The Criteria People Use in Relevance Decisions on Health Information: An Analysis of User Eye Movements When Browsing a Health Discussion Forum

PubMed Central

Khoo, Christopher SG; Chang, Yun-Ke

2016-01-01

Background People are increasingly accessing health-related social media sites, such as health discussion forums, to post and read user-generated health information. It is important to know what criteria people use when deciding the relevance of information found on health social media websites, in different situations. Objective The study attempted to identify the relevance criteria that people use when browsing a health discussion forum, in 3 types of use contexts: when seeking information for their own health issue, when seeking for other people’s health issue, and when browsing without a particular health issue in mind. Methods A total of 58 study participants were self-assigned to 1 of the 3 use contexts or information needs and were asked to browse a health discussion forum, HealthBoards.com. In the analysis, browsing a discussion forum was divided into 2 stages: scanning a set of post surrogates (mainly post titles) in the summary result screen and reading a detailed post content (including comments by other users). An eye tracker system was used to capture participants’ eye movement behavior and the text they skim over and focus (ie, fixate) on during browsing. By analyzing the text that people’s eyes fixated on, the types of health information used in the relevance judgment were determined. Post-experiment interviews elicited participants’ comments on the relevance of the information and criteria used. Results It was found that participants seeking health information for their own health issue focused significantly more on the poster’s symptoms, personal history of the disease, and description of the disease (P=.01, .001, and .02). Participants seeking for other people’s health issue focused significantly more on cause of disease, disease terminology, and description of treatments and procedures (P=.01, .01, and .02). In contrast, participants browsing with no particular issue in mind focused significantly more on general health topics, hot topics, and rare health issues (P=.01, .01, and .01). Conclusion Users browsing for their own health issues used mainly case-based relevance criteria to relate the poster's health situation to their own. Participants seeking for others’ issues used mostly general knowledge–based criteria, whereas users with no particular issue in mind used general interest– and curiosity-based criteria. PMID:27323893

Depressive thoughts limit working memory capacity in dysphoria.

PubMed

Hubbard, Nicholas A; Hutchison, Joanna L; Turner, Monroe; Montroy, Janelle; Bowles, Ryan P; Rypma, Bart

2016-01-01

Dysphoria is associated with persistence of attention on mood-congruent information. Longer time attending to mood-congruent information for dysphoric individuals (DIs) detracts from goal-relevant information processing and should reduce working memory (WM) capacity. Study 1 showed that DIs and non-DIs have similar WM capacities. Study 2 embedded depressive information into a WM task. Compared to non-DIs, DIs showed significantly reduced WM capacity for goal-relevant information in this task. Study 3 replicated results from Studies 1 and 2, and further showed that DIs had a significantly greater association between processing speed and recall on the depressively modified WM task compared to non-DIs. The presence of inter-task depressive information leads to DI-related decreased WM capacity. Results suggest dysphoria-related WM capacity deficits when depressive thoughts are present. WM capacity deficits in the presence of depressive thoughts are a plausible mechanism to explain day-to-day memory and concentration difficulties associated with depressed mood.

10 CFR 709.15 - Processing counterintelligence evaluation results.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... raise significant questions about the covered person's access to classified information or materials... in-depth interview with the covered person, may request relevant information from the covered person...

10 CFR 709.15 - Processing counterintelligence evaluation results.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... raise significant questions about the covered person's access to classified information or materials... in-depth interview with the covered person, may request relevant information from the covered person...

Alpha power gates relevant information during working memory updating.

PubMed

Manza, Peter; Hau, Chui Luen Vera; Leung, Hoi-Chung

2014-04-23

Human working memory (WM) is inherently limited, so we must filter out irrelevant information in our environment or our mind while retaining limited important relevant contents. Previous work suggests that neural oscillations in the alpha band (8-14 Hz) play an important role in inhibiting incoming distracting information during attention and selective encoding tasks. However, whether alpha power is involved in inhibiting no-longer-relevant content or in representing relevant WM content is still debated. To clarify this issue, we manipulated the amount of relevant/irrelevant information using a task requiring spatial WM updating while measuring neural oscillatory activity via EEG and localized current sources across the scalp using a surface Laplacian transform. An initial memory set of two, four, or six spatial locations was to be memorized over a delay until an updating cue was presented indicating that only one or three locations remained relevant for a subsequent recognition test. Alpha amplitude varied with memory maintenance and updating demands among a cluster of left frontocentral electrodes. Greater postcue alpha power was associated with the high relevant load conditions (six and four dots cued to reduce to three relevant) relative to the lower load conditions (four and two dots reduced to one). Across subjects, this difference in alpha power was correlated with condition differences in performance accuracy. In contrast, no significant effects of irrelevant load were observed. These findings demonstrate that, during WM updating, alpha power reflects maintenance of relevant memory contents rather than suppression of no-longer-relevant memory traces.

Disseminating relevant health information to underserved audiences: implications of the Digital Divide Pilot Projects*

PubMed Central

Kreps, Gary L.

2005-01-01

Objective: This paper examines the influence of the digital divide on disparities in health outcomes for vulnerable populations, identifying implications for medical and public libraries. Method: The paper describes the results of the Digital Divide Pilot Projects demonstration research programs funded by the National Cancer Institute to test new strategies for disseminating relevant health information to underserved and at-risk audiences. Results: The Digital Divide Pilot Projects field-tested innovative systemic strategies for helping underserved populations access and utilize relevant health information to make informed health-related decisions about seeking appropriate health care and support, resisting avoidable and significant health risks, and promoting their own health. Implications: The paper builds on the Digital Divide Pilot Projects by identifying implications for developing health communication strategies that libraries can adopt to provide digital health information to vulnerable populations. PMID:16239960

A Text-Mining Framework for Supporting Systematic Reviews.

PubMed

Li, Dingcheng; Wang, Zhen; Wang, Liwei; Sohn, Sunghwan; Shen, Feichen; Murad, Mohammad Hassan; Liu, Hongfang

2016-11-01

Systematic reviews (SRs) involve the identification, appraisal, and synthesis of all relevant studies for focused questions in a structured reproducible manner. High-quality SRs follow strict procedures and require significant resources and time. We investigated advanced text-mining approaches to reduce the burden associated with abstract screening in SRs and provide high-level information summary. A text-mining SR supporting framework consisting of three self-defined semantics-based ranking metrics was proposed, including keyword relevance, indexed-term relevance and topic relevance. Keyword relevance is based on the user-defined keyword list used in the search strategy. Indexed-term relevance is derived from indexed vocabulary developed by domain experts used for indexing journal articles and books. Topic relevance is defined as the semantic similarity among retrieved abstracts in terms of topics generated by latent Dirichlet allocation, a Bayesian-based model for discovering topics. We tested the proposed framework using three published SRs addressing a variety of topics (Mass Media Interventions, Rectal Cancer and Influenza Vaccine). The results showed that when 91.8%, 85.7%, and 49.3% of the abstract screening labor was saved, the recalls were as high as 100% for the three cases; respectively. Relevant studies identified manually showed strong topic similarity through topic analysis, which supported the inclusion of topic analysis as relevance metric. It was demonstrated that advanced text mining approaches can significantly reduce the abstract screening labor of SRs and provide an informative summary of relevant studies.

A Reading Preference and Risk Taxonomy for Printed Proprietary Information Compromise in the Aerospace and Defense Industry

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Stalker, Joshua Dylan

2012-01-01

The protection of proprietary information that users print from their information systems is a significant and relevant concern in the field of information security to both researchers and practitioners. Information security researchers have repeatedly indicated that human behaviors and perception are important factors influencing the information…

Dynamic generation of a table of contents with consumer-friendly labels.

PubMed

Miller, Trudi; Leroy, Gondy; Wood, Elizabeth

2006-01-01

Consumers increasingly look to the Internet for health information, but available resources are too difficult for the majority to understand. Interactive tables of contents (TOC) can help consumers access health information by providing an easy to understand structure. Using natural language processing and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), we have automatically generated TOCs for consumer health information. The TOC are categorized according to consumer-friendly labels for the UMLS semantic types and semantic groups. Categorizing phrases by semantic types is significantly more correct and relevant. Greater correctness and relevance was achieved with documents that are difficult to read than those at an easier reading level. Pruning TOCs to use categories that consumers favor further increases relevancy and correctness while reducing structural complexity.

Cue self-relevance affects autobiographical memory specificity in individuals with a history of major depression

PubMed Central

Crane, Catherine; Barnhofer, Thorsten; Williams, J. Mark G.

2007-01-01

Previously depressed and never-depressed individuals identified personal characteristics (self-guides) defining their ideal, ought, and feared selves. One week later they completed the autobiographical memory test (AMT). For each participant the number of AMT cues that reflected self-guide content was determined to produce an index of AMT cue self-relevance. Individuals who had never been depressed showed no significant relationship between cue self-relevance and specificity. In contrast, in previously depressed participants there was a highly significant negative correlation between cue self-relevance and specificity—the greater the number of AMT cues that reflected self-guide content, the fewer specific memories participants recalled. It is suggested that in individuals with a history of depression, cues reflecting self-guide content are more likely to prompt a shift to processing of information within the long-term self (Conway, Singer, & Tagini, 2004), increasing the likelihood that self-related semantic information will be provided in response to cues on the autobiographical memory test. PMID:17454667

Towards brain-activity-controlled information retrieval: Decoding image relevance from MEG signals.

PubMed

Kauppi, Jukka-Pekka; Kandemir, Melih; Saarinen, Veli-Matti; Hirvenkari, Lotta; Parkkonen, Lauri; Klami, Arto; Hari, Riitta; Kaski, Samuel

2015-05-15

We hypothesize that brain activity can be used to control future information retrieval systems. To this end, we conducted a feasibility study on predicting the relevance of visual objects from brain activity. We analyze both magnetoencephalographic (MEG) and gaze signals from nine subjects who were viewing image collages, a subset of which was relevant to a predetermined task. We report three findings: i) the relevance of an image a subject looks at can be decoded from MEG signals with performance significantly better than chance, ii) fusion of gaze-based and MEG-based classifiers significantly improves the prediction performance compared to using either signal alone, and iii) non-linear classification of the MEG signals using Gaussian process classifiers outperforms linear classification. These findings break new ground for building brain-activity-based interactive image retrieval systems, as well as for systems utilizing feedback both from brain activity and eye movements. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Cue self-relevance affects autobiographical memory specificity in individuals with a history of major depression.

PubMed

Crane, Catherine; Barnhofer, Thorsten; Mark, J; Williams, G

2007-04-01

Previously depressed and never-depressed individuals identified personal characteristics (self-guides) defining their ideal, ought, and feared selves. One week later they completed the autobiographical memory test (AMT). For each participant the number of AMT cues that reflected self-guide content was determined to produce an index of AMT cue self-relevance. Individuals who had never been depressed showed no significant relationship between cue self-relevance and specificity. In contrast, in previously depressed participants there was a highly significant negative correlation between cue self-relevance and specificity--the greater the number of AMT cues that reflected self-guide content, the fewer specific memories participants recalled. It is suggested that in individuals with a history of depression, cues reflecting self-guide content are more likely to prompt a shift to processing of information within the long-term self (Conway, Singer, & Tagini, 2004), increasing the likelihood that self-related semantic information will be provided in response to cues on the autobiographical memory test.

Active Learning with Irrelevant Examples

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mazzoni, Dominic; Wagstaff, Kiri L.; Burl, Michael

2006-01-01

Active learning algorithms attempt to accelerate the learning process by requesting labels for the most informative items first. In real-world problems, however, there may exist unlabeled items that are irrelevant to the user's classification goals. Queries about these points slow down learning because they provide no information about the problem of interest. We have observed that when irrelevant items are present, active learning can perform worse than random selection, requiring more time (queries) to achieve the same level of accuracy. Therefore, we propose a novel approach, Relevance Bias, in which the active learner combines its default selection heuristic with the output of a simultaneously trained relevance classifier to favor items that are likely to be both informative and relevant. In our experiments on a real-world problem and two benchmark datasets, the Relevance Bias approach significantly improved the learning rate of three different active learning approaches.

