access deficits

PubMed Central

Mirman, Daniel; Britt, Allison E.

2014-01-01

Semantic impairments have been divided into storage deficits, in which the semantic representations themselves are damaged, and access deficits, in which the representations are intact but access to them is impaired. The behavioural phenomena that have been associated with access deficits include sensitivity to cueing, sensitivity to presentation rate, performance inconsistency, negative serial position effects, sensitivity to number and strength of competitors, semantic blocking effects, disordered selection between strong and weak competitors, correlation between semantic deficits and executive function deficits and reduced word frequency effects. Four general accounts have been proposed for different subsets of these phenomena: abnormal refractoriness, too much activation, impaired competitive selection and deficits of semantic control. A combination of abnormal refractoriness and impaired competitive selection can account for most of the behavioural phenomena, but there remain several open questions. In particular, it remains unclear whether access deficits represent a single syndrome, a syndrome with multiple subtypes or a variable collection of phenomena, whether the underlying deficit is domain-general or domain-specific, whether it is owing to disorders of inhibition, activation or selection, and the nature of the connection (if any) between access phenomena in aphasia and in neurologically intact controls. Computational models offer a promising approach to answering these questions. PMID:24324232

Tools for Observing our Universe

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Woolack, Ed

2007-01-01

A selection of hands on demonstrations related to the detection of light will be presented to middle and high school instructors. The primary emphasis of the talk will be on conveying how scientists use light to remotely observe and understand the properties of astrophysical systems.

Four S's to Turn Your "Sex Talk" into a Super Program.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Friedman, Jay

1995-01-01

Selection of campus speakers on sexuality is discussed, including assessment of speaker qualifications, the importance of teaching style and tone, choice of subject, program design for a meaningful event, and the sensitivity of both the speaker and the institution. (MSE)

Time to Talk: 6 Things to Know When Selecting a Complementary Health Practitioner

MedlinePlus

... conditions. Choose a practitioner who understands how to work with people with your specific needs, even if general well-being is your goal. And, remember that health conditions can affect the safety of complementary approaches; for example, if ...

Walking, Talking Art Gallery.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Piazza, Sheila

2002-01-01

Discusses a project that aimed at educating the public about art by bringing art to the people. Explains that students selected their favorite artwork and made a t-shirt displaying their artwork. States that the students went into their community and also created a mural. (CMK)

Topology of an intracellular transduction chain (phototropism of Phycomyces): 1. Joint review of functional, temporal, and spatial aspects.

PubMed

Wenzler, D; Reinhardt, M; Fukshansky, L

2001-08-21

Two light-induced growth reactions in a unicellular cylindrical sporangiophore of Phycomyces blakesleeanus-vertical growth acceleration under symmetrical irradiation (photomecism) and directional growth under unilateral irradiation (phototropism)-share common input light perception as well as common output growth mechanism but have strongly divergent dynamics and other distinctive features. This divergence culminates in the phototropic paradoxes the main of which states that photomecism shows total adaptation, while phototropism does not adapt. The basis for this contradiction is that the phototropic transduction chain, unlike that of photomecism, faces a spatially non-uniform stimulus and processes a series of spatial patterns (light and absorption profiles, adaptation profile, etc.). The only way to resolve the paradoxes and correlate features of both responses within a single transduction chain is to assume non-local signal transduction, e.g. a cross-talk between different azimuthal locations within the cylindrical cell. On the other hand, to establish the presence of an appropriate cross-talk is equivalent of gaining insight into the topology of the transduction chain. This series of two papers contains a review reconsidering the entire field from this viewpoint (Paper 1) and a mathematical model of pattern transduction which unifies features of phototropism and resolves the paradoxes (Paper 2). At the same time, this is the first "proof of concept" for the "activity/pooling (a/p) networks"-a specific mathematical apparatus designed to analyse systemic properties and control in metabolic pathways. Copyright 2001 Academic Press.

mapview - Interactive viewing of spatial data in R

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Appelhans, Tim; Detsch, Florian; Reudenbach, Cristoph; Woellauer, Stefan

2016-04-01

In this talk we would like to introduce mapview, an R package designed to aid researchers during their work-flow of spatial data analysis. The package was initially developed within the framework of the DFG funded research group "KiLi - Kilimanjaro ecosystems under global change: Linking biodiversity, biotic interactions and biogeochemical ecosystem processes" but has quickly developed into a general purpose spatial data viewer. mapview provides some powerful tools for interactive visualization of standard spatial data in R. It has support for all Spatial*(DataFrame) objects as well as all Raster* objects. It is designed so that one function call - mapview(x) - is all you need to view the data interactively. Adding layers to existing views is very easy and we have taken great care in providing suitable defaults for features such as background maps or coloring but things can be customized flexibly (and permanently) to suit different needs. Even though mapview is for most parts based on the leaflet package, it is far more than just a convenience wrapper around leaflet functionality. mapview provides additional features for handling big data sets (up to several million points) as well as some specialized functionality to view and compare rasters of any size with arbitrary coordinate reference systems. Given that mapview is merely a bridge between R and the underlying leaflet.js javascript library, mapview can be used to produce web-maps by simply providing the path to a designated folder. This talk will be a live demonstration of some of the key features of mapview.

Clustering Properties of Emission Line Selected Galaxies over the past 12.5 Gyrs

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Khostovan, Ali Ahmad; Sobral, David; Mobasher, Bahram; Best, Philip N.; Smail, Ian; Matthee, Jorryt; Darvish, Behnam; Nayyeri, Hooshang; Hemmati, Shoubaneh; Stott, John P.

2018-01-01

In this talk, I will present my latest results on the clustering and dark matter halo (DMH) mass properties of ~7000 narrowband-selected [OIII] and [OII] emitters. I will briefly describe the past work that has been done with our samples (e.g., luminosity functions, evolution of equivalent widths) as motivation of using [OIII] and [OII] emitters to study clustering/halo properties. My talk will focus on our findings regarding the line luminosity and stellar mass dependencies with DMH mass. We find strongly increasing and redshift-independent trends between line luminosity and DMH mass with evidence for a shallower slope at the bright end consistent with halo masses of ~ 1012.5-13 M⊙. Similar, but weaker, trends between stellar mass and halo mass have also been found. We investigate the inter-dependencies of these trends on halo mass and find that the correlation with line luminosity is stronger than with stellar mass. This suggest that active galaxies may be connected with their host DMHs simply based on their emission line luminosity. If time permits, I will briefly present our most recent results using our sample of ~4000 Lyα emitters, where we find similar trends to that seen with the [OIII] and [OII] samples, as well as previous Hα measurements, which suggests galaxies selected based on emission lines may be tracing the same subpopulation of star forming galaxies. I will conclude my talk with an interpretation of this connection and suggest that the shallower slope seen for the brightest emitters is evidence for a transitional halo mass as suggested in models where quenching mechanisms truncate star formation activity and reduce the fraction of star forming galaxies with increasing halo mass.

Identifying and Supporting Productive Collaborative Teacher Talk

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Flarend, Alice M.

As improvements and changes in science education are promulgated, science teachers must be educated about these changes. Professional development programs are central to promoting teacher learning. Although the field seems to have agreed upon large-scalepedagogical features of high quality professional development with an emphasis on building a collaborative community of learners, effective implementation of these features is still problematic. The connections between these collaborative features and actual teacher work during the professional development remain unclear. This qualitative discourse study investigated how teachers engaged in small group discussions use discourse to collaborate during a weeklong professional development program that employed these useful pedagogical features. Small group discussions among the forty-two participants, diverse in their demographics and teaching experiences, were video and audio recorded. A collaborative discourse framework is developed and applied to the discussions, successfully categorizing episodes of discourse according to their productive potential for learning. The structure of the PD activities is then investigated to determine characteristics encouraging to these productive learning conversations. The analysis in this study indicated requiring groups to come to a consensus helps groups dig deeper into the content, promoting a more productive negotiation of concepts. Building consensus around an artifact such as a graph strengthened the need for consensus and thereby strengthened the opportunities for productive conversation. In addition, professional development activities that target building and using specific language were also opportunities for productive learning talk, providing opportunities to negotiate the deep meaning of words and concepts rather then leaving them unexamined. When viewed through the lens of Wenger's Community of Practice (1998) these findings are ways of strengthening the community. Consensus strengthens the mutual accountability and the purposeful building of vocabulary strengthens the shared repertoire, as did having the consensus artifact.

LHCb RICH Upgrade: an overview of the photon detector and electronic system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cassina, L.

2016-01-01

The LHCb experiment is one of the four large detectors operating at the LHC at CERN and it is mainly devoted to CP violation measurements and to the search for new physics in rare decays of beauty and charm hadrons. The data from the two Ring Image Cherenkov (RICH-1 and RICH-2) detectors are essential to identify particles in a wide momentum range. From 2019 onwards 14 TeV collisions with luminosities reaching up to 2 × 1033 cm-2s-1 with 25 ns bunch spacing are planned, with the goal of collecting 5 fb-1 of data per year. In order to avoid degradation of the PID performance at such high rate (40 MHz), the RICH detector has to be upgraded. New photodetectors (Multi-anode photomultiplier tubes, MaPMTs) have been chosen and will be read out using an 8-channel chip, named CLARO, designed to sustain a photon counting rate up to 40 MHz, while minimizing the power consumption and the cross-talk. A 128-bit digital register allows selection of thresholds and attenuation values and provides features useful for testing and debugging. Photosensors and electronics are arranged in basic units, the first prototypes of which have been tested in charged particle beams in autumn 2014. An overview of the CLARO features and of the readout electronics is presented.

Fast method of cross-talk effect reduction in biomedical imaging (Conference Presentation)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nowakowski, Maciej; Kolenderska, Sylwia M.; Borycki, Dawid; Wojtkowski, Maciej

2016-03-01

Optical imaging of biological samples or living tissue structures requires light delivery to a region of interest and then collection of scattered light or fluorescent light in order to reconstruct an image of the object. When the coherent illumination light enters bulky biological object, each of scattering center (single molecule, group of molecules or other sample feature) acts as a secondary light source. As a result, scattered spherical waves from these secondary sources interact with each other, generating cross-talk noise between optical channels (eigenmodes). The cross-talk effect have serious impact on the performance of the imaging systems. In particular it reduces an ability of optical system to transfer high spatial frequencies thereby reducing its resolution. In this work we present a fast method to eliminate all unwanted waves combination, that overlap at image plane, suppressing recovery of high spatial frequencies by using the spatio-temporal optical coherence manipulation (STOC, [1]). In this method a number of phase mask is introduced to illuminating beam by spatial light modulator in a time of single image acquisition. We use a digital mirror device (DMD) in order to rapid cross-talk noise reduction (up to 22kHz modulation frequency) when imaging living biological cells in vivo by using full-field microscopy setup with double pass arrangement. This, to our best knowledge, has never been shown before. [1] D. Borycki, M. Nowakowski, and M. Wojtkowski, Opt. Lett. 38, 4817 (2013).

Joseph A. Burton Forum Award Talk: How a Physics Education has Influenced Practice and Graduate Education in Technically-Focused Quantitative Policy Analysis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Granger Morgan, M.

2011-04-01

In a book for the general public published a year before his death, Carl Sagan wrote, "Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it's accompanied by an error bar---a quiet but instant reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect." For those of us educated in experimental natural science such an observation seems so obvious as to hardly need saying. Yet when, after completing a PhD in experimental radio physics, I began to work on problems in environmental and energy risk and policy analysis in the early 1970s, I was amazed to find that the characterization and treatment of uncertainty was almost completely lacking in the analysis of that day. In the first part of this talk, I will briefly summarize how I, and a number of my physics-educated colleagues, have worked to rectify this situation. Doctoral education in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP) at Carnegie Mellon University has also been shaped by a number of ideas and problem-solving styles that derive from physics. These have been strengthened considerably through integration with a number of ideas from experimental social science -- a field that too many in physics ignore or even belittle. In the second part of the talk, I will describe the PhD program in EPP, talk a bit about some of its unique features, and describe a few of the problems we address.

What People Talk About in Virtual Worlds

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maher, Mary Lou

This chapter examines what people talk about in virtual worlds, employing protocol analysis. Each of two scenario studies was developed to assess the impact of virtual worlds as a collaborative environment for a specific purpose: one for learning and one for designing. The first designed a place in Active Worlds for a course on Web Site Design, having group learning spaces surrounded by individual student galleries. Student text chat was analyzed through a coding scheme with four major categories: control, technology, learning, and place. The second studied expert architects in a Second Life environment called DesignWorld that combined 3D modeling and sketching tools. Video and audio recordings were coded in terms of four categories of communication content (designing, representation of the model, awareness of each other, and software features), and in terms of synthesis comparing alternative designs versus analysis of how well the proposed solution satisfies the given design task. Both studies found that people talk about their avatars, identity, and location in the virtual world. However, the discussion is chiefly about the task and not about the virtual world, implying that virtual worlds provide a viable environment for learning and designing that does not distract people from their task.

Could patients' coughing have communicative significance?

PubMed

Bailey, Julia V

2008-01-01

Medical discourse positions patients with coughs and colds negatively, so consulting health services with 'minor' respiratory illness is therefore more accountable than for other medical problems. Patients face dilemmas since they must persuade doctors of the doctorability of their illness without being seen as hypochondriacal, and they risk losing face if doctors decide that there is nothing much wrong. It is known that the placement of non-lexical features of talk such as laughing or crying can have interactional meaning. Using a data set of video-recorded doctor-patient cough and cold consultations, this study explores whether patients' coughing could have communicative significance. The study is a qualitative analysis of 33 consultations drawing on a constructionist, sociolinguistic analytic approach. Coughing is co-ordinated with talk rather than occurring randomly. Coughing helps patients to demonstrate the doctorability of their symptoms and to legitimize their claims for medical attention. Coughing is also associated with resistance to 'no problem' diagnoses, resulting in changes in the trajectory of talk (for example, soliciting more explanation from doctors and/or re-negotiation of doctors' investigation or treatment plans). Coughing is undoubtedly a manifestation of respiratory illness, but also has communicative significance in consultations for coughs and colds.

Kennedy Space Center Director Update

NASA Image and Video Library

2014-03-06

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Community leaders, business executives, educators, and state and local government leaders were updated on NASA Kennedy Space Center programs and accomplishments during Center Director Bob Cabana’s Center Director Update at the Debus Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. At left, Susan Fernandez from the Office of Senator Marco Rubio talks with another attendee near the Education display. Attendees talked with Cabana and other senior Kennedy managers and visited displays featuring updates on Kennedy programs and projects, including International Space Station, Commercial Crew, Ground System Development and Operations, Launch Services, Center Planning and Development, Technology, KSC Swamp Works and NASA Education. The morning concluded with a tour of the new Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the visitor complex. For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kennedy. Photo credit: NASA/Daniel Casper

Kennedy Space Center Director Update

NASA Image and Video Library

2014-03-06

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Community leaders, business executives, educators, and state and local government leaders were updated on NASA Kennedy Space Center programs and accomplishments during Center Director Bob Cabana’s Center Director Update at the Debus Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. An attendee talks with Trent Smith, program manager, and Tammy Belk, a program specialist, at the ISS Ground Processing and Research Office display. Attendees talked with Cabana and other senior Kennedy managers and visited displays featuring updates on Kennedy programs and projects, including International Space Station, Commercial Crew, Ground System Development and Operations, Launch Services, Center Planning and Development, Technology, KSC Swamp Works and NASA Education. The morning concluded with a tour of the new Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the visitor complex. For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kennedy. Photo credit: NASA/Daniel Casper

Soft Robots: Manipulation, Mobility, and Fast Actuation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shepherd, Robert; Ilievski, Filip; Choi, Wonjae; Stokes, Adam; Morin, Stephen; Mazzeo, Aaron; Kramer, Rebecca; Majidi, Carmel; Wood, Rob; Whitesides, George

2012-02-01

Material innovation will be a key feature in the next generation of robots. A simple, pneumatically powered actuator composed of only soft-elastomers can perform the function of a complex arrangement of mechanical components and electric motors. This talk will focus on soft-lithography as a simple method to fabricate robots--composed of exclusively soft materials (elastomeric polymers). These robots have sophisticated capabilities: a gripper (with no electrical sensors) can manipulate delicate and irregularly shaped objects and a quadrupedal robot can walk to an obstacle (a gap smaller than its walking height) then shrink its body and squeeze through the gap using an undulatory gait. This talk will also introduce a new method of rapidly actuating soft robots. Using this new method, a robot can be caused to jump more than 30 times its height in under 200 milliseconds.

The physiology of deglutition and the pathophysiology and complications of oropharyngeal dysphagia.

PubMed

Steele, Catriona M

2012-01-01

The opening session of the 2nd International Conference on Oropharyngeal Dysphagia featured a series of invited talks reviewing the definition of dysphagia, its prevalence and its pathophysiology. The discussion arising from these talks focused heavily on the current underrecognition of dysphagia as a significant concern for older adults, particularly those over 75. The burdens associated with dysphagia in this sector of the population were recognized to be substantial, both in social/psychological terms and in terms of economic consequences for the healthcare system. The importance of developing swallow screening protocols as a routine method for the early identification of dysphagia and aspiration was explored. The idea of launching political initiatives aimed at increasing awareness and the utilization of appropriate dysphagia healthcare codes was also discussed. Copyright © 2012 S. Karger AG, Basel.

Talk about "hooking up": the influence of college student social networks on nonrelationship sex.

PubMed

Holman, Amanda; Sillars, Alan

2012-01-01

This research considers how communication within college student social networks may encourage high-risk sexual relationships. Students (n = 274) described sexual scripts for hooking up and reported on peer communication, sexual behavior, and sexual attitudes. Students described varied hookup scripts, expressed ambivalent attitudes, and reported moderate participation in hookups overall. However, the most common hookup script, suggesting high-risk sexual activity (i.e., unplanned, inebriated sex), was featured in most accounts of students who themselves participated in hookups. Students overestimated how often others were hooking up, and these estimates were especially inflated by students who frequently talked about hooking up with friends. Among students with strong ties to peers, frequent peer communication about sex predicted participation in hookups and favorable attitudes about hooking up. Peer approval also predicted hookup behavior and attitudes.

Conversation and Object Manipulation Influence Children's Learning in a Museum.

PubMed

Jant, Erin A; Haden, Catherine A; Uttal, David H; Babcock, Elizabeth

2014-01-01

The effects of parent-child conversation and object manipulation on children's learning, transfer of knowledge, and memory were examined in two museum exhibits and conversations recorded at home. Seventy-eight children (Mage  = 4.9) and their parents were randomly assigned to receive conversation cards featuring elaborative questions about exhibit objects, the physical objects themselves, both, or neither, before their exhibit visits. Dyads who received the cards engaged in more elaborative talk and joint nonverbal activities with objects in the first exhibit than those who did not. Dyads who received objects engaged in the most parent-child joint talk. Results also illustrate transfer of information across exhibits and from museum to home. Implications for understanding mechanisms of informal learning and transfer are discussed. © 2014 The Authors. Child Development © 2014 Society for Research in Child Development, Inc.

Teacher Talk about Student Ability and Achievement in the Era of Data-Driven Decision Making

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Datnow, Amanda; Choi, Bailey; Park, Vicki; St. John, Elise

2018-01-01

Background: Data-driven decision making continues to be a common feature of educational reform agendas across the globe. In many U.S. schools, the teacher team meeting is a key setting in which data use is intended to take place, with the aim of planning instruction to address students' needs. However, most prior research has not examined how the…

Report of the Regional Literacy Seminar for Representatives of Non-Governmental Organizations in Asia (Colombo, Ceylon, January 18-28, 1970).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, London (England).

This report highlights the main features of each talk and discussion given at the seminar and pinpoints conclusions reached. The seminar made a number of recommendations, which include: (1) that Unesco place greater emphasis in all future functional literacy projects on the importance of literacy as a factor in the civic and political education of…

Intelligent Behavioral Action Aiding for Improved Autonomous Image Navigation

DTIC Science & Technology

2012-09-13

odometry, SICK laser scanning unit ( Lidar ), Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and ultrasonic distance measurement system (Figure 32). The Lidar , IMU...2010, July) GPS world. [Online]. http://www.gpsworld.com/tech-talk- blog/gnss-independent-navigation-solution-using-integrated- lidar -data-11378 [4...Milford, David McKinnon, Michael Warren, Gordon Wyeth, and Ben Upcroft, "Feature-based Visual Odometry and Featureless Place Recognition for SLAM in

Noise Enhanced Sensory Signal Processing

DTIC Science & Technology

2012-01-31

Moreover, a contrast sensitivity function (CSF), as an object feature enhancer , was employed for further improving the segmentation performance, which...Digital mammography work appeared in ACM Tech News on Feb. 3, 2010. 8. Interactions/Transitions Invited talks: • P.K. Varshney, “Noise Enhanced ... mammography machines with regard to our work on image enhancement based on SR. • Lectures at Lockheed Martin in Syracuse and SRC that included discussion

Lexical Features of Teacher Talk in English Classrooms in Senior High Schools

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Irmayani; Rachmajanti, Sri

2017-01-01

English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in Indonesia has been taught since elementary schools. As the only setting for EFL learners to learn English formally, the students of Senior High Schools are in the 7th to 9th year in acquiring English as a foreign language. As non-native English teachers who has been teaching English for years, English…

Speaking Personally about Distance Education: Foundations of Contemporary Practice. Readings in Distance Education, Number 6.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Moore, Michael G., Ed.; Shin, Namin, Ed.

"Speaking Personally" is the generic name given to one of the regular features of "The American Journal of Distance Education"--AJDE--an interview with a leading personality in the field. As implied in the title, interviewees have always been encouraged to talk in a relatively informal way. Since an interview has been reported in every issue of…

2011 Technology Expo

NASA Image and Video Library

2011-05-26

Phillip Stallcup with Agilent Technologies in Huntsville, Ala., talks with NASA employees Leslie Ladner (l) and Kelly Sullivan about spectrum analyzers and other test equipment during the Stennis Technology Expo on May 26. The expo was hosted by NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement and featured various exhibitors demonstrating the latest in a range of technologies, such as training equipment, secure data storage, video networks, distance learning and data management.

A Toddler's Treatment of "Mm" and "Mm Hm" in Talk with a Parent

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Filipi, Anna

2007-01-01

The study to be reported in this paper examined the work accomplished by "mm" and "mm hm" in the interactions of a parent and his daughter aged 0;10-2;0. Using the findings of Gardner (2001) for adults, the analysis shows that "mm" accomplished a range of functions based on its sequential placement and prosodic features, whereas "mm hm" was much…

Spring Research Festival Features Visit from FCPS Superintendent | Poster

Cancer.gov

One of the highlights of the 19th annual Spring Research Festival (SRF), held May 4–7, was a visit from Terry Alban, Ph.D., superintendent of Frederick County Public Schools (FCPS), and Mike Markoe, deputy superintendent, FCPS. They toured the event on May 7, talking to researchers and students about their posters. “Dr. Alban was very interested in hearing what the Werner H.

Online feature selection with streaming features.

PubMed

Wu, Xindong; Yu, Kui; Ding, Wei; Wang, Hao; Zhu, Xingquan

2013-05-01

We propose a new online feature selection framework for applications with streaming features where the knowledge of the full feature space is unknown in advance. We define streaming features as features that flow in one by one over time whereas the number of training examples remains fixed. This is in contrast with traditional online learning methods that only deal with sequentially added observations, with little attention being paid to streaming features. The critical challenges for Online Streaming Feature Selection (OSFS) include 1) the continuous growth of feature volumes over time, 2) a large feature space, possibly of unknown or infinite size, and 3) the unavailability of the entire feature set before learning starts. In the paper, we present a novel Online Streaming Feature Selection method to select strongly relevant and nonredundant features on the fly. An efficient Fast-OSFS algorithm is proposed to improve feature selection performance. The proposed algorithms are evaluated extensively on high-dimensional datasets and also with a real-world case study on impact crater detection. Experimental results demonstrate that the algorithms achieve better compactness and higher prediction accuracy than existing streaming feature selection algorithms.

Synthesis of Speaker Facial Movement to Match Selected Speech Sequences

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Scott, K. C.; Kagels, D. S.; Watson, S. H.; Rom, H.; Wright, J. R.; Lee, M.; Hussey, K. J.

1994-01-01

A system is described which allows for the synthesis of a video sequence of a realistic-appearing talking human head. A phonic based approach is used to describe facial motion; image processing rather than physical modeling techniques are used to create video frames.

Enhancing the Discrimination Ability of a Gas Sensor Array Based on a Novel Feature Selection and Fusion Framework.

PubMed

Deng, Changjian; Lv, Kun; Shi, Debo; Yang, Bo; Yu, Song; He, Zhiyi; Yan, Jia

2018-06-12

In this paper, a novel feature selection and fusion framework is proposed to enhance the discrimination ability of gas sensor arrays for odor identification. Firstly, we put forward an efficient feature selection method based on the separability and the dissimilarity to determine the feature selection order for each type of feature when increasing the dimension of selected feature subsets. Secondly, the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) classifier is applied to determine the dimensions of the optimal feature subsets for different types of features. Finally, in the process of establishing features fusion, we come up with a classification dominance feature fusion strategy which conducts an effective basic feature. Experimental results on two datasets show that the recognition rates of Database I and Database II achieve 97.5% and 80.11%, respectively, when k = 1 for KNN classifier and the distance metric is correlation distance (COR), which demonstrates the superiority of the proposed feature selection and fusion framework in representing signal features. The novel feature selection method proposed in this paper can effectively select feature subsets that are conducive to the classification, while the feature fusion framework can fuse various features which describe the different characteristics of sensor signals, for enhancing the discrimination ability of gas sensors and, to a certain extent, suppressing drift effect.

The roles of teachers' science talk in revealing language demands within diverse elementary school classrooms: a study of teaching heat and temperature in Singapore

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Seah, Lay Hoon; Yore, Larry D.

2017-01-01

This study of three science teachers' lessons on heat and temperature seeks to characterise classroom talk that highlighted the ways language is used and to examine the nature of the language demands revealed in constructing, negotiating, arguing and communicating science ideas. The transcripts from the entire instructional units for these teachers' four culturally and linguistically diverse Grade 4 classes (10 years old) with English as the language of instruction constitute the data for this investigation. Analysis of these transcripts focused on teachers' talk that made explicit reference to the form or function of the language of science and led to the inductive development of the 'Attending to Language Demands in Science' analytical framework. This framework in turn revealed that the major foregrounding purposes of teachers' talk include labelling, explaining, differentiating, selecting and constructing. Further classification of the instances within these categories revealed the extensive and contextualised nature of the language demands. The results challenge the conventional assumption that basic literacy skills dominate over disciplinary literacy skills in primary school science. Potential uses of the analytical framework that could further expand our understanding of the forms, functions and demands of language used in elementary school science are also discussed.

Improving spinning disk confocal microscopy by preventing pinhole cross-talk for intravital imaging

PubMed Central

Shimozawa, Togo; Yamagata, Kazuo; Kondo, Takefumi; Hayashi, Shigeo; Shitamukai, Atsunori; Konno, Daijiro; Matsuzaki, Fumio; Takayama, Jun; Onami, Shuichi; Nakayama, Hiroshi; Kosugi, Yasuhito; Watanabe, Tomonobu M.; Fujita, Katsumasa; Mimori-Kiyosue, Yuko

2013-01-01

A recent key requirement in life sciences is the observation of biological processes in their natural in vivo context. However, imaging techniques that allow fast imaging with higher resolution in 3D thick specimens are still limited. Spinning disk confocal microscopy using a Yokogawa Confocal Scanner Unit, which offers high-speed multipoint confocal live imaging, has been found to have wide utility among cell biologists. A conventional Confocal Scanner Unit configuration, however, is not optimized for thick specimens, for which the background noise attributed to “pinhole cross-talk,” which is unintended pinhole transmission of out-of-focus light, limits overall performance in focal discrimination and reduces confocal capability. Here, we improve spinning disk confocal microscopy by eliminating pinhole cross-talk. First, the amount of pinhole cross-talk is reduced by increasing the interpinhole distance. Second, the generation of out-of-focus light is prevented by two-photon excitation that achieves selective-plane illumination. We evaluate the effect of these modifications and test the applicability to the live imaging of green fluorescent protein-expressing model animals. As demonstrated by visualizing the fine details of the 3D cell shape and submicron-size cytoskeletal structures inside animals, these strategies dramatically improve higher-resolution intravital imaging. PMID:23401517

Improving spinning disk confocal microscopy by preventing pinhole cross-talk for intravital imaging.

PubMed

Shimozawa, Togo; Yamagata, Kazuo; Kondo, Takefumi; Hayashi, Shigeo; Shitamukai, Atsunori; Konno, Daijiro; Matsuzaki, Fumio; Takayama, Jun; Onami, Shuichi; Nakayama, Hiroshi; Kosugi, Yasuhito; Watanabe, Tomonobu M; Fujita, Katsumasa; Mimori-Kiyosue, Yuko

2013-02-26

A recent key requirement in life sciences is the observation of biological processes in their natural in vivo context. However, imaging techniques that allow fast imaging with higher resolution in 3D thick specimens are still limited. Spinning disk confocal microscopy using a Yokogawa Confocal Scanner Unit, which offers high-speed multipoint confocal live imaging, has been found to have wide utility among cell biologists. A conventional Confocal Scanner Unit configuration, however, is not optimized for thick specimens, for which the background noise attributed to "pinhole cross-talk," which is unintended pinhole transmission of out-of-focus light, limits overall performance in focal discrimination and reduces confocal capability. Here, we improve spinning disk confocal microscopy by eliminating pinhole cross-talk. First, the amount of pinhole cross-talk is reduced by increasing the interpinhole distance. Second, the generation of out-of-focus light is prevented by two-photon excitation that achieves selective-plane illumination. We evaluate the effect of these modifications and test the applicability to the live imaging of green fluorescent protein-expressing model animals. As demonstrated by visualizing the fine details of the 3D cell shape and submicron-size cytoskeletal structures inside animals, these strategies dramatically improve higher-resolution intravital imaging.