Associations between presence of relevant information in referrals to radiology and prevalence rates in patients with suspected pulmonary embolism.

PubMed

Hedner, Charlotta; Sundgren, Pia C; Kelly, Aine Marie

2013-09-01

The purpose of this study was to assess if the presence of information including the pretest probability (Wells score), other known risk factors, and symptoms given on referrals for computed tomography (CT) pulmonary angiography correlated with prevalence rates for pulmonary embolism (PE). Also, to evaluate for differences between a university and a regional hospital setting regarding patient characteristics, amount of relevant information provided on referrals, and prevalence rates for pulmonary embolism. Retrospective review of all consecutive referrals (emergency room, inpatient, and outpatient) for CT performed on children and adults for suspected PE from two sites: a tertiary (university) hospital (site 1) and a secondary (regional) hospital (site 2) over a 5-year period. The overall prevalence rate was 510/3641 or 14% of all referrals. Significantly higher number of males had a positive CT compared to women (18% versus 12%, P < .001). Although no statistically significant relationship between a greater amount of relevant information on the referral and the probability for positive finding existed, a slight trend was noted (P = .09). In two categories, "hypoxia" and "signs of deep vein thrombosis," the presence of this information conferred a higher probability for pulmonary embolism, P < .001. In the categories, "chest pain," "malaise," and "smoker/chronic obstructive pulmonary disease", the absence of information conferred a higher probability for pulmonary embolism. The amount of relevant clinical information on the request did not correlate with prevalence rates, which may reflect a lack of documentation on the part of emergency physicians who may use a "gestalt" approach. Request forms likely did not capture all relevant patient risks and many factors may interact with each other, both positively and negatively. Pretest probability estimations were rarely performed, despite their inclusion in major society guidelines. Copyright © 2013 AUR. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Towards an automated intelligence product generation capability

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Smith, Alison M.; Hawes, Timothy W.; Nolan, James J.

2015-05-01

Creating intelligence information products is a time consuming and difficult process for analysts faced with identifying key pieces of information relevant to a complex set of information requirements. Complicating matters, these key pieces of information exist in multiple modalities scattered across data stores, buried in huge volumes of data. This results in the current predicament analysts find themselves; information retrieval and management consumes huge amounts of time that could be better spent performing analysis. The persistent growth in data accumulation rates will only increase the amount of time spent on these tasks without a significant advance in automated solutions for information product generation. We present a product generation tool, Automated PrOduct Generation and Enrichment (APOGEE), which aims to automate the information product creation process in order to shift the bulk of the analysts' effort from data discovery and management to analysis. APOGEE discovers relevant text, imagery, video, and audio for inclusion in information products using semantic and statistical models of unstructured content. APOGEEs mixed-initiative interface, supported by highly responsive backend mechanisms, allows analysts to dynamically control the product generation process ensuring a maximally relevant result. The combination of these capabilities results in significant reductions in the time it takes analysts to produce information products while helping to increase the overall coverage. Through evaluation with a domain expert, APOGEE has been shown the potential to cut down the time for product generation by 20x. The result is a flexible end-to-end system that can be rapidly deployed in new operational settings.

A study on mastectomy samples to evaluate breast imaging quality and potential clinical relevance of differential phase contrast mammography.

PubMed

Hauser, Nik; Wang, Zhentian; Kubik-Huch, Rahel A; Trippel, Mafalda; Singer, Gad; Hohl, Michael K; Roessl, Ewald; Köhler, Thomas; van Stevendaal, Udo; Wieberneit, Nataly; Stampanoni, Marco

2014-03-01

Differential phase contrast and scattering-based x-ray mammography has the potential to provide additional and complementary clinically relevant information compared with absorption-based mammography. The purpose of our study was to provide a first statistical evaluation of the imaging capabilities of the new technique compared with digital absorption mammography. We investigated non-fixed mastectomy samples of 33 patients with invasive breast cancer, using grating-based differential phase contrast mammography (mammoDPC) with a conventional, low-brilliance x-ray tube. We simultaneously recorded absorption, differential phase contrast, and small-angle scattering signals that were combined into novel high-frequency-enhanced images with a dedicated image fusion algorithm. Six international, expert breast radiologists evaluated clinical digital and experimental mammograms in a 2-part blinded, prospective independent reader study. The results were statistically analyzed in terms of image quality and clinical relevance. The results of the comparison of mammoDPC with clinical digital mammography revealed the general quality of the images to be significantly superior (P < 0.001); sharpness, lesion delineation, as well as the general visibility of calcifications to be significantly more assessable (P < 0.001); and delineation of anatomic components of the specimens (surface structures) to be significantly sharper (P < 0.001). Spiculations were significantly better identified, and the overall clinically relevant information provided by mammoDPC was judged to be superior (P < 0.001). Our results demonstrate that complementary information provided by phase and scattering enhanced mammograms obtained with the mammoDPC approach deliver images of generally superior quality. This technique has the potential to improve radiological breast diagnostics.

A content relevance model for social media health information.

PubMed

Prybutok, Gayle Linda; Koh, Chang; Prybutok, Victor R

2014-04-01

Consumer health informatics includes the development and implementation of Internet-based systems to deliver health risk management information and health intervention applications to the public. The application of consumer health informatics to educational and interventional efforts such as smoking reduction and cessation has garnered attention from both consumers and health researchers in recent years. Scientists believe that smoking avoidance or cessation before the age of 30 years can prevent more than 90% of smoking-related cancers and that individuals who stop smoking fare as well in preventing cancer as those who never start. The goal of this study was to determine factors that were most highly correlated with content relevance for health information provided on the Internet for a study group of 18- to 30-year-old college students. Data analysis showed that the opportunity for convenient entertainment, social interaction, health information-seeking behavior, time spent surfing on the Internet, the importance of available activities on the Internet (particularly e-mail), and perceived site relevance for Internet-based sources of health information were significantly correlated with content relevance for 18- to 30-year-old college students, an educated subset of this population segment.

Information Competence of a Library Specialist as a Condition for Their Professional Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kaviev, Airat F.; Mamontova, Marina S.

2016-01-01

The relevance of the study is due to the intensive introduction of information technology to library activities. Active use of information technology has a significant impact on the professional development of a librarian. It requires a high level of information competence. The purpose of the paper is to present and describe an information…

Free will and psychiatric assessments of criminal responsibility: a parallel with informed consent.

PubMed

Meynen, Gerben

2010-11-01

In some criminal cases a forensic psychiatrist is asked to make an assessment of the state of mind of the defendant at the time of the legally relevant act. A considerable number of people seem to hold that the basis for this assessment is that free will is required for legal responsibility, and that mental disorders can compromise free will. In fact, because of the alleged relationship between the forensic assessment and free will, researchers in forensic psychiatry also consider the complicated metaphysical discussions on free will relevant to the assessment. At the same time, there is concern about the lack of advancement with respect to clarifying the nature of the forensic assessment. In this paper I argue that, even if free will is considered relevant, there may be no need for forensic researchers to engage into metaphysical discussions on free will in order to make significant progress. I will do so, drawing a parallel between the assessment of criminal responsibility on the one hand, and the medical practice of obtaining informed consent on the other. I argue that also with respect to informed consent, free will is considered relevant, or even crucial. This is the parallel. Yet, researchers on informed consent have not entered into metaphysical debates on free will. Meanwhile, research on informed consent has made significant progress. Based on the parallel with respect to free will, and the differences with respect to research, I conclude that researchers on forensic assessment may not have to engage into metaphysical discussions on free will in order to advance our understanding of this psychiatric practice.

Free will and psychiatric assessments of criminal responsibility: a parallel with informed consent

PubMed Central

2010-01-01

In some criminal cases a forensic psychiatrist is asked to make an assessment of the state of mind of the defendant at the time of the legally relevant act. A considerable number of people seem to hold that the basis for this assessment is that free will is required for legal responsibility, and that mental disorders can compromise free will. In fact, because of the alleged relationship between the forensic assessment and free will, researchers in forensic psychiatry also consider the complicated metaphysical discussions on free will relevant to the assessment. At the same time, there is concern about the lack of advancement with respect to clarifying the nature of the forensic assessment. In this paper I argue that, even if free will is considered relevant, there may be no need for forensic researchers to engage into metaphysical discussions on free will in order to make significant progress. I will do so, drawing a parallel between the assessment of criminal responsibility on the one hand, and the medical practice of obtaining informed consent on the other. I argue that also with respect to informed consent, free will is considered relevant, or even crucial. This is the parallel. Yet, researchers on informed consent have not entered into metaphysical debates on free will. Meanwhile, research on informed consent has made significant progress. Based on the parallel with respect to free will, and the differences with respect to research, I conclude that researchers on forensic assessment may not have to engage into metaphysical discussions on free will in order to advance our understanding of this psychiatric practice. PMID:20424919

How "community" matters for how people interact with information: mixed methods study of young men who have sex with other men.

PubMed

Veinot, Tiffany Christine; Meadowbrooke, Chrysta Cathleen; Loveluck, Jimena; Hickok, Andrew; Bauermeister, Jose Artruro

2013-02-21

We lack a systematic portrait of the relationship between community involvement and how people interact with information. Young men who have sex with men (YMSM) are a population for which these relationships are especially salient: their gay community involvement varies and their information technology use is high. YMSM under age 24 are also one of the US populations with the highest risk of HIV/AIDS. To develop, test, and refine a model of gay community involvement (GCI) factors in human-information interaction (HII) as applied to HIV/AIDS information among YMSM, specifically examining the role of Internet use in GCI and HII. Mixed methods included: 1) online questionnaire with 194 YMSM; and 2) qualitative interviews with 19 YMSM with high GCI levels. Recruitment utilized social media, dating websites, health clinics, bars/clubs, and public postings. The survey included questions regarding HIV/AIDS-related information acquisition and use patterns, gay community involvement, risk behaviors, and technology use. For survey data, we tested multiple linear regression models using a series of community- and information-related variables as dependent variables. Independent variables included community- and information-related variables and demographic covariates. We then conducted a recursive path analysis in order to estimate a final model, which we refined through a grounded theory analysis of qualitative interview data. Four community-related variables significantly predicted how people interact with information (HII variables): 1) gay community involvement (GCI), 2) social costs of information seeking, 3) network expertise accessibility, and 4) community relevance. GCI was associated with significantly lower perceived social costs of HIV/AIDS information seeking (R(2)=0.07). GCI and social costs significantly predicted network expertise accessibility (R(2)=0.14). GCI predicted 14% of the variance in community relevance and 9% of the variance in information seeking frequency. Incidental HIV/AIDS information acquisition (IIA) was also significantly predicted by GCI (R(2)=0.16). 28% of the variance in HIV/AIDS information use was explained by community relevance, network expertise access, and both IIA and information seeking. The final path model showed good fit: the RSMEA was 0.054 (90% CI: .000-.101); the Chi-square was non-significant (χ(2)(11)=17.105; P=.105); and the CFI was 0.967. Qualitative findings suggest that the model may be enhanced by including information sharing: organizing events, disseminating messages, encouraging safety, and referring and recommending. Information sharing emerged under conditions of pro-social community value enactment and may have consequences for further HII. YMSM with greater GCI generally used the Internet more, although they chatted online less. HIV/AIDS-related HII and associated technology uses are community-embedded processes. The model provides theoretical mediators that may serve as a focus for intervention: 1) valuing HIV/AIDS information, through believing it is relevant to one's group, and 2) supportive and knowledgeable network members with whom to talk about HIV/AIDS. Pro-social community value endorsement and information sharing may also be important theoretical mediators. Our model could open possibilities for considering how informatics interventions can also be designed as community-level interventions and vice versa.

Gene Regulatory Network Inferences Using a Maximum-Relevance and Maximum-Significance Strategy

PubMed Central

Liu, Wei; Zhu, Wen; Liao, Bo; Chen, Xiangtao

2016-01-01

Recovering gene regulatory networks from expression data is a challenging problem in systems biology that provides valuable information on the regulatory mechanisms of cells. A number of algorithms based on computational models are currently used to recover network topology. However, most of these algorithms have limitations. For example, many models tend to be complicated because of the “large p, small n” problem. In this paper, we propose a novel regulatory network inference method called the maximum-relevance and maximum-significance network (MRMSn) method, which converts the problem of recovering networks into a problem of how to select the regulator genes for each gene. To solve the latter problem, we present an algorithm that is based on information theory and selects the regulator genes for a specific gene by maximizing the relevance and significance. A first-order incremental search algorithm is used to search for regulator genes. Eventually, a strict constraint is adopted to adjust all of the regulatory relationships according to the obtained regulator genes and thus obtain the complete network structure. We performed our method on five different datasets and compared our method to five state-of-the-art methods for network inference based on information theory. The results confirm the effectiveness of our method. PMID:27829000

How Long Should Routine EEG Be Recorded to Get Relevant Information?

PubMed

Doudoux, Hannah; Skaare, Kristina; Geay, Thomas; Kahane, Philippe; Bosson, Jean L; Sabourdy, Cécile; Vercueil, Laurent

2017-03-01

The optimal duration of routine EEG (rEEG) has not been determined on a clinical basis. This study aims to determine the time required to obtain relevant information during rEEG with respect to the clinical request. All rEEGs performed over 3 months in unselected patients older than 14 years in an academic hospital were analyzed retrospectively. The latency required to obtain relevant information was determined for each rEEG by 2 independent readers blinded to the clinical data. EEG final diagnoses and latencies were analyzed with respect to the main clinical requests: subacute cognitive impairment, spells, transient focal neurologic manifestation or patients referred by epileptologists. From 430 rEEGs performed in the targeted period, 364 were analyzed: 92% of the pathological rEEGs were provided within the first 10 minutes of recording. Slowing background activity was diagnosed from the beginning, whereas interictal epileptiform discharges were recorded over time. Moreover, the time elapsed to demonstrate a pattern differed significantly in the clinical groups: in patients with subacute cognitive impairment, EEG abnormalities appeared within the first 10 minutes, whereas in the other groups, data could be provided over time. Patients with subacute cognitive impairment differed from those in the other groups significantly in the elapsed time required to obtain relevant information during rEEG, suggesting that 10-minute EEG recordings could be sufficient, arguing in favor of individualized rEEG. However, this conclusion does not apply to intensive care unit patients.

Prevalence of Potential and Clinically Relevant Statin-Drug Interactions in Frail and Robust Older Inpatients.

PubMed

Thai, Michele; Hilmer, Sarah; Pearson, Sallie-Anne; Reeve, Emily; Gnjidic, Danijela

2015-10-01

A significant proportion of older people are prescribed statins and are also exposed to polypharmacy, placing them at increased risk of statin-drug interactions. To describe the prevalence rates of potential and clinically relevant statin-drug interactions in older inpatients according to frailty status. A cross-sectional study of patients aged ≥65 years who were prescribed a statin and were admitted to a teaching hospital between 30 July and 10 October 2014 in Sydney, Australia, was conducted. Data on socio-demographics, comorbidities and medications were collected using a standardized questionnaire. Potential statin-drug interactions were defined if listed in the Australian Medicines Handbook and three international drug information sources: the British National Formulary, Drug Interaction Facts and Drug-Reax(®). Clinically relevant statin-drug interactions were defined as interactions with the highest severity rating in at least two of the three international drug information sources. Frailty was assessed using the Reported Edmonton Frail Scale. A total of 180 participants were recruited (median age 78 years, interquartile range 14), 35.0% frail and 65.0% robust. Potential statin-drug interactions were identified in 10% of participants, 12.7% of frail participants and 8.5% of robust participants. Clinically relevant statin-drug interactions were identified in 7.8% of participants, 9.5% of frail participants and 6.8% of robust participants. Depending on the drug information source used, the prevalence rates of potential and clinically relevant statin-drug interactions ranged between 14.4 and 35.6% and between 14.4 and 20.6%, respectively. In our study of frail and robust older inpatients taking statins, the overall prevalence of potential statin-drug interactions was low and varied significantly according to the drug information source used.

I spy with my little eye: cognitive processing of framed physical activity messages.

PubMed

Bassett-Gunter, Rebecca L; Latimer-Cheung, Amy E; Martin Ginis, Kathleen A; Castelhano, Monica

2014-01-01

The primary purpose was to examine the relative cognitive processing of gain-framed versus loss-framed physical activity messages following exposure to health risk information. Guided by the Extended Parallel Process Model, the secondary purpose was to examine the relation between dwell time, message recall, and message-relevant thoughts, as well as perceived risk, personal relevance, and fear arousal. Baseline measures of perceived risk for inactivity-related disease and health problems were administered to 77 undergraduate students. Participants read population-specific health risk information while wearing a head-mounted eye tracker, which measured dwell time on message content. Perceived risk was then reassessed. Next, participants read PA messages while the eye tracker measured dwell time on message content. Immediately following message exposure, recall, thought-listing, fear arousal, and personal relevance were measured. Dwell time on gain-framed messages was significantly greater than loss-framed messages. However, message recall and thought-listing did not differ by message frame. Dwell time was not significantly related to recall or thought-listing. Consistent with the Extended Parallel Process Model, fear arousal was significantly related to recall, thought-listing, and personal relevance. In conclusion, gain-framed messages may evoke greater dwell time than loss-famed messages. However, dwell time alone may be insufficient for evoking further cognitive processing.

Antecedent Characteristics of Online Cancer Information Seeking Among Rural Breast Cancer Patients: An Application of the Cognitive-Social Health Information Processing (C-SHIP) Model

PubMed Central

Shaw, Bret R.; DuBenske, Lori L.; Han, Jeong Yeob; Cofta-Woerpel, Ludmila; Bush, Nigel; Gustafson, David H.; McTavish, Fiona

2013-01-01

Little research has examined the antecedent characteristics of patients most likely to seek online cancer information. This study employs the Cognitive-Social Health Information Processing (C-SHIP) model as a framework to understand what psychosocial characteristics precede online cancer-related information seeking among rural breast cancer patients who often have fewer healthcare providers and limited local support services. Examining 144 patients who were provided free computer hardware, Internet access and training for how to use an Interactive Cancer Communication System, pre-test survey scores indicating patients’ psychosocial status were correlated with specific online cancer information seeking behaviors. Each of the factors specified by the C-SHIP model had significant relationships with online cancer information seeking behaviors with the strongest findings emerging for cancer-relevant encodings and self-construals, cancer-relevant beliefs and expectancies and cancer-relevant self-regulatory competencies and skills. Specifically, patients with more negative appraisals in these domains were more likely to seek out online cancer information. Additionally, antecedent variables associated with the C-SHIP model had more frequent relationships with experiential information as compared to didactic information. This study supports the applicability of the model to discern why people afflicted with cancer may seek online information to cope with their disease. PMID:18569368

Antecedent characteristics of online cancer information seeking among rural breast cancer patients: an application of the Cognitive-Social Health Information Processing (C-SHIP) model.

PubMed

Shaw, Bret R; Dubenske, Lori L; Han, Jeong Yeob; Cofta-Woerpel, Ludmila; Bush, Nigel; Gustafson, David H; McTavish, Fiona

2008-06-01

Little research has examined the antecedent characteristics of patients most likely to seek online cancer information. This study employs the Cognitive-Social Health Information Processing (C-SHIP) model as a framework to understand what psychosocial characteristics precede online cancer-related information seeking among rural breast cancer patients who often have fewer health care providers and limited local support services. Examining 144 patients who were provided free computer hardware, Internet access, and training for how to use an interactive cancer communication system, pretest survey scores indicating patients' psychosocial status were correlated with specific online cancer information seeking behaviors. Each of the factors specified by the C-SHIP model had significant relationships with online cancer information seeking behaviors, with the strongest findings emerging for cancer-relevant encodings and self-construals, cancer-relevant beliefs and expectancies, and cancer-relevant self-regulatory competencies and skills. Specifically, patients with more negative appraisals in these domains were more likely to seek out online cancer information. Additionally, antecedent variables associated with the C-SHIP model had more frequent relationships with experiential information as compared with to didactic information. This study supports the applicability of the model to discern why people afflicted with cancer may seek online information to cope with their disease.

Relevance similarity: an alternative means to monitor information retrieval systems

PubMed Central

Dong, Peng; Loh, Marie; Mondry, Adrian

2005-01-01

Background Relevance assessment is a major problem in the evaluation of information retrieval systems. The work presented here introduces a new parameter, "Relevance Similarity", for the measurement of the variation of relevance assessment. In a situation where individual assessment can be compared with a gold standard, this parameter is used to study the effect of such variation on the performance of a medical information retrieval system. In such a setting, Relevance Similarity is the ratio of assessors who rank a given document same as the gold standard over the total number of assessors in the group. Methods The study was carried out on a collection of Critically Appraised Topics (CATs). Twelve volunteers were divided into two groups of people according to their domain knowledge. They assessed the relevance of retrieved topics obtained by querying a meta-search engine with ten keywords related to medical science. Their assessments were compared to the gold standard assessment, and Relevance Similarities were calculated as the ratio of positive concordance with the gold standard for each topic. Results The similarity comparison among groups showed that a higher degree of agreements exists among evaluators with more subject knowledge. The performance of the retrieval system was not significantly different as a result of the variations in relevance assessment in this particular query set. Conclusion In assessment situations where evaluators can be compared to a gold standard, Relevance Similarity provides an alternative evaluation technique to the commonly used kappa scores, which may give paradoxically low scores in highly biased situations such as document repositories containing large quantities of relevant data. PMID:16029513

Understanding Health Literacy Measurement Through Eye Tracking

PubMed Central

Mackert, Michael; Champlin, Sara E.; Pasch, Keryn E.; Weiss, Barry D.

2013-01-01

This study used eye-tracking technology to explore how individuals with different levels of health literacy visualize health-related information. The authors recruited 25 university administrative staff (more likely to have adequate health literacy skills) and 25 adults enrolled in an adult literacy program (more likely to have limited health literacy skills). The authors administered the Newest Vital Sign (NVS) health literacy assessment to each participant. The assessment involves having individuals answer questions about a nutrition label while viewing the label. The authors used computerized eye-tracking technology to measure the amount of time each participant spent fixing their view at nutrition label information that was relevant to the questions being asked and the amount of time they spent viewing nonrelevant information. Results showed that lower NVS scores were significantly associated with more time spent on information not relevant for answering the NVS items. This finding suggests that efforts to improve health literacy measurement should include the ability to differentiate not just between individuals who have difficulty interpreting and using health information, but also between those who have difficulty finding relevant information. In addition, this finding suggests that health education material should minimize the inclusion of nonrelevant information. PMID:24093355

Reconstructing genome-wide regulatory network of E. coli using transcriptome data and predicted transcription factor activities