Leo Szilard Lectureship Award Talk - Universal Scaling Laws from Cells to Cities; A Physicist's Search for Quantitative, Unified Theories of Biological and Social Structure and Dynamics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

West, Geoffrey

2013-04-01

Many of the most challenging, exciting and profound questions facing science and society, from the origins of life to global sustainability, fall under the banner of ``complex adaptive systems.'' This talk explores how scaling can be used to begin to develop physics-inspired quantitative, predictive, coarse-grained theories for understanding their structure, dynamics and organization based on underlying mathematisable principles. Remarkably, most physiological, organisational and life history phenomena in biology and socio-economic systems scale in a simple and ``universal'' fashion: metabolic rate scales approximately as the 3/4-power of mass over 27 orders of magnitude from complex molecules to the largest organisms. Time-scales (such as lifespans and growth-rates) and sizes (such as genome lengths and RNA densities) scale with exponents which are typically simple multiples of 1/4, suggesting that fundamental constraints underlie much of the generic structure and dynamics of living systems. These scaling laws follow from dynamical and geometrical properties of space-filling, fractal-like, hierarchical branching networks, presumed optimised by natural selection. This leads to a general framework that potentially captures essential features of diverse systems including vasculature, ontogenetic growth, cancer, aging and mortality, sleep, cell size, and DNA nucleotide substitution rates. Cities and companies also scale: wages, profits, patents, crime, disease, pollution, road lengths scale similarly across the globe, reflecting underlying universal social network dynamics which point to general principles of organization transcending their individuality. These have dramatic implications for global sustainability: innovation and wealth creation that fuel social systems, left unchecked, potentially sow the seeds for their inevitable collapse.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Jeffrey A Appel

BTeV is a new Fermilab beauty and charm experiment designed to operate in the CZero region of the Tevatron collider. Critical to the success of BTeV is its pixel detector. The unique features of this pixel detector include its proximity to the beam, its operation with a beam crossing time of 132 ns, and the need for the detector information to be read out quickly enough to be used for the lowest level trigger. This talk presents an overview of the pixel detector design, giving the motivations for the technical choices made. The status of the current R&D on detectormore » components is also reviewed. Additional Pixel 2002 talks on the BTeV pixel detector are given by Dave Christian[1], Mayling Wong[2], and Sergio Zimmermann[3]. Table 1 gives a selection of pixel detector parameters for the ALICE, ATLAS, BTeV, and CMS experiments. Comparing the progression of this table, which I have been updating for the last several years, has shown a convergence of specifications. Nevertheless, significant differences endure. The BTeV data-driven readout, horizontal and vertical position resolution better than 9 {micro}m with the {+-} 300 mr forward acceptance, and positioning in vacuum and as close as 6 mm from the circulating beams remain unique. These features are driven by the physics goals of the BTeV experiment. Table 2 demonstrates that the vertex trigger performance made possible by these features is requisite for a very large fraction of the B meson decay physics which is so central to the motivation for BTeV. For most of the physics quantities of interest listed in the table, the vertex trigger is essential. The performance of the BTeV pixel detector may be summarized by looking at particular physics examples; e.g., the B{sub s} meson decay B{sub s} {yields} D{sub s}{sup -} K{sup +}. For that decay, studies using GEANT3 simulations provide quantitative measures of performance. For example, the separation between the B{sub s} decay point and the primary proton-antiproton interaction can be measured with an rms uncertainty of 138 {micro}m. This, with the uncertainty in the decay vertex position, leads to an uncertainty of the B{sub s} proper decay time of 46 fs. Even if the parameter x{sub s} equals 25 (where the current lower limit on x{sub s} is about 15), the corresponding relevant proper time is 400 fs. So, the detector resolution is more than adequate to make an excellent measurement of this parameter.« less

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Schroeder, Julian I

The 19th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research was a successful meeting attended by 815 scientists from around the world including 322 from the United States, 146 attendees from Canada, 179 from Europe, 134 from Asia, and 34 from a combination of Australia, South America, Africa and the Middle East. The scientific program was of excellent quality featuring 64 talks, including 41 from invited speakers. The Keynote Lecture, delivered by Chris Somerville (Energy Biosciences Institute/UC Berkeley) was particularly relevant to US agriculture and energy research and was titled The Development of Cellulosic Biofuels. There were also 6 community-organized workshops featuring 30more » additional talks on topics including Frontiers in Plant Systems Biology, Sources and strategies for Gene Structure, Gene Function, and Metabolic Pathway annotation at TAIR and AraCyc, Advanced Bioinformatic Resources for Arabidopsis, Laser Microtechniques and Applications with Arabidopsis, Plant Proteomics- Tools, Approaches, Standards and Breakthroughs in Studying the Proteome, and Phytohormone Biosynthesis and Signal Transduction. Conference organizers arranged a special seminar by Jim Collins (head of the Directorate of Biosciences at NSF) to provide a community discussion forum regarding the future of Arabidopsis research. Approximately 575 posters were presented in topic areas including, among others, Development, Signal Transduction, Cell Walls, Non-Arabidopsis Systems, and Interactions with Biotic and Abiotic Factors. All conference abstracts and the full program are posted at The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), a publicly-accessibly website (www.arabidopsis.org/news/abstracts.jsp.) A survey completed by approximately 40% of the meeting attendees showed high satisfaction with the quality of the presentations, meeting organization and the city of Montreal. The conference is the largest annual international Arabidopsis venue which allowed the exchange of information at the forefront of Arabidopsis research and facilitated the establishment of new, and the strengthening of old, collaborations and networks. In addition, the conference provides the site for the annual meetings of the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC) and the North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee (NAASC.) Graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, junior faculty, and underrepresented minorities made up half of the oral presentations thereby promoting the training of young scientists and facilitating important career development opportunities for speakers. Several poster sessions provided an opportunity for younger participants to freely meet with more established scientists. The NAASC continued its outreach efforts and again sponsored two special luncheons to encourage personal and professional development of young scientists and underrepresented minorities. The Emerging Scientists Luncheon featured 8 graduate students selected on the basis of scientific excellence of their submitted research abstracts. Also attending were the Keynote Speaker and faculty conference organizers. The Minority Funding Luncheon, featured 7 awardees (2 female graduate students, 2 female faculty, 2 male graduate students and 1 male faculty) selected by the NAASC through a widely-publicized application process. This luncheon was established specifically to provide an opportunity for underrepresented minorities, and/or scientists from Minority-Serving Institutions/Historically Black Colleges and Universities to network with NAASC members and representatives from federal funding agencies in an informal and intimate setting. This luncheon included introductions of each award recipient and discussion of outreach efforts and informal research and career discussions. Staff members from The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), the public U.S. Arabidopsis bioinformatics resource, led one workshop and participated in another to convey information to the community about Arabidopsis resources. Participation by young researchers was facilitated through DOE-sponsored registration awards to 10 early career applicants from the US including five graduate students, four postdoctoral scholars and one new assistant faculty member.« less

Be/X-ray Binary Science for Future X-ray Timing Missions

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wilson-Hodge, Colleen A.

2011-01-01

For future missions, the Be/X-ray binary community needs to clearly define our science priorities for the future to advocate for their inclusion in future missions. In this talk, I will describe current designs for two potential future missions and Be X-ray binary science enabled by these designs. The Large Observatory For X-ray Timing (LOFT) is an X-ray timing mission selected in February 2011 for the assessment phase from the 2010 ESA M3 call for proposals. The Advanced X-ray Timing ARray (AXTAR) is a NASA explorer concept X-ray timing mission. This talk is intended to initiate discussions of our science priorities for the future.

Selective Audiovisual Semantic Integration Enabled by Feature-Selective Attention.

PubMed

Li, Yuanqing; Long, Jinyi; Huang, Biao; Yu, Tianyou; Wu, Wei; Li, Peijun; Fang, Fang; Sun, Pei

2016-01-13

An audiovisual object may contain multiple semantic features, such as the gender and emotional features of the speaker. Feature-selective attention and audiovisual semantic integration are two brain functions involved in the recognition of audiovisual objects. Humans often selectively attend to one or several features while ignoring the other features of an audiovisual object. Meanwhile, the human brain integrates semantic information from the visual and auditory modalities. However, how these two brain functions correlate with each other remains to be elucidated. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we explored the neural mechanism by which feature-selective attention modulates audiovisual semantic integration. During the fMRI experiment, the subjects were presented with visual-only, auditory-only, or audiovisual dynamical facial stimuli and performed several feature-selective attention tasks. Our results revealed that a distribution of areas, including heteromodal areas and brain areas encoding attended features, may be involved in audiovisual semantic integration. Through feature-selective attention, the human brain may selectively integrate audiovisual semantic information from attended features by enhancing functional connectivity and thus regulating information flows from heteromodal areas to brain areas encoding the attended features.

EEG feature selection method based on decision tree.

PubMed

Duan, Lijuan; Ge, Hui; Ma, Wei; Miao, Jun

2015-01-01

This paper aims to solve automated feature selection problem in brain computer interface (BCI). In order to automate feature selection process, we proposed a novel EEG feature selection method based on decision tree (DT). During the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal processing, a feature extraction method based on principle component analysis (PCA) was used, and the selection process based on decision tree was performed by searching the feature space and automatically selecting optimal features. Considering that EEG signals are a series of non-linear signals, a generalized linear classifier named support vector machine (SVM) was chosen. In order to test the validity of the proposed method, we applied the EEG feature selection method based on decision tree to BCI Competition II datasets Ia, and the experiment showed encouraging results.

Compensatory selection for roads over natural linear features by wolves in northern Ontario: Implications for caribou conservation

PubMed Central

Patterson, Brent R.; Anderson, Morgan L.; Rodgers, Arthur R.; Vander Vennen, Lucas M.; Fryxell, John M.

2017-01-01

Woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) in Ontario are a threatened species that have experienced a substantial retraction of their historic range. Part of their decline has been attributed to increasing densities of anthropogenic linear features such as trails, roads, railways, and hydro lines. These features have been shown to increase the search efficiency and kill rate of wolves. However, it is unclear whether selection for anthropogenic linear features is additive or compensatory to selection for natural (water) linear features which may also be used for travel. We studied the selection of water and anthropogenic linear features by 52 resident wolves (Canis lupus x lycaon) over four years across three study areas in northern Ontario that varied in degrees of forestry activity and human disturbance. We used Euclidean distance-based resource selection functions (mixed-effects logistic regression) at the seasonal range scale with random coefficients for distance to water linear features, primary/secondary roads/railways, and hydro lines, and tertiary roads to estimate the strength of selection for each linear feature and for several habitat types, while accounting for availability of each feature. Next, we investigated the trade-off between selection for anthropogenic and water linear features. Wolves selected both anthropogenic and water linear features; selection for anthropogenic features was stronger than for water during the rendezvous season. Selection for anthropogenic linear features increased with increasing density of these features on the landscape, while selection for natural linear features declined, indicating compensatory selection of anthropogenic linear features. These results have implications for woodland caribou conservation. Prey encounter rates between wolves and caribou seem to be strongly influenced by increasing linear feature densities. This behavioral mechanism–a compensatory functional response to anthropogenic linear feature density resulting in decreased use of natural travel corridors–has negative consequences for the viability of woodland caribou. PMID:29117234

Compensatory selection for roads over natural linear features by wolves in northern Ontario: Implications for caribou conservation.

PubMed

Newton, Erica J; Patterson, Brent R; Anderson, Morgan L; Rodgers, Arthur R; Vander Vennen, Lucas M; Fryxell, John M

2017-01-01

Woodland caribou (Rangifer tarandus caribou) in Ontario are a threatened species that have experienced a substantial retraction of their historic range. Part of their decline has been attributed to increasing densities of anthropogenic linear features such as trails, roads, railways, and hydro lines. These features have been shown to increase the search efficiency and kill rate of wolves. However, it is unclear whether selection for anthropogenic linear features is additive or compensatory to selection for natural (water) linear features which may also be used for travel. We studied the selection of water and anthropogenic linear features by 52 resident wolves (Canis lupus x lycaon) over four years across three study areas in northern Ontario that varied in degrees of forestry activity and human disturbance. We used Euclidean distance-based resource selection functions (mixed-effects logistic regression) at the seasonal range scale with random coefficients for distance to water linear features, primary/secondary roads/railways, and hydro lines, and tertiary roads to estimate the strength of selection for each linear feature and for several habitat types, while accounting for availability of each feature. Next, we investigated the trade-off between selection for anthropogenic and water linear features. Wolves selected both anthropogenic and water linear features; selection for anthropogenic features was stronger than for water during the rendezvous season. Selection for anthropogenic linear features increased with increasing density of these features on the landscape, while selection for natural linear features declined, indicating compensatory selection of anthropogenic linear features. These results have implications for woodland caribou conservation. Prey encounter rates between wolves and caribou seem to be strongly influenced by increasing linear feature densities. This behavioral mechanism-a compensatory functional response to anthropogenic linear feature density resulting in decreased use of natural travel corridors-has negative consequences for the viability of woodland caribou.

McTwo: a two-step feature selection algorithm based on maximal information coefficient.

PubMed

Ge, Ruiquan; Zhou, Manli; Luo, Youxi; Meng, Qinghan; Mai, Guoqin; Ma, Dongli; Wang, Guoqing; Zhou, Fengfeng

2016-03-23

High-throughput bio-OMIC technologies are producing high-dimension data from bio-samples at an ever increasing rate, whereas the training sample number in a traditional experiment remains small due to various difficulties. This "large p, small n" paradigm in the area of biomedical "big data" may be at least partly solved by feature selection algorithms, which select only features significantly associated with phenotypes. Feature selection is an NP-hard problem. Due to the exponentially increased time requirement for finding the globally optimal solution, all the existing feature selection algorithms employ heuristic rules to find locally optimal solutions, and their solutions achieve different performances on different datasets. This work describes a feature selection algorithm based on a recently published correlation measurement, Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC). The proposed algorithm, McTwo, aims to select features associated with phenotypes, independently of each other, and achieving high classification performance of the nearest neighbor algorithm. Based on the comparative study of 17 datasets, McTwo performs about as well as or better than existing algorithms, with significantly reduced numbers of selected features. The features selected by McTwo also appear to have particular biomedical relevance to the phenotypes from the literature. McTwo selects a feature subset with very good classification performance, as well as a small feature number. So McTwo may represent a complementary feature selection algorithm for the high-dimensional biomedical datasets.

INTERACTIONS OF CHANGING CLIMATE AND ULTRAVIOLET RADIATION IN AQUATIC AND TERRESTRIAL BIOGEOCHEMICAL CYCLES

EPA Science Inventory

During the past decade interest has developed in the interactive effects of climate change and UV radiation on aquatic and terrestrial biogeochemical cycles. This talk used selected case studies to illustrate approaches that are being used to investigate these intriguing processe...

Attentional Selection Can Be Predicted by Reinforcement Learning of Task-relevant Stimulus Features Weighted by Value-independent Stickiness.

PubMed

Balcarras, Matthew; Ardid, Salva; Kaping, Daniel; Everling, Stefan; Womelsdorf, Thilo

2016-02-01

Attention includes processes that evaluate stimuli relevance, select the most relevant stimulus against less relevant stimuli, and bias choice behavior toward the selected information. It is not clear how these processes interact. Here, we captured these processes in a reinforcement learning framework applied to a feature-based attention task that required macaques to learn and update the value of stimulus features while ignoring nonrelevant sensory features, locations, and action plans. We found that value-based reinforcement learning mechanisms could account for feature-based attentional selection and choice behavior but required a value-independent stickiness selection process to explain selection errors while at asymptotic behavior. By comparing different reinforcement learning schemes, we found that trial-by-trial selections were best predicted by a model that only represents expected values for the task-relevant feature dimension, with nonrelevant stimulus features and action plans having only a marginal influence on covert selections. These findings show that attentional control subprocesses can be described by (1) the reinforcement learning of feature values within a restricted feature space that excludes irrelevant feature dimensions, (2) a stochastic selection process on feature-specific value representations, and (3) value-independent stickiness toward previous feature selections akin to perseveration in the motor domain. We speculate that these three mechanisms are implemented by distinct but interacting brain circuits and that the proposed formal account of feature-based stimulus selection will be important to understand how attentional subprocesses are implemented in primate brain networks.

IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging.

PubMed

2017-01-01

The IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI) is a scientific conference dedicated to mathematical, algorithmic, and computational aspects of biological and biomedical imaging, across all scales of observation. It fosters knowledge transfer among different imaging communities and contributes to an integrative approach to biomedical imaging. ISBI is a joint initiative from the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS). The 2018 meeting will include tutorials, and a scientific program composed of plenary talks, invited special sessions, challenges, as well as oral and poster presentations of peer-reviewed papers. High-quality papers are requested containing original contributions to the topics of interest including image formation and reconstruction, computational and statistical image processing and analysis, dynamic imaging, visualization, image quality assessment, and physical, biological, and statistical modeling. Accepted 4-page regular papers will be published in the symposium proceedings published by IEEE and included in IEEE Xplore. To encourage attendance by a broader audience of imaging scientists and offer additional presentation opportunities, ISBI 2018 will continue to have a second track featuring posters selected from 1-page abstract submissions without subsequent archival publication.

Photodissociation of quantum state-selected diatomic molecules yields new insight into ultracold chemistry

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McDonald, Mickey; McGuyer, Bart H.; Lee, Chih-Hsi; Apfelbeck, Florian; Zelevinsky, Tanya

2016-05-01

When a molecule is subjected to a sufficiently energetic photon it can break apart into fragments through a process called ``photodissociation''. For over 70 years this simple chemical reaction has served as a vital experimental tool for acquiring information about molecular structure, since the character of the photodissociative transition can be inferred by measuring the 3D photofragment angular distribution (PAD). While theoretical understanding of this process has gradually evolved from classical considerations to a fully quantum approach, experiments to date have not yet revealed the full quantum nature of this process. In my talk I will describe recent experiments involving the photodissociation of ultracold, optical lattice-trapped, and fully quantum state-resolved 88Sr2 molecules. Optical absorption images of the PADs produced in these experiments reveal features which are inherently quantum mechanical in nature, such as matter-wave interference between output channels, and are sensitive to the quantum statistics of the molecular wavefunctions. The results of these experiments cannot be predicted using quasiclassical methods. Instead, we describe our results with a fully quantum mechanical model yielding new intuition about ultracold chemistry.

2009 Gordon Research Conference, Applied and Environmental Microbiology

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Dubilier, Nicole

The topic of the 2009 Gordon Conference on Applied and Environmental Microbiology is: From Single Cells to the Environment. The Conference will present and discuss cutting-edge research on applied and environmental microbiology with a focus on understanding interactions between microorganisms and the environment at levels ranging from single cells to complex communities. The Conference will feature a wide range of topics such as single cell techniques (including genomics, imaging, and NanoSIMS), microbial diversity at scales ranging from clonal to global, environmental 'meta-omics', biodegradation and bioremediation, metal - microbe interactions, animal microbiomes and symbioses. The Conference will bring together investigators whomore » are at the forefront of their field, and will provide opportunities for junior scientists and graduate students to present their work in poster format and exchange ideas with leaders in the field. Some poster presenters will be selected for short talks. The collegial atmosphere of this Conference, with extensive discussion sessions as well as opportunities for informal gatherings in the afternoons and evenings, provides an ideal setting for scientists from different disciplines to exchange ideas, brainstorm and discuss cross-disciplinary collaborations.« less

Origin of the Giant Honeycomb Network of Quinones on Cu(111)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Einstein, T. L.; Kim, Kwangmoo; Wyrick, Jon; Cheng, Zhihai; Bartels, Ludwig; Berland, Kristian; Hyldgaard, Per

2011-03-01

We discuss the factors that lead to the amazing regular giant honeycomb network formed by quinones on Cu(111). Using a related lattice gas model with many characteristic energies, we can reproduce many experimental features. These models require a long-range attraction, which can be attributed to indirect interactions mediated by the Shockley surface state of Cu(111). However, Wyrick's preceding talk gave evidence that the network self-selects for the size of the pore rather than for the periodicity of the superstructure, suggesting that confined states are the key ingredient. We discuss this phenomenon in terms of the magic numbers of 2D quantum dots. We also report calculations of the effects of anthraquinones (AQ) in modifying the surface states by considering a superlattice of AQ chains with various separations. We discuss implications of these results for tuning the electronic states and, thence, superstructures. Supported by (TLE) NSF CHE 07-50334 & UMD MRSEC DMR 05-20471, (JW & LB) NSF CHE NSF CHE 07-49949, (KB & PH) Swedish Vetenskapsrådet VR 621-2008-4346.

PREFACE: 3rd International Workshop on Infrared Plasma Spectroscopy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Davies, P. B.; Röpcke, Jürgen; Hempel, Frank

2009-07-01

This volume containsd a selection of papers from the third Infrared Plasma Spectroscopy (IPS) Workshop held in Greifswald, Germany in July 2008. Although not all the contributions have been written up in time for the deadline for this volume, nevertheless the 12 contributions presented here give a fair representation of the conference topics. The conference comprised four different types of contribution. Firstly, four invited lectures focussed on the prime areas of interest. Secondly, eight shorter contributed talks, grouped as closely as possible with the appropriate invited lecture. These contributed talks covered topics in both pure and applied infrared plasma spectroscopy. A feature of the two previous IPS conferences has been a contribution from commercial organisations namely those involved in manufacturing devices, detectors and spectrometers. This group of participants formed the third part of the conference programme and gave five oral presentations covering topics like QCL and detector/detection developments and novel spectrometer designs. The fourth contributing group comprised 27 poster presentations. It should be mentioned that some of the latter were poster versions of contributed talks. The conference was remarkable for the wide spread of topics covered in a relatively small meeting, consisting of 44 participants. The participants were made up of 34 scientists from within Europe and 4 from the rest of the world. It is interesting to reflect on changes that have occurred since the previous meeting just a year earlier. Two clear developments which have occurred are the emergence of Quantum Cascade Lasers (QCL) and their use in Cavity Ring Down (CRD) spectroscopy. A major shift from cw lead salt diode lasers to cw and pulsed QCL in both pure and applied projects now seems to be well under way. The topics covered in the earlier conferences focussed more on applying infrared spectroscopy to plasma monitoring and control. When choosing the topics to cover the scientific committee felt that this time it would be useful to emphasise new spectroscopic developments as well as covering applications. This might serve as a guide as to where the subject of infrared spectroscopy in combination with plasma sources might be heading in the future i.e. to emphasize pure infrared spectroscopy developments. The first invited lecture (G Guelachvili and N Picque) and the last invited lecture (F K Tittel, Y Bakhirkin, R Curl, A Kosterev, R Lewicki, D Thomasz and S So) were chosen to set the scene and realise this objective. The second (R Engeln, R Zijlmans, S Welzel, O Gabriel, J-P van Helden, J Röpcke and D Schram) and third (X Aubert, C Lazzaroni, D Marinov, O Guaitella, S Welzel, A Pipa, J Röpcke and A Rousseau) invited talks focussed on the application of the IR laser techniques with particular emphasis on the role of surfaces in plasmas and the relevance of plasma surface interactions. Surface plasma interactions did not feature strongly in the two earlier meetings and so this topic too, along with the emphasis on novel infrared spectroscopy techniques, represents a new direction for the conference. Paul B Davies and Jürgen Röpcke International Scientific Committee P B Davies, Cambridge, UK: Chair J Röpcke, Greifswald, Germany: Co-Chair R Engeln, Eindhoven, Netherlands G Hancock, Oxford, U K M Hori, Nagoya, Japan H Linnartz, Leiden, Netherlands R Martini, New York, USA J Meichsner, Greifswald, Germany A Rousseau, Paris, France Local Organizing Committee J Röpcke (INP: Chair) F Hempel (INP: Secretary) J Meichsner (IfP, University of Greifswald) N Lang (INP) L Glawe (INP) C Krcka (INP) B Lindemann (INP) Conference photograph

Measuring The cmb Polarization At 94 GHz With The QUIET Pseudo-cL Pipeline

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Buder, Immanuel; QUIET Collaboration

2012-01-01

The Q/U Imaging ExperimenT (QUIET) aims to limit or detect cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization from inflation. This talk is part of a 3-talk series on QUIET. The previous talk describes the QUIET science and instrument. QUIET has two parallel analysis pipelines which are part of an effort to validate the analysis and confirm the result. In this talk, I will describe the analysis methods of one of these: the pseudo-Cl pipeline. Calibration, noise modeling, filtering, and data-selection choices are made following a blind-analysis strategy. Central to this strategy is a suite of 30 null tests, each motivated by a possible instrumental problem or systematic effect. The systematic errors are also evaluated through full-season simulations in the blind stage of the analysis before the result is known. The CMB power spectra are calculated using a pseudo-Cl cross-correlation technique which suppresses contamination and makes the result insensitive to noise bias. QUIET will detect the first three peaks of the even-parity (E-mode) spectrum at high significance. I will show forecasts of the systematic errors for these results and for the upper limit on B-mode polarization. The very low systematic errors in these forecasts show that the technology is ready to be applied in a more sensitive next-generation experiment. The next and final talk in this series covers the other parallel analysis pipeline, based on maximum likelihood methods. This work was supported by NSF and the Department of Education.

The effect of feature selection methods on computer-aided detection of masses in mammograms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hupse, Rianne; Karssemeijer, Nico

2010-05-01

In computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) research, feature selection methods are often used to improve generalization performance of classifiers and shorten computation times. In an application that detects malignant masses in mammograms, we investigated the effect of using a selection criterion that is similar to the final performance measure we are optimizing, namely the mean sensitivity of the system in a predefined range of the free-response receiver operating characteristics (FROC). To obtain the generalization performance of the selected feature subsets, a cross validation procedure was performed on a dataset containing 351 abnormal and 7879 normal regions, each region providing a set of 71 mass features. The same number of noise features, not containing any information, were added to investigate the ability of the feature selection algorithms to distinguish between useful and non-useful features. It was found that significantly higher performances were obtained using feature sets selected by the general test statistic Wilks' lambda than using feature sets selected by the more specific FROC measure. Feature selection leads to better performance when compared to a system in which all features were used.

Speech Emotion Feature Selection Method Based on Contribution Analysis Algorithm of Neural Network

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Wang Xiaojia; Mao Qirong; Zhan Yongzhao

There are many emotion features. If all these features are employed to recognize emotions, redundant features may be existed. Furthermore, recognition result is unsatisfying and the cost of feature extraction is high. In this paper, a method to select speech emotion features based on contribution analysis algorithm of NN is presented. The emotion features are selected by using contribution analysis algorithm of NN from the 95 extracted features. Cluster analysis is applied to analyze the effectiveness for the features selected, and the time of feature extraction is evaluated. Finally, 24 emotion features selected are used to recognize six speech emotions.more » The experiments show that this method can improve the recognition rate and the time of feature extraction.« less

Review on DTU-parton model for hh and hA collisions

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Chiu, C.B.

1981-02-01

Recently several groups have considered small-p/sub T/ models, which combine features from both the parton model and the DTU model. We shall refer to them loosely as the DTU-parton model. In this talk, we take a definite point of view to motivate this model, and based on this framework we briefly survey its phenomenological applications to hadron-hadron and hadron-nucleus collisions.

Discussion of CoSA: Clustering of Sparse Approximations

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Armstrong, Derek Elswick

2017-03-07

The purpose of this talk is to discuss the possible applications of CoSA (Clustering of Sparse Approximations) to the exploitation of HSI (HyperSpectral Imagery) data. CoSA is presented by Moody et al. in the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing (“Land cover classification in multispectral imagery using clustering of sparse approximations over learned feature dictionaries”, Vol. 8, 2014) and is based on machine learning techniques.

NASA Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-21

NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck talks during the NASA Future Forum at The Ohio State University on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

The CASA Software Package

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Petry, Dirk

2018-03-01

CASA is the standard science data analysis package for ALMA and VLA but it can also be used for the analysis of data from other observatories. In this talk, I will give an overview of the structure and features of CASA, who develops it, and the present status and plans, and then show typical analysis workflows for ALMA data with special emphasis on the handling of single dish data and its combination with interferometric data.

CrossTalk: The Journal of Defense Software Engineering. Volume 19, Number 12, December 2006

DTIC Science & Technology

2006-12-01

Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis ( FODA ) FODA is a domain analysis and engineer- ing method that focuses on developing reusable assets [9]. By examining...Eliciting Security Requirements This article describes an approach for doing trade-off analysis among requirements elicitation methods. by Dr. Nancy R...high-level requirements are addressed and met in the requirements work products. 3. Unclear requirements Mitigation Perform requirements analysis and

Overview and accomplishments of the Borexino experiment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ranucci, G.; Agostini, M.; Appel, S.; Bellini, G.; Benziger, J.; Bick, D.; Bonfini, G.; Bravo, D.; Caccianiga, B.; Calaprice, F.; Caminata, A.; Cavalcante, P.; Chepurnov, A.; D'Angelo, D.; Davini, S.; Derbin, A.; Di Noto, L.; Drachnev, I.; Etenko, A.; Fomenko, K.; Franco, D.; Gabriele, F.; Galbiati, C.; Ghiano, C.; Giammarchi, M.; Goeger-Neff, M.; Goretti, A.; Gromov, M.; Hagner, C.; Hungerford, E.; Ianni, Aldo; Ianni, Andrea; Jedrzejczak, K.; Kaiser, M.; Kobychev, V.; Korablev, D.; Korga, G.; Kryn, D.; Laubenstein, M.; Lehnert, B.; Litvinovich, E.; Lombardi, F.; Lombardi, P.; Ludhova, L.; Lukyanchenko, G.; Machulin, I.; Manecki, S.; Maneschg, W.; Marcocci, S.; Meroni, E.; Meyer, M.; Miramonti, L.; Misiaszek, M.; Montuschi, M.; Mosteiro, P.; Muratova, V.; Neumair, B.; Oberauer, L.; Obolensky, M.; Ortica, F.; Pallavicini, M.; Papp, L.; Perasso, L.; Pocar, A.; Razeto, A.; Re, A.; Romani, A.; Roncin, R.; Rossi, N.; Schönert, S.; Semenov, D.; Simgen, H.; Skorokhvatov, M.; Smirnov, O.; Sotnikov, A.; Sukhotin, S.; Suvorov, Y.; Tartaglia, R.; Testera, G.; Thurn, J.; Toropova, M.; Unzhakov, E.; Vishneva, A.; Vogelaar, R. B.; von Feilitzsch, F.; Wang, H.; Weinz, S.; Winter, J.; Wojcik, M.; Wurm, M.; Yokley, Z.; Zaimidoroga, O.; Zavatarelli, S.; Zuber, K.; Zuzel, G.

2016-02-01

The Borexino experiment is running at the Laboratori del Gran Sasso in Italy since 2007. Its technical distinctive feature is the unprecedented ultralow background of the inner scintillating core, which is the basis of the outstanding achievements accumulated by the experiment. In this talk, after recalling the main features of the detector, the impressive solar data gathered so far by the experiment will be summarized, with special emphasis to the most recent and prominent result concerning the detection of the fundamental pp solar neutrino flux, which is the direct probe of the engine mechanism powering our star. Such a milestone measurement puts Borexino in the unique situation of being the only experiment able to do solar neutrino spectroscopy over the entire solar spectrum; the counterpart of this peculiar status in the oscillation interpretation of the data is the capability of Borexino alone to perform the full validation across the solar energy range of the MSW-LMA paradigm. The talk will be concluded highlighting the perspectives for the final stage of the solar program of the experiment, centered on the goal to fully complete the solar spectroscopy with the missing piece of the CNO neutrinos. If successful, such a measurement would represent the final crowning of the long quest of Borexino to unravel all the properties of the neutrinos from the Sun.