PubMed Central

2011-01-01

Background Gene regulatory networks play essential roles in living organisms to control growth, keep internal metabolism running and respond to external environmental changes. Understanding the connections and the activity levels of regulators is important for the research of gene regulatory networks. While relevance score based algorithms that reconstruct gene regulatory networks from transcriptome data can infer genome-wide gene regulatory networks, they are unfortunately prone to false positive results. Transcription factor activities (TFAs) quantitatively reflect the ability of the transcription factor to regulate target genes. However, classic relevance score based gene regulatory network reconstruction algorithms use models do not include the TFA layer, thus missing a key regulatory element. Results This work integrates TFA prediction algorithms with relevance score based network reconstruction algorithms to reconstruct gene regulatory networks with improved accuracy over classic relevance score based algorithms. This method is called Gene expression and Transcription factor activity based Relevance Network (GTRNetwork). Different combinations of TFA prediction algorithms and relevance score functions have been applied to find the most efficient combination. When the integrated GTRNetwork method was applied to E. coli data, the reconstructed genome-wide gene regulatory network predicted 381 new regulatory links. This reconstructed gene regulatory network including the predicted new regulatory links show promising biological significances. Many of the new links are verified by known TF binding site information, and many other links can be verified from the literature and databases such as EcoCyc. The reconstructed gene regulatory network is applied to a recent transcriptome analysis of E. coli during isobutanol stress. In addition to the 16 significantly changed TFAs detected in the original paper, another 7 significantly changed TFAs have been detected by using our reconstructed network. Conclusions The GTRNetwork algorithm introduces the hidden layer TFA into classic relevance score-based gene regulatory network reconstruction processes. Integrating the TFA biological information with regulatory network reconstruction algorithms significantly improves both detection of new links and reduces that rate of false positives. The application of GTRNetwork on E. coli gene transcriptome data gives a set of potential regulatory links with promising biological significance for isobutanol stress and other conditions. PMID:21668997

How "Community" Matters for How People Interact With Information: Mixed Methods Study of Young Men Who Have Sex With Other Men

PubMed Central

Meadowbrooke, Chrysta Cathleen; Loveluck, Jimena; Hickok, Andrew; Bauermeister, Jose Artruro

2013-01-01

Background We lack a systematic portrait of the relationship between community involvement and how people interact with information. Young men who have sex with men (YMSM) are a population for which these relationships are especially salient: their gay community involvement varies and their information technology use is high. YMSM under age 24 are also one of the US populations with the highest risk of HIV/AIDS. Objective To develop, test, and refine a model of gay community involvement (GCI) factors in human-information interaction (HII) as applied to HIV/AIDS information among YMSM, specifically examining the role of Internet use in GCI and HII. Methods Mixed methods included: 1) online questionnaire with 194 YMSM; and 2) qualitative interviews with 19 YMSM with high GCI levels. Recruitment utilized social media, dating websites, health clinics, bars/clubs, and public postings. The survey included questions regarding HIV/AIDS–related information acquisition and use patterns, gay community involvement, risk behaviors, and technology use. For survey data, we tested multiple linear regression models using a series of community- and information-related variables as dependent variables. Independent variables included community- and information-related variables and demographic covariates. We then conducted a recursive path analysis in order to estimate a final model, which we refined through a grounded theory analysis of qualitative interview data. Results Four community-related variables significantly predicted how people interact with information (HII variables): 1) gay community involvement (GCI), 2) social costs of information seeking, 3) network expertise accessibility, and 4) community relevance. GCI was associated with significantly lower perceived social costs of HIV/AIDS information seeking (R 2=0.07). GCI and social costs significantly predicted network expertise accessibility (R 2=0.14). GCI predicted 14% of the variance in community relevance and 9% of the variance in information seeking frequency. Incidental HIV/AIDS information acquisition (IIA) was also significantly predicted by GCI (R 2=0.16). 28% of the variance in HIV/AIDS information use was explained by community relevance, network expertise access, and both IIA and information seeking. The final path model showed good fit: the RSMEA was 0.054 (90% CI: .000-.101); the Chi-square was non-significant (χ2(11)=17.105; P=.105); and the CFI was 0.967. Qualitative findings suggest that the model may be enhanced by including information sharing: organizing events, disseminating messages, encouraging safety, and referring and recommending. Information sharing emerged under conditions of pro-social community value enactment and may have consequences for further HII. YMSM with greater GCI generally used the Internet more, although they chatted online less. Conclusions HIV/AIDS–related HII and associated technology uses are community-embedded processes. The model provides theoretical mediators that may serve as a focus for intervention: 1) valuing HIV/AIDS information, through believing it is relevant to one’s group, and 2) supportive and knowledgeable network members with whom to talk about HIV/AIDS. Pro-social community value endorsement and information sharing may also be important theoretical mediators. Our model could open possibilities for considering how informatics interventions can also be designed as community-level interventions and vice versa. PMID:23428825

Detecting clinically relevant new information in clinical notes across specialties and settings.

PubMed

Zhang, Rui; Pakhomov, Serguei V S; Arsoniadis, Elliot G; Lee, Janet T; Wang, Yan; Melton, Genevieve B

2017-07-05

Automated methods for identifying clinically relevant new versus redundant information in electronic health record (EHR) clinical notes is useful for clinicians and researchers involved in patient care and clinical research, respectively. We evaluated methods to automatically identify clinically relevant new information in clinical notes, and compared the quantity of redundant information across specialties and clinical settings. Statistical language models augmented with semantic similarity measures were evaluated as a means to detect and quantify clinically relevant new and redundant information over longitudinal clinical notes for a given patient. A corpus of 591 progress notes over 40 inpatient admissions was annotated for new information longitudinally by physicians to generate a reference standard. Note redundancy between various specialties was evaluated on 71,021 outpatient notes and 64,695 inpatient notes from 500 solid organ transplant patients (April 2015 through August 2015). Our best method achieved at best performance of 0.87 recall, 0.62 precision, and 0.72 F-measure. Addition of semantic similarity metrics compared to baseline improved recall but otherwise resulted in similar performance. While outpatient and inpatient notes had relatively similar levels of high redundancy (61% and 68%, respectively), redundancy differed by author specialty with mean redundancy of 75%, 66%, 57%, and 55% observed in pediatric, internal medicine, psychiatry and surgical notes, respectively. Automated techniques with statistical language models for detecting redundant versus clinically relevant new information in clinical notes do not improve with the addition of semantic similarity measures. While levels of redundancy seem relatively similar in the inpatient and ambulatory settings in the Fairview Health Services, clinical note redundancy appears to vary significantly with different medical specialties.

An analysis of contextual information relevant to medical care unexpectedly volunteered to researchers by asthma patients.

PubMed

Black, Heather L; Priolo, Chantel; Gonzalez, Rodalyn; Geer, Sabrina; Adam, Bariituu; Apter, Andrea J

2012-09-01

To describe and categorize contextual information relevant to patients' medical care unexpectedly volunteered to research personnel as part of a patient advocate (PA) intervention to facilitate access health care, communication with medical personnel, and self-management of a chronic disease such as asthma. We adapted a patient navigator intervention, to overcome barriers to access and communication for adults with moderate or severe asthma. Informed by focus groups of patients and providers, our PAs facilitated preparation for a visit with an asthma provider, attended the visit, confirmed understanding, and assisted with post-visit activities. During meetings with researchers, either for PA activities or for data collection, participants frequently volunteered personal and medical information relevant for achieving successful self-management that was not routinely shared with medical personnel. For this project, researchers journaled information not captured by the structured questionnaires and protocol. Using a qualitative analysis, we describe (1) researchers' journals of these unique communications; (2) their relevance for accomplishing self-management; (3) PAs' formal activities including teach-back, advocacy, and facilitating appointment making; and (4) observations of patients' interactions with the clinical practices. In 83 journals, patients' social support (83%), health (68%), and deportment (69%) were described. PA assistance with navigating the medical system (59%), teach-back (46%), and observed interactions with patient and medical staff (76%) were also journaled. Implicit were ways patients and practices could overcome barriers to access and communication. These journals describe the importance of seeking contextual and medically relevant information from all patients and, especially, those with significant morbidities, prompting patients for barriers to access to health care, and confirming understanding of medical information.

An analysis of contextual information relevant to medical care unexpectedly volunteered to researchers by asthma patients

PubMed Central

Black, Heather L.; Priolo, Chantel; Gonzalez, Rodalyn; Geer, Sabrina; Adam, Bariituu; Apter, Andrea J.

2012-01-01

Objective To describe and categorize contextual information relevant to patients’ medical care unexpectedly volunteered to research personnel as part of a patient advocate intervention to facilitate access health care, communication with medical personnel, and self-management of a chronic disease like asthma. Methods We adapted a patient navigator intervention, to overcome barriers to access and communication for adults with moderate or severe asthma. Informed by focus groups of patients and providers, our Patient Advocates facilitated preparation for a visit with an asthma provider, attended the visit, confirmed understanding, and assisted with post-visit activities. During meetings with researchers, either for PA activities or data collection, participants frequently volunteered personal and medical information relevant for achieving successful self-management that was not routinely shared with medical personnel. For this project, researchers journaled information not captured by the structured questionnaires and protocol. Using a qualitative analysis, we describe 1) researchers’ journals of these unique communications, 2) their relevance for accomplishing self-management, 3) Patient Advocates’ formal activities including teach-back, advocacy, and facilitating appointment-making, and 4) observations of patients’ interactions with the clinical practices. Results In 83 journals, patients’ social support (83%), health (68%), and deportment (69%) were described. Patient Advocate assistance with navigating the medical system (59%), teach-back (46%), and observed interactions with patient and medical staff (76%) were also journaled. Implicit were ways patients and practices could overcome barriers to access and communication. Conclusions These journals describe the importance of seeking contextual and medically relevant information from all patients and especially those with significant morbidities, prompting patients for barriers to accessing care, and confirming understanding of medical information. PMID:22788543

Feature saliency and feedback information interactively impact visual category learning

PubMed Central

Hammer, Rubi; Sloutsky, Vladimir; Grill-Spector, Kalanit

2015-01-01

Visual category learning (VCL) involves detecting which features are most relevant for categorization. VCL relies on attentional learning, which enables effectively redirecting attention to object’s features most relevant for categorization, while ‘filtering out’ irrelevant features. When features relevant for categorization are not salient, VCL relies also on perceptual learning, which enables becoming more sensitive to subtle yet important differences between objects. Little is known about how attentional learning and perceptual learning interact when VCL relies on both processes at the same time. Here we tested this interaction. Participants performed VCL tasks in which they learned to categorize novel stimuli by detecting the feature dimension relevant for categorization. Tasks varied both in feature saliency (low-saliency tasks that required perceptual learning vs. high-saliency tasks), and in feedback information (tasks with mid-information, moderately ambiguous feedback that increased attentional load, vs. tasks with high-information non-ambiguous feedback). We found that mid-information and high-information feedback were similarly effective for VCL in high-saliency tasks. This suggests that an increased attentional load, associated with the processing of moderately ambiguous feedback, has little effect on VCL when features are salient. In low-saliency tasks, VCL relied on slower perceptual learning; but when the feedback was highly informative participants were able to ultimately attain the same performance as during the high-saliency VCL tasks. However, VCL was significantly compromised in the low-saliency mid-information feedback task. We suggest that such low-saliency mid-information learning scenarios are characterized by a ‘cognitive loop paradox’ where two interdependent learning processes have to take place simultaneously. PMID:25745404

An exploration of Intolerance of Uncertainty and memory bias.

PubMed

Francis, Kylie; Dugas, Michel J; Ricard, Nathalie C

2016-09-01

Research suggests that individuals high in Intolerance of Uncertainty (IU) have information processing biases, which may explain the close relationship between IU and worry. Specifically, high IU individuals show an attentional bias for uncertainty, and negatively interpret uncertain information. However, evidence of a memory bias for uncertainty among high IU individuals is limited. This study therefore explored the relationship between IU and memory for uncertainty. In two separate studies, explicit and implicit memory for uncertain compared to other types of words was assessed. Cognitive avoidance and other factors that could influence information processing were also examined. IUS Factor 1 was a significant positive predictor of explicit memory for positive words, and IUS Factor 2 a significant negative predictor of implicit memory for positive words. Stimulus relevance and vocabulary were significant predictors of implicit memory for uncertain words. Cognitive avoidance was a significant predictor of both explicit and implicit memory for threat words. Female gender was a significant predictor of implicit memory for uncertain and neutral words. Word stimuli such as those used in these studies may not be the optimal way of assessing information processing biases related to IU. In addition, the predominantly female, largely student sample may limit the generalizability of the findings. Future research focusing on IU factors, stimulus relevance, and both explicit and implicit memory, was recommended. The potential role of cognitive avoidance on memory, information processing, and worry was explored. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Perceptual and categorical decision making: goal-relevant representation of two domains at different levels of abstraction.