Applying conversation analysis to foster accurate reporting in the diet history interview.

PubMed

Tapsell, L C; Brenninger, V; Barnard, J

2000-07-01

Inaccuracy in reporting dietary intakes is a major problem in managing diet-related disease. There is no single best method of dietary assessment, but the diet history lends itself well to the clinical setting. In many diet histories data are collected orally, so analysis of interviews can provide insights into reporting behaviors. Conversation analysis is a qualitative method that describes the systematic organization of talk between people. Patterns are identified and checked for consistency within and among individual interviews. The aim of this study was to describe consistent ways of reporting diet histories and to identify conversational features of problematic reporting. Diet history interviews from 62 overweight and insulin-resistant adult volunteers (50 women, 12 men) attending an outpatient clinic and 14 healthy volunteers (7 men, 7 women) participating in an energy balance study were audiotaped and transcribed. Conversation analysis identified a remarkably consistent pattern of reporting diet histories and 3 conversational features that indicated problematic reporting: "it depends," denoting variability (least of all at breakfast); "probably," suggesting guesswork (related to portion sizes); and elaborated talk on certain foods, distinguishing sensitive topics (e.g., alcohol, chocolate, butter/margarine, take-out foods) from safe topics. These findings indicate that there are ways in which dietetics practitioners may conduct the diet history interview to foster more accurate reporting.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLA. - Standing inside Discovery’s payload bay, Carol Scott (right), lead orbiter engineer, talks about her job as part of a special feature for the KSC Web. With his back to the camera is Bill Kallus, Media manager in the KSC Web Studio. Behind Scott can be seen the open hatch of the airlock, which provides support functions such as airlock depressurization and repressurization, extravehicular activity equipment recharge, liquid-cooled garment water cooling, EVA equipment checkout, donning and communications. The outer hatch isolates the airlock from the unpressurized payload bay when closed and permits the EVA crew members to exit from the airlock to the payload bay when open.

NASA Image and Video Library

2004-01-22

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLA. - Standing inside Discovery’s payload bay, Carol Scott (right), lead orbiter engineer, talks about her job as part of a special feature for the KSC Web. With his back to the camera is Bill Kallus, Media manager in the KSC Web Studio. Behind Scott can be seen the open hatch of the airlock, which provides support functions such as airlock depressurization and repressurization, extravehicular activity equipment recharge, liquid-cooled garment water cooling, EVA equipment checkout, donning and communications. The outer hatch isolates the airlock from the unpressurized payload bay when closed and permits the EVA crew members to exit from the airlock to the payload bay when open.

Feature Selection Method Based on Neighborhood Relationships: Applications in EEG Signal Identification and Chinese Character Recognition

PubMed Central

Zhao, Yu-Xiang; Chou, Chien-Hsing

2016-01-01

In this study, a new feature selection algorithm, the neighborhood-relationship feature selection (NRFS) algorithm, is proposed for identifying rat electroencephalogram signals and recognizing Chinese characters. In these two applications, dependent relationships exist among the feature vectors and their neighboring feature vectors. Therefore, the proposed NRFS algorithm was designed for solving this problem. By applying the NRFS algorithm, unselected feature vectors have a high priority of being added into the feature subset if the neighboring feature vectors have been selected. In addition, selected feature vectors have a high priority of being eliminated if the neighboring feature vectors are not selected. In the experiments conducted in this study, the NRFS algorithm was compared with two feature algorithms. The experimental results indicated that the NRFS algorithm can extract the crucial frequency bands for identifying rat vigilance states and identifying crucial character regions for recognizing Chinese characters. PMID:27314346

Entrofy: Participant Selection Made Easy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Huppenkothen, Daniela

2016-03-01

Selection participants for a workshop out of a much larger applicant pool can be a difficult task, especially when the goal is diversifying over a range of criteria (e.g. academic seniority, research field, skill levels, gender etc). In this talk I am presenting our tool, Entrofy, aimed at aiding organizers in this task. Entrofy is an open-source tool using a maximum entropy-based algorithm that aims to select a set of participants out of the applicant pool such that a pre-defined range of criteria are globally maximized. This approach allows for a potentially more transparent and less biased selection process while encouraging organizers to think deeply about the goals and the process of their participant selection.

Novel mechanisms of G-protein-coupled receptors functions: AT1 angiotensin receptor acts as a signaling hub and focal point of receptor cross-talk.

PubMed

Tóth, András D; Turu, Gábor; Hunyady, László; Balla, András

2018-04-01

AT 1 angiotensin receptor (AT 1 R), a prototypical G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR), is the main receptor, which mediates the effects of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS). AT 1 R plays a crucial role in the regulation of blood pressure and salt-water homeostasis, and in the development of pathological conditions, such as hypertension, heart failure, cardiovascular remodeling, renal fibrosis, inflammation, and metabolic disorders. Stimulation of AT 1 R leads to pleiotropic signal transduction pathways generating arrays of complex cellular responses. Growing amount of evidence shows that AT 1 R is a versatile GPCR, which has multiple unique faces with distinct conformations and signaling properties providing new opportunities for functionally selective pharmacological targeting of the receptor. Biased ligands of AT 1 R have been developed to selectively activate the β-arrestin pathway, which may have therapeutic benefits compared to the conventional angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers. In this review, we provide a summary about the most recent findings and novel aspects of the AT 1 R function, signaling, regulation, dimerization or oligomerization and its cross-talk with other receptors, including epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor, adrenergic receptors and CB 1 cannabinoid receptor. Better understanding of the mechanisms and structural aspects of AT 1 R activation and cross-talk can lead to the development of novel type of drugs for the treatment of cardiovascular and other diseases. Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Selective Audiovisual Semantic Integration Enabled by Feature-Selective Attention

PubMed Central

Li, Yuanqing; Long, Jinyi; Huang, Biao; Yu, Tianyou; Wu, Wei; Li, Peijun; Fang, Fang; Sun, Pei

2016-01-01

An audiovisual object may contain multiple semantic features, such as the gender and emotional features of the speaker. Feature-selective attention and audiovisual semantic integration are two brain functions involved in the recognition of audiovisual objects. Humans often selectively attend to one or several features while ignoring the other features of an audiovisual object. Meanwhile, the human brain integrates semantic information from the visual and auditory modalities. However, how these two brain functions correlate with each other remains to be elucidated. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we explored the neural mechanism by which feature-selective attention modulates audiovisual semantic integration. During the fMRI experiment, the subjects were presented with visual-only, auditory-only, or audiovisual dynamical facial stimuli and performed several feature-selective attention tasks. Our results revealed that a distribution of areas, including heteromodal areas and brain areas encoding attended features, may be involved in audiovisual semantic integration. Through feature-selective attention, the human brain may selectively integrate audiovisual semantic information from attended features by enhancing functional connectivity and thus regulating information flows from heteromodal areas to brain areas encoding the attended features. PMID:26759193

Natural image classification driven by human brain activity

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Dai; Peng, Hanyang; Wang, Jinqiao; Tang, Ming; Xue, Rong; Zuo, Zhentao

2016-03-01

Natural image classification has been a hot topic in computer vision and pattern recognition research field. Since the performance of an image classification system can be improved by feature selection, many image feature selection methods have been developed. However, the existing supervised feature selection methods are typically driven by the class label information that are identical for different samples from the same class, ignoring with-in class image variability and therefore degrading the feature selection performance. In this study, we propose a novel feature selection method, driven by human brain activity signals collected using fMRI technique when human subjects were viewing natural images of different categories. The fMRI signals associated with subjects viewing different images encode the human perception of natural images, and therefore may capture image variability within- and cross- categories. We then select image features with the guidance of fMRI signals from brain regions with active response to image viewing. Particularly, bag of words features based on GIST descriptor are extracted from natural images for classification, and a sparse regression base feature selection method is adapted to select image features that can best predict fMRI signals. Finally, a classification model is built on the select image features to classify images without fMRI signals. The validation experiments for classifying images from 4 categories of two subjects have demonstrated that our method could achieve much better classification performance than the classifiers built on image feature selected by traditional feature selection methods.

EFS: an ensemble feature selection tool implemented as R-package and web-application.

PubMed

Neumann, Ursula; Genze, Nikita; Heider, Dominik

2017-01-01

Feature selection methods aim at identifying a subset of features that improve the prediction performance of subsequent classification models and thereby also simplify their interpretability. Preceding studies demonstrated that single feature selection methods can have specific biases, whereas an ensemble feature selection has the advantage to alleviate and compensate for these biases. The software EFS (Ensemble Feature Selection) makes use of multiple feature selection methods and combines their normalized outputs to a quantitative ensemble importance. Currently, eight different feature selection methods have been integrated in EFS, which can be used separately or combined in an ensemble. EFS identifies relevant features while compensating specific biases of single methods due to an ensemble approach. Thereby, EFS can improve the prediction accuracy and interpretability in subsequent binary classification models. EFS can be downloaded as an R-package from CRAN or used via a web application at http://EFS.heiderlab.de.

Crocodile Talk: Attributions of Incestuously Abused and Nonabused Sisters.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Monahan, Kathleen

1997-01-01

This qualitative study analyzed the retrospective attributions of adult sisters (five abused sister dyads, and five abused and nonabused sister dyads) who grew up in incestuous families. It examined the attributions of subjects regarding the general sibling group; victim selection and nonselection; and attributions regarding jealousy, protection,…

Executive Suite: Feminine Style.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lynch, Edith M.

The author provides the reader an "inside look" at women's role in management by selecting 95 women in management as a sample to gather research on women executives through questionnaires, personal talks, and formal interviews. Although the book is mainly about women in the middle/upper levels of management, coverage is given also to…

Listening for Details of Talk: Early Childhood Parent-Teacher Conference Communication Facilitators

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Cheatham, Gregory A.; Ostrosky, Michaelene M.

2009-01-01

In this article, the authors present parent-educator conversations, which were selected to illustrate common communication patterns and provide links to some of the Division for Early Childhood of the Council for Exceptional Children's recommended practices for communicating and collaborating with parents. Using conversation analysis, researchers…

Links between Parents' Epistemological Stance and Children's Evidence Talk

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Luce, Megan R.; Callanan, Maureen A.; Smilovic, Sarah

2013-01-01

Recent experimental research highlights young children's selectivity in learning from others. Little is known, however, about the patterns of information that children actually encounter in conversations with adults. This study investigated variation in parents' tendency to focus on testable evidence as a way to answer science-related questions…

Disengaging from Workplace Relationships. A Research Note

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sias, Patricia M.; Perry, Tara

2004-01-01

A randomly-selected sample of 306 adults employed full-time rated how likely individuals would be to use various communication strategies (cost escalation, depersonalization, and state-of-the-relationship talk) to disengage from a workplace relationship (with the target of the deteriorations being a supervisor, a peer coworker, or a subordinate…

Women with Intellectual Disabilities Talk about Their Perceptions of Sex

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bernert, D. J.; Ogletree, R. J.

2013-01-01

Background: Sexuality is learned through sexual socialisation that women with intellectual disabilities (IDs) understand and express. Rules of sexual engagement for these women can include barriers for their socialisation, intimate partner selection, and sexual expression. These rules can become more limiting when coupled with rules of femininity…

Let's Talk about Race: Evaluating a College Interracial Discussion Group on Race

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ashby, Kimberly M.; Collins, Dana L.; Helms, Janet E.; Manlove, Joshua

2018-01-01

The authors evaluate Dialogues on Race, an interracial group intervention in which undergraduate student facilitators led conversations about race with their peers. The evaluation process is described, including developing collaborative relationships, identifying program goals, selecting measures, and analyzing and presenting results. The authors…

Talking about the Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jones, Christie

2005-01-01

A high school teacher has used a novel by Stephen King as her end-of-the-year literature unit to teach her students. She suggests how this selection helps in achieving her goals to get students to practice reading and discussing literature and to apply these skills beyond the English classroom.

Kennedy Space Center Director Update

NASA Image and Video Library

2014-03-06

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Community leaders, business executives, educators, and state and local government leaders were updated on NASA Kennedy Space Center programs and accomplishments during Center Director Bob Cabana’s Center Director Update at the Debus Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. From left, Scott Thurston, Kennedy deputy of the spacecraft office of the Commercial Crew Program, talks with Scott Colloredo, director of the Center Planning and Development Directorate. Attendees talked with Cabana and other senior Kennedy managers and visited displays featuring updates on Kennedy programs and projects, including International Space Station, Commercial Crew, Ground System Development and Operations, Launch Services, Center Planning and Development, Technology, KSC Swamp Works and NASA Education. The morning concluded with a tour of the new Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the visitor complex. For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kennedy. Photo credit: NASA/Daniel Casper

Kennedy Space Center Director Update

NASA Image and Video Library

2014-03-06

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Community leaders, business executives, educators, and state and local government leaders were updated on NASA Kennedy Space Center programs and accomplishments during Center Director Bob Cabana’s Center Director Update at the Debus Center at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. Attendees talk with Trey Carlson, Kennedy Master Planner, at the Center Planning and Development Directorate, or CPDD, display. In the background is Mario Busacca, chief of CPDD’s Spaceport Planning Office. Attendees talked with Cabana and other senior Kennedy managers and visited displays featuring updates on Kennedy programs and projects, including International Space Station, Commercial Crew, Ground System Development and Operations, Launch Services, Center Planning and Development, Technology, KSC Swamp Works and NASA Education. The morning concluded with a tour of the new Space Shuttle Atlantis exhibit at the visitor complex. For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kennedy. Photo credit: NASA/Daniel Casper

Astronomy and Art Merged: Targeting Other Audiences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Friedman, A. F.

1999-05-01

One of the fundamental concerns of museum exhibition is to reach as broad an audience as possible. One way to open up the history of astronomy to a wider audience is to create an exhibit with an interdisciplinary theme and to select a venue outside of a science institution. Here I discuss ``Awestruck by the Majesty of the Heavens: Artistic Perspectives from the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum History of Astronomy Collection," which took place at the Chicago Cultural Center from January to March of 1997. ``Awestruck" featured a selection of celestial charts, portrait prints of famous astronomers, plates from books on astronomical topics, and other works on paper. It focused on the connections between art and science during the period 1500-1800. Scientific content and place within the history of astronomy were discussed in addition to the artistic merit of the objects. The Chicago Cultural Center is an institution that is home to a wide variety of cultural programming including art, music, film, theater, and dance. In addition to providing a different audience for this material than that which typically visits the Adler, ``Awestruck" also represented an expansion of material for the Cultural Center's audience to view, as their exhibition spaces primarily show only 20th-century art. Programming such as gallery talks and the production of an art-museum-type exhibition catalog will also be discussed.

Feature selection methods for big data bioinformatics: A survey from the search perspective.

PubMed

Wang, Lipo; Wang, Yaoli; Chang, Qing

2016-12-01

This paper surveys main principles of feature selection and their recent applications in big data bioinformatics. Instead of the commonly used categorization into filter, wrapper, and embedded approaches to feature selection, we formulate feature selection as a combinatorial optimization or search problem and categorize feature selection methods into exhaustive search, heuristic search, and hybrid methods, where heuristic search methods may further be categorized into those with or without data-distilled feature ranking measures. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Feature selection method based on multi-fractal dimension and harmony search algorithm and its application

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Chen; Ni, Zhiwei; Ni, Liping; Tang, Na

2016-10-01

Feature selection is an important method of data preprocessing in data mining. In this paper, a novel feature selection method based on multi-fractal dimension and harmony search algorithm is proposed. Multi-fractal dimension is adopted as the evaluation criterion of feature subset, which can determine the number of selected features. An improved harmony search algorithm is used as the search strategy to improve the efficiency of feature selection. The performance of the proposed method is compared with that of other feature selection algorithms on UCI data-sets. Besides, the proposed method is also used to predict the daily average concentration of PM2.5 in China. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain competitive results in terms of both prediction accuracy and the number of selected features.

An Interactive Website to Reduce Sexual Risk Behavior: Process Evaluation of TeensTalkHealth

PubMed Central

Sieving, Renee E; Terveen, Loren G; Rosser, BR Simon; Kodet, Amy J; Rothberg, Vienna D

2015-01-01

Background Different theoretical frameworks support the use of interactive websites to promote sexual health. Although several Web-based interventions have been developed to address sexual risk taking among young people, no evaluated interventions have attempted to foster behavior change through moderated interaction among a virtual network of adolescents (who remain anonymous to one another) and health professionals. Objective The objective was to conduct a summative process evaluation of TeensTalkHealth, an interactive sexual health website designed to promote condom use and other healthy decision making in the context of romantic and sexual relationships. Methods Evaluation data were obtained from 147 adolescents who participated in a feasibility and acceptability study. Video vignettes, teen-friendly articles, and other content served as conversation catalysts between adolescents and health educators on message boards. Results Adolescents’ perceptions that the website encouraged condom use across a variety of relationship situations were very high. Almost 60% (54/92, 59%) of intervention participants completed two-thirds or more of requested tasks across the 4-month intervention. Adolescents reported high levels of comfort, perceived privacy, ease of website access and use, and perceived credibility of health educators. Potential strategies to enhance engagement and completion of intervention tasks during future implementations of TeensTalkHealth are discussed, including tailoring of content, periodic website chats with health educators and anonymous peers, and greater incorporation of features from popular social networking websites. Conclusions TeensTalkHealth is a feasible, acceptable, and promising approach to complement and enhance existing services for youth. PMID:26336157

Kernel-based Joint Feature Selection and Max-Margin Classification for Early Diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Adeli, Ehsan; Wu, Guorong; Saghafi, Behrouz; An, Le; Shi, Feng; Shen, Dinggang

2017-01-01

Feature selection methods usually select the most compact and relevant set of features based on their contribution to a linear regression model. Thus, these features might not be the best for a non-linear classifier. This is especially crucial for the tasks, in which the performance is heavily dependent on the feature selection techniques, like the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases. Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders, which progresses slowly while affects the quality of life dramatically. In this paper, we use the data acquired from multi-modal neuroimaging data to diagnose PD by investigating the brain regions, known to be affected at the early stages. We propose a joint kernel-based feature selection and classification framework. Unlike conventional feature selection techniques that select features based on their performance in the original input feature space, we select features that best benefit the classification scheme in the kernel space. We further propose kernel functions, specifically designed for our non-negative feature types. We use MRI and SPECT data of 538 subjects from the PPMI database, and obtain a diagnosis accuracy of 97.5%, which outperforms all baseline and state-of-the-art methods.

Kernel-based Joint Feature Selection and Max-Margin Classification for Early Diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease

PubMed Central

Adeli, Ehsan; Wu, Guorong; Saghafi, Behrouz; An, Le; Shi, Feng; Shen, Dinggang

2017-01-01

Feature selection methods usually select the most compact and relevant set of features based on their contribution to a linear regression model. Thus, these features might not be the best for a non-linear classifier. This is especially crucial for the tasks, in which the performance is heavily dependent on the feature selection techniques, like the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases. Parkinson’s disease (PD) is one of the most common neurodegenerative disorders, which progresses slowly while affects the quality of life dramatically. In this paper, we use the data acquired from multi-modal neuroimaging data to diagnose PD by investigating the brain regions, known to be affected at the early stages. We propose a joint kernel-based feature selection and classification framework. Unlike conventional feature selection techniques that select features based on their performance in the original input feature space, we select features that best benefit the classification scheme in the kernel space. We further propose kernel functions, specifically designed for our non-negative feature types. We use MRI and SPECT data of 538 subjects from the PPMI database, and obtain a diagnosis accuracy of 97.5%, which outperforms all baseline and state-of-the-art methods. PMID:28120883

Collaborative knowledge acquisition for the design of context-aware alert systems

PubMed Central

Joffe, Erel; Havakuk, Ofer; Herskovic, Jorge R; Patel, Vimla L

2012-01-01

Objective To present a framework for combining implicit knowledge acquisition from multiple experts with machine learning and to evaluate this framework in the context of anemia alerts. Materials and Methods Five internal medicine residents reviewed 18 anemia alerts, while ‘talking aloud’. They identified features that were reviewed by two or more physicians to determine appropriate alert level, etiology and treatment recommendation. Based on these features, data were extracted from 100 randomly-selected anemia cases for a training set and an additional 82 cases for a test set. Two staff internists assigned an alert level, etiology and treatment recommendation before and after reviewing the entire electronic medical record. The training set of 118 cases (100 plus 18) and the test set of 82 cases were explored using RIDOR and JRip algorithms. Results The feature set was sufficient to assess 93% of anemia cases (intraclass correlation for alert level before and after review of the records by internists 1 and 2 were 0.92 and 0.95, respectively). High-precision classifiers were constructed to identify low-level alerts (precision p=0.87, recall R=0.4), iron deficiency (p=1.0, R=0.73), and anemia associated with kidney disease (p=0.87, R=0.77). Discussion It was possible to identify low-level alerts and several conditions commonly associated with chronic anemia. This approach may reduce the number of clinically unimportant alerts. The study was limited to anemia alerts. Furthermore, clinicians were aware of the study hypotheses potentially biasing their evaluation. Conclusion Implicit knowledge acquisition, collaborative filtering and machine learning were combined automatically to induce clinically meaningful and precise decision rules. PMID:22744961

Cross-talk from β-Adrenergic Receptors Modulates α2A-Adrenergic Receptor Endocytosis in Sympathetic Neurons via Protein Kinase A and Spinophilin*

PubMed Central

Cottingham, Christopher; Lu, Roujian; Jiao, Kai; Wang, Qin

2013-01-01

Inter-regulation of adrenergic receptors (ARs) via cross-talk is a long appreciated but mechanistically unclear physiological phenomenon. Evidence from the AR literature and our own extensive studies on regulation of α2AARs by the scaffolding protein spinophilin have illuminated a potential novel mechanism for cross-talk from β to α2ARs. In the present study, we have characterized a mode of endogenous AR cross-talk in native adrenergic neurons whereby canonical βAR-mediated signaling modulates spinophilin-regulated α2AAR endocytosis through PKA. Our findings demonstrate that co-activation of β and α2AARs, either by application of endogenous agonist or by simultaneous stimulation with distinct selective agonists, results in acceleration of endogenous α2AAR endocytosis in native neurons. We show that receptor-independent PKA activation by forskolin is sufficient to accelerate α2AAR endocytosis and that α2AAR stimulation alone drives accelerated endocytosis in spinophilin-null neurons. Endocytic response acceleration by β/α2AAR co-activation is blocked by PKA inhibition and lost in spinophilin-null neurons, consistent with our previous finding that spinophilin is a substrate for phosphorylation by PKA that disrupts its interaction with α2AARs. Importantly, we show that α2AR agonist-mediated α2AAR/spinophilin interaction is blocked by βAR co-activation in a PKA-dependent fashion. We therefore propose a novel mechanism for cross-talk from β to α2ARs, whereby canonical βAR-mediated signaling coupled to PKA activation results in phosphorylation of spinophilin, disrupting its interaction with α2AARs and accelerating α2AAR endocytic responses. This mechanism of cross-talk has significant implications for endogenous adrenergic physiology and for therapeutic targeting of β and α2AARs. PMID:23965992

Integrated feature extraction and selection for neuroimage classification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fan, Yong; Shen, Dinggang

2009-02-01

Feature extraction and selection are of great importance in neuroimage classification for identifying informative features and reducing feature dimensionality, which are generally implemented as two separate steps. This paper presents an integrated feature extraction and selection algorithm with two iterative steps: constrained subspace learning based feature extraction and support vector machine (SVM) based feature selection. The subspace learning based feature extraction focuses on the brain regions with higher possibility of being affected by the disease under study, while the possibility of brain regions being affected by disease is estimated by the SVM based feature selection, in conjunction with SVM classification. This algorithm can not only take into account the inter-correlation among different brain regions, but also overcome the limitation of traditional subspace learning based feature extraction methods. To achieve robust performance and optimal selection of parameters involved in feature extraction, selection, and classification, a bootstrapping strategy is used to generate multiple versions of training and testing sets for parameter optimization, according to the classification performance measured by the area under the ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve. The integrated feature extraction and selection method is applied to a structural MR image based Alzheimer's disease (AD) study with 98 non-demented and 100 demented subjects. Cross-validation results indicate that the proposed algorithm can improve performance of the traditional subspace learning based classification.

Compact cancer biomarkers discovery using a swarm intelligence feature selection algorithm.

PubMed

Martinez, Emmanuel; Alvarez, Mario Moises; Trevino, Victor

2010-08-01

Biomarker discovery is a typical application from functional genomics. Due to the large number of genes studied simultaneously in microarray data, feature selection is a key step. Swarm intelligence has emerged as a solution for the feature selection problem. However, swarm intelligence settings for feature selection fail to select small features subsets. We have proposed a swarm intelligence feature selection algorithm based on the initialization and update of only a subset of particles in the swarm. In this study, we tested our algorithm in 11 microarray datasets for brain, leukemia, lung, prostate, and others. We show that the proposed swarm intelligence algorithm successfully increase the classification accuracy and decrease the number of selected features compared to other swarm intelligence methods. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Dynamical states, possibilities and propagation of stress signal

PubMed Central

Malik, Md. Zubbair; Ali, Shahnawaz; Singh, Soibam Shyamchand; Ishrat, Romana; Singh, R. K. Brojen

2017-01-01

The stress driven dynamics of Notch-Wnt-p53 cross-talk is subjected to a few possible dynamical states governed by simple fractal rules, and allowed to decide its own fate by choosing one of these states which are contributed from long range correlation with varied fluctuations due to active molecular interaction. The topological properties of the networks corresponding to these dynamical states have hierarchical features with assortive structure. The stress signal driven by nutlin and modulated by mediator GSK3 acts as anti-apoptotic signal in this system, whereas, the stress signal driven by Axin and modulated by GSK3 behaves as anti-apoptotic for a certain range of Axin and GSK3 interaction, and beyond which the signal acts as favor-apoptotic signal. However, this stress system prefers to stay in an active dynamical state whose counterpart complex network is closest to hierarchical topology with exhibited roles of few interacting hubs. During the propagation of stress signal, the system allows the propagator pathway to inherit all possible properties of the state to the receiver pathway/pathways with slight modifications, indicating efficient information processing and democratic sharing of responsibilities in the system via cross-talk. The increase in the number of cross-talk pathways in the system favors to establish self-organization. PMID:28106087

Dynamical states, possibilities and propagation of stress signal.

PubMed

Malik, Md Zubbair; Ali, Shahnawaz; Singh, Soibam Shyamchand; Ishrat, Romana; Singh, R K Brojen

2017-01-20

The stress driven dynamics of Notch-Wnt-p53 cross-talk is subjected to a few possible dynamical states governed by simple fractal rules, and allowed to decide its own fate by choosing one of these states which are contributed from long range correlation with varied fluctuations due to active molecular interaction. The topological properties of the networks corresponding to these dynamical states have hierarchical features with assortive structure. The stress signal driven by nutlin and modulated by mediator GSK3 acts as anti-apoptotic signal in this system, whereas, the stress signal driven by Axin and modulated by GSK3 behaves as anti-apoptotic for a certain range of Axin and GSK3 interaction, and beyond which the signal acts as favor-apoptotic signal. However, this stress system prefers to stay in an active dynamical state whose counterpart complex network is closest to hierarchical topology with exhibited roles of few interacting hubs. During the propagation of stress signal, the system allows the propagator pathway to inherit all possible properties of the state to the receiver pathway/pathways with slight modifications, indicating efficient information processing and democratic sharing of responsibilities in the system via cross-talk. The increase in the number of cross-talk pathways in the system favors to establish self-organization.

Multi-task feature selection in microarray data by binary integer programming.

PubMed

Lan, Liang; Vucetic, Slobodan

2013-12-20

A major challenge in microarray classification is that the number of features is typically orders of magnitude larger than the number of examples. In this paper, we propose a novel feature filter algorithm to select the feature subset with maximal discriminative power and minimal redundancy by solving a quadratic objective function with binary integer constraints. To improve the computational efficiency, the binary integer constraints are relaxed and a low-rank approximation to the quadratic term is applied. The proposed feature selection algorithm was extended to solve multi-task microarray classification problems. We compared the single-task version of the proposed feature selection algorithm with 9 existing feature selection methods on 4 benchmark microarray data sets. The empirical results show that the proposed method achieved the most accurate predictions overall. We also evaluated the multi-task version of the proposed algorithm on 8 multi-task microarray datasets. The multi-task feature selection algorithm resulted in significantly higher accuracy than when using the single-task feature selection methods.

Attentional Selection of Feature Conjunctions Is Accomplished by Parallel and Independent Selection of Single Features.

PubMed

Andersen, Søren K; Müller, Matthias M; Hillyard, Steven A

2015-07-08

Experiments that study feature-based attention have often examined situations in which selection is based on a single feature (e.g., the color red). However, in more complex situations relevant stimuli may not be set apart from other stimuli by a single defining property but by a specific combination of features. Here, we examined sustained attentional selection of stimuli defined by conjunctions of color and orientation. Human observers attended to one out of four concurrently presented superimposed fields of randomly moving horizontal or vertical bars of red or blue color to detect brief intervals of coherent motion. Selective stimulus processing in early visual cortex was assessed by recordings of steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) elicited by each of the flickering fields of stimuli. We directly contrasted attentional selection of single features and feature conjunctions and found that SSVEP amplitudes on conditions in which selection was based on a single feature only (color or orientation) exactly predicted the magnitude of attentional enhancement of SSVEPs when attending to a conjunction of both features. Furthermore, enhanced SSVEP amplitudes elicited by attended stimuli were accompanied by equivalent reductions of SSVEP amplitudes elicited by unattended stimuli in all cases. We conclude that attentional selection of a feature-conjunction stimulus is accomplished by the parallel and independent facilitation of its constituent feature dimensions in early visual cortex. The ability to perceive the world is limited by the brain's processing capacity. Attention affords adaptive behavior by selectively prioritizing processing of relevant stimuli based on their features (location, color, orientation, etc.). We found that attentional mechanisms for selection of different features belonging to the same object operate independently and in parallel: concurrent attentional selection of two stimulus features is simply the sum of attending to each of those features separately. This result is key to understanding attentional selection in complex (natural) scenes, where relevant stimuli are likely to be defined by a combination of stimulus features. Copyright © 2015 the authors 0270-6474/15/359912-08$15.00/0.

Milagro Observations of Potential TeV Emitters

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Abeysekara, Anushka; Linnemann, James

2012-03-01

We searched for point sources in Milagro sky maps at the locations in four catalogs of potential TeV emitting sources. Our candidates are selected from the Fermi 2FGL pulsars, Fermi 2FGL extragalactic sources, TeVCat extragalactic sources, and from the BL Lac TeV Candidate list published by Costamante and Ghisellini in 2002. The False Discovery Rate (FDR) statistical procedure is used to select the sources. The FDR procedure controls the fraction of false detections. Our results are presented in this talk.

Collective feature selection to identify crucial epistatic variants.

PubMed

Verma, Shefali S; Lucas, Anastasia; Zhang, Xinyuan; Veturi, Yogasudha; Dudek, Scott; Li, Binglan; Li, Ruowang; Urbanowicz, Ryan; Moore, Jason H; Kim, Dokyoon; Ritchie, Marylyn D

2018-01-01

Machine learning methods have gained popularity and practicality in identifying linear and non-linear effects of variants associated with complex disease/traits. Detection of epistatic interactions still remains a challenge due to the large number of features and relatively small sample size as input, thus leading to the so-called "short fat data" problem. The efficiency of machine learning methods can be increased by limiting the number of input features. Thus, it is very important to perform variable selection before searching for epistasis. Many methods have been evaluated and proposed to perform feature selection, but no single method works best in all scenarios. We demonstrate this by conducting two separate simulation analyses to evaluate the proposed collective feature selection approach. Through our simulation study we propose a collective feature selection approach to select features that are in the "union" of the best performing methods. We explored various parametric, non-parametric, and data mining approaches to perform feature selection. We choose our top performing methods to select the union of the resulting variables based on a user-defined percentage of variants selected from each method to take to downstream analysis. Our simulation analysis shows that non-parametric data mining approaches, such as MDR, may work best under one simulation criteria for the high effect size (penetrance) datasets, while non-parametric methods designed for feature selection, such as Ranger and Gradient boosting, work best under other simulation criteria. Thus, using a collective approach proves to be more beneficial for selecting variables with epistatic effects also in low effect size datasets and different genetic architectures. Following this, we applied our proposed collective feature selection approach to select the top 1% of variables to identify potential interacting variables associated with Body Mass Index (BMI) in ~ 44,000 samples obtained from Geisinger's MyCode Community Health Initiative (on behalf of DiscovEHR collaboration). In this study, we were able to show that selecting variables using a collective feature selection approach could help in selecting true positive epistatic variables more frequently than applying any single method for feature selection via simulation studies. We were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of collective feature selection along with a comparison of many methods in our simulation analysis. We also applied our method to identify non-linear networks associated with obesity.

500(deg)C electronics for harsh environments

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sadwick, Laurence P.; Hwu, R. Jennifer; Chern, J. H. Howard; Lin, Ching-Hsu; Castillo, Linda Del; Johnson, Travis

2005-01-01

Solid state vacuum devices (SSVDs) are a relatively new class of electronic devices. Innosys is a leading producer of high frequency SSVDs for a number of applications, including RF communications. SSVDs combine features inherent to both solid state and vacuum transistors. Electron transport can be by solid state or vacuum or both. The focus of this talk is on thermionic SSVDs, in which the primary vacuum transport is by thermionically liberated electron emission.

American Conference on Neutron Scattering 2014

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Dillen, J. Ardie

2014-12-31

Scientists from the around the world converged in Knoxville, TN to have share ideas, present technical information and contribute to the advancement of neutron scattering. Featuring over 400 oral/poster presentations, ACNS 2014 offered a strong program of plenary, invited and contributed talks and poster sessions covering topics in soft condensed matter, hard condensed matter, biology, chemistry, energy and engineering applications in neutron physics – confirming the great diversity of science that is enabled by neutron scattering.

STS-127 Firing Room

NASA Image and Video Library

2009-07-11

Bob Cabana, Director of NASA's Kennedy Space Center talks with other mission managers in Firing Room Four of the Launch Control Center at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Sunday, July 12, 2009. Endeavour is set to launch at 7:13p.m. EDT with the crew of STS-127 and start a 16-day mission that will feature five spacewalks and complete construction of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

ASK Talks with W. Scott Cameron

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Cameron, W. Scott

2002-01-01

This paper presents an interview with Scott Cameron who is the Capital Systems Manager for the Food and Beverage Global Business Unit of Procter and Gamble. He has been managing capital projects and mentoring other project managers for the past 20 years at Procter and Gamble within its Beauty Care, Health Care, Food and Beverage, and Fabric and Home Care Businesses. Scott also has been an Academy Sharing Knowledge (ASK) feature writer since Volume One.

NASA Columbus Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-20

Metro High School Student Anthony Springer talks during the NASA Future Forum Inspiration and Education Panel at The Ohio State University on Monday, Feb. 20, 2012, in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA Columbus Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-20

Dayton Regional STEM student Cheyenne Benson talks during the NASA Future Forum Inspiration and Education Panel at The Ohio State University on Monday, Feb. 20, 2012, in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

AVC: Selecting discriminative features on basis of AUC by maximizing variable complementarity.

PubMed

Sun, Lei; Wang, Jun; Wei, Jinmao

2017-03-14

The Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve is well-known in evaluating classification performance in biomedical field. Owing to its superiority in dealing with imbalanced and cost-sensitive data, the ROC curve has been exploited as a popular metric to evaluate and find out disease-related genes (features). The existing ROC-based feature selection approaches are simple and effective in evaluating individual features. However, these approaches may fail to find real target feature subset due to their lack of effective means to reduce the redundancy between features, which is essential in machine learning. In this paper, we propose to assess feature complementarity by a trick of measuring the distances between the misclassified instances and their nearest misses on the dimensions of pairwise features. If a misclassified instance and its nearest miss on one feature dimension are far apart on another feature dimension, the two features are regarded as complementary to each other. Subsequently, we propose a novel filter feature selection approach on the basis of the ROC analysis. The new approach employs an efficient heuristic search strategy to select optimal features with highest complementarities. The experimental results on a broad range of microarray data sets validate that the classifiers built on the feature subset selected by our approach can get the minimal balanced error rate with a small amount of significant features. Compared with other ROC-based feature selection approaches, our new approach can select fewer features and effectively improve the classification performance.

A Feature and Algorithm Selection Method for Improving the Prediction of Protein Structural Class.

PubMed

Ni, Qianwu; Chen, Lei

2017-01-01

Correct prediction of protein structural class is beneficial to investigation on protein functions, regulations and interactions. In recent years, several computational methods have been proposed in this regard. However, based on various features, it is still a great challenge to select proper classification algorithm and extract essential features to participate in classification. In this study, a feature and algorithm selection method was presented for improving the accuracy of protein structural class prediction. The amino acid compositions and physiochemical features were adopted to represent features and thirty-eight machine learning algorithms collected in Weka were employed. All features were first analyzed by a feature selection method, minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR), producing a feature list. Then, several feature sets were constructed by adding features in the list one by one. For each feature set, thirtyeight algorithms were executed on a dataset, in which proteins were represented by features in the set. The predicted classes yielded by these algorithms and true class of each protein were collected to construct a dataset, which were analyzed by mRMR method, yielding an algorithm list. From the algorithm list, the algorithm was taken one by one to build an ensemble prediction model. Finally, we selected the ensemble prediction model with the best performance as the optimal ensemble prediction model. Experimental results indicate that the constructed model is much superior to models using single algorithm and other models that only adopt feature selection procedure or algorithm selection procedure. The feature selection procedure or algorithm selection procedure are really helpful for building an ensemble prediction model that can yield a better performance. Copyright© Bentham Science Publishers; For any queries, please email at epub@benthamscience.org.

Non-negative matrix factorization in texture feature for classification of dementia with MRI data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sarwinda, D.; Bustamam, A.; Ardaneswari, G.

2017-07-01

This paper investigates applications of non-negative matrix factorization as feature selection method to select the features from gray level co-occurrence matrix. The proposed approach is used to classify dementia using MRI data. In this study, texture analysis using gray level co-occurrence matrix is done to feature extraction. In the feature extraction process of MRI data, we found seven features from gray level co-occurrence matrix. Non-negative matrix factorization selected three features that influence of all features produced by feature extractions. A Naïve Bayes classifier is adapted to classify dementia, i.e. Alzheimer's disease, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and normal control. The experimental results show that non-negative factorization as feature selection method able to achieve an accuracy of 96.4% for classification of Alzheimer's and normal control. The proposed method also compared with other features selection methods i.e. Principal Component Analysis (PCA).

PREFACE: 4th Symposium on Prospects in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries (DISCRETE2014)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Di Domenico, Antonio; Mavromatos, Nick E.; Mitsou, Vasiliki A.; Skliros, Dimitri P.

2015-07-01

The DISCRETE 2014: Fourth Symposium in the Physics of Discrete Symmetries took place at King's College London, Strand Campus, London WC2R 2LS, from Tuesday, December 2 2014 till Saturday, December 6 2014. This is the fourth Edition of the DISCRETE conference series, which is a biannual event, having been held previously in Valencia (Discrete'08), Rome (Discrete2010) and Lisbon (Discrete2012). The topics covered at the DISCRETE series of conferences are: T, C, P, CP symmetries; accidental symmetries (B, L conservation); CPT symmetry, decoherence and entangled states, Lorentz symmetry breaking (phenomenology and current bounds); neutrino mass and mixing; implications for cosmology and astroparticle physics, dark matter searches; experimental prospects at LHC, new facilities. In DISCRETE 2014 we have also introduced two new topics: cosmological aspects of non-commutative space-times as well as PT symmetric Hamiltonians (non-Hermitian but with real eigenvalues), a topic that has wide applications in particle physics and beyond. The conference was opened by the King's College London Vice Principal on Research and Innovation, Mr Chris Mottershead, followed by a welcome address by the Chair of DISCRETE 2014 (Professor Nick E. Mavromatos). After these introductory talks, the scientific programme of the DISCRETE 2014 symposium started. Following the tradition of DISCRETE series of conferences, the talks (138 in total) were divided into plenary-review talks (25), invited research talks (50) and shorter presentations (63) — selected by the conveners of each session in consultation with the organisers — from the submitted abstracts. We have been fortunate to have very high-quality, thought stimulating and interesting talks at all levels, which, together with the discussions among the participants, made the conference quite enjoyable. There were 152 registered participants for the event.

Comparison of Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization and Biogeography-based Optimization for Feature Selection to Classify Clusters of Microcalcifications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Khehra, Baljit Singh; Pharwaha, Amar Partap Singh

2017-04-01

Ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) is one type of breast cancer. Clusters of microcalcifications (MCCs) are symptoms of DCIS that are recognized by mammography. Selection of robust features vector is the process of selecting an optimal subset of features from a large number of available features in a given problem domain after the feature extraction and before any classification scheme. Feature selection reduces the feature space that improves the performance of classifier and decreases the computational burden imposed by using many features on classifier. Selection of an optimal subset of features from a large number of available features in a given problem domain is a difficult search problem. For n features, the total numbers of possible subsets of features are 2n. Thus, selection of an optimal subset of features problem belongs to the category of NP-hard problems. In this paper, an attempt is made to find the optimal subset of MCCs features from all possible subsets of features using genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and biogeography-based optimization (BBO). For simulation, a total of 380 benign and malignant MCCs samples have been selected from mammogram images of DDSM database. A total of 50 features extracted from benign and malignant MCCs samples are used in this study. In these algorithms, fitness function is correct classification rate of classifier. Support vector machine is used as a classifier. From experimental results, it is also observed that the performance of PSO-based and BBO-based algorithms to select an optimal subset of features for classifying MCCs as benign or malignant is better as compared to GA-based algorithm.

SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks): A Selective Bibliography, 1971-1981.

DTIC Science & Technology

1982-08-01

European Security: Mutual and Balance Force Reductions." Linda P. Brady. INTERNATIONAL SECURITY REVIEW 6:189-208, Summer 1981 "Negotiating With The...Danger." D. Seligman . FORTUNE 99:50-56, July 2, 1979 "Participation of the European States in the SALT III Negotiations." Hubertus Hoffmann and Rolf

Walking the Talk: Towards a More Inclusive Field of Disability Studies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Opini, Bathseba

2016-01-01

This paper is a conversation about growing an inclusive field of disability studies. The paper draws on data collected through an analysis of existing disability studies programmes in selected Canadian universities. The paper makes a case for including diverse perspectives, experiences, viewpoints, and voices in these programmes. In this work, I…

Social and Cognitive Factors in Second Language Acquisition: Selected Proceedings of the 1999 Second Language Research Forum.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Swierzbin, Bonnie, Ed.; Morris, Frank, Ed.; Anderson, Michael E., Ed.; Klee, Carol A., Ed.; Tarone, Elaine, Ed.

This edited volume includes the following chapters: "Three Kinds of Sociolinguistics and SLA: A Psycholinguistic Perspective" (Dennis R. Preston); "Getting Serious about Language Play: Language Play, Interlanguage Variation, and Second Language Acquisition" (Elaine Tarone); "Oppositional Talk and the Acquisition of Modality in L2 English" (Tom…

Portfolio Preparation Tips for Teachers, Part 2

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hunter-Lombardi, Brooke

2009-01-01

In the August/September 2008 issue of "SchoolArts," the author talked about strategies for helping students develop content and good working habits to support making portfolio-quality pieces. In this article, she offers some tips which focus on the importance of critique, presentation, and selection of images to end up with a polished,…

Guiding Your Child through Those Tough and Turbulent Teen Years.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Beck, Irene

1994-01-01

As adolescents work through issues like independence, identity, and intimacy, parents must establish their role and guide their children through difficult years. The article suggests that parents stay informed and connected, talk to their children, take a stand on issues, select battles carefully, be approachable, and enhance self-esteem. (SM)

Correlations and Fluctuations in Strong Interactions:. a Selection of Topics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bialas, A.

2003-09-01

Invited talk at the 10th Workshop on Multiparticle Production: Correlations and Fluctuations in QCD. It contains a short account of (i) Event-by-event fluctuations and their relations to "inclusive distributions; (ii) Fluctuations of the conserved charges" (iii) Coincidence probabilities and Renyi entropies, and (iv) HBT correlations in the presence of flow.

Encountering Science Education's Capacity to Affect and Be Affected

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alsop, Steve

2016-01-01

What might science education learn from the recent affective turn in the humanities and social sciences? Framed as a response to Michalinos Zembylas's article, this essay draws from selected theorizing in affect theory, science education and science and technology studies, in pursuit of diverse and productive ways to talk of affect within science…

CrossTalk: The Journal of Defense Software Engineering. Volume 24, Number 3, May/June 2011

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-05-01

performance to match peak capacity. Selection. Supportive devices (e.g. prosthesis , text readers) Motives Assessment of people’s motives to work...iden- tified limitation. An example might be to assign a team member with an innate ability to communicate with people and get them to feel comfortable

Managing urban and high-use recreation settings.

Treesearch

Paul H. Gobster

1993-01-01

Presents a selection of papers from the "Urban Forestry" and "Ethnic Minorities and the Environment" paper sessions of the 4th North American Symposium on Society and Resource Management. Nine paper sessions organized by the North Central Forest Experiment Station-Chicago brought together 51 authors in 34 talks, 23 papers of which are included here...

Should Reformers Support Education Savings Accounts?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ladner, Matthew; Smith, Nelson

2016-01-01

In this article, "Education Next" talks with Matthew Ladner and Nelson Smith on the topic of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). ESAs apply the logic of school choice to the ever-expanding realm of education offerings. Rather than simply empowering families to select the school of their choice, ESAs provide families with most or all of…

Feature Selection for Classification of Polar Regions Using a Fuzzy Expert System

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Penaloza, Mauel A.; Welch, Ronald M.

1996-01-01

Labeling, feature selection, and the choice of classifier are critical elements for classification of scenes and for image understanding. This study examines several methods for feature selection in polar regions, including the list, of a fuzzy logic-based expert system for further refinement of a set of selected features. Six Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) Local Area Coverage (LAC) arctic scenes are classified into nine classes: water, snow / ice, ice cloud, land, thin stratus, stratus over water, cumulus over water, textured snow over water, and snow-covered mountains. Sixty-seven spectral and textural features are computed and analyzed by the feature selection algorithms. The divergence, histogram analysis, and discriminant analysis approaches are intercompared for their effectiveness in feature selection. The fuzzy expert system method is used not only to determine the effectiveness of each approach in classifying polar scenes, but also to further reduce the features into a more optimal set. For each selection method,features are ranked from best to worst, and the best half of the features are selected. Then, rules using these selected features are defined. The results of running the fuzzy expert system with these rules show that the divergence method produces the best set features, not only does it produce the highest classification accuracy, but also it has the lowest computation requirements. A reduction of the set of features produced by the divergence method using the fuzzy expert system results in an overall classification accuracy of over 95 %. However, this increase of accuracy has a high computation cost.

Unbiased feature selection in learning random forests for high-dimensional data.

PubMed

Nguyen, Thanh-Tung; Huang, Joshua Zhexue; Nguyen, Thuy Thi

2015-01-01

Random forests (RFs) have been widely used as a powerful classification method. However, with the randomization in both bagging samples and feature selection, the trees in the forest tend to select uninformative features for node splitting. This makes RFs have poor accuracy when working with high-dimensional data. Besides that, RFs have bias in the feature selection process where multivalued features are favored. Aiming at debiasing feature selection in RFs, we propose a new RF algorithm, called xRF, to select good features in learning RFs for high-dimensional data. We first remove the uninformative features using p-value assessment, and the subset of unbiased features is then selected based on some statistical measures. This feature subset is then partitioned into two subsets. A feature weighting sampling technique is used to sample features from these two subsets for building trees. This approach enables one to generate more accurate trees, while allowing one to reduce dimensionality and the amount of data needed for learning RFs. An extensive set of experiments has been conducted on 47 high-dimensional real-world datasets including image datasets. The experimental results have shown that RFs with the proposed approach outperformed the existing random forests in increasing the accuracy and the AUC measures.

Train axle bearing fault detection using a feature selection scheme based multi-scale morphological filter

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Yifan; Liang, Xihui; Lin, Jianhui; Chen, Yuejian; Liu, Jianxin

2018-02-01

This paper presents a novel signal processing scheme, feature selection based multi-scale morphological filter (MMF), for train axle bearing fault detection. In this scheme, more than 30 feature indicators of vibration signals are calculated for axle bearings with different conditions and the features which can reflect fault characteristics more effectively and representatively are selected using the max-relevance and min-redundancy principle. Then, a filtering scale selection approach for MMF based on feature selection and grey relational analysis is proposed. The feature selection based MMF method is tested on diagnosis of artificially created damages of rolling bearings of railway trains. Experimental results show that the proposed method has a superior performance in extracting fault features of defective train axle bearings. In addition, comparisons are performed with the kurtosis criterion based MMF and the spectral kurtosis criterion based MMF. The proposed feature selection based MMF method outperforms these two methods in detection of train axle bearing faults.

Genetic Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Feature Selection for Very-High-Resolution Remotely Sensed Imagery Object Change Detection.

PubMed

Chen, Qiang; Chen, Yunhao; Jiang, Weiguo

2016-07-30

In the field of multiple features Object-Based Change Detection (OBCD) for very-high-resolution remotely sensed images, image objects have abundant features and feature selection affects the precision and efficiency of OBCD. Through object-based image analysis, this paper proposes a Genetic Particle Swarm Optimization (GPSO)-based feature selection algorithm to solve the optimization problem of feature selection in multiple features OBCD. We select the Ratio of Mean to Variance (RMV) as the fitness function of GPSO, and apply the proposed algorithm to the object-based hybrid multivariate alternative detection model. Two experiment cases on Worldview-2/3 images confirm that GPSO can significantly improve the speed of convergence, and effectively avoid the problem of premature convergence, relative to other feature selection algorithms. According to the accuracy evaluation of OBCD, GPSO is superior at overall accuracy (84.17% and 83.59%) and Kappa coefficient (0.6771 and 0.6314) than other algorithms. Moreover, the sensitivity analysis results show that the proposed algorithm is not easily influenced by the initial parameters, but the number of features to be selected and the size of the particle swarm would affect the algorithm. The comparison experiment results reveal that RMV is more suitable than other functions as the fitness function of GPSO-based feature selection algorithm.

Preface

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Dascalu, Dan; Muller, Alexandru

2003-07-01

It is a great pleasure for us to introduce this special issue featuring selected papers from the 13th European Micromechanics Workshop, MME'02, organized by the National Institute for R&D in Microtechnologies (IMT Bucharest). The conference was held in the beautiful mountain resort Sinaia, a former Romanian royal residence, 120 km north of Bucharest. In 1989 the first MME workshop was held in Twente, since then it has traveled from one Western European country to another. MME'02 is the first workshop to have been held in Eastern Europe. MEMS consolidated as an exciting field for research and development over the past decade and the MEMS industry is now a substantial presence. Commercial applications of MEMS technology now include pressure, chemical, acceleration, rotation rate sensors, microphones, microdevices in microfluidic systems for bio-engineering, RF switches and fiber optic networks (optical switches), etc. Microtechnology is one of the major growth markets of the 21st century. Microsystems are now key products in information and communication technology, automotive engineering and are also increasing in the fields of chemistry and life sciences. The 6th Framework Programme, already underway, promotes long-term initiatives in this area of research. After reviewing 72 high-quality abstracts submitted for the conference, the programme organizers selected 68 for presentation during the one and half days of the workshop. There were 62 papers from Europe and six papers from outside Europe (USA, Canada and Singapore). The papers covered materials, processing, modeling and applications of micromachining and micromachined devices. Following the tradition of the MME workshops, non-invited papers were discussed at poster sessions after a short oral presentation. This formula was again highly appreciated and stimulated much discussion between scientists. Five invited papers were also presented orally. These invited talks reviewed the latest technological developments in MEMS topics. This year special attention was devoted to the emerging RF MEMS technology. In addition, a presentation of `Microsystems in FP6' was held as a special invited talk at the end of the conference. The selection of papers for inclusion in this issue was difficult, due to the high quality of the papers of the workshop. The final content is a result of the collaboration of the programme committee and Institute of Physics Publishing staff. We wish to thank our colleagues from the MME'02 programme committee: A G R Evans (Southampton University), M Hill (Cork Institute of Technology) and R Wolffenbuttel (Delft University of Technology). We are grateful to all participants for making the workshop a very stimulating meeting place for the MEMS community in Europe.

Genetic Programming and Frequent Itemset Mining to Identify Feature Selection Patterns of iEEG and fMRI Epilepsy Data

PubMed Central

Smart, Otis; Burrell, Lauren

2014-01-01

Pattern classification for intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals has furthered epilepsy research toward understanding the origin of epileptic seizures and localizing dysfunctional brain tissue for treatment. Prior research has demonstrated that implicitly selecting features with a genetic programming (GP) algorithm more effectively determined the proper features to discern biomarker and non-biomarker interictal iEEG and fMRI activity than conventional feature selection approaches. However for each the iEEG and fMRI modalities, it is still uncertain whether the stochastic properties of indirect feature selection with a GP yield (a) consistent results within a patient data set and (b) features that are specific or universal across multiple patient data sets. We examined the reproducibility of implicitly selecting features to classify interictal activity using a GP algorithm by performing several selection trials and subsequent frequent itemset mining (FIM) for separate iEEG and fMRI epilepsy patient data. We observed within-subject consistency and across-subject variability with some small similarity for selected features, indicating a clear need for patient-specific features and possible need for patient-specific feature selection or/and classification. For the fMRI, using nearest-neighbor classification and 30 GP generations, we obtained over 60% median sensitivity and over 60% median selectivity. For the iEEG, using nearest-neighbor classification and 30 GP generations, we obtained over 65% median sensitivity and over 65% median selectivity except one patient. PMID:25580059

Method of generating features optimal to a dataset and classifier

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Bruillard, Paul J.; Gosink, Luke J.; Jarman, Kenneth D.

A method of generating features optimal to a particular dataset and classifier is disclosed. A dataset of messages is inputted and a classifier is selected. An algebra of features is encoded. Computable features that are capable of describing the dataset from the algebra of features are selected. Irredundant features that are optimal for the classifier and the dataset are selected.

Temporal Correlation Mechanisms and Their Role in Feature Selection: A Single-Unit Study in Primate Somatosensory Cortex

PubMed Central

Gomez-Ramirez, Manuel; Trzcinski, Natalie K.; Mihalas, Stefan; Niebur, Ernst

2014-01-01

Studies in vision show that attention enhances the firing rates of cells when it is directed towards their preferred stimulus feature. However, it is unknown whether other sensory systems employ this mechanism to mediate feature selection within their modalities. Moreover, whether feature-based attention modulates the correlated activity of a population is unclear. Indeed, temporal correlation codes such as spike-synchrony and spike-count correlations (rsc) are believed to play a role in stimulus selection by increasing the signal and reducing the noise in a population, respectively. Here, we investigate (1) whether feature-based attention biases the correlated activity between neurons when attention is directed towards their common preferred feature, (2) the interplay between spike-synchrony and rsc during feature selection, and (3) whether feature attention effects are common across the visual and tactile systems. Single-unit recordings were made in secondary somatosensory cortex of three non-human primates while animals engaged in tactile feature (orientation and frequency) and visual discrimination tasks. We found that both firing rate and spike-synchrony between neurons with similar feature selectivity were enhanced when attention was directed towards their preferred feature. However, attention effects on spike-synchrony were twice as large as those on firing rate, and had a tighter relationship with behavioral performance. Further, we observed increased rsc when attention was directed towards the visual modality (i.e., away from touch). These data suggest that similar feature selection mechanisms are employed in vision and touch, and that temporal correlation codes such as spike-synchrony play a role in mediating feature selection. We posit that feature-based selection operates by implementing multiple mechanisms that reduce the overall noise levels in the neural population and synchronize activity across subpopulations that encode the relevant features of sensory stimuli. PMID:25423284

Geological and Seismic Data Mining For The Development of An Interpretation System Within The Alptransit Project

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Klose, C. D.; Giese, R.; Löw, S.; Borm, G.

Especially for deep underground excavations, the prediction of the locations of small- scale hazardous geotechnical structures is nearly impossible when exploration is re- stricted to surface based methods. Hence, for the AlpTransit base tunnels, exploration ahead has become an essential component of the excavation plan. The project de- scribed in this talk aims at improving the technology for the geological interpretation of reflection seismic data. The discovered geological-seismic relations will be used to develop an interpretation system based on artificial intelligence to predict hazardous geotechnical structures of the advancing tunnel face. This talk gives, at first, an overview about the data mining of geological and seismic properties of metamorphic rocks within the Penninic gneiss zone in Southern Switzer- land. The data results from measurements of a specific geophysical prediction system developed by the GFZ Potsdam, Germany, along the 2600 m long and 1400 m deep Faido access tunnel. The goal is to find those seismic features (i.e. compression and shear wave velocities, velocity ratios and velocity gradients) which show a significant relation to geological properties (i.e. fracturing and fabric features). The seismic properties were acquired from different tomograms, whereas the geolog- ical features derive from tunnel face maps. The features are statistically compared with the seismic rock properties taking into account the different methods used for the tunnel excavation (TBM and Drill/Blast). Fracturing and the mica content stay in a positive relation to the velocity values. Both, P- and S-wave velocities near the tunnel surface describe the petrology better, whereas in the interior of the rock mass they correlate to natural micro- and macro-scopic fractures surrounding tectonites, i.e. cataclasites. The latter lie outside of the excavation damage zone and the tunnel loos- ening zone. The shear wave velocities are better indicators for rock fracturing than compression wave velocities. The velocity ratios indicate the mica content and the water content of the rocks.

Feature Selection Methods for Zero-Shot Learning of Neural Activity.

PubMed

Caceres, Carlos A; Roos, Matthew J; Rupp, Kyle M; Milsap, Griffin; Crone, Nathan E; Wolmetz, Michael E; Ratto, Christopher R

2017-01-01

Dimensionality poses a serious challenge when making predictions from human neuroimaging data. Across imaging modalities, large pools of potential neural features (e.g., responses from particular voxels, electrodes, and temporal windows) have to be related to typically limited sets of stimuli and samples. In recent years, zero-shot prediction models have been introduced for mapping between neural signals and semantic attributes, which allows for classification of stimulus classes not explicitly included in the training set. While choices about feature selection can have a substantial impact when closed-set accuracy, open-set robustness, and runtime are competing design objectives, no systematic study of feature selection for these models has been reported. Instead, a relatively straightforward feature stability approach has been adopted and successfully applied across models and imaging modalities. To characterize the tradeoffs in feature selection for zero-shot learning, we compared correlation-based stability to several other feature selection techniques on comparable data sets from two distinct imaging modalities: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Electrocorticography. While most of the feature selection methods resulted in similar zero-shot prediction accuracies and spatial/spectral patterns of selected features, there was one exception; A novel feature/attribute correlation approach was able to achieve those accuracies with far fewer features, suggesting the potential for simpler prediction models that yield high zero-shot classification accuracy.

The State of Group Support System Research through a Survey of Papers 1980 to 1991

DTIC Science & Technology

1991-09-01

September 1991 Author: _____ Matthew G. Rausch Approved by: I ’K . Tung X. Bui, Thesis Advisor -Moshe Z iran ,econd Reader Department of Admih sraiv Siences ...focus of their support features (voting/analytical modeling, communication/idea organization, game theory/ conflict analysis), and still others by...Moncrieff, J., Taylor, A., April 1990, "Talking with JIMMY Using Electronic Publications in Higher Education," Online Review, Vol. 14, No. 2. Minch, P

NASA Columbus Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-20

Ohio Space Grant Consortium (OSGC) Director Gary Slater talks during the NASA Future Forum Inspiration and Education Panel at The Ohio State University on Monday, Feb. 20, 2012, in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

KSC-2011-6489

NASA Image and Video Library

2011-08-13

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Some veteran space shuttle fliers sign autographs and talk with shuttle workers and their families at the “We Made History! Shuttle Program Celebration,” Aug. 13, at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, Fla. The event was held to honor shuttle workers’ dedication to NASA’s Space Shuttle Program and to celebrate 30 years of space shuttle achievements. The event featured food, music, entertainment, astronaut appearances, educational activities, giveaways, and Starfire Night Skyshow. Photo credit: Jim Grossmann

The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory - An Isolated Nuclear Research Establishment

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Bradbury, Norris E.; Meade, Roger Allen

Early in his twenty-five year career as the Director of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Norris Bradbury wrote at length about the atomic bomb and the many implications the bomb might have on the world. His themes were both technical and philosophical. In 1963, after nearly twenty years of leading the nation’s first nuclear weapons laboratory, Bradbury took the opportunity to broaden his writing. In a paper delivered to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s symposium on the “Criteria in the Selection of Sites for the Construction of Reactors and Nuclear Research Centers,” Bradbury took the opportunity to talk about themore » business of nuclear research and the human component of operating a scientific laboratory. This report is the transcript of his talk.« less

Max-AUC Feature Selection in Computer-Aided Detection of Polyps in CT Colonography

PubMed Central

Xu, Jian-Wu; Suzuki, Kenji

2014-01-01

We propose a feature selection method based on a sequential forward floating selection (SFFS) procedure to improve the performance of a classifier in computerized detection of polyps in CT colonography (CTC). The feature selection method is coupled with a nonlinear support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Unlike the conventional linear method based on Wilks' lambda, the proposed method selected the most relevant features that would maximize the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), which directly maximizes classification performance, evaluated based on AUC value, in the computer-aided detection (CADe) scheme. We presented two variants of the proposed method with different stopping criteria used in the SFFS procedure. The first variant searched all feature combinations allowed in the SFFS procedure and selected the subsets that maximize the AUC values. The second variant performed a statistical test at each step during the SFFS procedure, and it was terminated if the increase in the AUC value was not statistically significant. The advantage of the second variant is its lower computational cost. To test the performance of the proposed method, we compared it against the popular stepwise feature selection method based on Wilks' lambda for a colonic-polyp database (25 polyps and 2624 nonpolyps). We extracted 75 morphologic, gray-level-based, and texture features from the segmented lesion candidate regions. The two variants of the proposed feature selection method chose 29 and 7 features, respectively. Two SVM classifiers trained with these selected features yielded a 96% by-polyp sensitivity at false-positive (FP) rates of 4.1 and 6.5 per patient, respectively. Experiments showed a significant improvement in the performance of the classifier with the proposed feature selection method over that with the popular stepwise feature selection based on Wilks' lambda that yielded 18.0 FPs per patient at the same sensitivity level. PMID:24608058

Max-AUC feature selection in computer-aided detection of polyps in CT colonography.