PubMed

Shankar, Swetha; Kayser, Andrew S

2017-06-01

To date it has been unclear whether perceptual decision making and rule-based categorization reflect activation of similar cognitive processes and brain regions. On one hand, both map potentially ambiguous stimuli to a smaller set of motor responses. On the other hand, decisions about perceptual salience typically concern concrete sensory representations derived from a noisy stimulus, while categorization is typically conceptualized as an abstract decision about membership in a potentially arbitrary set. Previous work has primarily examined these types of decisions in isolation. Here we independently varied salience in both the perceptual and categorical domains in a random dot-motion framework by manipulating dot-motion coherence and motion direction relative to a category boundary, respectively. Behavioral and modeling results suggest that categorical (more abstract) information, which is more relevant to subjects' decisions, is weighted more strongly than perceptual (more concrete) information, although they also have significant interactive effects on choice. Within the brain, BOLD activity within frontal regions strongly differentiated categorical salience and weakly differentiated perceptual salience; however, the interaction between these two factors activated similar frontoparietal brain networks. Notably, explicitly evaluating feature interactions revealed a frontal-parietal dissociation: parietal activity varied strongly with both features, but frontal activity varied with the combined strength of the information that defined the motor response. Together, these data demonstrate that frontal regions are driven by decision-relevant features and argue that perceptual decisions and rule-based categorization reflect similar cognitive processes and activate similar brain networks to the extent that they define decision-relevant stimulus-response mappings. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Here we study the behavioral and neural dynamics of perceptual categorization when decision information varies in multiple domains at different levels of abstraction. Behavioral and modeling results suggest that categorical (more abstract) information is weighted more strongly than perceptual (more concrete) information but that perceptual and categorical domains interact to influence decisions. Frontoparietal brain activity during categorization flexibly represents decision-relevant features and highlights significant dissociations in frontal and parietal activity during decision making. Copyright © 2017 the American Physiological Society.

Perceptual and categorical decision making: goal-relevant representation of two domains at different levels of abstraction

PubMed Central

Kayser, Andrew S.

2017-01-01

To date it has been unclear whether perceptual decision making and rule-based categorization reflect activation of similar cognitive processes and brain regions. On one hand, both map potentially ambiguous stimuli to a smaller set of motor responses. On the other hand, decisions about perceptual salience typically concern concrete sensory representations derived from a noisy stimulus, while categorization is typically conceptualized as an abstract decision about membership in a potentially arbitrary set. Previous work has primarily examined these types of decisions in isolation. Here we independently varied salience in both the perceptual and categorical domains in a random dot-motion framework by manipulating dot-motion coherence and motion direction relative to a category boundary, respectively. Behavioral and modeling results suggest that categorical (more abstract) information, which is more relevant to subjects’ decisions, is weighted more strongly than perceptual (more concrete) information, although they also have significant interactive effects on choice. Within the brain, BOLD activity within frontal regions strongly differentiated categorical salience and weakly differentiated perceptual salience; however, the interaction between these two factors activated similar frontoparietal brain networks. Notably, explicitly evaluating feature interactions revealed a frontal-parietal dissociation: parietal activity varied strongly with both features, but frontal activity varied with the combined strength of the information that defined the motor response. Together, these data demonstrate that frontal regions are driven by decision-relevant features and argue that perceptual decisions and rule-based categorization reflect similar cognitive processes and activate similar brain networks to the extent that they define decision-relevant stimulus-response mappings. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Here we study the behavioral and neural dynamics of perceptual categorization when decision information varies in multiple domains at different levels of abstraction. Behavioral and modeling results suggest that categorical (more abstract) information is weighted more strongly than perceptual (more concrete) information but that perceptual and categorical domains interact to influence decisions. Frontoparietal brain activity during categorization flexibly represents decision-relevant features and highlights significant dissociations in frontal and parietal activity during decision making. PMID:28250149

17 CFR 200.552 - NEPA planning.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

... AND ETHICS; AND INFORMATION AND REQUESTS Regulations Pertaining to the Protection of the Environment... significantly affecting the quality of the human environment, the Commission shall: (a) Advise the relevant...

17 CFR 200.552 - NEPA planning.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

... AND ETHICS; AND INFORMATION AND REQUESTS Regulations Pertaining to the Protection of the Environment... significantly affecting the quality of the human environment, the Commission shall: (a) Advise the relevant...

17 CFR 200.552 - NEPA planning.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

... AND ETHICS; AND INFORMATION AND REQUESTS Regulations Pertaining to the Protection of the Environment... significantly affecting the quality of the human environment, the Commission shall: (a) Advise the relevant...

Invisible Authorship: Women's Names, Databases, and Technology.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tescione, Susan M.

Bibliographic databases act as search tools to locate relevant literature and information, but they also disseminate information about the works indexed in the records. Articles and authors that cannot be found cannot be cited, and the ability to disseminate data for that particular work is diminished. This study found no significant differences…

A Feminist Standpoint for Library and Information Science Education.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hannigan, Jane Anne

1994-01-01

Uses a feminist standpoint to correct inaccurate scholarship in curricula, pedagogy, and research in library and information science. Topics include feminist philosophy and its relevance to curricula revision, specific curricula changes, the significance of women's ways of learning to pedagogy, research needs and the role of subjectivity in…

The use of evidenced-based information by nurses and midwives to inform practice.

PubMed

Veeramah, Ven

2016-02-01

To examine the implementation of evidence-based information by nurses and midwives to inform their practice. It is widely recognised that the main benefits of using evidence-based information are to improve and update clinical practice and to enhance the quality of care and outcomes for patients. However, despite a large body of research showing that nurses and midwives have positive attitudes towards evidence-based practice , its implementation remains a considerable and significant challenge. This was a cross-sectional on-line survey. A self-completed questionnaire was used to collect data from a convenience sample of 386 nursing and midwifery diplomates and graduates from June-December 2013. One hundred and seventy-two participants completed the questionnaire, giving a response rate of 44·6%. The majority of respondents expressed very positive attitude towards evidence-based practice and nearly everyone felt that this should become an important part of daily practice. A significant number stated that they have regular access to research through a number of relevant databases and the Internet at their place of work and evidence-based guidelines relevant to their speciality were also available. The two top barriers perceived by respondents were lack of time to search for relevant evidence-based information and being able to make time during working hours to look for new information. The most popular strategy suggested was to ensure evidence-based information is readily available in a form which nurses and midwives can easily understand the implications for their practice. Health services and government agencies should make a concerted effort to make time for nurses and midwives to access, appraise and use evidence-based information to inform practice. More resources including protected time should be made available to support nurses and midwives to use evidence-based information to improve the quality of care provided. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Brain fingerprinting classification concealed information test detects US Navy military medical information with P300

PubMed Central

Farwell, Lawrence A.; Richardson, Drew C.; Richardson, Graham M.; Furedy, John J.

2014-01-01

A classification concealed information test (CIT) used the “brain fingerprinting” method of applying P300 event-related potential (ERP) in detecting information that is (1) acquired in real life and (2) unique to US Navy experts in military medicine. Military medicine experts and non-experts were asked to push buttons in response to three types of text stimuli. Targets contain known information relevant to military medicine, are identified to subjects as relevant, and require pushing one button. Subjects are told to push another button to all other stimuli. Probes contain concealed information relevant to military medicine, and are not identified to subjects. Irrelevants contain equally plausible, but incorrect/irrelevant information. Error rate was 0%. Median and mean statistical confidences for individual determinations were 99.9% with no indeterminates (results lacking sufficiently high statistical confidence to be classified). We compared error rate and statistical confidence for determinations of both information present and information absent produced by classification CIT (Is a probe ERP more similar to a target or to an irrelevant ERP?) vs. comparison CIT (Does a probe produce a larger ERP than an irrelevant?) using P300 plus the late negative component (LNP; together, P300-MERMER). Comparison CIT produced a significantly higher error rate (20%) and lower statistical confidences: mean 67%; information-absent mean was 28.9%, less than chance (50%). We compared analysis using P300 alone with the P300 + LNP. P300 alone produced the same 0% error rate but significantly lower statistical confidences. These findings add to the evidence that the brain fingerprinting methods as described here provide sufficient conditions to produce less than 1% error rate and greater than 95% median statistical confidence in a CIT on information obtained in the course of real life that is characteristic of individuals with specific training, expertise, or organizational affiliation. PMID:25565941

49 CFR 556.9 - Public inspection of relevant information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

... 49 Transportation 6 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Public inspection of relevant information. 556.9... NONCOMPLIANCE § 556.9 Public inspection of relevant information. Information relevant to a petition under this... Administration, 400 Seventh Street, SW., Washington, DC 20590. Copies of available information may be obtained in...

NASA/DOD Aerospace Knowledge Diffusion Research Project. Report 15: Technical uncertainty and project complexity as correlates of information use by US industry-affiliated aerospace engineers and scientists: Results of an exploratory investigation

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Pinelli, Thomas E.; Glassman, Nanci A.; Affelder, Linda O.; Hecht, Laura M.; Kennedy, John M.; Barclay, Rebecca O.

1993-01-01

An exploratory study was conducted that investigated the influence of technical uncertainty and project complexity on information use by U.S. industry-affiliated aerospace engineers and scientists. The study utilized survey research in the form of a self-administered mail questionnaire. U.S. aerospace engineers and scientists on the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) mailing list served as the study population. The adjusted response rate was 67 percent. The survey instrument is appendix C to this report. Statistically significant relationships were found to exist between technical uncertainty, project complexity, and information use. Statistically significant relationships were found to exist between technical uncertainty, project complexity, and the use of federally funded aerospace R&D. The results of this investigation are relevant to researchers investigating information-seeking behavior of aerospace engineers. They are also relevant to R&D managers and policy planners concerned with transferring the results of federally funded aerospace R&D to the U.S. aerospace industry.

Library outreach: overcoming health literacy challenges*

PubMed Central

Parker, Ruth; Kreps, Gary L.

2005-01-01

Objective: This paper examines the powerful influences of consumer health literacy on access to and use of relevant health information. Method: The paper describes how widespread problems with health literacy significantly limit effective dissemination of relevant health information in society, especially to many vulnerable populations where health literacy challenges are especially pervasive. Results: The paper examines strengths and weaknesses of different programs for addressing health literacy problems, including educational programs, message design programs, and strategic communication training and intervention programs. Implications: The paper evaluates strategies that can be implemented throughout the modern health care system to address problems of health literacy by improving health information access, processing, and understanding. It concludes by examining several strategies that libraries can adopt to overcome many health literacy challenges. PMID:16239962

Equitable Representation of Deaf People in Mainstream Academia: Why Not?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Woodcock, Kathryn; Rohan, Meg J.; Campbell, Linda

2007-01-01

Approximately 5% of people in most countries have deafness or significant hearing loss. This significant minority is underrepresented in mainstream universities across the world. Background information about deafness, relevant technology and its drawbacks, and the use of interpreters are discussed. The barriers to equitable representation of…

Improving team information sharing with a structured call-out in anaesthetic emergencies: a randomized controlled trial.

PubMed

Weller, J M; Torrie, J; Boyd, M; Frengley, R; Garden, A; Ng, W L; Frampton, C

2014-06-01

Sharing information with the team is critical in developing a shared mental model in an emergency, and fundamental to effective teamwork. We developed a structured call-out tool, encapsulated in the acronym 'SNAPPI': Stop; Notify; Assessment; Plan; Priorities; Invite ideas. We explored whether a video-based intervention could improve structured call-outs during simulated crises and if this would improve information sharing and medical management. In a simulation-based randomized, blinded study, we evaluated the effect of the video-intervention teaching SNAPPI on scores for SNAPPI, information sharing, and medical management using baseline and follow-up crisis simulations. We assessed information sharing using a probe technique where nurses and technicians received unique, clinically relevant information probes before the simulation. Shared knowledge of probes was measured in a written, post-simulation test. We also scored sharing of diagnostic options with the team and medical management. Anaesthetists' scores for SNAPPI were significantly improved, as was the number of diagnostic options they shared. We found a non-significant trend to improve information-probe sharing and medical management in the intervention group, and across all simulations, a significant correlation between SNAPPI and information-probe sharing. Of note, only 27% of the clinically relevant information about the patient provided to the nurse and technician in the pre-simulation information probes was subsequently learnt by the anaesthetist. We developed a structured communication tool, SNAPPI, to improve information sharing between anaesthetists and their team, taught it using a video-based intervention, and provide initial evidence to support its value for improving communication in a crisis. © The Author [2014]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Journal of Anaesthesia. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Relevance of Google-customized search engine vs. CISMeF quality-controlled health gateway.

PubMed

Gehanno, Jean-François; Kerdelhue, Gaétan; Sakji, Saoussen; Massari, Philippe; Joubert, Michel; Darmoni, Stéfan J

2009-01-01

CISMeF (acronym for Catalog and Index of French Language Health Resources on the Internet) is a quality-controlled health gateway conceived to catalog and index the most important and quality-controlled sources of institutional health information in French. The goal of this study is to compare the relevance of results provided by this gateway from a small set of documents selected and described by human experts to those provided by a search engine from a large set of automatically indexed and ranked resources. The Google-Customized search engine (CSE) was used. The evaluation was made using the 10th first results of 15 queries and two blinded physician evaluators. There was no significant difference between the relevance of information retrieval in CISMeF and Google CSE. In conclusion, automatic indexing does not lead to lower relevance than a manual MeSH indexing and may help to cope with the increasing number of references to be indexed in a controlled health quality gateway.

Generating disease-pertinent treatment vocabularies from MEDLINE citations.

PubMed

Wang, Liqin; Del Fiol, Guilherme; Bray, Bruce E; Haug, Peter J

2017-01-01

Healthcare communities have identified a significant need for disease-specific information. Disease-specific ontologies are useful in assisting the retrieval of disease-relevant information from various sources. However, building these ontologies is labor intensive. Our goal is to develop a system for an automated generation of disease-pertinent concepts from a popular knowledge resource for the building of disease-specific ontologies. A pipeline system was developed with an initial focus of generating disease-specific treatment vocabularies. It was comprised of the components of disease-specific citation retrieval, predication extraction, treatment predication extraction, treatment concept extraction, and relevance ranking. A semantic schema was developed to support the extraction of treatment predications and concepts. Four ranking approaches (i.e., occurrence, interest, degree centrality, and weighted degree centrality) were proposed to measure the relevance of treatment concepts to the disease of interest. We measured the performance of four ranks in terms of the mean precision at the top 100 concepts with five diseases, as well as the precision-recall curves against two reference vocabularies. The performance of the system was also compared to two baseline approaches. The pipeline system achieved a mean precision of 0.80 for the top 100 concepts with the ranking by interest. There were no significant different among the four ranks (p=0.53). However, the pipeline-based system had significantly better performance than the two baselines. The pipeline system can be useful for an automated generation of disease-relevant treatment concepts from the biomedical literature. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Natural brain-information interfaces: Recommending information by relevance inferred from human brain signals

PubMed Central

Eugster, Manuel J. A.; Ruotsalo, Tuukka; Spapé, Michiel M.; Barral, Oswald; Ravaja, Niklas; Jacucci, Giulio; Kaski, Samuel

2016-01-01

Finding relevant information from large document collections such as the World Wide Web is a common task in our daily lives. Estimation of a user’s interest or search intention is necessary to recommend and retrieve relevant information from these collections. We introduce a brain-information interface used for recommending information by relevance inferred directly from brain signals. In experiments, participants were asked to read Wikipedia documents about a selection of topics while their EEG was recorded. Based on the prediction of word relevance, the individual’s search intent was modeled and successfully used for retrieving new relevant documents from the whole English Wikipedia corpus. The results show that the users’ interests toward digital content can be modeled from the brain signals evoked by reading. The introduced brain-relevance paradigm enables the recommendation of information without any explicit user interaction and may be applied across diverse information-intensive applications. PMID:27929077

Natural brain-information interfaces: Recommending information by relevance inferred from human brain signals

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Eugster, Manuel J. A.; Ruotsalo, Tuukka; Spapé, Michiel M.; Barral, Oswald; Ravaja, Niklas; Jacucci, Giulio; Kaski, Samuel

2016-12-01

Finding relevant information from large document collections such as the World Wide Web is a common task in our daily lives. Estimation of a user’s interest or search intention is necessary to recommend and retrieve relevant information from these collections. We introduce a brain-information interface used for recommending information by relevance inferred directly from brain signals. In experiments, participants were asked to read Wikipedia documents about a selection of topics while their EEG was recorded. Based on the prediction of word relevance, the individual’s search intent was modeled and successfully used for retrieving new relevant documents from the whole English Wikipedia corpus. The results show that the users’ interests toward digital content can be modeled from the brain signals evoked by reading. The introduced brain-relevance paradigm enables the recommendation of information without any explicit user interaction and may be applied across diverse information-intensive applications.

Goal-Directed Visual Processing Differentially Impacts Human Ventral and Dorsal Visual Representations

PubMed Central

2017-01-01

Recent studies have challenged the ventral/“what” and dorsal/“where” two-visual-processing-pathway view by showing the existence of “what” and “where” information in both pathways. Is the two-pathway distinction still valid? Here, we examined how goal-directed visual information processing may differentially impact visual representations in these two pathways. Using fMRI and multivariate pattern analysis, in three experiments on human participants (57% females), by manipulating whether color or shape was task-relevant and how they were conjoined, we examined shape-based object category decoding in occipitotemporal and parietal regions. We found that object category representations in all the regions examined were influenced by whether or not object shape was task-relevant. This task effect, however, tended to decrease as task-relevant and irrelevant features were more integrated, reflecting the well-known object-based feature encoding. Interestingly, task relevance played a relatively minor role in driving the representational structures of early visual and ventral object regions. They were driven predominantly by variations in object shapes. In contrast, the effect of task was much greater in dorsal than ventral regions, with object category and task relevance both contributing significantly to the representational structures of the dorsal regions. These results showed that, whereas visual representations in the ventral pathway are more invariant and reflect “what an object is,” those in the dorsal pathway are more adaptive and reflect “what we do with it.” Thus, despite the existence of “what” and “where” information in both visual processing pathways, the two pathways may still differ fundamentally in their roles in visual information representation. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Visual information is thought to be processed in two distinctive pathways: the ventral pathway that processes “what” an object is and the dorsal pathway that processes “where” it is located. This view has been challenged by recent studies revealing the existence of “what” and “where” information in both pathways. Here, we found that goal-directed visual information processing differentially modulates shape-based object category representations in the two pathways. Whereas ventral representations are more invariant to the demand of the task, reflecting what an object is, dorsal representations are more adaptive, reflecting what we do with the object. Thus, despite the existence of “what” and “where” information in both pathways, visual representations may still differ fundamentally in the two pathways. PMID:28821655

Self-relevance and wishful thinking: facilitation and distortion in source monitoring.

PubMed

Barber, Sarah J; Gordon, Ruthanna; Franklin, Nancy

2009-06-01

When making source attributions, people tend to attribute desirable statements to reliable sources and undesirable statements to unreliable sources, a phenomenon known as the wishful thinking effect (Gordon, Franklin, & Beck, 2005). In the present study, we examined the influence of wishful thinking on source monitoring for self-relevant information. On one hand, wishful thinking is expected, because self-relevant desires are presumably strong. However, self-relevance is known to confer a memory advantage and may thus provide protection from desire-based biases. In Experiment 1, source memory for self-relevant information was contrasted against source memory for information relevant to others and for neutral information. Results indicated that self-relevant information was affected by wishful thinking and was remembered more accurately than was other information. Experiment 2 showed that the magnitude of the self-relevant wishful thinking effect did not increase with a delay.

A User-Centered Approach to Adaptive Hypertext Based on an Information Relevance Model

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mathe, Nathalie; Chen, James

1994-01-01

Rapid and effective to information in large electronic documentation systems can be facilitated if information relevant in an individual user's content can be automatically supplied to this user. However most of this knowledge on contextual relevance is not found within the contents of documents, it is rather established incrementally by users during information access. We propose a new model for interactively learning contextual relevance during information retrieval, and incrementally adapting retrieved information to individual user profiles. The model, called a relevance network, records the relevance of references based on user feedback for specific queries and user profiles. It also generalizes such knowledge to later derive relevant references for similar queries and profiles. The relevance network lets users filter information by context of relevance. Compared to other approaches, it does not require any prior knowledge nor training. More importantly, our approach to adaptivity is user-centered. It facilitates acceptance and understanding by users by giving them shared control over the adaptation without disturbing their primary task. Users easily control when to adapt and when to use the adapted system. Lastly, the model is independent of the particular application used to access information, and supports sharing of adaptations among users.

Improving the relevance and efficiency of human exposure assessments within the process of regulatory risk assessment.

PubMed

Money, Chris

2018-01-24

The process for undertaking exposure assessments varies dependent on its purpose. But for exposure assessments to be relevant and accurate, they are reliant on access to reliable information on key exposure determinants. Acquiring such information is seldom straightforward and can take significant time and resources. This articles examines how the application of tiered and targeted approaches to information acquisition, within the context of European human health risk assessments, can not only lead to improvements in the efficiency and effectiveness of the process but also in the confidence of stakeholders in its outputs. The article explores how the benefits might be further improved through the coordination of such activities, as well as those areas that represent barriers to wider international harmonisation.

46 CFR 560.5 - Receipt of relevant information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

... 46 Shipping 9 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Receipt of relevant information. 560.5 Section 560.5... FOREIGN PORTS § 560.5 Receipt of relevant information. (a) In making its decision on matters arising under... submissions should be supported by affidavits of fact and memorandum of law. Relevant information may include...

A Compositional Relevance Model for Adaptive Information Retrieval

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mathe, Nathalie; Chen, James; Lu, Henry, Jr. (Technical Monitor)

1994-01-01

There is a growing need for rapid and effective access to information in large electronic documentation systems. Access can be facilitated if information relevant in the current problem solving context can be automatically supplied to the user. This includes information relevant to particular user profiles, tasks being performed, and problems being solved. However most of this knowledge on contextual relevance is not found within the contents of documents, and current hypermedia tools do not provide any easy mechanism to let users add this knowledge to their documents. We propose a compositional relevance network to automatically acquire the context in which previous information was found relevant. The model records information on the relevance of references based on user feedback for specific queries and contexts. It also generalizes such information to derive relevant references for similar queries and contexts. This model lets users filter information by context of relevance, build personalized views of documents over time, and share their views with other users. It also applies to any type of multimedia information. Compared to other approaches, it is less costly and doesn't require any a priori statistical computation, nor an extended training period. It is currently being implemented into the Computer Integrated Documentation system which enables integration of various technical documents in a hypertext framework.

On the role of working memory in spatial contextual cueing.

PubMed

Travis, Susan L; Mattingley, Jason B; Dux, Paul E

2013-01-01

The human visual system receives more information than can be consciously processed. To overcome this capacity limit, we employ attentional mechanisms to prioritize task-relevant (target) information over less relevant (distractor) information. Regularities in the environment can facilitate the allocation of attention, as demonstrated by the spatial contextual cueing paradigm. When observers are exposed repeatedly to a scene and invariant distractor information, learning from earlier exposures enhances the search for the target. Here, we investigated whether spatial contextual cueing draws on spatial working memory resources and, if so, at what level of processing working memory load has its effect. Participants performed 2 tasks concurrently: a visual search task, in which the spatial configuration of some search arrays occasionally repeated, and a spatial working memory task. Increases in working memory load significantly impaired contextual learning. These findings indicate that spatial contextual cueing utilizes working memory resources.