PubMed

Xu, Jian-Wu; Suzuki, Kenji

2014-03-01

We propose a feature selection method based on a sequential forward floating selection (SFFS) procedure to improve the performance of a classifier in computerized detection of polyps in CT colonography (CTC). The feature selection method is coupled with a nonlinear support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Unlike the conventional linear method based on Wilks' lambda, the proposed method selected the most relevant features that would maximize the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), which directly maximizes classification performance, evaluated based on AUC value, in the computer-aided detection (CADe) scheme. We presented two variants of the proposed method with different stopping criteria used in the SFFS procedure. The first variant searched all feature combinations allowed in the SFFS procedure and selected the subsets that maximize the AUC values. The second variant performed a statistical test at each step during the SFFS procedure, and it was terminated if the increase in the AUC value was not statistically significant. The advantage of the second variant is its lower computational cost. To test the performance of the proposed method, we compared it against the popular stepwise feature selection method based on Wilks' lambda for a colonic-polyp database (25 polyps and 2624 nonpolyps). We extracted 75 morphologic, gray-level-based, and texture features from the segmented lesion candidate regions. The two variants of the proposed feature selection method chose 29 and 7 features, respectively. Two SVM classifiers trained with these selected features yielded a 96% by-polyp sensitivity at false-positive (FP) rates of 4.1 and 6.5 per patient, respectively. Experiments showed a significant improvement in the performance of the classifier with the proposed feature selection method over that with the popular stepwise feature selection based on Wilks' lambda that yielded 18.0 FPs per patient at the same sensitivity level.

Feature engineering for drug name recognition in biomedical texts: feature conjunction and feature selection.

PubMed

Liu, Shengyu; Tang, Buzhou; Chen, Qingcai; Wang, Xiaolong; Fan, Xiaoming

2015-01-01

Drug name recognition (DNR) is a critical step for drug information extraction. Machine learning-based methods have been widely used for DNR with various types of features such as part-of-speech, word shape, and dictionary feature. Features used in current machine learning-based methods are usually singleton features which may be due to explosive features and a large number of noisy features when singleton features are combined into conjunction features. However, singleton features that can only capture one linguistic characteristic of a word are not sufficient to describe the information for DNR when multiple characteristics should be considered. In this study, we explore feature conjunction and feature selection for DNR, which have never been reported. We intuitively select 8 types of singleton features and combine them into conjunction features in two ways. Then, Chi-square, mutual information, and information gain are used to mine effective features. Experimental results show that feature conjunction and feature selection can improve the performance of the DNR system with a moderate number of features and our DNR system significantly outperforms the best system in the DDIExtraction 2013 challenge.

Effect of feature-selective attention on neuronal responses in macaque area MT

PubMed Central

Chen, X.; Hoffmann, K.-P.; Albright, T. D.

2012-01-01

Attention influences visual processing in striate and extrastriate cortex, which has been extensively studied for spatial-, object-, and feature-based attention. Most studies exploring neural signatures of feature-based attention have trained animals to attend to an object identified by a certain feature and ignore objects/displays identified by a different feature. Little is known about the effects of feature-selective attention, where subjects attend to one stimulus feature domain (e.g., color) of an object while features from different domains (e.g., direction of motion) of the same object are ignored. To study this type of feature-selective attention in area MT in the middle temporal sulcus, we trained macaque monkeys to either attend to and report the direction of motion of a moving sine wave grating (a feature for which MT neurons display strong selectivity) or attend to and report its color (a feature for which MT neurons have very limited selectivity). We hypothesized that neurons would upregulate their firing rate during attend-direction conditions compared with attend-color conditions. We found that feature-selective attention significantly affected 22% of MT neurons. Contrary to our hypothesis, these neurons did not necessarily increase firing rate when animals attended to direction of motion but fell into one of two classes. In one class, attention to color increased the gain of stimulus-induced responses compared with attend-direction conditions. The other class displayed the opposite effects. Feature-selective activity modulations occurred earlier in neurons modulated by attention to color compared with neurons modulated by attention to motion direction. Thus feature-selective attention influences neuronal processing in macaque area MT but often exhibited a mismatch between the preferred stimulus dimension (direction of motion) and the preferred attention dimension (attention to color). PMID:22170961

Effect of feature-selective attention on neuronal responses in macaque area MT.

PubMed

Chen, X; Hoffmann, K-P; Albright, T D; Thiele, A

2012-03-01

Attention influences visual processing in striate and extrastriate cortex, which has been extensively studied for spatial-, object-, and feature-based attention. Most studies exploring neural signatures of feature-based attention have trained animals to attend to an object identified by a certain feature and ignore objects/displays identified by a different feature. Little is known about the effects of feature-selective attention, where subjects attend to one stimulus feature domain (e.g., color) of an object while features from different domains (e.g., direction of motion) of the same object are ignored. To study this type of feature-selective attention in area MT in the middle temporal sulcus, we trained macaque monkeys to either attend to and report the direction of motion of a moving sine wave grating (a feature for which MT neurons display strong selectivity) or attend to and report its color (a feature for which MT neurons have very limited selectivity). We hypothesized that neurons would upregulate their firing rate during attend-direction conditions compared with attend-color conditions. We found that feature-selective attention significantly affected 22% of MT neurons. Contrary to our hypothesis, these neurons did not necessarily increase firing rate when animals attended to direction of motion but fell into one of two classes. In one class, attention to color increased the gain of stimulus-induced responses compared with attend-direction conditions. The other class displayed the opposite effects. Feature-selective activity modulations occurred earlier in neurons modulated by attention to color compared with neurons modulated by attention to motion direction. Thus feature-selective attention influences neuronal processing in macaque area MT but often exhibited a mismatch between the preferred stimulus dimension (direction of motion) and the preferred attention dimension (attention to color).

Comparison of Feature Selection Techniques in Machine Learning for Anatomical Brain MRI in Dementia.

PubMed

Tohka, Jussi; Moradi, Elaheh; Huttunen, Heikki

2016-07-01

We present a comparative split-half resampling analysis of various data driven feature selection and classification methods for the whole brain voxel-based classification analysis of anatomical magnetic resonance images. We compared support vector machines (SVMs), with or without filter based feature selection, several embedded feature selection methods and stability selection. While comparisons of the accuracy of various classification methods have been reported previously, the variability of the out-of-training sample classification accuracy and the set of selected features due to independent training and test sets have not been previously addressed in a brain imaging context. We studied two classification problems: 1) Alzheimer's disease (AD) vs. normal control (NC) and 2) mild cognitive impairment (MCI) vs. NC classification. In AD vs. NC classification, the variability in the test accuracy due to the subject sample did not vary between different methods and exceeded the variability due to different classifiers. In MCI vs. NC classification, particularly with a large training set, embedded feature selection methods outperformed SVM-based ones with the difference in the test accuracy exceeding the test accuracy variability due to the subject sample. The filter and embedded methods produced divergent feature patterns for MCI vs. NC classification that suggests the utility of the embedded feature selection for this problem when linked with the good generalization performance. The stability of the feature sets was strongly correlated with the number of features selected, weakly correlated with the stability of classification accuracy, and uncorrelated with the average classification accuracy.

Modified Bat Algorithm for Feature Selection with the Wisconsin Diagnosis Breast Cancer (WDBC) Dataset

PubMed

Jeyasingh, Suganthi; Veluchamy, Malathi

2017-05-01

Early diagnosis of breast cancer is essential to save lives of patients. Usually, medical datasets include a large variety of data that can lead to confusion during diagnosis. The Knowledge Discovery on Database (KDD) process helps to improve efficiency. It requires elimination of inappropriate and repeated data from the dataset before final diagnosis. This can be done using any of the feature selection algorithms available in data mining. Feature selection is considered as a vital step to increase the classification accuracy. This paper proposes a Modified Bat Algorithm (MBA) for feature selection to eliminate irrelevant features from an original dataset. The Bat algorithm was modified using simple random sampling to select the random instances from the dataset. Ranking was with the global best features to recognize the predominant features available in the dataset. The selected features are used to train a Random Forest (RF) classification algorithm. The MBA feature selection algorithm enhanced the classification accuracy of RF in identifying the occurrence of breast cancer. The Wisconsin Diagnosis Breast Cancer Dataset (WDBC) was used for estimating the performance analysis of the proposed MBA feature selection algorithm. The proposed algorithm achieved better performance in terms of Kappa statistic, Mathew’s Correlation Coefficient, Precision, F-measure, Recall, Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Relative Absolute Error (RAE) and Root Relative Squared Error (RRSE). Creative Commons Attribution License

Genetic Particle Swarm Optimization–Based Feature Selection for Very-High-Resolution Remotely Sensed Imagery Object Change Detection

PubMed Central

Chen, Qiang; Chen, Yunhao; Jiang, Weiguo

2016-01-01

In the field of multiple features Object-Based Change Detection (OBCD) for very-high-resolution remotely sensed images, image objects have abundant features and feature selection affects the precision and efficiency of OBCD. Through object-based image analysis, this paper proposes a Genetic Particle Swarm Optimization (GPSO)-based feature selection algorithm to solve the optimization problem of feature selection in multiple features OBCD. We select the Ratio of Mean to Variance (RMV) as the fitness function of GPSO, and apply the proposed algorithm to the object-based hybrid multivariate alternative detection model. Two experiment cases on Worldview-2/3 images confirm that GPSO can significantly improve the speed of convergence, and effectively avoid the problem of premature convergence, relative to other feature selection algorithms. According to the accuracy evaluation of OBCD, GPSO is superior at overall accuracy (84.17% and 83.59%) and Kappa coefficient (0.6771 and 0.6314) than other algorithms. Moreover, the sensitivity analysis results show that the proposed algorithm is not easily influenced by the initial parameters, but the number of features to be selected and the size of the particle swarm would affect the algorithm. The comparison experiment results reveal that RMV is more suitable than other functions as the fitness function of GPSO-based feature selection algorithm. PMID:27483285

Toward optimal feature and time segment selection by divergence method for EEG signals classification.

PubMed

Wang, Jie; Feng, Zuren; Lu, Na; Luo, Jing

2018-06-01

Feature selection plays an important role in the field of EEG signals based motor imagery pattern classification. It is a process that aims to select an optimal feature subset from the original set. Two significant advantages involved are: lowering the computational burden so as to speed up the learning procedure and removing redundant and irrelevant features so as to improve the classification performance. Therefore, feature selection is widely employed in the classification of EEG signals in practical brain-computer interface systems. In this paper, we present a novel statistical model to select the optimal feature subset based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence measure, and automatically select the optimal subject-specific time segment. The proposed method comprises four successive stages: a broad frequency band filtering and common spatial pattern enhancement as preprocessing, features extraction by autoregressive model and log-variance, the Kullback-Leibler divergence based optimal feature and time segment selection and linear discriminate analysis classification. More importantly, this paper provides a potential framework for combining other feature extraction models and classification algorithms with the proposed method for EEG signals classification. Experiments on single-trial EEG signals from two public competition datasets not only demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in selecting discriminative features and time segment, but also show that the proposed method yields relatively better classification results in comparison with other competitive methods. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Sentiment analysis of feature ranking methods for classification accuracy

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Joseph, Shashank; Mugauri, Calvin; Sumathy, S.

2017-11-01

Text pre-processing and feature selection are important and critical steps in text mining. Text pre-processing of large volumes of datasets is a difficult task as unstructured raw data is converted into structured format. Traditional methods of processing and weighing took much time and were less accurate. To overcome this challenge, feature ranking techniques have been devised. A feature set from text preprocessing is fed as input for feature selection. Feature selection helps improve text classification accuracy. Of the three feature selection categories available, the filter category will be the focus. Five feature ranking methods namely: document frequency, standard deviation information gain, CHI-SQUARE, and weighted-log likelihood -ratio is analyzed.

Can Adult Low-Skilled Literacy Learners Assess and Discuss Their Own Spelling Knowledge?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Viise, Neva M.; Austin, Ottilie F.

2005-01-01

This qualitative study investigates the ability of adult low-skilled readers to talk about the thought processes and phonetic strategies they use to make decisions about their spelling. Four adult learners, all exhibiting word knowledge at a second-grade level or below, participated in individual 45-minute audiotaped interviews. Selected portions…

On the Sequential Negotiation of Identity in Spanish-Language Discourse: Mobilizing Linguistic Resources in the Service of Social Action

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Raymond, Chase Wesley

2014-01-01

This dissertation takes an ethnomethodologically-grounded, conversation-analytic approach in investigating the sequential deployment of linguistic resources in Spanish-language talk-in-interaction. Three sets of resources are examined: 2nd-person singular reference forms (tú, vos, usted), indicative/subjunctive verbal mood selection, and…

Talking Trash on the Internet: Working Real Data into Your Classroom.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lynch, Maurice P.; Walton, Susan A.

1998-01-01

Describes how a middle school teacher used the Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Virginia (CBNERRVA) Web site to provide scientific data for a unit on recycling. Includes sample data sheets and tables, charts results of a Web search for marine debris using different search engines, and lists selected marine data Web sites. (PEN)

Selecting Individualized Reading Material for Informal Assessment of Students with Visual Impairments

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kennedy, Mary Ann Rhoads

2004-01-01

Testing materials for high school students whose reading is below grade level might not be age-appropriate or sufficiently motivating. The first step in finding appropriate material would be to talk with the student to learn his or her interests. To find age-appropriate material the author searched Internet resources and then used Microsoft Word…

Classroom Interaction Strategies Employed by English Teachers at Lower Secondary Schools

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Suryati, Nunung

2015-01-01

This article reports a study on teachers' use of interaction strategies in English Language Teaching (ELT) in lower secondary level of education. The study involved eighteen teachers from Lower Secondary Schools in Malang, East Java. Classroom observation was selected as a method in this study by utilizing Self Evaluation Teacher Talk (SETT) as…

Reach Out and Touch Someone: Tactile Communication in Selected Puerto Rican Novels.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Mara, Joan

The importance and varieties of human touch have been the subject of much research. Touching varies from culture to culture and is a way of talking in most Latin American countries. Three Puerto Rican novels provide examples of this nonverbal communicative style: "Mambru se fue a la guerra," by Jose Luis Gonzalez; "La vispera del…

A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Predictors of Expressive-Language Outcomes among Late Talkers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fisher, Evelyn L.

2017-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the literature on predictors of outcomes among late talkers using systematic review and meta-analysis methods. We sought to answer the question: What factors predict preschool-age expressive-language outcomes among late-talking toddlers? Method: We entered carefully selected search terms into the…

Gates's Millions: Can Big Bucks Turn Students into Graduates?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ashburn, Elyse

2010-01-01

In the last year, advocacy groups have churned out reports on how all kinds of students--those who work, are minorities, attend less-selective colleges, or come from low-income families--struggle in higher education. They have talked about the needs of the modern workforce, and how the United States is falling behind. All coalesced around the same…

Educational intervention about oral piercing knowledge among dental students and adolescents at schools.

PubMed

Junco, Pilar; Barrios, Rocío; Ruiz, María José; Bravo, Manuel

2017-10-01

Oral piercing can lead to complications and dentists are in a unique position to detect such complications. The purpose of this study was: (i) to assess the immediate and the long-term effects, on dental students, of a training programme about oral piercing knowledge; and (ii) to assess the immediate effect, on adolescents, of a single educational intervention session about oral piercing. A training programme for dental students (n = 66) was carried out in three phases. The last phase consisted of preparing and giving talks about oral piercing at schools, which was delivered by a random selection of dental students involved in the training programme. Dental students answered a questionnaire about oral piercing knowledge, before, immediately after (only the dental students included in the last phase) and 12 months after the training programme. Adolescents (n = 347) answered a survey about oral piercing knowledge before and after the talks. There were statistically significant differences in all comparison groups, except for the results in the 'before intervention' and in the '12 months after intervention' groups among dental students who had not prepared and given the talks to adolescents. Knowledge about oral piercing significantly improved among adolescents when comparing results before (mean questionnaire score = 3.0) and after (mean questionnaire score = 6.2) the talks. Oral piercing educational intervention had a favourable impact on adolescents and dental students, particularly among those who were more involved in the learning process. © 2017 FDI World Dental Federation.

International Congress on Transposable Elements (ICTE) 2012 in Saint Malo and the sea of TE stories.

PubMed

Ainouche, Abdelkader; Bétermier, Mireille; Chandler, Mick; Cordaux, Richard; Cristofari, Gaël; Deragon, Jean-Marc; Lesage, Pascale; Panaud, Olivier; Quesneville, Hadi; Vaury, Chantal; Vieira, Cristina; Vitte, Clémentine

2012-10-30

An international conference on Transposable Elements (TEs) was held 21-24 April 2012 in Saint Malo, France. Organized by the French Transposition Community (GDR Elements Génétiques Mobiles et Génomes, CNRS) and the French Society of Genetics (SFG), the conference's goal was to bring together researchers from around the world who study transposition in diverse organisms using multiple experimental approaches. The meeting drew more than 217 attendees and most contributed through poster presentations (117), invited talks and short talks selected from poster abstracts (48 in total). The talks were organized into four scientific sessions, focused on: impact of TEs on genomes, control of transposition, evolution of TEs and mechanisms of transposition. Here, we present highlights from the talks given during the platform sessions. The conference was sponsored by Alliance pour les sciences de la vie et de la santé (Aviesan), Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM), Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD), Institut national de la recherche agronomique (INRA), Université de Perpignan, Université de Rennes 1, Région Bretagne and Mobile DNA. CHAIR OF THE ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE: Jean-Marc Deragon ORGANIZERS: Abdelkader Ainouche, Mireille Bétermier, Mick Chandler, Richard Cordaux, Gaël Cristofari, Jean-Marc Deragon, Pascale Lesage, Didier Mazel, Olivier Panaud, Hadi Quesneville, Chantal Vaury, Cristina Vieira and Clémentine Vitte.

Identification of four class emotion from Indonesian spoken language using acoustic and lexical features

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kasyidi, Fatan; Puji Lestari, Dessi

2018-03-01

One of the important aspects in human to human communication is to understand emotion of each party. Recently, interactions between human and computer continues to develop, especially affective interaction where emotion recognition is one of its important components. This paper presents our extended works on emotion recognition of Indonesian spoken language to identify four main class of emotions: Happy, Sad, Angry, and Contentment using combination of acoustic/prosodic features and lexical features. We construct emotion speech corpus from Indonesia television talk show where the situations are as close as possible to the natural situation. After constructing the emotion speech corpus, the acoustic/prosodic and lexical features are extracted to train the emotion model. We employ some machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes, and Random Forest to get the best model. The experiment result of testing data shows that the best model has an F-measure score of 0.447 by using only the acoustic/prosodic feature and F-measure score of 0.488 by using both acoustic/prosodic and lexical features to recognize four class emotion using the SVM RBF Kernel.

Mutual information criterion for feature selection with application to classification of breast microcalcifications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Diamant, Idit; Shalhon, Moran; Goldberger, Jacob; Greenspan, Hayit

2016-03-01

Classification of clustered breast microcalcifications into benign and malignant categories is an extremely challenging task for computerized algorithms and expert radiologists alike. In this paper we present a novel method for feature selection based on mutual information (MI) criterion for automatic classification of microcalcifications. We explored the MI based feature selection for various texture features. The proposed method was evaluated on a standardized digital database for screening mammography (DDSM). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and the advantage of using the MI-based feature selection to obtain the most relevant features for the task and thus to provide for improved performance as compared to using all features.

Feature Selection Methods for Zero-Shot Learning of Neural Activity

PubMed Central

Caceres, Carlos A.; Roos, Matthew J.; Rupp, Kyle M.; Milsap, Griffin; Crone, Nathan E.; Wolmetz, Michael E.; Ratto, Christopher R.

2017-01-01

Dimensionality poses a serious challenge when making predictions from human neuroimaging data. Across imaging modalities, large pools of potential neural features (e.g., responses from particular voxels, electrodes, and temporal windows) have to be related to typically limited sets of stimuli and samples. In recent years, zero-shot prediction models have been introduced for mapping between neural signals and semantic attributes, which allows for classification of stimulus classes not explicitly included in the training set. While choices about feature selection can have a substantial impact when closed-set accuracy, open-set robustness, and runtime are competing design objectives, no systematic study of feature selection for these models has been reported. Instead, a relatively straightforward feature stability approach has been adopted and successfully applied across models and imaging modalities. To characterize the tradeoffs in feature selection for zero-shot learning, we compared correlation-based stability to several other feature selection techniques on comparable data sets from two distinct imaging modalities: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Electrocorticography. While most of the feature selection methods resulted in similar zero-shot prediction accuracies and spatial/spectral patterns of selected features, there was one exception; A novel feature/attribute correlation approach was able to achieve those accuracies with far fewer features, suggesting the potential for simpler prediction models that yield high zero-shot classification accuracy. PMID:28690513

Semi-Local DFT Functionals with Exact-Exchange-Like Features: Beyond the AK13

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Armiento, Rickard

The Armiento-Kümmel functional from 2013 (AK13) is a non-empirical semi-local exchange functional on generalized gradient approximation form (GGA) in Kohn-Sham (KS) density functional theory (DFT). Recent works have established that AK13 gives improved electronic-structure exchange features over other semi-local methods, with a qualitatively improved orbital description and band structure. For example, the Kohn-Sham band gap is greatly extended, as it is for exact exchange. This talk outlines recent efforts towards new exchange-correlation functionals based on, and extending, the AK13 design ideas. The aim is to improve the quantitative accuracy, the description of energetics, and to address other issues found with the original formulation. Swedish e-Science Research Centre (SeRC).

Cernan, Stafford, and Young talk at ASVC prior to grand opening

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1997-01-01

Some of the former Apollo program astronauts tour the new Apollo/Saturn V Center (ASVC) at KSC prior to the gala grand opening ceremony for the facility that was held Jan. 8, 1997. The astronauts were invited to participate in the event, which also featured NASA Administrator Dan Goldin and KSC Director Jay Honeycutt. Discussing old times are (from left) Apollo 10 Lunar Module Pilot and Apollo 17 Commander Eugene A. Cernan; Apollo 10 Commander Thomas P. Stafford and Apollo 16 Commander John W. Young. The ASVC also features several other Apollo program spacecraft components, multimedia presentations and a simulated Apollo/ Saturn V liftoff. The facility will be a part of the KSC bus tour that embarks from the KSC Visitor Center.

Selectivity analysis of an incoherent grating imaged in a photorefractive crystal

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tebaldi, Myrian; Forte, Gustavo; Bolognini, Nestor; Lasprilla A., Maria del Carmen

2018-04-01

In this work, the diffraction efficiency of a volume phase grating incoherently stored in a photorefractive BSO crystal is theoretically and experimentally analyzed. The results confirm the theoretical proposal based on the coupled wave theory adopting a new grating depth parameter associated to the write-in incoherent optical system. The selectivity behavior is governed by the exit pupil diameter of the imaging recording system that controls the depth of the tridimensional image distribution along the propagation direction. Two incoherent gratings are multiplexed in a single crystal and reconstructed without cross-talk.

Associations of parents' self, child, and other "fat talk" with child eating behaviors and weight.

PubMed

Lydecker, Janet A; Riley, Kristen E; Grilo, Carlos M

2018-03-15

Fat talk, negative communication about weight, is common in the media, peer groups, and families. Little is known about parental fat talk directed at oneself or others. This study examined associations between different forms of parental fat talk and child disordered eating behaviors and weight, and differences by child sex and age. Parents of preadolescents or adolescents (n = 581) reported fat talk about themselves (self-fat talk), others (obesity-fat talk), and their child (child-fat talk). 76.0% of parents reported regular self-fat talk in front of children, 51.5% reported obesity-fat talk, and 43.6% reported child-fat talk. Fat talk did not differ significantly between parents of preadolescents and adolescents but was more common with sons than daughters. Of the three forms of fat talk, only child-fat talk was associated with all child eating and weight variables (binge eating, overeating, secretive eating, and overweight/obesity); associations were strongest for adolescent girls. Child sex was associated with secretive eating and overweight/obesity. Parents reported using different forms of fat talk frequently. Parent self- and obesity-fat talk were reported more frequently, but child-fat talk was the most strongly associated with children's eating and weight. Because of associations with disordered eating behaviors, intervening to reduce fat talk might contribute to improving pediatric disordered eating and weight-related interventions. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Learning Science in High School: What is actually going on?

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tan, Aik Ling; Hong, Huaqing

2014-03-01

This paper examines learning of science in 15 grade nine classrooms by analyzing the type of talk that teachers engaged in. Using transcripts from audio recordings that are part of the Singapore Corpus of Research in Education database, annotations were carried out on the phrases of teacher talk using Mortimer and Scott's framework for meaning making in science classrooms. Interpreted from a sociocultural view of science learning and based on text coverage per 1,000 words spoken by teachers and students, we analyzed the content of instruction and found that (1) teachers in all three sub-disciplines of science used the least number of words to make statements of generalizations, with chemistry teachers privileging description more than physics and biology teachers, while physics teachers use more words for explanation when compared with biology and chemistry teachers and (2) teachers from all three sub-disciplines depended more on empirical justification than theoretical justifications. These findings suggest that most scientific stories in Singaporean grade nine classrooms are dependent on specific contexts and that the nature and organization of knowledge in each sub-discipline defines the features that teachers use in the classrooms to talk knowledge into being. We discuss our findings on whether science curriculum should be framed as 'separate subjects' or if they should be developed as 'integrated science' and draw implications to science teacher education and the conduct of high stakes public placement examinations.

Meeting Report on Experimental Approaches to Evolution and Ecology Using Yeast and Other Model Systems

PubMed Central

Jarosz, Daniel F.; Dudley, Aimée M.

2017-01-01

The fourth EMBO-sponsored conference on Experimental Approaches to Evolution and Ecology Using Yeast and Other Model Systems (https://www.embl.de/training/events/2016/EAE16-01/), was held at the EMBL in Heidelberg, Germany, October 19–23, 2016. The conference was organized by Judith Berman (Tel Aviv University), Maitreya Dunham (University of Washington), Jun-Yi Leu (Academia Sinica), and Lars Steinmetz (EMBL Heidelberg and Stanford University). The meeting attracted ∼120 researchers from 28 countries and covered a wide range of topics in the fields of genetics, evolutionary biology, and ecology, with a unifying focus on yeast as a model system. Attendees enjoyed the Keith Haring-inspired yeast florescence microscopy artwork (Figure 1), a unique feature of the meeting since its inception, and the 1 min flash talks that catalyzed discussions at two vibrant poster sessions. The meeting coincided with the 20th anniversary of the publication describing the sequence of the first eukaryotic genome, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Many of the conference talks focused on important questions about what is contained in the genome, how genomes evolve, and the architecture and behavior of communities of phenotypically and genotypically diverse microorganisms. Here, we summarize highlights of the research talks around these themes. Nearly all presentations focused on novel findings, and we refer the reader to relevant manuscripts that have subsequently been published. PMID:28814445

Engaging the Audience: Developing Presentation Skills in Science Students

PubMed Central

Stuart, Ann E.

2013-01-01

This article describes a graduate class in presentation skills (“PClass”) as a model for how a class with similar objectives, expectations and culture might be mounted for undergraduates. The required class is given for students in neuroscience and physiology programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; I describe the class in the years I led it, from 2003–2012. The class structure centered on peer rehearsal, critiquing of PowerPoint, and chalk talks by the students; video-recording of student talks for later review by the student with the instructor; and presentation of polished talks in a formal setting. A different faculty visitor to the class each week gave the students a variety of perspectives. The students also gained insight into their own evolving skills by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of seminars given by visitors to the campus. A unique feature of the class was collaboration with a professional actor from the University’s Department of Dramatic Arts, who helped the students develop techniques for keeping the attention of an audience, for speaking with confidence, and for controlling nervousness. The undergraduate campus would be expected to lend itself to this sort of interdisciplinary faculty cooperation. In addition, students worked on becoming adept at designing and presenting posters, introducing speakers graciously and taking charge of the speaker’s question session, and speaking to a lay audience. PMID:24319389

The Context of Graduate Student Preparation in Physics: professional roles of research and teaching

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Finkelstein, Noah

2004-05-01

This talk considers the role of graduate training from a broad perspective --- that of making professional physicists. Following Shulman's definition and characterization of 'professionals' [1], it may be observed that graduate student preparation in research follows a traditional and effective track of creating professionals. However, at the same time, other forms professional activity of physicists, notably teaching and educational practice, remain largely absent. This talk presents a model of the contextual nature of student learning that sheds light on why and how this division occurs. Given such attention to context, this talk then examines a graduate student program in physics that is designed to augment the traditional training of graduate students in order to more fully inform and prepare students for their future roles. Data are presented from a study of a local four-year implementation of the national Preparing Future Physics Faculty Program to document the structure, key features, and outcomes of the program. Results include a framework and general heuristics for successful implementation, and the impact of emphasizing education and physics education research. Among the findings, this graduate training program demonstrates one mechanism for infusing physics education research and its findings into the broader physics community. [1] Shulman. L.S., Professing the Liberal Arts, In Education and Democracy: Re-imagining Liberal Learning in America, edited by Robert Orrill. New York: College Board Publications, 1997

What do "Vertigo" and "Blue Velvet" tell on carbon cycle and climate change?

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Vesala, Timo

2017-04-01

I have created a series of three lectures/popular talks based on short excerpts on feature films. The titles of the talks are "Clouds and drops in films", "Is wind beautiful?" and the latest one, "From Vertigo to Blue Velvet - Connotations on movies and climate change". Related to excerpts, during the talks, I am telling on the movie itself - personal thoughts and opinions, status in film history, anecdotes - and on the scientific items - wind, storms, micrometeorology, turbulence, rain, fog, clouds, climate change, greenhouse gases, forests, inland waters, wetlands, energy, aerosols. I stress that the movies do not represent classical catastrophe movies or science fiction but they vary from silent comedies via war films to contemporary art house, from Keaton via Elem Klimov to Béla Tarr. Many of the excerpts are elusive related to the actual scientific point. The total amount of the movie titles is 32. In my presentation I discuss the benefits of this format to popularize science, tell on feedback I have gained and show few illustrative examples. Beside public science events, scientific conferences and summer schools I have presented the latest lecture in "Lens Politica Film & Art Festival, Helsinki" and in "Midnight Sun Film Festival, Sodankylä, Finland". The format utilizing films gives also possibility to express more polemic messages than would be appropriate in a normal scientific, although meant for the public at large, speech.

Engaging the audience: developing presentation skills in science students.

PubMed

Stuart, Ann E

2013-01-01

This article describes a graduate class in presentation skills ("PClass") as a model for how a class with similar objectives, expectations and culture might be mounted for undergraduates. The required class is given for students in neuroscience and physiology programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; I describe the class in the years I led it, from 2003-2012. The class structure centered on peer rehearsal, critiquing of PowerPoint, and chalk talks by the students; video-recording of student talks for later review by the student with the instructor; and presentation of polished talks in a formal setting. A different faculty visitor to the class each week gave the students a variety of perspectives. The students also gained insight into their own evolving skills by discussing the strengths and weaknesses of seminars given by visitors to the campus. A unique feature of the class was collaboration with a professional actor from the University's Department of Dramatic Arts, who helped the students develop techniques for keeping the attention of an audience, for speaking with confidence, and for controlling nervousness. The undergraduate campus would be expected to lend itself to this sort of interdisciplinary faculty cooperation. In addition, students worked on becoming adept at designing and presenting posters, introducing speakers graciously and taking charge of the speaker's question session, and speaking to a lay audience.

Astroglia-Microglia Cross Talk during Neurodegeneration in the Rat Hippocampus

PubMed Central

Batlle, Montserrat; Ferri, Lorenzo; Andrade, Carmen; Ortega, Francisco-Javier; Vidal-Taboada, Jose M.; Pugliese, Marco; Mahy, Nicole; Rodríguez, Manuel J.

2015-01-01

Brain injury triggers a progressive inflammatory response supported by a dynamic astroglia-microglia interplay. We investigated the progressive chronic features of the astroglia-microglia cross talk in the perspective of neuronal effects in a rat model of hippocampal excitotoxic injury. N-Methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) injection triggered a process characterized within 38 days by atrophy, neuronal loss, and fast astroglia-mediated S100B increase. Microglia reaction varied with the lesion progression. It presented a peak of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) secretion at one day after the lesion, and a transient YM1 secretion within the first three days. Microglial glucocorticoid receptor expression increased up to day 5, before returning progressively to sham values. To further investigate the astroglia role in the microglia reaction, we performed concomitant transient astroglia ablation with L-α-aminoadipate and NMDA-induced lesion. We observed a striking maintenance of neuronal death associated with enhanced microglial reaction and proliferation, increased YM1 concentration, and decreased TNF-α secretion and glucocorticoid receptor expression. S100B reactivity only increased after astroglia recovery. Our results argue for an initial neuroprotective microglial reaction, with a direct astroglial control of the microglial cytotoxic response. We propose the recovery of the astroglia-microglia cross talk as a tissue priority conducted to ensure a proper cellular coordination that retails brain damage. PMID:25977914

Enhancing the Performance of LibSVM Classifier by Kernel F-Score Feature Selection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sarojini, Balakrishnan; Ramaraj, Narayanasamy; Nickolas, Savarimuthu

Medical Data mining is the search for relationships and patterns within the medical datasets that could provide useful knowledge for effective clinical decisions. The inclusion of irrelevant, redundant and noisy features in the process model results in poor predictive accuracy. Much research work in data mining has gone into improving the predictive accuracy of the classifiers by applying the techniques of feature selection. Feature selection in medical data mining is appreciable as the diagnosis of the disease could be done in this patient-care activity with minimum number of significant features. The objective of this work is to show that selecting the more significant features would improve the performance of the classifier. We empirically evaluate the classification effectiveness of LibSVM classifier on the reduced feature subset of diabetes dataset. The evaluations suggest that the feature subset selected improves the predictive accuracy of the classifier and reduce false negatives and false positives.

The fate of task-irrelevant visual motion: perceptual load versus feature-based attention.

PubMed

Taya, Shuichiro; Adams, Wendy J; Graf, Erich W; Lavie, Nilli

2009-11-18

We tested contrasting predictions derived from perceptual load theory and from recent feature-based selection accounts. Observers viewed moving, colored stimuli and performed low or high load tasks associated with one stimulus feature, either color or motion. The resultant motion aftereffect (MAE) was used to evaluate attentional allocation. We found that task-irrelevant visual features received less attention than co-localized task-relevant features of the same objects. Moreover, when color and motion features were co-localized yet perceived to belong to two distinct surfaces, feature-based selection was further increased at the expense of object-based co-selection. Load theory predicts that the MAE for task-irrelevant motion would be reduced with a higher load color task. However, this was not seen for co-localized features; perceptual load only modulated the MAE for task-irrelevant motion when this was spatially separated from the attended color location. Our results suggest that perceptual load effects are mediated by spatial selection and do not generalize to the feature domain. Feature-based selection operates to suppress processing of task-irrelevant, co-localized features, irrespective of perceptual load.

Who do people talk to about healthy lifestyles? A South Australian survey.

PubMed

Moorhead, R G

1992-12-01

To investigate who people talk to about healthy lifestyle a personal interview of people in a representative sample of South Australians was carried out. The information was collected by interview from all occupants of selected private dwellings who were aged 15 years or older. The interviewer used a prompt card with nine possible responses and the question asked was "which one of these would you be most likely to talk about healthy lifestyle changes?" Forty-four per cent nominated the general practitioner and 22% a family member. People who were either married or in a de facto relationship (30%) significantly chose a general practitioner more than others (14%) (P < 0.05). In the 30-59 age group more men (12%) than women (6%) chose a family member as a healthy lifestyle adviser (P < 0.05). There was no statistically significant difference in interest in healthy lifestyle in people born in Australia and outside Australia, or in the employed or unemployed. It is suggested that further attention needs to be paid to training in preventive medicine at all levels of general practice education and more needs to be known about the role of family members as healthy lifestyle advisers.

Parent-teen communication about sex in urban Thai families.

PubMed

Rhucharoenpornpanich, Orratai; Chamratrithirong, Aphichat; Fongkaew, Warunee; Miller, Brenda A; Cupp, Pamela K; Rosati, Michael J; Byrnes, Hilary F; Atwood, Katharine A; Chookhare, Warunee

2012-01-01

This study describes sexual communication among Thai parents and their teens and identifies variables related to communication about sex in urban Thai families. Data were derived from 420 families whose teenage children ages 13-14 years were randomly selected using the probability proportional to size technique. Interviews were conducted with 1 parent and 1 teenage child in each family. In-depth interviews were also conducted in 30 parents and teens drawn from the same 420 families. Results showed that parents were most likely to talk with their teens about body changes and dating; however, less discussion about sex-related issues, birth control, and HIV/AIDS occurred. More daughters than sons reported frequent discussions with their parents about sex. Parents who believed their teens had been involved in sexual activity were more likely to talk about HIV/AIDS and the difficulty of teenagers having babies, instead of talking about sexual intercourse or when to start having sex. Multiple regression analysis indicated that gender of the child (female), parental religiosity, and parental perception of teen sexual activity were significant predictors of increased sexual communication in Thai families. The findings suggest a need for approaches designed to facilitate communication skills about sex-related issues among Thai parents.

Parent-Teen Communication about Sex in Urban Thai Families

PubMed Central

Rhucharoenpornpanich, Orratai; Chamratrithirong, Aphichat; Fongkaew, Warunee; Miller, Brenda A.; Cupp, Pamela K.; Roseti, Michael J.; Byrnes, Hilary F.; Atwood, Katharine; Chookhare, Warunee

2012-01-01

This study describes sexual communication among Thai parents and their teens and identifies variables related to communication about sex in urban Thai families. Data were derived from 420 families whose teenage children ages 13 – 14 were randomly selected using the probability proportional to size technique. Interviews were conducted with one parent and one teenage child in each family. In-depth interviews were also conducted in 30 parents and teens drawn from the same 420 families. Results showed that parents were most likely to talk with their teens about body changes and dating; however, less discussion about sex-related issues, birth control and HIV/AIDS occurred. More daughters than sons reported frequent discussions with their parents about sex. Parents who believed their teens had been involved in sexual activity were more likely to talk about HIV/AIDS and the difficulty of teenagers having babies, instead of talking about sexual intercourse or when to start having sex. Multiple regression analysis indicated that sex of the child (girls), parental religiosity and parental perception of teen sexual activity were significant predictors of increased sexual communication in Thai families. The findings suggest a need for approaches designed to facilitate communication skills about sex- related issues among Thai parents. PMID:22206411

Let's talk about health: shoppers' discourse regarding health while food shopping.

PubMed

O'Brien, Michelle C; McConnon, Aine; Hollywood, Lynsey E; Cuskelly, Geraldine J; Barnett, Julie; Raats, Monique; Dean, Moira

2015-04-01

The present study aimed to examine the role of health in consumers' food purchasing decisions through investigating the nature of people's discourse regarding health while conducting their food shopping. The study employed the think-aloud technique as part of an accompanied shop. All mentions of health and terms relating to health were identified from the data set. Inductive thematic analysis was conducted to examine how health was talked about in relation to people's food choice decisions. Supermarkets in Dublin, Republic of Ireland and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Participants (n 50) were aged over 18 years and represented the main household shopper. Responsibility for others and the perceived need to illicit strict control to avoid 'unhealthy' food selections played a dominant role in how health was talked about during the accompanied shop. Consequently healthy shopping was viewed as difficult and effort was required to make the healthy choice, with shoppers relating to product-based inferences to support their decisions. This qualitative exploration has provided evidence of a number of factors influencing the consideration of health during consumers' food shopping. These results highlight opportunities for stakeholders such as public health bodies and the food industry to explore further ways to help enable consumers make healthy food choices.

Controlling material reactivity using architecture

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sullivan, Kyle

2017-06-01

The reactivity of thermites can be tailored through selection of several parameters, and can range from very slow burns to rapid deflagrations. 3D printing is a rapidly emerging field, and offers the potential to build architected parts. Here we sought to explore whether controlling such features could be a suitable path forward for gaining additional control of the reactivity. This talk discusses several new methods for preparing thermite samples with controlled architectures using 3D printing. Additionally, we demonstrate that the architecture can play a role in the reactivity of an object. Our results suggest that architecture can be used to tailor the convective and/or advective energy transport during a deflagration, thus enhancing or retarding the reaction. The results are promising in that they give researchers an additional way of controlling the energy release rate without defaulting to the conventional approach of changing the formulation. This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. LLNL-ABS-708525. In collaboration with: Cheng Zhu, Eric Duoss, Matt Durban, Alex Gash, Alexandra Golobic, Michael Grapes, David Kolesky, Joshua Kuntz, Jennifer Lewis, Christopher Spadaccini; LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LAB.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Lewis, Jennifer

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) seeks to advance the rates of participation by women in events at national mathematical sciences conference primarily in the U.S. The grant was funded from 8/1/2007 through 3/31/2015. The first component is the lecture series (Noether, Kovalevsky and Falconer Lectures) named after celebrated mathematicians, and featuring prominent women mathematicians, with the result that men, as well as women, will learn about the achievements of women in the mathematical sciences. 22 women mathematicians gave lectures at the annual JMM, SIAM Annual Meetings, and the MAA MathFest. The second component is AWM’s “Workshops for Womenmore » Graduate Students and Recent PhDs,” which select junior women to give research talks and research poster presentations at the SIAM Annual Meeting. The workshop activities allow wider recruitment of participants and increased attention to mentoring. 122 women gave mathematics research presentations. The third component is the AWM’s 40th Anniversary Research Symposium, 2011. 300 women and men attended the two-day symposium with 135 women presenting mathematics research. These activities have succeeded in increasing the number of women speakers and presenters at meetings and have brought more women attendees to the meetings.« less

Direct Immersion Annealing of Block Copolymer Thin Films

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Karim, Alamgir

We demonstrate ordering of thin block copolymer (BCP) films via direct immersion annealing (DIA) at enhanced rate leading to stable morphologies. The BCP films are immersed in carefully selected mixtures of good and marginal solvents that can impart enhanced polymer mobility, while inhibiting film dissolution. DIA is compatible with roll-to-roll assembly manufacturing and has distinct advantages over conventional thermal annealing and batch processing solvent-vapor annealing methods. We identify three solvent composition-dependent BCP film ordering regimes in DIA for the weakly interacting polystyrene -poly(methyl methacrylate) (PS -PMMA) system: rapid short range order, optimal long-range order, and a film instability regime. Kinetic studies in the ``optimal long-range order'' processing regime as a function of temperature indicate a significant reduction of activation energy for BCP grain growth compared to oven annealing at conventional temperatures. An attractive feature of DIA is its robustness to ordering other BCP (e.g. PS-P2VP) and PS-PMMA systems exhibiting spherical, lamellar and cylindrical ordering. Inclusion of nanoparticles in these films at high concentrations and fast ordering kinetics study with neutron reflectivity and SANS will be discussed. This is (late) Contributed Talk Abstract for Dillon Medal Symposium at DPOLY - discussed with DPOLY Chair Dvora Perahia.

John H. Dillon Medal Talk: Protein Fibrils, Polymer Physics: Encounter at the Nanoscale

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mezzenga, Raffaele

2011-03-01

Aggregation of proteins is central to many aspects of daily life, ranging from blood coagulation, to eye cataract formation disease, food processing, or neurodegenerative infections. In particular, the physical mechanisms responsible for amyloidosis, the irreversible fibril formation of various proteins implicated in protein misfolding disorders such as Alzheimer, Creutzfeldt-Jakob or Huntington's diseases, have not yet been fully elucidated. In this talk I will discuss how polymer physics and colloidal science concepts can be used to reveal very useful information on the formation, structure and properties of amyloid protein fibrils. I will discuss their physical properties at various length scales, from their collective liquid crystalline behavior in solution to their structural features at the single molecule length scale and show how polymer science notions can shed a new light on these interesting systems. 1) ``Understanding amyloid aggregation by statistical analysis of atomic force microscopy images'' J. Adamcik, J.-M. Jung, J. Flakowski, P. De Los Rios, G. Dietler and R. Mezzenga, Nature nanotechnology, 5, 423 (2010)

Talking with text: communication in therapist-led, live chat cancer support groups.

PubMed

Stephen, Joanne; Collie, Kate; McLeod, Deborah; Rojubally, Adina; Fergus, Karen; Speca, Michael; Turner, Jill; Taylor-Brown, Jill; Sellick, Scott; Burrus, Kimberly; Elramly, Mai

2014-03-01

CancerChatCanada is a pan-Canadian initiative with a mandate to make professionally led cancer support groups available to more people in Canada. Although online support groups are becoming increasingly popular, little is known about therapist-led, synchronous groups using live chat. The purpose of this study was to generate a rich descriptive account of communication experiences in CancerChatCanada groups and to gain an understanding of processes associated with previously-reported benefits. We used interpretive description to analyze interview segments from 102 patients, survivors and family caregivers who participated in CancerChatCanada groups between 2007 and 2011. The analysis yielded four inter-related process themes (Reaching Out From Home, Feeling Safe, Emotional Release, and Talking With Text) and one outcome theme (Resonance and Kinship). The findings extend previous research about text-only online support groups and provide novel insights into features of facilitated, live chat communication that are valued by group members. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Race in Supervision: Let's Talk About It.

PubMed

Schen, Cathy R; Greenlee, Alecia

2018-01-01

Addressing race and racial trauma within psychotherapy supervision is increasingly important in psychiatry training. A therapist's ability to discuss race and racial trauma in psychotherapy supervision increases the likelihood that these topics will be explored as they arise in the therapeutic setting. The authors discuss the contextual and sociocultural dynamics that contributed to their own avoidance of race and racial trauma within the supervisory relationship. The authors examine the features that eventually led to a robust discussion of race and culture within the supervisory setting and identify salient themes that occurred during three phases of the conversation about race: pre-dialogue, the conversation, and after the conversation. These themes include building an alliance, supercompetence, avoidance, shared vulnerability, "if I speak on this, I own it," closeness versus distance, and speaking up. This article reviews the key literature in the field of psychiatry and psychology that has shaped how we understand race and racial trauma and concludes with guidelines for supervisors on how to facilitate talking about race in supervision.

High-throughput characterization for solar fuels materials discovery

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mitrovic, Slobodan; Becerra, Natalie; Cornell, Earl; Guevarra, Dan; Haber, Joel; Jin, Jian; Jones, Ryan; Kan, Kevin; Marcin, Martin; Newhouse, Paul; Soedarmadji, Edwin; Suram, Santosh; Xiang, Chengxiang; Gregoire, John; High-Throughput Experimentation Team

2014-03-01

In this talk I will present the status of the High-Throughput Experimentation (HTE) project of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP). JCAP is an Energy Innovation Hub of the U.S. Department of Energy with a mandate to deliver a solar fuel generator based on an integrated photoelectrochemical cell (PEC). However, efficient and commercially viable catalysts or light absorbers for the PEC do not exist. The mission of HTE is to provide the accelerated discovery through combinatorial synthesis and rapid screening of material properties. The HTE pipeline also features high-throughput material characterization using x-ray diffraction and x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS). In this talk I present the currently operating pipeline and focus on our combinatorial XPS efforts to build the largest free database of spectra from mixed-metal oxides, nitrides, sulfides and alloys. This work was performed at Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, a DOE Energy Innovation Hub, supported through the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Award No. DE-SC0004993.

Classification Influence of Features on Given Emotions and Its Application in Feature Selection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xing, Yin; Chen, Chuang; Liu, Li-Long

2018-04-01

In order to solve the problem that there is a large amount of redundant data in high-dimensional speech emotion features, we analyze deeply the extracted speech emotion features and select better features. Firstly, a given emotion is classified by each feature. Secondly, the recognition rate is ranked in descending order. Then, the optimal threshold of features is determined by rate criterion. Finally, the better features are obtained. When applied in Berlin and Chinese emotional data set, the experimental results show that the feature selection method outperforms the other traditional methods.

Feature Selection in Classification of Eye Movements Using Electrooculography for Activity Recognition

PubMed Central

Mala, S.; Latha, K.

2014-01-01

Activity recognition is needed in different requisition, for example, reconnaissance system, patient monitoring, and human-computer interfaces. Feature selection plays an important role in activity recognition, data mining, and machine learning. In selecting subset of features, an efficient evolutionary algorithm Differential Evolution (DE), a very efficient optimizer, is used for finding informative features from eye movements using electrooculography (EOG). Many researchers use EOG signals in human-computer interactions with various computational intelligence methods to analyze eye movements. The proposed system involves analysis of EOG signals using clearness based features, minimum redundancy maximum relevance features, and Differential Evolution based features. This work concentrates more on the feature selection algorithm based on DE in order to improve the classification for faultless activity recognition. PMID:25574185

Feature selection in classification of eye movements using electrooculography for activity recognition.

PubMed

Mala, S; Latha, K

2014-01-01

Activity recognition is needed in different requisition, for example, reconnaissance system, patient monitoring, and human-computer interfaces. Feature selection plays an important role in activity recognition, data mining, and machine learning. In selecting subset of features, an efficient evolutionary algorithm Differential Evolution (DE), a very efficient optimizer, is used for finding informative features from eye movements using electrooculography (EOG). Many researchers use EOG signals in human-computer interactions with various computational intelligence methods to analyze eye movements. The proposed system involves analysis of EOG signals using clearness based features, minimum redundancy maximum relevance features, and Differential Evolution based features. This work concentrates more on the feature selection algorithm based on DE in order to improve the classification for faultless activity recognition.

Viral genome structures, charge, and sequences are optimal for capsid assembly

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hagan, Michael

2014-03-01

For many viruses, the spontaneous assembly of a capsid shell around the nu-cleic acid (NA) genome is an essential step in the viral life cycle. Capsid formation is a multicomponent, out-of-equilibrium assembly process for which kinetic effects and thermodynamic constraints compete to determine the outcome. Understand-ing how viral components drive highly efficient assembly under these constraints could promote biomedical efforts to block viral propagation, and would elucidate the factors controlling assembly in a wide range of systems containing proteins and polyelectrolytes. This talk will describe coarse-grained models of capsid proteins and NAs with which we investigate the dynamics and thermodynamics of virus assembly. In con-trast to recent theoretical models, we find that capsids spontaneously `overcharge' that is, the NA length which is kinetically and thermodynamically optimal possess-es a negative charge greater than the positive charge of the capsid. When applied to specific virus capsids, the calculated optimal NA lengths closely correspond to the natural viral genome lengths. These results suggest that the features included in this model (i.e. electrostatics, excluded volume, and NA tertiary structure) play key roles in determining assembly thermodynamics and consequently exert selec-tive pressure on viral evolution. I will then discuss mechanisms by which se-quence-specific interactions between NAs and capsid proteins promote selective encapsidation of the viral genome. This work was supported by NIH R01GM108021 and the Brandeis MRSEC NSF-MRSEC-0820492.

Concentric-electrode organic electrochemical transistors: case study for selective hydrazine sensing

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pecqueur, S.; Lenfant, S.; Guérin, D.; Alibart, F.; Vuillaume, D.

2017-12-01

We report on hydrazine-sensing organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) with a design consisting in concentric annular electrodes. The design engineering of these OECTs was motivated by the great potential of using OECT sensing arrays in fields such as bioelectronics. In this work, PEDOT:PSS-based OECTs have been studied as aqueous sensors, specifically sensitive to the lethal hydrazine molecule. These amperometric sensors have many relevant features for the development of hydrazine sensors, such as a sensitivity down to 10-5 M of hydrazine in water, an order of magnitude higher selectivity for hydrazine than for 9 other water soluble common analytes, the capability to recover entirely its base signal after water flushing and a very low voltage operation. The specificity for hydrazine to be sensed by our OECTs is caused by its catalytic oxidation at the gate electrode and enables increasing the output current modulation of the devices. This has permitted the device-geometry study of the whole series of 80 micrometric OECT devices with sub-20-nm PEDOT:PSS layers, channel lengths down to 1 μm and a specific device geometry of coplanar and concentric electrodes. The numerous geometries unravel new aspects of the OECT mechanisms governing the electrochemical sensing behaviours of the device, more particularly the effect of the contacts which are inherent at the micro-scale. By lowering the device cross-talking, micrometric gate-integrated radial OECTs shall contribute to the diminishing of the readout invasiveness and therefore promotes further the development of OECT biosensors.

Pharmaceutical cocrystals: walking the talk.

PubMed

Bolla, Geetha; Nangia, Ashwini

2016-06-28

Pharmaceutical cocrystals belong to a sub-class of cocrystals wherein one of the components is a drug molecule (or an active pharmaceutical ingredient, API) and the second is a benign food or drug grade additive (generally regarded as safe, GRAS). The two components are hydrogen-bonded in a fixed stoichiometric ratio in the crystal lattice. In the past decade, pharmaceutical cocrystals have demonstrated significant promise in their ability to modify the physicochemical and pharmacokinetic properties of drug substances, such as the solubility and dissolution rate, bioavailability, particle morphology and size, tableting and compaction, melting point, physical form, biochemical and hydration stability, and permeability. In this feature review, we highlight some prominent examples of drug cocrystals which exhibit variable hardness/softness and elasticity/plasticity depending on coformer selection, improvement of solubility and permeability in the same cocrystal, increase of the melting point for solid formulation, enhanced color performance, photostability and hydration stability, and a longer half-life. Cocrystals of flavanoids and polyphenols can make improved pharmaceuticals and also extend to the larger class of nutraceuticals. The application of crystal engineering to assemble ternary cocrystals expands this field to drug-drug cocrystals which may be useful in multi-drug resistance, mitigating side effects of drugs, or attenuating/enhancing drug action synergistically by rational selection. The advent of new techniques for structural characterization beyond the standard X-ray diffraction will provide a better understanding of drug phases which are at the borderline of crystalline-amorphous nature and even newer opportunities in the future.

A social constructionist analysis of talk in episodes of psychiatric student nurses conversations with clients in community clinics.

PubMed

Middleton, Lyn; Uys, Leana

2009-03-01

This paper is a report of a study of the 'discursive doings' of psychiatric nursing students' practice as they are jointly constructed in conversations with clients in community psychiatric clinics. This construction of psychiatric nursing as a therapeutic, holistic, person-centred, interactional process is central to the identity of psychiatric nursing as a discipline. However, recent studies are beginning to suggest a dissonance between the person-centred rhetoric and institutional practice. A discourse analysis was conducted in 2002-03 using the transcripts of seven conversations between nursing students and clients visiting psychiatric community clinics on a monthly basis. These were selected from a sample of 20 conversations based on their clarity and completeness. Texts were analysed using the notational systems of Silverman and Mishler and some of Fairclough's analytic text structure features. In all the transcripts, an agenda for surveillance was explicitly established in the students' opening sequences of each text. Almost all exchanges in the texts were organized around cycles of questions from students and responses from clients, which allowed students to control the conversations. Information delivery was also found to be at work within the texts, although it is not as prominent or as persistent as the question and answer structure. Students took up the responses of clients selectively as though working to a pre-set agenda. These discursive activities manifest a symptom-like approach to nursing care and have the effect of disabling the development of client-authorized expressions of agency.

PREFACE: 3rd International Workshop on "State of the Art in Nuclear Cluster Physics"

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yamada, Taiichi; Kanada-En'yo, Yoshiko

2014-12-01

The 3rd International Workshop on "State of the Art in Nuclear Cluster Physics"(SOTANCP3) was held at KGU Kannai Media Center, Kanto Gakuin University, Yokohama, Japan, from May 26 to 30, 2014. Yokohama is the second largest city in Japan, about 25 km southeast of Tokyo. The first workshop of the series was held in Strasbourg, France, in 2008 and the second one was in Brussels, Belgium, in 2010. The purpose of SOTANCP3 was to discuss the present status and future perspectives of the nuclear cluster physics. The following nine topics were selected in order to cover most of the scientific programme and highlight an area where new ideas have emerged over recent years: (1) Cluster structures and many-body correlations in stable and unstable nuclei (2) Clustering aspects of nuclear reactions and resonances (3) Alpha condensates and analogy with condensed matter approaches (4) Role of tensor force in cluster physics and ab initio approaches (5) Clustering in hypernuclei (6) Nuclear fission, superheavy nuclei, and cluster decay (7) Cluster physics and nuclear astrophysics (8) Clustering in nuclear matter and neutron stars (9) Clustering in hadron and atomic physics There were 122 participants, including 53 from 17 foreign countries. In addition to invited talks, we had many talks selected from contributed papers. There were plenary, parallel, and poster sessions. Poster contributions were also presented as four-minute talks in parallel sessions. This proceedings contains the papers presented in invited and selected talks together with those presented in poster sessions. We would like to express our gratitude to the members of the International Advisory Committee and those of the Organizing Committee for their efforts which made this workshop successful. In particular we would like to present our great thanks to Drs. Y. Funaki, W. Horiuchi, N. Itagaki, M. Kimura, T. Myo, and T. Yoshida. We would like also to thank the following organizations for their sponsors: RCNP (Research Center for Nuclear Physics, Osaka University), CNS (Center for Nuclear Study, University of Tokyo), JICFuS (Joint Institute for Computational Fundamental Science), and RIKEN (Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, Institute of Physical and Chemical Research). This workshop was supported by Yokohama Convention & Visitors Bureau and Kanto Gakuin University. It remains to be announced that the next, the fourth in this series of SOTANCP workshops, SOTANCP4, will be held in Galveston, Texas, USA, in 2018.

I’m not just fat, I’m old: has the study of body image overlooked “old talk”?

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Background Research indicates that body dissatisfaction is correlated with and often predictive of both physical and mental health problems. “Fat talk,” a well-studied form of body image talk in adolescents and university-aged women, has been implicated as contributing to body dissatisfaction and mediating the relationship between body dissatisfaction and other mental health problems. Limited research, however, has investigated fat talk across the female lifespan. Further, consistent with most body image research, fat talk research solely focuses on the thin dimension of idealized female attractiveness, even though other dimensions may contribute to body dissatisfaction in women. Method The current study investigated whether or not “old talk,” a hereto un-described form of body image talk, appears to be a parallel, but distinct, form of body image talk that taps into the young dimension of the thin-young-ideal standard of female beauty. An international, internet sample of women (aged 18-87, N = 914) completed questionnaires aimed at assessing fat talk, old talk, body image disturbance, and eating disorder pathology. Results Results indicated that both fat talk and old talk were reported by women across the lifespan, although they evidenced different trajectories of frequency. Like fat talk, old talk was significantly correlated with body image disturbance and eating disorder pathology, albeit at a lower rate than fat talk in the total sample. Old talk was more highly correlated with ageing appearance anxiety than fat talk, and the correlation between old talk and body image disturbance and ED pathology increased with women’s ages. Conclusion Results suggest that old talk is a form of body image talk that is related to but distinct from fat talk. Old talk appears to be similarly problematic to fat talk for women whose age increases their deviation from the thin-young-ideal. Further research into the phenomenon of old talk is warranted as is increased attention to fat talk across the full lifespan of women. PMID:24764529

Perceptual quality estimation of H.264/AVC videos using reduced-reference and no-reference models

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shahid, Muhammad; Pandremmenou, Katerina; Kondi, Lisimachos P.; Rossholm, Andreas; Lövström, Benny

2016-09-01

Reduced-reference (RR) and no-reference (NR) models for video quality estimation, using features that account for the impact of coding artifacts, spatio-temporal complexity, and packet losses, are proposed. The purpose of this study is to analyze a number of potentially quality-relevant features in order to select the most suitable set of features for building the desired models. The proposed sets of features have not been used in the literature and some of the features are used for the first time in this study. The features are employed by the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), which selects only the most influential of them toward perceptual quality. For comparison, we apply feature selection in the complete feature sets and ridge regression on the reduced sets. The models are validated using a database of H.264/AVC encoded videos that were subjectively assessed for quality in an ITU-T compliant laboratory. We infer that just two features selected by RR LASSO and two bitstream-based features selected by NR LASSO are able to estimate perceptual quality with high accuracy, higher than that of ridge, which uses more features. The comparisons with competing works and two full-reference metrics also verify the superiority of our models.