Memory Accessibility and Medical Decision-Making for Significant Others: The Role of Socially Shared Retrieval-Induced Forgetting

PubMed Central

Coman, Dora; Coman, Alin; Hirst, William

2013-01-01

Medical decisions will often entail a broad search for relevant information. No sources alone may offer a complete picture, and many may be selective in their presentation. This selectivity may induce forgetting for previously learned material, thereby adversely affecting medical decision-making. In the study phase of two experiments, participants learned information about a fictitious disease and advantages and disadvantages of four treatment options. In the subsequent practice phase, they read a pamphlet selectively presenting either relevant (Experiment 1) or irrelevant (Experiment 2) advantages or disadvantages. A final cued recall followed and, in Experiment 2, a decision as to the best treatment for a patient. Not only did reading the pamphlet induce forgetting for related and unmentioned information, the induced forgetting adversely affected decision-making. The research provides a cautionary note about the risks of searching through selectively presented information when making a medical decision. PMID:23785320

A longitudinal study on the information needs and preferences of patients after an acute coronary syndrome.

PubMed

Greco, Andrea; Cappelletti, Erika Rosa; Monzani, Dario; Pancani, Luca; D'Addario, Marco; Magrin, Maria Elena; Miglioretti, Massimo; Sarini, Marcello; Scrignaro, Marta; Vecchio, Luca; Fattirolli, Francesco; Steca, Patrizia

2016-09-20

Research has shown that the provision of pertinent health information to patients with cardiovascular disease is associated with better adherence to medical prescriptions, behavioral changes, and enhanced perception of control over the disease. Yet there is no clear knowledge on how to improve information pertinence. Identifying and meeting the information needs of patients and their preferences for sources of information is pivotal to developing patient-led services. This prospective, observational study was aimed at exploring the information needs and perceived relevance of different information sources for patients during the twenty-four months following an acute coronary syndrome. Two hundred and seventeen newly diagnosed patients with acute coronary syndrome were enrolled in the study. The patients were primarily men (83.41 %) with a mean age of 57.28 years (range 35-75; SD = 7.98). Patients' needs for information and the perceived relevance of information sources were evaluated between 2 and 8 weeks after hospitalization (baseline) and during three follow-ups at 6, 12 and 24 months after baseline. Repeated measures ANOVA, Bonferroni post hoc tests and Cochran's Q Test were performed to test differences in variables of interest over time. Results showed a reduction in information needs, but this decrease was significant only for topics related to daily activities, behavioral habits, risk and complication. At baseline, the primary sources of information were specialists and general practitioners, followed by family members and information leaflets given by physicians. Relevance of other sources changed differently over time. The present longitudinal study is an original contribution to the investigation of changes in information needs and preferences for sources of information among patients who are diagnosed with acute coronary syndrome. One of the main results of this study is that information on self-disease management is perceived as a minor theme for patients even two years after the event. Knowledge on how patients' information needs and perceived relevance of information sources change over time could enhance the quality of chronic disease management, leading health-care systems to move toward more patient-tailored care.

Changing Zaire to Congo: the fate of no-longer relevant mnemonic information.

PubMed

Eriksson, Johan; Stiernstedt, Mikael; Öhlund, Maria; Nyberg, Lars

2014-11-01

In an ever-changing world there is constant pressure on revising long-term memory, such when people or countries change name. What happens to the old, pre-existing information? One possibility is that old associations gradually are weakened and eventually lost. Alternatively, old and no longer relevant information may still be an integral part of memory traces. To test the hypothesis that old mnemonic information still becomes activated when people correctly retrieve new, currently relevant information, brain activity was measured with fMRI while participants performed a cued-retrieval task. Paired associates (symbol-sound and symbol-face pairs) were first learned during two days. Half of the associations were then updated during the next two days, followed by fMRI scanning on day 5 and also 18 months later. As expected, retrieval reactivated sensory cortex related to the most recently learned association (visual cortex for symbol-face pairs, auditory cortex for symbol-sound pairs). Critically, retrieval also reactivated sensory cortex related to the no-longer relevant associate. Eighteen months later, only non-updated symbol-face associations were intact. Intriguingly, a subset of the updated associations was now treated as though the original association had taken over, in that memory performance was significantly worse than chance and that activity in sensory cortex for the original but not the updated associate correlated (negatively) with performance. Moreover, the degree of "residual" reactivation during day 5 inversely predicted memory performance 18 months later. Thus, updating of long-term memory involves adding new information to already existing networks, in which old information can stay resilient for a long time. Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Using a familiar risk comparison within a risk ladder to improve risk understanding by low numerates: a study of visual attention.

PubMed

Keller, Carmen

2011-07-01

Previous experimental research provides evidence that a familiar risk comparison within a risk ladder is understood by low- and high-numerate individuals. It especially helps low numerates to better evaluate risk. In the present study, an eye tracker was used to capture individuals' visual attention to a familiar risk comparison, such as the risk associated with smoking. Two parameters of information processing-efficiency and level-were derived from visual attention. A random sample of participants from the general population (N= 68) interpreted a given risk level with the help of the risk ladder. Numeracy was negatively correlated with overall visual attention on the risk ladder (r(s) =-0.28, p= 0.01), indicating that the lower the numeracy, the more the time spent looking at the whole risk ladder. Numeracy was positively correlated with the efficiency of processing relevant frequency (r(s) = 0.34, p < 0.001) and relevant textual information (r(s) = 0.34, p < 0.001), but not with the efficiency of processing relevant comparative information and numerical information. There was a significant negative correlation between numeracy and the level of processing of relevant comparative risk information (r(s) =-0.21, p < 0.01), indicating that low numerates processed the comparative risk information more deeply than the high numerates. There was no correlation between numeracy and perceived risk. These results add to previous experimental research, indicating that the smoking risk comparison was crucial for low numerates to evaluate and understand risk. Furthermore, the eye-tracker method is promising for studying information processing and improving risk communication formats. © 2011 Society for Risk Analysis.

Chemical Principles Revisited: Artifacts and the Electromotive Series.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mickey, Charles D.

1980-01-01

Reviews chemical information relevant to the study of archeology and specifically to the history of man's use of metals. Gives reasons why most significant artifacts found by archeologists are made of gold instead of iron. (CS)

Teenage Drinking: Does Advertising Make a Difference?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Atkin, Charles; And Others

1984-01-01

Surveyed teenagers (grades 7-12) about their drinking behavior, their exposure to alcohol advertising, relevant demographic information, and other communication influences. Concluded that exposure to alcohol advertising is significantly associated with teenage drinking behavior and intentions. (PD)

Correlation filtering in financial time series (Invited Paper)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Aste, T.; Di Matteo, Tiziana; Tumminello, M.; Mantegna, R. N.

2005-05-01

We apply a method to filter relevant information from the correlation coefficient matrix by extracting a network of relevant interactions. This method succeeds to generate networks with the same hierarchical structure of the Minimum Spanning Tree but containing a larger amount of links resulting in a richer network topology allowing loops and cliques. In Tumminello et al.,1 we have shown that this method, applied to a financial portfolio of 100 stocks in the USA equity markets, is pretty efficient in filtering relevant information about the clustering of the system and its hierarchical structure both on the whole system and within each cluster. In particular, we have found that triangular loops and 4 element cliques have important and significant relations with the market structure and properties. Here we apply this filtering procedure to the analysis of correlation in two different kind of interest rate time series (16 Eurodollars and 34 US interest rates).

German dentists' websites on periodontitis have low quality of information.

PubMed

Schwendicke, Falk; Stange, Jörg; Stange, Claudia; Graetz, Christian

2017-08-02

The internet is an increasingly relevant source of health information. We aimed to assess the quality of German dentists' websites on periodontitis, hypothesizing that it was significantly associated with a number of practice-specific parameters. We searched four electronic search engines and included pages which were freely accessible, posted by a dental practice in Germany, and mentioned periodontal disease/therapy. Websites were assessed for (1) technical and functional aspects, (2) generic quality and risk of bias, (3) disease-specific information. For 1 and 2, validated tools (LIDA/DISCERN) were used for assessment. For 3, we developed a criterion catalogue encompassing items on etiologic and prognostic factors for periodontitis, the diagnostic and treatment process, and the generic chance of tooth retention in periodontitis patients. Inter- and intra-rater reliabilities were largely moderate. Generalized linear modeling was used to assess the association between the information quality (measured as % of maximally available scores) and practice-specific characteristics. Seventy-one websites were included. Technical and functional aspects were reported in significantly higher quality (median: 71%, 25/75th percentiles: 67/79%) than all other aspects (p < 0.05). Generic risk of bias and most disease-specific aspects showed significantly lower reporting quality (median range was 0-40%), with poorest reporting for prognostic factors (9;0/27%), diagnostic process (0;0/33%) and chances of tooth retention (0;0/2%). We found none of the practice-specific parameters to have significant impact on the overall quality of the websites. Most German dentists' websites on periodontitis are not fully trustworthy and relevant information are not or insufficiently considered. There is great need to improve the information quality from such websites at least with regards to periodontitis.

Information security system quality assessment through the intelligent tools

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Trapeznikov, E. V.

2018-04-01

The technology development has shown the automated system information security comprehensive analysis necessity. The subject area analysis indicates the study relevance. The research objective is to develop the information security system quality assessment methodology based on the intelligent tools. The basis of the methodology is the information security assessment model in the information system through the neural network. The paper presents the security assessment model, its algorithm. The methodology practical implementation results in the form of the software flow diagram are represented. The practical significance of the model being developed is noted in conclusions.

BIOREL: the benchmark resource to estimate the relevance of the gene networks.

PubMed

Antonov, Alexey V; Mewes, Hans W

2006-02-06

The progress of high-throughput methodologies in functional genomics has lead to the development of statistical procedures to infer gene networks from various types of high-throughput data. However, due to the lack of common standards, the biological significance of the results of the different studies is hard to compare. To overcome this problem we propose a benchmark procedure and have developed a web resource (BIOREL), which is useful for estimating the biological relevance of any genetic network by integrating different sources of biological information. The associations of each gene from the network are classified as biologically relevant or not. The proportion of genes in the network classified as "relevant" is used as the overall network relevance score. Employing synthetic data we demonstrated that such a score ranks the networks fairly in respect to the relevance level. Using BIOREL as the benchmark resource we compared the quality of experimental and theoretically predicted protein interaction data.

Beta oscillations reflect supramodal information during perceptual judgment.

PubMed

Haegens, Saskia; Vergara, José; Rossi-Pool, Román; Lemus, Luis; Romo, Ranulfo

2017-12-26

Previous work on perceptual decision making in the sensorimotor system has shown population dynamics in the beta band, corresponding to the encoding of stimulus properties and the final decision outcome. Here, we asked how oscillatory dynamics in the medial premotor cortex (MPC) contribute to supramodal perceptual decision making. We recorded local field potentials (LFPs) and spikes in two monkeys trained to perform a tactile-acoustic frequency discrimination task, including both unimodal and crossmodal conditions. We studied the role of oscillatory activity as a function of stimulus properties (frequency and sensory modality), as well as decision outcome. We found that beta-band power correlated with relevant stimulus properties: there was a significant modulation by stimulus frequency during the working-memory (WM) retention interval, as well as modulation by stimulus modality-the latter was observed only in the case of a purely unimodal task, where modality information was relevant to prepare for the upcoming second stimulus. Furthermore, we found a significant modulation of beta power during the comparison and decision period, which was predictive of decision outcome. Finally, beta-band spike-field coherence (SFC) matched these LFP observations. In conclusion, we demonstrate that beta power in MPC is reflective of stimulus features in a supramodal, context-dependent manner, and additionally reflects the decision outcome. We propose that these beta modulations are a signature of the recruitment of functional neuronal ensembles, which encode task-relevant information.

Free software to analyse the clinical relevance of drug interactions with antiretroviral agents (SIMARV®) in patients with HIV/AIDS.