Feature Grouping and Selection Over an Undirected Graph.

PubMed

Yang, Sen; Yuan, Lei; Lai, Ying-Cheng; Shen, Xiaotong; Wonka, Peter; Ye, Jieping

2012-01-01

High-dimensional regression/classification continues to be an important and challenging problem, especially when features are highly correlated. Feature selection, combined with additional structure information on the features has been considered to be promising in promoting regression/classification performance. Graph-guided fused lasso (GFlasso) has recently been proposed to facilitate feature selection and graph structure exploitation, when features exhibit certain graph structures. However, the formulation in GFlasso relies on pairwise sample correlations to perform feature grouping, which could introduce additional estimation bias. In this paper, we propose three new feature grouping and selection methods to resolve this issue. The first method employs a convex function to penalize the pairwise l ∞ norm of connected regression/classification coefficients, achieving simultaneous feature grouping and selection. The second method improves the first one by utilizing a non-convex function to reduce the estimation bias. The third one is the extension of the second method using a truncated l 1 regularization to further reduce the estimation bias. The proposed methods combine feature grouping and feature selection to enhance estimation accuracy. We employ the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and difference of convex functions (DC) programming to solve the proposed formulations. Our experimental results on synthetic data and two real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

STS-127 Firing Room

NASA Image and Video Library

2009-07-11

Mike Suffredini, NASA Manager, International Space Station (ISS) Program, talks with other NASA mission managers in from Firing Room Four of the Launch Control Center at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Sunday, July 12, 2009. The space shuttle Endeavour is set to launch at 7:13p.m. EDT with the crew of STS-127 and start a 16-day mission that will feature five spacewalks and complete construction of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

The Space Mobile Network

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Israel, David

2017-01-01

The definition and development of the next generation space communications and navigation architecture is underway. The primary goals are to remove communications and navigations constraints from missions and to enable increased autonomy. The Space Mobile Network (SMN) is an architectural concept that includes new technology and operations that will provide flight systems with an similar user experience to terrestrial wireless mobile networks. This talk will describe the SMN and its proposed new features, such as Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN), optical communications, and User Initiated Services (UIS).

At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: United States Military Aid to the Royal LAO Government 1955-75

DTIC Science & Technology

1991-05-01

number of other people interrupted their busy schedules to read drafts of this dissertation. Professor William M. iv Leary, University of Georgia... busy schedule to talk with me about the activities of the CIA and Air America in Laos. His comments on guerilla warfare were extremely vi valuable...Vietnam and the Mekong valley. These features have also given the plain an important strategic value. For centuries, armies have crossed through the

NASA Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-21

Roger Launius, senior curator, Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum, talks during the NASA Future Forum panel titled "Shifting Roles for Public, Private, and International Players in Space" at The Ohio State University on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-21

Bobby Braun, professor, Georgia Institute of Technology, talks during the NASA Future Forum panel titled "Shifting Roles for Public, Private, and International Players in Space" at The Ohio State University on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA Columbus Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-20

Eric Fingerhut, head of Education at Battelle, former chancellor of Ohio's Higher Education System, talks during the during the NASA Future Forum Inspiration and Education Panel at The Ohio State University on Monday, Feb. 20, 2012, in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA Columbus Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-20

Founding head of MC2 STEM High School Jeffrey McClellan talks during the NASA Future Forum Inspiration and Education Panel at The Ohio State University on Monday, Feb. 20, 2012, in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

Animal welfare: what has changed in the past 50 years?

PubMed

2014-07-12

The 3(rd) CABI symposium on animal welfare and behaviour was held on June 11, and featured a range of talks on 'animals as machines'. The symposium marked the 50(th) anniversary of the publication of the book 'Animal Machines' by Ruth Harrison. The book decried the conditions experienced at that time by many animals kept in intensive farming systems, and the speakers at the symposium discussed how far animal welfare had come since its publication. Georgina Mills reports. British Veterinary Association.

Emerging Generation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Victims

DTIC Science & Technology

2011-02-02

consist of a diverse mix of born-again religious believers and new agers who garner their values from the latest action movie and daily talk shows.2...Cycle Two begins when they return home to a warm reception of a grateful nation and huge yellow ribbons that drape the threshold of the family... trailer : http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QcE6CdR60NY&feature=related (accessed 4 December 2010). 20 Ibid, 2:07. 21 Simon Wessely and Edgar Jones

Proceedings of the twentieth annual meeting of the society for organic petrology

USGS Publications Warehouse

Bragg, Linda J.; Lentz, Erika E.; Warwick, Peter D.; Finkelman, Robert B.; Trippi, Michael H.; Karlsen, Alex W.

2004-01-01

The Society for Organic Petrology (TSOP; pronounced "Tee'-sop") was established in 1984 to consolidate and foster the organizational activities of scientists and engineers involved with coal petrology, kerogen petrology, organic geochemistry, and related disciplines. The following report, "Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of The Society for Organic Petrology" (ISSN 1060-7250), features technical talks, poster presentations, business meetings, short courses, and field trips from the Fall 2003 annual meeting held in Washington, D.C.

NASA Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-21

Jordan Hansell, chairman and CEO, NetJets Inc. talks during the NASA Future Forum panel titled "Importance of Technology, Science and Innovation for our Economic Future" at The Ohio State University on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-21

Michael Donovan, technology consultant, New Services Development, Hewlett-Packard Company talks during the NASA Future Forum panel titled "Importance of Technology, Science and Innovation for our Economic Future" at The Ohio State University on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-21

Carlos Grodsinsky, Vice Presiden of Technology, Zin Technologies, talks during the NASA Future Forum panel titled "Transferring and Commercializing Technology to Benefit Our Lives and Our Economy" at The Ohio State University on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

NASA Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-21

Fayette Collier, Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters talks during the NASA Future Forum panel titled "Transferring and Commercializing Technology to Benefit Our Lives and Our Economy" at The Ohio State University on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

KSC00pp0054

NASA Image and Video Library

2000-01-14

Senator Connie Mack and Senator George Kirkpatrick talk before the Florida Space Summit being held today at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. The event, featuring a discussion on the future of space as it relates to the State of Florida and moderated by Center Director Roy Bridges, included participants such as Senator Bob Graham, Rep. Dave Weldon, members of Florida's State government including Gov. Jeb Bush, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, 45th Space Wing Commander Brig. Gen. Donald Pettit and heads of aerospace companies

KSC-00pp0054

NASA Image and Video Library

2000-01-14

Senator Connie Mack and Senator George Kirkpatrick talk before the Florida Space Summit being held today at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. The event, featuring a discussion on the future of space as it relates to the State of Florida and moderated by Center Director Roy Bridges, included participants such as Senator Bob Graham, Rep. Dave Weldon, members of Florida's State government including Gov. Jeb Bush, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, 45th Space Wing Commander Brig. Gen. Donald Pettit and heads of aerospace companies

First passage time: Connecting random walks to functional responses in heterogeneous environments (Invited)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lewis, M. A.; McKenzie, H.; Merrill, E.

2010-12-01

In this talk I will outline first passage time analysis for animals undertaking complex movement patterns, and will demonstrate how first passage time can be used to derive functional responses in predator prey systems. The result is a new approach to understanding type III functional responses based on a random walk model. I will extend the analysis to heterogeneous environments to assess the effects of linear features on functional responses in wolves and elk using GPS tracking data.

NASA Columbus Future Forum

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-02-20

Ohio State University graduate student, biological sciences and NASA Student Ambassador, Monica Okon talks during the NASA Future Forum Inspiration and Education Panel at The Ohio State University on Monday, Feb. 20, 2012, in Columbus, Ohio. The NASA Future Forum features panel discussions on the importance of education to our nation's future in space, the benefit of commercialized space technology to our economy and lives here on Earth, and the shifting roles for the public, commercial and international communities in space. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

KSC-2010-4570

NASA Image and Video Library

2010-09-05

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Attendees of the 2010 Tom Joyner Family Reunion talk with NASA astronaut Mike Foreman at the Gaylord Palms Convention Center in Orlando, Fla. To encourage student attendees to focus on pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), NASA featured some of its greatest legends and trailblazers during a panel discussion at the reunion event. NASA's Education Office sponsored the panel discussion and educational activities as part of the agency's "Summer of Innovation" initiative and the federal "Educate to Innovate" campaign. Photo credit: NASA/Amanda Diller

Natural image statistics and low-complexity feature selection.

PubMed

Vasconcelos, Manuela; Vasconcelos, Nuno

2009-02-01

Low-complexity feature selection is analyzed in the context of visual recognition. It is hypothesized that high-order dependences of bandpass features contain little information for discrimination of natural images. This hypothesis is characterized formally by the introduction of the concepts of conjunctive interference and decomposability order of a feature set. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the feasibility of low-complexity feature selection are then derived in terms of these concepts. It is shown that the intrinsic complexity of feature selection is determined by the decomposability order of the feature set and not its dimension. Feature selection algorithms are then derived for all levels of complexity and are shown to be approximated by existing information-theoretic methods, which they consistently outperform. The new algorithms are also used to objectively test the hypothesis of low decomposability order through comparison of classification performance. It is shown that, for image classification, the gain of modeling feature dependencies has strongly diminishing returns: best results are obtained under the assumption of decomposability order 1. This suggests a generic law for bandpass features extracted from natural images: that the effect, on the dependence of any two features, of observing any other feature is constant across image classes.

Effective traffic features selection algorithm for cyber-attacks samples

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, Yihong; Liu, Fangzheng; Du, Zhenyu

2018-05-01

By studying the defense scheme of Network attacks, this paper propose an effective traffic features selection algorithm based on k-means++ clustering to deal with the problem of high dimensionality of traffic features which extracted from cyber-attacks samples. Firstly, this algorithm divide the original feature set into attack traffic feature set and background traffic feature set by the clustering. Then, we calculates the variation of clustering performance after removing a certain feature. Finally, evaluating the degree of distinctiveness of the feature vector according to the result. Among them, the effective feature vector is whose degree of distinctiveness exceeds the set threshold. The purpose of this paper is to select out the effective features from the extracted original feature set. In this way, it can reduce the dimensionality of the features so as to reduce the space-time overhead of subsequent detection. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is feasible and it has some advantages over other selection algorithms.

Challenging fat talk: An experimental investigation of reactions to body disparaging conversations.

PubMed

Ambwani, Suman; Baumgardner, Megan; Guo, Cai; Simms, Lea; Abromowitz, Emily

2017-12-01

Although "fat talk" is associated with increased eating disorder risk, the predictors of fat talk engagement and viable alternatives to these pervasive conversations remain unclear. The current experiment examined responses to fat talk versus feminist-oriented challenging fat talk scenarios. Undergraduate women (N=283) completed baseline questionnaires assessing body dissatisfaction, fat talk engagement, and positive impression management. One week later, they were randomized to view one of the two scenarios, followed by assessment of mood, fat talk engagement, social acceptability, and social likeability. Results indicated that the challenging fat talk vignette (versus the fat talk vignette) yielded less negative affect and fat talk and was perceived as more socially attractive with a more likeable target character. Baseline body dissatisfaction, baseline fat talk tendencies, and momentary negative affect predicted post-exposure fat talk engagement. Current findings highlight possibilities for implementing feminist language and psychoeducation in fat talk prevention efforts. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Relevance popularity: A term event model based feature selection scheme for text classification.

PubMed

Feng, Guozhong; An, Baiguo; Yang, Fengqin; Wang, Han; Zhang, Libiao

2017-01-01

Feature selection is a practical approach for improving the performance of text classification methods by optimizing the feature subsets input to classifiers. In traditional feature selection methods such as information gain and chi-square, the number of documents that contain a particular term (i.e. the document frequency) is often used. However, the frequency of a given term appearing in each document has not been fully investigated, even though it is a promising feature to produce accurate classifications. In this paper, we propose a new feature selection scheme based on a term event Multinomial naive Bayes probabilistic model. According to the model assumptions, the matching score function, which is based on the prediction probability ratio, can be factorized. Finally, we derive a feature selection measurement for each term after replacing inner parameters by their estimators. On a benchmark English text datasets (20 Newsgroups) and a Chinese text dataset (MPH-20), our numerical experiment results obtained from using two widely used text classifiers (naive Bayes and support vector machine) demonstrate that our method outperformed the representative feature selection methods.

Hybrid feature selection for supporting lightweight intrusion detection systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Song, Jianglong; Zhao, Wentao; Liu, Qiang; Wang, Xin

2017-08-01

Redundant and irrelevant features not only cause high resource consumption but also degrade the performance of Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), especially when coping with big data. These features slow down the process of training and testing in network traffic classification. Therefore, a hybrid feature selection approach in combination with wrapper and filter selection is designed in this paper to build a lightweight intrusion detection system. Two main phases are involved in this method. The first phase conducts a preliminary search for an optimal subset of features, in which the chi-square feature selection is utilized. The selected set of features from the previous phase is further refined in the second phase in a wrapper manner, in which the Random Forest(RF) is used to guide the selection process and retain an optimized set of features. After that, we build an RF-based detection model and make a fair comparison with other approaches. The experimental results on NSL-KDD datasets show that our approach results are in higher detection accuracy as well as faster training and testing processes.

Classification of epileptic EEG signals based on simple random sampling and sequential feature selection.

PubMed

Ghayab, Hadi Ratham Al; Li, Yan; Abdulla, Shahab; Diykh, Mohammed; Wan, Xiangkui

2016-06-01

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are used broadly in the medical fields. The main applications of EEG signals are the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as epilepsy, Alzheimer, sleep problems and so on. This paper presents a new method which extracts and selects features from multi-channel EEG signals. This research focuses on three main points. Firstly, simple random sampling (SRS) technique is used to extract features from the time domain of EEG signals. Secondly, the sequential feature selection (SFS) algorithm is applied to select the key features and to reduce the dimensionality of the data. Finally, the selected features are forwarded to a least square support vector machine (LS_SVM) classifier to classify the EEG signals. The LS_SVM classifier classified the features which are extracted and selected from the SRS and the SFS. The experimental results show that the method achieves 99.90, 99.80 and 100 % for classification accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, respectively.

Joint L2,1 Norm and Fisher Discrimination Constrained Feature Selection for Rational Synthesis of Microporous Aluminophosphates.

PubMed

Qi, Miao; Wang, Ting; Yi, Yugen; Gao, Na; Kong, Jun; Wang, Jianzhong

2017-04-01

Feature selection has been regarded as an effective tool to help researchers understand the generating process of data. For mining the synthesis mechanism of microporous AlPOs, this paper proposes a novel feature selection method by joint l 2,1 norm and Fisher discrimination constraints (JNFDC). In order to obtain more effective feature subset, the proposed method can be achieved in two steps. The first step is to rank the features according to sparse and discriminative constraints. The second step is to establish predictive model with the ranked features, and select the most significant features in the light of the contribution of improving the predictive accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, JNFDC is the first work which employs the sparse representation theory to explore the synthesis mechanism of six kinds of pore rings. Numerical simulations demonstrate that our proposed method can select significant features affecting the specified structural property and improve the predictive accuracy. Moreover, comparison results show that JNFDC can obtain better predictive performances than some other state-of-the-art feature selection methods. © 2017 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Tech Talk for Social Studies Teachers. Writing about Nazi Germany and Leni Riefenstahl:-Using Technology to Access Information

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Street, Chris; Stang, Kristin

2008-01-01

Asking students to explore teacher-selected Web sites is an effective way to provide students with appropriate links to credible online resources. This article provides several links to relevant sites that cover the Holocaust and Nazi Germany in general. It also provides several sites that focus on one particularly controversial and significant…

The Coordination of Verbal and Nonverbal Interaction towards Three Parties: The Analysis of a Talk Show.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

von Raffler-Engel, Walburga

A study of randomly selected "Donahue" shows revealed how host Phil Donahue interacts with several parties at one time and how he subordinates various interactions to suit the hierarchy of importance he attributes to each party, with the television viewer being the most important. Donahue organizes his body movement mainly for television…

Language at Work. Selected Papers from the Annual Meeting of the British Association for Applied Linguistics (University of Birmingham, England, September 1997). British Studies in Applied Linguistics 13.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hunston, Susan, Ed.

Papers on the role of language in the work environment include: "Institutions, Writing and Talk in Environmental Discourse" (Greg Myers); "Negotiating Training: Shifting Participant Frameworks in the Workplace" (Kristina Bennert); "Relational Management in Chinese-British Business Meetings" (Helen Spencer-Oatey,…

Seeing through a Different Lens: What Do Interns Learn when They Make Video Cases of Their Own Teaching?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rosaen, Cheryl L.; Lundeberg, Mary; Terpstra, Marjorie; Cooper, Marjorie; Fu, Jing; Niu, Rui

2010-01-01

This study included four preservice interns at a Midwestern university in the United States who were learning to facilitate interactive discussions in English language arts. The authors investigated how the interns' perceptions of their self-selected audience influenced what they noticed, talked about, and learned as they constructed a video case…

Linguistics, Language, and the Professions: Education, Journalism, Law, Medicine, and Technology. Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (Washington, DC, May 4-6, 2000).

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Alatis, James E., Ed.; Hamilton, Heidi E., Ed.; Tan, Ai-Hui, Ed.

This volume contains the published version of selected papers from the 2000 Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT). Plenary speeches include the following: "The Talk of Learning Professional Work" (Shirley Brice Heath); "Linguistics, Education, and the Ebonics Firestorm" (John R. Rickford);…

Investigating a memory-based account of negative priming: support for selection-feature mismatch.

PubMed

MacDonald, P A; Joordens, S

2000-08-01

Using typical and modified negative priming tasks, the selection-feature mismatch account of negative priming was tested. In the modified task, participants performed selections on the basis of a semantic feature (e.g., referent size). This procedure has been shown to enhance negative priming (P. A. MacDonald, S. Joordens, & K. N. Seergobin, 1999). Across 3 experiments, negative priming occurred only when the repeated item mismatched in terms of the feature used as the basis for selections. When the repeated item was congruent on the selection feature across the prime and probe displays, positive priming arose. This pattern of results appeared in both the ignored- and the attended-repetition conditions. Negative priming does not result from previously ignoring an item. These findings strongly support the selection-feature mismatch account of negative priming and refute both the distractor inhibition and the episodic-retrieval explanations.

Talking Wheelchair

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1981-01-01

Communication is made possible for disabled individuals by means of an electronic system, developed at Stanford University's School of Medicine, which produces highly intelligible synthesized speech. Familiarly known as the "talking wheelchair" and formally as the Versatile Portable Speech Prosthesis (VPSP). Wheelchair mounted system consists of a word processor, a video screen, a voice synthesizer and a computer program which instructs the synthesizer how to produce intelligible sounds in response to user commands. Computer's memory contains 925 words plus a number of common phrases and questions. Memory can also store several thousand other words of the user's choice. Message units are selected by operating a simple switch, joystick or keyboard. Completed message appears on the video screen, then user activates speech synthesizer, which generates a voice with a somewhat mechanical tone. With the keyboard, an experienced user can construct messages as rapidly as 30 words per minute.

Ordinal feature selection for iris and palmprint recognition.

PubMed

Sun, Zhenan; Wang, Libin; Tan, Tieniu

2014-09-01

Ordinal measures have been demonstrated as an effective feature representation model for iris and palmprint recognition. However, ordinal measures are a general concept of image analysis and numerous variants with different parameter settings, such as location, scale, orientation, and so on, can be derived to construct a huge feature space. This paper proposes a novel optimization formulation for ordinal feature selection with successful applications to both iris and palmprint recognition. The objective function of the proposed feature selection method has two parts, i.e., misclassification error of intra and interclass matching samples and weighted sparsity of ordinal feature descriptors. Therefore, the feature selection aims to achieve an accurate and sparse representation of ordinal measures. And, the optimization subjects to a number of linear inequality constraints, which require that all intra and interclass matching pairs are well separated with a large margin. Ordinal feature selection is formulated as a linear programming (LP) problem so that a solution can be efficiently obtained even on a large-scale feature pool and training database. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LP formulation is advantageous over existing feature selection methods, such as mRMR, ReliefF, Boosting, and Lasso for biometric recognition, reporting state-of-the-art accuracy on CASIA and PolyU databases.

Economic indicators selection for crime rates forecasting using cooperative feature selection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Alwee, Razana; Shamsuddin, Siti Mariyam Hj; Salleh Sallehuddin, Roselina

2013-04-01

Features selection in multivariate forecasting model is very important to ensure that the model is accurate. The purpose of this study is to apply the Cooperative Feature Selection method for features selection. The features are economic indicators that will be used in crime rate forecasting model. The Cooperative Feature Selection combines grey relational analysis and artificial neural network to establish a cooperative model that can rank and select the significant economic indicators. Grey relational analysis is used to select the best data series to represent each economic indicator and is also used to rank the economic indicators according to its importance to the crime rate. After that, the artificial neural network is used to select the significant economic indicators for forecasting the crime rates. In this study, we used economic indicators of unemployment rate, consumer price index, gross domestic product and consumer sentiment index, as well as data rates of property crime and violent crime for the United States. Levenberg-Marquardt neural network is used in this study. From our experiments, we found that consumer price index is an important economic indicator that has a significant influence on the violent crime rate. While for property crime rate, the gross domestic product, unemployment rate and consumer price index are the influential economic indicators. The Cooperative Feature Selection is also found to produce smaller errors as compared to Multiple Linear Regression in forecasting property and violent crime rates.

Feature Selection for Ridge Regression with Provable Guarantees.

PubMed

Paul, Saurabh; Drineas, Petros

2016-04-01

We introduce single-set spectral sparsification as a deterministic sampling-based feature selection technique for regularized least-squares classification, which is the classification analog to ridge regression. The method is unsupervised and gives worst-case guarantees of the generalization power of the classification function after feature selection with respect to the classification function obtained using all features. We also introduce leverage-score sampling as an unsupervised randomized feature selection method for ridge regression. We provide risk bounds for both single-set spectral sparsification and leverage-score sampling on ridge regression in the fixed design setting and show that the risk in the sampled space is comparable to the risk in the full-feature space. We perform experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets; a subset of TechTC-300 data sets, to support our theory. Experimental results indicate that the proposed methods perform better than the existing feature selection methods.

Improving Classification of Protein Interaction Articles Using Context Similarity-Based Feature Selection.

PubMed

Chen, Yifei; Sun, Yuxing; Han, Bing-Qing

2015-01-01

Protein interaction article classification is a text classification task in the biological domain to determine which articles describe protein-protein interactions. Since the feature space in text classification is high-dimensional, feature selection is widely used for reducing the dimensionality of features to speed up computation without sacrificing classification performance. Many existing feature selection methods are based on the statistical measure of document frequency and term frequency. One potential drawback of these methods is that they treat features separately. Hence, first we design a similarity measure between the context information to take word cooccurrences and phrase chunks around the features into account. Then we introduce the similarity of context information to the importance measure of the features to substitute the document and term frequency. Hence we propose new context similarity-based feature selection methods. Their performance is evaluated on two protein interaction article collections and compared against the frequency-based methods. The experimental results reveal that the context similarity-based methods perform better in terms of the F1 measure and the dimension reduction rate. Benefiting from the context information surrounding the features, the proposed methods can select distinctive features effectively for protein interaction article classification.

Feature Selection Using Information Gain for Improved Structural-Based Alert Correlation

PubMed Central

Siraj, Maheyzah Md; Zainal, Anazida; Elshoush, Huwaida Tagelsir; Elhaj, Fatin

2016-01-01

Grouping and clustering alerts for intrusion detection based on the similarity of features is referred to as structurally base alert correlation and can discover a list of attack steps. Previous researchers selected different features and data sources manually based on their knowledge and experience, which lead to the less accurate identification of attack steps and inconsistent performance of clustering accuracy. Furthermore, the existing alert correlation systems deal with a huge amount of data that contains null values, incomplete information, and irrelevant features causing the analysis of the alerts to be tedious, time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, this paper focuses on selecting accurate and significant features of alerts that are appropriate to represent the attack steps, thus, enhancing the structural-based alert correlation model. A two-tier feature selection method is proposed to obtain the significant features. The first tier aims at ranking the subset of features based on high information gain entropy in decreasing order. The‏ second tier extends additional features with a better discriminative ability than the initially ranked features. Performance analysis results show the significance of the selected features in terms of the clustering accuracy using 2000 DARPA intrusion detection scenario-specific dataset. PMID:27893821

A New Direction of Cancer Classification: Positive Effect of Low-Ranking MicroRNAs.

PubMed

Li, Feifei; Piao, Minghao; Piao, Yongjun; Li, Meijing; Ryu, Keun Ho

2014-10-01

Many studies based on microRNA (miRNA) expression profiles showed a new aspect of cancer classification. Because one characteristic of miRNA expression data is the high dimensionality, feature selection methods have been used to facilitate dimensionality reduction. The feature selection methods have one shortcoming thus far: they just consider the problem of where feature to class is 1:1 or n:1. However, because one miRNA may influence more than one type of cancer, human miRNA is considered to be ranked low in traditional feature selection methods and are removed most of the time. In view of the limitation of the miRNA number, low-ranking miRNAs are also important to cancer classification. We considered both high- and low-ranking features to cover all problems (1:1, n:1, 1:n, and m:n) in cancer classification. First, we used the correlation-based feature selection method to select the high-ranking miRNAs, and chose the support vector machine, Bayes network, decision tree, k-nearest-neighbor, and logistic classifier to construct cancer classification. Then, we chose Chi-square test, information gain, gain ratio, and Pearson's correlation feature selection methods to build the m:n feature subset, and used the selected miRNAs to determine cancer classification. The low-ranking miRNA expression profiles achieved higher classification accuracy compared with just using high-ranking miRNAs in traditional feature selection methods. Our results demonstrate that the m:n feature subset made a positive impression of low-ranking miRNAs in cancer classification.

Artificial bee colony algorithm for single-trial electroencephalogram analysis.

PubMed

Hsu, Wei-Yen; Hu, Ya-Ping

2015-04-01

In this study, we propose an analysis system combined with feature selection to further improve the classification accuracy of single-trial electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Acquiring event-related brain potential data from the sensorimotor cortices, the system comprises artifact and background noise removal, feature extraction, feature selection, and feature classification. First, the artifacts and background noise are removed automatically by means of independent component analysis and surface Laplacian filter, respectively. Several potential features, such as band power, autoregressive model, and coherence and phase-locking value, are then extracted for subsequent classification. Next, artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is used to select features from the aforementioned feature combination. Finally, selected subfeatures are classified by support vector machine. Comparing with and without artifact removal and feature selection, using a genetic algorithm on single-trial EEG data for 6 subjects, the results indicate that the proposed system is promising and suitable for brain-computer interface applications. © EEG and Clinical Neuroscience Society (ECNS) 2014.

Application of quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization to motor imagery EEG classification.

PubMed

Hsu, Wei-Yen

2013-12-01

In this study, we propose a recognition system for single-trial analysis of motor imagery (MI) electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Applying event-related brain potential (ERP) data acquired from the sensorimotor cortices, the system chiefly consists of automatic artifact elimination, feature extraction, feature selection and classification. In addition to the use of independent component analysis, a similarity measure is proposed to further remove the electrooculographic (EOG) artifacts automatically. Several potential features, such as wavelet-fractal features, are then extracted for subsequent classification. Next, quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) is used to select features from the feature combination. Finally, selected sub-features are classified by support vector machine (SVM). Compared with without artifact elimination, feature selection using a genetic algorithm (GA) and feature classification with Fisher's linear discriminant (FLD) on MI data from two data sets for eight subjects, the results indicate that the proposed method is promising in brain-computer interface (BCI) applications.

Optimum location of external markers using feature selection algorithms for real‐time tumor tracking in external‐beam radiotherapy: a virtual phantom study

PubMed Central

Nankali, Saber; Miandoab, Payam Samadi; Baghizadeh, Amin

2016-01-01

In external‐beam radiotherapy, using external markers is one of the most reliable tools to predict tumor position, in clinical applications. The main challenge in this approach is tumor motion tracking with highest accuracy that depends heavily on external markers location, and this issue is the objective of this study. Four commercially available feature selection algorithms entitled 1) Correlation‐based Feature Selection, 2) Classifier, 3) Principal Components, and 4) Relief were proposed to find optimum location of external markers in combination with two “Genetic” and “Ranker” searching procedures. The performance of these algorithms has been evaluated using four‐dimensional extended cardiac‐torso anthropomorphic phantom. Six tumors in lung, three tumors in liver, and 49 points on the thorax surface were taken into account to simulate internal and external motions, respectively. The root mean square error of an adaptive neuro‐fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) as prediction model was considered as metric for quantitatively evaluating the performance of proposed feature selection algorithms. To do this, the thorax surface region was divided into nine smaller segments and predefined tumors motion was predicted by ANFIS using external motion data of given markers at each small segment, separately. Our comparative results showed that all feature selection algorithms can reasonably select specific external markers from those segments where the root mean square error of the ANFIS model is minimum. Moreover, the performance accuracy of proposed feature selection algorithms was compared, separately. For this, each tumor motion was predicted using motion data of those external markers selected by each feature selection algorithm. Duncan statistical test, followed by F‐test, on final results reflected that all proposed feature selection algorithms have the same performance accuracy for lung tumors. But for liver tumors, a correlation‐based feature selection algorithm, in combination with a genetic search algorithm, proved to yield best performance accuracy for selecting optimum markers. PACS numbers: 87.55.km, 87.56.Fc PMID:26894358

Optimum location of external markers using feature selection algorithms for real-time tumor tracking in external-beam radiotherapy: a virtual phantom study.

PubMed

Nankali, Saber; Torshabi, Ahmad Esmaili; Miandoab, Payam Samadi; Baghizadeh, Amin

2016-01-08

In external-beam radiotherapy, using external markers is one of the most reliable tools to predict tumor position, in clinical applications. The main challenge in this approach is tumor motion tracking with highest accuracy that depends heavily on external markers location, and this issue is the objective of this study. Four commercially available feature selection algorithms entitled 1) Correlation-based Feature Selection, 2) Classifier, 3) Principal Components, and 4) Relief were proposed to find optimum location of external markers in combination with two "Genetic" and "Ranker" searching procedures. The performance of these algorithms has been evaluated using four-dimensional extended cardiac-torso anthropomorphic phantom. Six tumors in lung, three tumors in liver, and 49 points on the thorax surface were taken into account to simulate internal and external motions, respectively. The root mean square error of an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) as prediction model was considered as metric for quantitatively evaluating the performance of proposed feature selection algorithms. To do this, the thorax surface region was divided into nine smaller segments and predefined tumors motion was predicted by ANFIS using external motion data of given markers at each small segment, separately. Our comparative results showed that all feature selection algorithms can reasonably select specific external markers from those segments where the root mean square error of the ANFIS model is minimum. Moreover, the performance accuracy of proposed feature selection algorithms was compared, separately. For this, each tumor motion was predicted using motion data of those external markers selected by each feature selection algorithm. Duncan statistical test, followed by F-test, on final results reflected that all proposed feature selection algorithms have the same performance accuracy for lung tumors. But for liver tumors, a correlation-based feature selection algorithm, in combination with a genetic search algorithm, proved to yield best performance accuracy for selecting optimum markers.

Automatic migraine classification via feature selection committee and machine learning techniques over imaging and questionnaire data.

PubMed

Garcia-Chimeno, Yolanda; Garcia-Zapirain, Begonya; Gomez-Beldarrain, Marian; Fernandez-Ruanova, Begonya; Garcia-Monco, Juan Carlos

2017-04-13

Feature selection methods are commonly used to identify subsets of relevant features to facilitate the construction of models for classification, yet little is known about how feature selection methods perform in diffusion tensor images (DTIs). In this study, feature selection and machine learning classification methods were tested for the purpose of automating diagnosis of migraines using both DTIs and questionnaire answers related to emotion and cognition - factors that influence of pain perceptions. We select 52 adult subjects for the study divided into three groups: control group (15), subjects with sporadic migraine (19) and subjects with chronic migraine and medication overuse (18). These subjects underwent magnetic resonance with diffusion tensor to see white matter pathway integrity of the regions of interest involved in pain and emotion. The tests also gather data about pathology. The DTI images and test results were then introduced into feature selection algorithms (Gradient Tree Boosting, L1-based, Random Forest and Univariate) to reduce features of the first dataset and classification algorithms (SVM (Support Vector Machine), Boosting (Adaboost) and Naive Bayes) to perform a classification of migraine group. Moreover we implement a committee method to improve the classification accuracy based on feature selection algorithms. When classifying the migraine group, the greatest improvements in accuracy were made using the proposed committee-based feature selection method. Using this approach, the accuracy of classification into three types improved from 67 to 93% when using the Naive Bayes classifier, from 90 to 95% with the support vector machine classifier, 93 to 94% in boosting. The features that were determined to be most useful for classification included are related with the pain, analgesics and left uncinate brain (connected with the pain and emotions). The proposed feature selection committee method improved the performance of migraine diagnosis classifiers compared to individual feature selection methods, producing a robust system that achieved over 90% accuracy in all classifiers. The results suggest that the proposed methods can be used to support specialists in the classification of migraines in patients undergoing magnetic resonance imaging.

Joint Feature Selection and Classification for Multilabel Learning.

PubMed

Huang, Jun; Li, Guorong; Huang, Qingming; Wu, Xindong

2018-03-01

Multilabel learning deals with examples having multiple class labels simultaneously. It has been applied to a variety of applications, such as text categorization and image annotation. A large number of algorithms have been proposed for multilabel learning, most of which concentrate on multilabel classification problems and only a few of them are feature selection algorithms. Current multilabel classification models are mainly built on a single data representation composed of all the features which are shared by all the class labels. Since each class label might be decided by some specific features of its own, and the problems of classification and feature selection are often addressed independently, in this paper, we propose a novel method which can perform joint feature selection and classification for multilabel learning, named JFSC. Different from many existing methods, JFSC learns both shared features and label-specific features by considering pairwise label correlations, and builds the multilabel classifier on the learned low-dimensional data representations simultaneously. A comparative study with state-of-the-art approaches manifests a competitive performance of our proposed method both in classification and feature selection for multilabel learning.

A hybrid feature selection method using multiclass SVM for diagnosis of erythemato-squamous disease

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Maryam, Setiawan, Noor Akhmad; Wahyunggoro, Oyas

2017-08-01

The diagnosis of erythemato-squamous disease is a complex problem and difficult to detect in dermatology. Besides that, it is a major cause of skin cancer. Data mining implementation in the medical field helps expert to diagnose precisely, accurately, and inexpensively. In this research, we use data mining technique to developed a diagnosis model based on multiclass SVM with a novel hybrid feature selection method to diagnose erythemato-squamous disease. Our hybrid feature selection method, named ChiGA (Chi Square and Genetic Algorithm), uses the advantages from filter and wrapper methods to select the optimal feature subset from original feature. Chi square used as filter method to remove redundant features and GA as wrapper method to select the ideal feature subset with SVM used as classifier. Experiment performed with 10 fold cross validation on erythemato-squamous diseases dataset taken from University of California Irvine (UCI) machine learning database. The experimental result shows that the proposed model based multiclass SVM with Chi Square and GA can give an optimum feature subset. There are 18 optimum features with 99.18% accuracy.

Scientifically speaking: Identifying, analyzing, and promoting science talk in small groups

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Holthuis, Nicole Inamine

In this dissertation I define, document, and analyze the nature of students' science talk as they work in cooperative learning groups. Three questions form the basis of this research. First, what is science talk? Second, how much and what kind of science talk did students do? And, third, what conditions help promote or inhibit students' science talk? This study was conducted in a total of six classrooms in three high schools. I videotaped and audiotaped students as they worked in small groups during the course of an ecology unit. I analyzed this videotape data and field notes using both quantitative and qualitative methods. I define science talk as talk that serves to move students along in terms of the science (both content and process) required or suggested by the activity. More specifically, I identified five epistemological characteristics that delineate what counts as scientific knowledge and, subsequently, science talk. From this definition, I developed an analytic framework and science talk observation instrument to document the quantity and level of student and teacher talk during groupwork. Analysis of the data from this instrument indicates that the overall level of students' science talk is considerable and students do significantly more science talk than school talk. I also found that while the overall level and type of science talk does not vary by class or by school, it does vary by activity type. Finally, my analysis suggests that science talk does not vary by gender composition of the group. I explored the classroom conditions that promote or inhibit science talk during groupwork. My findings suggest that, among other things, teachers can promote science talk by delegating authority to students, by emphasizing content and the big idea, by implementing open-ended tasks, and by modeling science talk. In conclusion, the findings described in this dissertation point teachers and researchers toward ways in which they may improve practice in order to foster more science talk. In addition, my Science Talk Instrument and analytic framework provides teachers, teacher educators, and researchers a means of understanding and evaluating student talk in small groups.

Selective attention to temporal features on nested time scales.

PubMed

Henry, Molly J; Herrmann, Björn; Obleser, Jonas

2015-02-01

Meaningful auditory stimuli such as speech and music often vary simultaneously along multiple time scales. Thus, listeners must selectively attend to, and selectively ignore, separate but intertwined temporal features. The current study aimed to identify and characterize the neural network specifically involved in this feature-selective attention to time. We used a novel paradigm where listeners judged either the duration or modulation rate of auditory stimuli, and in which the stimulation, working memory demands, response requirements, and task difficulty were held constant. A first analysis identified all brain regions where individual brain activation patterns were correlated with individual behavioral performance patterns, which thus supported temporal judgments generically. A second analysis then isolated those brain regions that specifically regulated selective attention to temporal features: Neural responses in a bilateral fronto-parietal network including insular cortex and basal ganglia decreased with degree of change of the attended temporal feature. Critically, response patterns in these regions were inverted when the task required selectively ignoring this feature. The results demonstrate how the neural analysis of complex acoustic stimuli with multiple temporal features depends on a fronto-parietal network that simultaneously regulates the selective gain for attended and ignored temporal features. © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

A combinatorial feature selection approach to describe the QSAR of dual site inhibitors of acetylcholinesterase.

PubMed

Asadabadi, Ebrahim Barzegari; Abdolmaleki, Parviz; Barkooie, Seyyed Mohsen Hosseini; Jahandideh, Samad; Rezaei, Mohammad Ali

2009-12-01

Regarding the great potential of dual binding site inhibitors of acetylcholinesterase as the future potent drugs of Alzheimer's disease, this study was devoted to extraction of the most effective structural features of these inhibitors from among a large number of quantitative descriptors. To do this, we adopted a unique approach in quantitative structure-activity relationships. An efficient feature selection method was emphasized in such an approach, using the confirmative results of different routine and novel feature selection methods. The proposed methods generated quite consistent results ensuring the effectiveness of the selected structural features.

A combined Fisher and Laplacian score for feature selection in QSAR based drug design using compounds with known and unknown activities.

PubMed

Valizade Hasanloei, Mohammad Amin; Sheikhpour, Razieh; Sarram, Mehdi Agha; Sheikhpour, Elnaz; Sharifi, Hamdollah

2018-02-01

Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) is an effective computational technique for drug design that relates the chemical structures of compounds to their biological activities. Feature selection is an important step in QSAR based drug design to select the most relevant descriptors. One of the most popular feature selection methods for classification problems is Fisher score which aim is to minimize the within-class distance and maximize the between-class distance. In this study, the properties of Fisher criterion were extended for QSAR models to define the new distance metrics based on the continuous activity values of compounds with known activities. Then, a semi-supervised feature selection method was proposed based on the combination of Fisher and Laplacian criteria which exploits both compounds with known and unknown activities to select the relevant descriptors. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed semi-supervised feature selection method in selecting the relevant descriptors, we applied the method and other feature selection methods on three QSAR data sets such as serine/threonine-protein kinase PLK3 inhibitors, ROCK inhibitors and phenol compounds. The results demonstrated that the QSAR models built on the selected descriptors by the proposed semi-supervised method have better performance than other models. This indicates the efficiency of the proposed method in selecting the relevant descriptors using the compounds with known and unknown activities. The results of this study showed that the compounds with known and unknown activities can be helpful to improve the performance of the combined Fisher and Laplacian based feature selection methods.

A combined Fisher and Laplacian score for feature selection in QSAR based drug design using compounds with known and unknown activities

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Valizade Hasanloei, Mohammad Amin; Sheikhpour, Razieh; Sarram, Mehdi Agha; Sheikhpour, Elnaz; Sharifi, Hamdollah

2018-02-01

Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) is an effective computational technique for drug design that relates the chemical structures of compounds to their biological activities. Feature selection is an important step in QSAR based drug design to select the most relevant descriptors. One of the most popular feature selection methods for classification problems is Fisher score which aim is to minimize the within-class distance and maximize the between-class distance. In this study, the properties of Fisher criterion were extended for QSAR models to define the new distance metrics based on the continuous activity values of compounds with known activities. Then, a semi-supervised feature selection method was proposed based on the combination of Fisher and Laplacian criteria which exploits both compounds with known and unknown activities to select the relevant descriptors. To demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed semi-supervised feature selection method in selecting the relevant descriptors, we applied the method and other feature selection methods on three QSAR data sets such as serine/threonine-protein kinase PLK3 inhibitors, ROCK inhibitors and phenol compounds. The results demonstrated that the QSAR models built on the selected descriptors by the proposed semi-supervised method have better performance than other models. This indicates the efficiency of the proposed method in selecting the relevant descriptors using the compounds with known and unknown activities. The results of this study showed that the compounds with known and unknown activities can be helpful to improve the performance of the combined Fisher and Laplacian based feature selection methods.

Irrelevant reward and selection histories have different influences on task-relevant attentional selection.

PubMed

MacLean, Mary H; Giesbrecht, Barry

2015-07-01

Task-relevant and physically salient features influence visual selective attention. In the present study, we investigated the influence of task-irrelevant and physically nonsalient reward-associated features on visual selective attention. Two hypotheses were tested: One predicts that the effects of target-defining task-relevant and task-irrelevant features interact to modulate visual selection; the other predicts that visual selection is determined by the independent combination of relevant and irrelevant feature effects. These alternatives were tested using a visual search task that contained multiple targets, placing a high demand on the need for selectivity, and that was data-limited and required unspeeded responses, emphasizing early perceptual selection processes. One week prior to the visual search task, participants completed a training task in which they learned to associate particular colors with a specific reward value. In the search task, the reward-associated colors were presented surrounding targets and distractors, but were neither physically salient nor task-relevant. In two experiments, the irrelevant reward-associated features influenced performance, but only when they were presented in a task-relevant location. The costs induced by the irrelevant reward-associated features were greater when they oriented attention to a target than to a distractor. In a third experiment, we examined the effects of selection history in the absence of reward history and found that the interaction between task relevance and selection history differed, relative to when the features had previously been associated with reward. The results indicate that under conditions that demand highly efficient perceptual selection, physically nonsalient task-irrelevant and task-relevant factors interact to influence visual selective attention.

Sending and Receiving Text Messages with Sexual Content: Relations with Early Sexual Activity and Borderline Personality Features in Late Adolescence

PubMed Central

Brinkley, Dawn Y.; Ackerman, Robert A.; Ehrenreich, Samuel E.; Underwood, Marion K.

2017-01-01

This research examined adolescents’ written text messages with sexual content to investigate how sexting relates to sexual activity and borderline personality features. Participants (N = 181, 85 girls) completed a measure of borderline personality features prior to 10th grade and were subsequently given smartphones configured to capture the content of their text messages. Four days of text messaging were micro-coded for content related to sex. Following 12th grade, participants reported on their sexual activity and again completed a measure of borderline personality features. Results showed that engaging in sexting at age 16 was associated with reporting an early sexual debut, having sexual intercourse experience, having multiple sex partners, and engaging in drug use in combination with sexual activity two years later. Girls engaging in sex talk were more likely to have had sexual intercourse by age 18. Text messaging about hypothetical sex in grade 10 also predicted borderline personality features at age 18. These findings suggest that sending text messages with sexual content poses risks for adolescents. Programs to prevent risky sexual activity and to promote psychological health could be enhanced by teaching adolescents to use digital communication responsibly. PMID:28824224

Sending and Receiving Text Messages with Sexual Content: Relations with Early Sexual Activity and Borderline Personality Features in Late Adolescence.

PubMed

Brinkley, Dawn Y; Ackerman, Robert A; Ehrenreich, Samuel E; Underwood, Marion K

2017-05-01

This research examined adolescents' written text messages with sexual content to investigate how sexting relates to sexual activity and borderline personality features. Participants (N = 181, 85 girls) completed a measure of borderline personality features prior to 10 th grade and were subsequently given smartphones configured to capture the content of their text messages. Four days of text messaging were micro-coded for content related to sex. Following 12 th grade, participants reported on their sexual activity and again completed a measure of borderline personality features. Results showed that engaging in sexting at age 16 was associated with reporting an early sexual debut, having sexual intercourse experience, having multiple sex partners, and engaging in drug use in combination with sexual activity two years later. Girls engaging in sex talk were more likely to have had sexual intercourse by age 18. Text messaging about hypothetical sex in grade 10 also predicted borderline personality features at age 18. These findings suggest that sending text messages with sexual content poses risks for adolescents. Programs to prevent risky sexual activity and to promote psychological health could be enhanced by teaching adolescents to use digital communication responsibly.

Multi-level gene/MiRNA feature selection using deep belief nets and active learning.

PubMed

Ibrahim, Rania; Yousri, Noha A; Ismail, Mohamed A; El-Makky, Nagwa M

2014-01-01

Selecting the most discriminative genes/miRNAs has been raised as an important task in bioinformatics to enhance disease classifiers and to mitigate the dimensionality curse problem. Original feature selection methods choose genes/miRNAs based on their individual features regardless of how they perform together. Considering group features instead of individual ones provides a better view for selecting the most informative genes/miRNAs. Recently, deep learning has proven its ability in representing the data in multiple levels of abstraction, allowing for better discrimination between different classes. However, the idea of using deep learning for feature selection is not widely used in the bioinformatics field yet. In this paper, a novel multi-level feature selection approach named MLFS is proposed for selecting genes/miRNAs based on expression profiles. The approach is based on both deep and active learning. Moreover, an extension to use the technique for miRNAs is presented by considering the biological relation between miRNAs and genes. Experimental results show that the approach was able to outperform classical feature selection methods in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) by 9%, lung cancer by 6% and breast cancer by around 10% in F1-measure. Results also show the enhancement in F1-measure of our approach over recently related work in [1] and [2].

A Hierarchical Feature and Sample Selection Framework and Its Application for Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

An, Le; Adeli, Ehsan; Liu, Mingxia; Zhang, Jun; Lee, Seong-Whan; Shen, Dinggang

2017-03-01

Classification is one of the most important tasks in machine learning. Due to feature redundancy or outliers in samples, using all available data for training a classifier may be suboptimal. For example, the Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is correlated with certain brain regions or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), and identification of relevant features is critical for computer-aided diagnosis. Many existing methods first select features from structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or SNPs and then use those features to build the classifier. However, with the presence of many redundant features, the most discriminative features are difficult to be identified in a single step. Thus, we formulate a hierarchical feature and sample selection framework to gradually select informative features and discard ambiguous samples in multiple steps for improved classifier learning. To positively guide the data manifold preservation process, we utilize both labeled and unlabeled data during training, making our method semi-supervised. For validation, we conduct experiments on AD diagnosis by selecting mutually informative features from both MRI and SNP, and using the most discriminative samples for training. The superior classification results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, as compared with the rivals.

MODEL2TALK: An Intervention to Promote Productive Classroom Talk

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

van der Veen, Chiel; van der Wilt, Femke; van Kruistum, Claudia; van Oers, Bert; Michaels, Sarah

2017-01-01

This article describes the MODEL2TALK intervention, which aims to promote young children's oral communicative competence through productive classroom talk. Productive classroom talk provides children in early childhood education with many opportunities to talk and think together. Results from a large-scale study show that productive classroom talk…

An improved wrapper-based feature selection method for machinery fault diagnosis

PubMed Central

2017-01-01

A major issue of machinery fault diagnosis using vibration signals is that it is over-reliant on personnel knowledge and experience in interpreting the signal. Thus, machine learning has been adapted for machinery fault diagnosis. The quantity and quality of the input features, however, influence the fault classification performance. Feature selection plays a vital role in selecting the most representative feature subset for the machine learning algorithm. In contrast, the trade-off relationship between capability when selecting the best feature subset and computational effort is inevitable in the wrapper-based feature selection (WFS) method. This paper proposes an improved WFS technique before integration with a support vector machine (SVM) model classifier as a complete fault diagnosis system for a rolling element bearing case study. The bearing vibration dataset made available by the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Centre was executed using the proposed WFS and its performance has been analysed and discussed. The results reveal that the proposed WFS secures the best feature subset with a lower computational effort by eliminating the redundancy of re-evaluation. The proposed WFS has therefore been found to be capable and efficient to carry out feature selection tasks. PMID:29261689

Asymmetric bagging and feature selection for activities prediction of drug molecules.

PubMed

Li, Guo-Zheng; Meng, Hao-Hua; Lu, Wen-Cong; Yang, Jack Y; Yang, Mary Qu

2008-05-28

Activities of drug molecules can be predicted by QSAR (quantitative structure activity relationship) models, which overcomes the disadvantages of high cost and long cycle by employing the traditional experimental method. With the fact that the number of drug molecules with positive activity is rather fewer than that of negatives, it is important to predict molecular activities considering such an unbalanced situation. Here, asymmetric bagging and feature selection are introduced into the problem and asymmetric bagging of support vector machines (asBagging) is proposed on predicting drug activities to treat the unbalanced problem. At the same time, the features extracted from the structures of drug molecules affect prediction accuracy of QSAR models. Therefore, a novel algorithm named PRIFEAB is proposed, which applies an embedded feature selection method to remove redundant and irrelevant features for asBagging. Numerical experimental results on a data set of molecular activities show that asBagging improve the AUC and sensitivity values of molecular activities and PRIFEAB with feature selection further helps to improve the prediction ability. Asymmetric bagging can help to improve prediction accuracy of activities of drug molecules, which can be furthermore improved by performing feature selection to select relevant features from the drug molecules data sets.

System Complexity Reduction via Feature Selection

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Deng, Houtao

2011-01-01

This dissertation transforms a set of system complexity reduction problems to feature selection problems. Three systems are considered: classification based on association rules, network structure learning, and time series classification. Furthermore, two variable importance measures are proposed to reduce the feature selection bias in tree…

Classification of motor imagery tasks for BCI with multiresolution analysis and multiobjective feature selection.

PubMed

Ortega, Julio; Asensio-Cubero, Javier; Gan, John Q; Ortiz, Andrés

2016-07-15

Brain-computer interfacing (BCI) applications based on the classification of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals require solving high-dimensional pattern classification problems with such a relatively small number of training patterns that curse of dimensionality problems usually arise. Multiresolution analysis (MRA) has useful properties for signal analysis in both temporal and spectral analysis, and has been broadly used in the BCI field. However, MRA usually increases the dimensionality of the input data. Therefore, some approaches to feature selection or feature dimensionality reduction should be considered for improving the performance of the MRA based BCI. This paper investigates feature selection in the MRA-based frameworks for BCI. Several wrapper approaches to evolutionary multiobjective feature selection are proposed with different structures of classifiers. They are evaluated by comparing with baseline methods using sparse representation of features or without feature selection. The statistical analysis, by applying the Kolmogorov-Smirnoff and Kruskal-Wallis tests to the means of the Kappa values evaluated by using the test patterns in each approach, has demonstrated some advantages of the proposed approaches. In comparison with the baseline MRA approach used in previous studies, the proposed evolutionary multiobjective feature selection approaches provide similar or even better classification performances, with significant reduction in the number of features that need to be computed.

Feature Selection for Speech Emotion Recognition in Spanish and Basque: On the Use of Machine Learning to Improve Human-Computer Interaction

PubMed Central

Arruti, Andoni; Cearreta, Idoia; Álvarez, Aitor; Lazkano, Elena; Sierra, Basilio

2014-01-01

Study of emotions in human–computer interaction is a growing research area. This paper shows an attempt to select the most significant features for emotion recognition in spoken Basque and Spanish Languages using different methods for feature selection. RekEmozio database was used as the experimental data set. Several Machine Learning paradigms were used for the emotion classification task. Experiments were executed in three phases, using different sets of features as classification variables in each phase. Moreover, feature subset selection was applied at each phase in order to seek for the most relevant feature subset. The three phases approach was selected to check the validity of the proposed approach. Achieved results show that an instance-based learning algorithm using feature subset selection techniques based on evolutionary algorithms is the best Machine Learning paradigm in automatic emotion recognition, with all different feature sets, obtaining a mean of 80,05% emotion recognition rate in Basque and a 74,82% in Spanish. In order to check the goodness of the proposed process, a greedy searching approach (FSS-Forward) has been applied and a comparison between them is provided. Based on achieved results, a set of most relevant non-speaker dependent features is proposed for both languages and new perspectives are suggested. PMID:25279686

Cernan, Stafford, and Young talk at ASVC prior to grand opening

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1997-01-01

Some of the former Apollo program astronauts tour the new Apollo/Saturn V Center (ASVC) at KSC prior to the gala grand opening ceremony for the facility that was held Jan. 8, 1997. The astronauts were invited to participate in the event, which also featured NASA Administrator Dan Goldin and KSC Director Jay Honeycutt. Discussing old times beneath the KSC Apollo/Saturn V rocket inside the building are (from left) Apollo 10 Lunar Module Pilot and Apollo 17 Commander Eugene A. Cernan; Apollo 10 Commander Thomas P. Stafford and Apollo 16 Commander John W. Young. The ASVC also features several other Apollo program spacecraft components, multimedia presentations and a simulated Apollo/ Saturn V liftoff. The facility will be a part of the KSC bus tour that embarks from the KSC Visitor Center.

Efficiently Serving HDF5 Products via OPeNDAP

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Yang, Kent

2017-01-01

Hyrax OPeNDAP services are widely used by the Earth Science data centers in NASA, NOAA and other organizations to serve end users. In this talk, we will present some key features added in the HDF5 Hyrax OPeNDAP handler that can help data centers to better serve the HDF5netCDF-4 data products. Among these new features, we will focus on the following:1.The DAP4 support 2.The memory cache and the disk cache support that can reduce the service access time 3.The enhancement that makes the swath-like HDF5 products visualized by CF-client tools. We will also discuss the role of the HDF5 handler in-depth in the recent study of the Hyrax service in the cloud environment.

The impact of feature selection on one and two-class classification performance for plant microRNAs.

PubMed

Khalifa, Waleed; Yousef, Malik; Saçar Demirci, Müşerref Duygu; Allmer, Jens

2016-01-01

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short nucleotide sequences that form a typical hairpin structure which is recognized by a complex enzyme machinery. It ultimately leads to the incorporation of 18-24 nt long mature miRNAs into RISC where they act as recognition keys to aid in regulation of target mRNAs. It is involved to determine miRNAs experimentally and, therefore, machine learning is used to complement such endeavors. The success of machine learning mostly depends on proper input data and appropriate features for parameterization of the data. Although, in general, two-class classification (TCC) is used in the field; because negative examples are hard to come by, one-class classification (OCC) has been tried for pre-miRNA detection. Since both positive and negative examples are currently somewhat limited, feature selection can prove to be vital for furthering the field of pre-miRNA detection. In this study, we compare the performance of OCC and TCC using eight feature selection methods and seven different plant species providing positive pre-miRNA examples. Feature selection was very successful for OCC where the best feature selection method achieved an average accuracy of 95.6%, thereby being ∼29% better than the worst method which achieved 66.9% accuracy. While the performance is comparable to TCC, which performs up to 3% better than OCC, TCC is much less affected by feature selection and its largest performance gap is ∼13% which only occurs for two of the feature selection methodologies. We conclude that feature selection is crucially important for OCC and that it can perform on par with TCC given the proper set of features.

An experimental investigation of the consequences and social functions of fat talk in friendship groups.

PubMed

Cruwys, Tegan; Leverington, Carly T; Sheldon, Anne M

2016-01-01

Fat talk is a form of self-degrading, thin-ideal endorsing communication that occurs within female friendship groups. Previous studies have suggested negative associations with wellbeing, but have been predominantly correlational and based on self-report. This study aimed to assess the causal relationship between fat talk and the correlates of disordered eating (thin-ideal internalization, body dissatisfaction, negative affect, and dieting intentions) by experimentally manipulating fat talk in existing friendship groups and measuring naturalistic expression of fat talk and its effects. Participants were 85 women aged 17-25 who completed the experiment in friendship pairs. They were randomly assigned to a condition in which their friend expressed fat talk, positive body talk, or neutral talk. This study found evidence of a causal link between listening to friends fat talk and increased correlates of disordered eating. The negative effects of listening to fat talk were fully mediated by fat talk expression. This study also revealed a social function of fat talk, whereby participants rated their friends more positively when they were perceived to behave consistently with group norms, either pro- or anti-fat talk. Positive body talk showed none of the negative effects of fat talk, and was considered socially acceptable regardless of existing friendship group norms. These findings indicate that fat talk is a mechanism through which the thin ideal is transmitted between individuals. Interventions at the level of the friendship group to challenge norms and communication styles may break the link between societal risk factors and individual risk of eating disorders. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

FSR: feature set reduction for scalable and accurate multi-class cancer subtype classification based on copy number.

PubMed

Wong, Gerard; Leckie, Christopher; Kowalczyk, Adam

2012-01-15

Feature selection is a key concept in machine learning for microarray datasets, where features represented by probesets are typically several orders of magnitude larger than the available sample size. Computational tractability is a key challenge for feature selection algorithms in handling very high-dimensional datasets beyond a hundred thousand features, such as in datasets produced on single nucleotide polymorphism microarrays. In this article, we present a novel feature set reduction approach that enables scalable feature selection on datasets with hundreds of thousands of features and beyond. Our approach enables more efficient handling of higher resolution datasets to achieve better disease subtype classification of samples for potentially more accurate diagnosis and prognosis, which allows clinicians to make more informed decisions in regards to patient treatment options. We applied our feature set reduction approach to several publicly available cancer single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array datasets and evaluated its performance in terms of its multiclass predictive classification accuracy over different cancer subtypes, its speedup in execution as well as its scalability with respect to sample size and array resolution. Feature Set Reduction (FSR) was able to reduce the dimensions of an SNP array dataset by more than two orders of magnitude while achieving at least equal, and in most cases superior predictive classification performance over that achieved on features selected by existing feature selection methods alone. An examination of the biological relevance of frequently selected features from FSR-reduced feature sets revealed strong enrichment in association with cancer. FSR was implemented in MATLAB R2010b and is available at http://ww2.cs.mu.oz.au/~gwong/FSR.

Selective processing of multiple features in the human brain: effects of feature type and salience.

PubMed

McGinnis, E Menton; Keil, Andreas

2011-02-09

Identifying targets in a stream of items at a given constant spatial location relies on selection of aspects such as color, shape, or texture. Such attended (target) features of a stimulus elicit a negative-going event-related brain potential (ERP), termed Selection Negativity (SN), which has been used as an index of selective feature processing. In two experiments, participants viewed a series of Gabor patches in which targets were defined as a specific combination of color, orientation, and shape. Distracters were composed of different combinations of color, orientation, and shape of the target stimulus. This design allows comparisons of items with and without specific target features. Consistent with previous ERP research, SN deflections extended between 160-300 ms. Data from the subsequent P3 component (300-450 ms post-stimulus) were also examined, and were regarded as an index of target processing. In Experiment A, predominant effects of target color on SN and P3 amplitudes were found, along with smaller ERP differences in response to variations of orientation and shape. Manipulating color to be less salient while enhancing the saliency of the orientation of the Gabor patch (Experiment B) led to delayed color selection and enhanced orientation selection. Topographical analyses suggested that the location of SN on the scalp reliably varies with the nature of the to-be-attended feature. No interference of non-target features on the SN was observed. These results suggest that target feature selection operates by means of electrocortical facilitation of feature-specific sensory processes, and that selective electrocortical facilitation is more effective when stimulus saliency is heightened.

Feature selection for the classification of traced neurons.

PubMed

López-Cabrera, José D; Lorenzo-Ginori, Juan V

2018-06-01

The great availability of computational tools to calculate the properties of traced neurons leads to the existence of many descriptors which allow the automated classification of neurons from these reconstructions. This situation determines the necessity to eliminate irrelevant features as well as making a selection of the most appropriate among them, in order to improve the quality of the classification obtained. The dataset used contains a total of 318 traced neurons, classified by human experts in 192 GABAergic interneurons and 126 pyramidal cells. The features were extracted by means of the L-measure software, which is one of the most used computational tools in neuroinformatics to quantify traced neurons. We review some current feature selection techniques as filter, wrapper, embedded and ensemble methods. The stability of the feature selection methods was measured. For the ensemble methods, several aggregation methods based on different metrics were applied to combine the subsets obtained during the feature selection process. The subsets obtained applying feature selection methods were evaluated using supervised classifiers, among which Random Forest, C4.5, SVM, Naïve Bayes, Knn, Decision Table and the Logistic classifier were used as classification algorithms. Feature selection methods of types filter, embedded, wrappers and ensembles were compared and the subsets returned were tested in classification tasks for different classification algorithms. L-measure features EucDistanceSD, PathDistanceSD, Branch_pathlengthAve, Branch_pathlengthSD and EucDistanceAve were present in more than 60% of the selected subsets which provides evidence about their importance in the classification of this neurons. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.