PubMed

Giraldo, N A; Amariles, P; Monsalve, M; Faus, M J

Highly active antiretroviral therapy has extended the expected lifespan of patients with HIV/AIDS. However, the therapeutic benefits of some drugs used simultaneously with highly active antiretroviral therapy may be adversely affected by drug interactions. The goal was to design and develop a free software to facilitate analysis, assessment, and clinical decision making according to the clinical relevance of drug interactions in patients with HIV/AIDS. A comprehensive Medline/PubMed database search of drug interactions was performed. Articles that recognized any drug interactions in HIV disease were selected. The publications accessed were limited to human studies in English or Spanish, with full texts retrieved. Drug interactions were analyzed, assessed, and grouped into four levels of clinical relevance according to gravity and probability. Software to systematize the information regarding drug interactions and their clinical relevance was designed and developed. Overall, 952 different references were retrieved and 446 selected; in addition, 67 articles were selected from the citation lists of identified articles. A total of 2119 pairs of drug interactions were identified; of this group, 2006 (94.7%) were drug-drug interactions, 1982 (93.5%) had an identified pharmacokinetic mechanism, and 1409 (66.5%) were mediated by enzyme inhibition. In terms of clinical relevance, 1285 (60.6%) drug interactions were clinically significant in patients with HIV (levels 1 and 2). With this information, a software program that facilitates identification and assessment of the clinical relevance of antiretroviral drug interactions (SIMARV ® ) was developed. A free software package with information on 2119 pairs of antiretroviral drug interactions was designed and developed that could facilitate analysis, assessment, and clinical decision making according to the clinical relevance of drug interactions in patients with HIV/AIDS. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Statistical interpretation of machine learning-based feature importance scores for biomarker discovery.

PubMed

Huynh-Thu, Vân Anh; Saeys, Yvan; Wehenkel, Louis; Geurts, Pierre

2012-07-01

Univariate statistical tests are widely used for biomarker discovery in bioinformatics. These procedures are simple, fast and their output is easily interpretable by biologists but they can only identify variables that provide a significant amount of information in isolation from the other variables. As biological processes are expected to involve complex interactions between variables, univariate methods thus potentially miss some informative biomarkers. Variable relevance scores provided by machine learning techniques, however, are potentially able to highlight multivariate interacting effects, but unlike the p-values returned by univariate tests, these relevance scores are usually not statistically interpretable. This lack of interpretability hampers the determination of a relevance threshold for extracting a feature subset from the rankings and also prevents the wide adoption of these methods by practicians. We evaluated several, existing and novel, procedures that extract relevant features from rankings derived from machine learning approaches. These procedures replace the relevance scores with measures that can be interpreted in a statistical way, such as p-values, false discovery rates, or family wise error rates, for which it is easier to determine a significance level. Experiments were performed on several artificial problems as well as on real microarray datasets. Although the methods differ in terms of computing times and the tradeoff, they achieve in terms of false positives and false negatives, some of them greatly help in the extraction of truly relevant biomarkers and should thus be of great practical interest for biologists and physicians. As a side conclusion, our experiments also clearly highlight that using model performance as a criterion for feature selection is often counter-productive. Python source codes of all tested methods, as well as the MATLAB scripts used for data simulation, can be found in the Supplementary Material.

A new approach to the concept of "relevance" in information retrieval (IR).

PubMed

Kagolovsky, Y; Möhr, J R

2001-01-01

The concept of "relevance" is the fundamental concept of information science in general and information retrieval, in particular. Although "relevance" is extensively used in evaluation of information retrieval, there are considerable problems associated with reaching an agreement on its definition, meaning, evaluation, and application in information retrieval. There are a number of different views on "relevance" and its use for evaluation. Based on a review of the literature the main problems associated with the concept of "relevance" in information retrieval are identified. The authors argue that the proposal for the solution of the problems can be based on the conceptual IR framework built using a systems analytic approach to IR. Using this framework different kinds of "relevance" relationships in the IR process are identified, and a methodology for evaluation of "relevance" based on methods of semantics capturing and comparison is proposed.

75 FR 20843 - Notice of Workshop To Discuss Policy-Relevant Science to Inform EPA's Integrated Plan for the...

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2010-04-21

... Policy-Relevant Science to Inform EPA's Integrated Plan for the Review of the Lead National Ambient Air...-Relevant Science to Inform EPA's Integrated Plan for Review of the National Ambient Air Quality Standards... review focuses on the key policy-relevant issues and considers the most meaningful new science to inform...

Completeness of reporting of patient-relevant clinical trial outcomes: comparison of unpublished clinical study reports with publicly available data.

PubMed

Wieseler, Beate; Wolfram, Natalia; McGauran, Natalie; Kerekes, Michaela F; Vervölgyi, Volker; Kohlepp, Petra; Kamphuis, Marloes; Grouven, Ulrich

2013-10-01

Access to unpublished clinical study reports (CSRs) is currently being discussed as a means to allow unbiased evaluation of clinical research. The Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) routinely requests CSRs from manufacturers for its drug assessments. Our objective was to determine the information gain from CSRs compared to publicly available sources (journal publications and registry reports) for patient-relevant outcomes included in IQWiG health technology assessments (HTAs) of drugs. We used a sample of 101 trials with full CSRs received for 16 HTAs of drugs completed by IQWiG between 15 January 2006 and 14 February 2011, and analyzed the CSRs and the publicly available sources of these trials. For each document type we assessed the completeness of information on all patient-relevant outcomes included in the HTAs (benefit outcomes, e.g., mortality, symptoms, and health-related quality of life; harm outcomes, e.g., adverse events). We dichotomized the outcomes as "completely reported" or "incompletely reported." For each document type, we calculated the proportion of outcomes with complete information per outcome category and overall. We analyzed 101 trials with CSRs; 86 had at least one publicly available source, 65 at least one journal publication, and 50 a registry report. The trials included 1,080 patient-relevant outcomes. The CSRs provided complete information on a considerably higher proportion of outcomes (86%) than the combined publicly available sources (39%). With the exception of health-related quality of life (57%), CSRs provided complete information on 78% to 100% of the various benefit outcomes (combined publicly available sources: 20% to 53%). CSRs also provided considerably more information on harms. The differences in completeness of information for patient-relevant outcomes between CSRs and journal publications or registry reports (or a combination of both) were statistically significant for all types of outcomes. The main limitation of our study is that our sample is not representative because only CSRs provided voluntarily by pharmaceutical companies upon request could be assessed. In addition, the sample covered only a limited number of therapeutic areas and was restricted to randomized controlled trials investigating drugs. In contrast to CSRs, publicly available sources provide insufficient information on patient-relevant outcomes of clinical trials. CSRs should therefore be made publicly available. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary.

Using grey literature to prepare pharmacy students for an evolving healthcare delivery system.

PubMed

Happe, Laura E; Walker, Desiree'

2013-05-13

To assess the impact of using "grey literature" (information internally produced in print or electronic format by agencies such as hospitals, government, businesses, etc) rather than a textbook in a course on healthcare delivery systems on students' perception of the relevance of healthcare delivery system topics and their ability to identify credible sources of this information. A reading from the grey literature was identified and assigned to the students for each topic in the course. Pre- and post-course survey instruments were used for the assessment. Students reported healthcare delivery systems topics to be moderately relevant to the profession of pharmacy on both the pre- and post-course survey instruments. Students' knowledge of current and credible sources of information on healthcare delivery system topics significantly improved based on self-reports and scores on objective assessments (p<0.05). Assignment of grey literature in a course on healthcare delivery systems can be used to ensure that information in the pharmacy school curriculum is the most current and credible information available.

Developing a long-term condition's information service in collaboration with third sector organisations.

PubMed

McShane, Lesley; Greenwell, Kate; Corbett, Sally; Walker, Richard

2014-06-01

People with long-term conditions need to be signposted to high quality information and advice to understand and manage their condition. Information seeking tools combined with third sector information could help address their information needs. To describe the development and implementation of an information service for people living with long-term conditions at one NHS acute trust in the Northeast of England. An information service was trialled using bespoke information models for three long-term conditions in collaboration with third sector organisations. These guided people to relevant, timely and reliable information. Both clinician and service user questionnaires were used to evaluate satisfaction with the service. Appropriately designed information models can be used interchangeably across all services. Between 75% and 91% of users agreed that they were satisfied with various aspects of the service. Generally, users received relevant, understandable and high quality information at the right time. Nearly all health professionals (94-100%) felt the service was accessible, provided high quality information and did not significantly impact on their consultation time. The developed information service was well received by service users and health professionals. Specifically, the use of information prescriptions and menus facilitated access to information for people with long-term conditions. © 2014 The authors. Health Information and Libraries Journal © 2014 Health Libraries Group.

Problem representation and mathematical problem solving of students of varying math ability.

PubMed

Krawec, Jennifer L

2014-01-01

The purpose of this study was to examine differences in math problem solving among students with learning disabilities (LD, n = 25), low-achieving students (LA, n = 30), and average-achieving students (AA, n = 29). The primary interest was to analyze the processes students use to translate and integrate problem information while solving problems. Paraphrasing, visual representation, and problem-solving accuracy were measured in eighth grade students using a researcher-modified version of the Mathematical Processing Instrument. Results indicated that both students with LD and LA students struggled with processing but that students with LD were significantly weaker than their LA peers in paraphrasing relevant information. Paraphrasing and visual representation accuracy each accounted for a statistically significant amount of variance in problem-solving accuracy. Finally, the effect of visual representation of relevant information on problem-solving accuracy was dependent on ability; specifically, for students with LD, generating accurate visual representations was more strongly related to problem-solving accuracy than for AA students. Implications for instruction for students with and without LD are discussed.

Need for better analgesic treatment after tonsillectomy in ear, nose and throat practices.

PubMed

Kamarauskas, Audrius; Dahl, Mads Ronald; Hlidarsdottir, Tinna; Mainz, Jan; Ovesen, Therese

2013-05-01

The objective of this study was to investigate patient-reported outcomes on quality (PRO) of outpatient tonsillectomy in Danish ear, nose and throat practices in terms of indicators, standards and prognostic factors. Patients filled in a post-operative questionnaire three weeks after tonsillectomy. The questions were focused on the preoperative information about the procedure. Unscheduled contacts to Danish health care after the tonsillectomy and number of days absent from work/school were reported. A pain score was indicated daily during the first 14 post-operative days. A total of 89% of the 614 enrolled patients returned the questionnaire. 30% were dissatisfied with the information they had been afforded about post-operative complications and risks and 23% had unscheduled contacts to Danish health care. The daily pain score and absence from work/school were significantly higher among adults (> 15 years) than among children. The pain score correlated significantly with absence from work/school, unscheduled contacts and short observation time. PRO was significantly influenced by the length of the observation time before discharge, and a higher pain score was associated with a lower satisfaction with preoperative information about complications/risks. Most patients/parents are satisfied with outpatient tonsillectomy. However, the post-operative pain control needs revision, the preoperative information should be intensified and the observation of the patients before discharge should be extended. not relevant. not relevant.

Optimizing the stimulus presentation paradigm design for the P300-based brain-computer interface using performance prediction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mainsah, B. O.; Reeves, G.; Collins, L. M.; Throckmorton, C. S.

2017-08-01

Objective. The role of a brain-computer interface (BCI) is to discern a user’s intended message or action by extracting and decoding relevant information from brain signals. Stimulus-driven BCIs, such as the P300 speller, rely on detecting event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to a user attending to relevant or target stimulus events. However, this process is error-prone because the ERPs are embedded in noisy electroencephalography (EEG) data, representing a fundamental problem in communication of the uncertainty in the information that is received during noisy transmission. A BCI can be modeled as a noisy communication system and an information-theoretic approach can be exploited to design a stimulus presentation paradigm to maximize the information content that is presented to the user. However, previous methods that focused on designing error-correcting codes failed to provide significant performance improvements due to underestimating the effects of psycho-physiological factors on the P300 ERP elicitation process and a limited ability to predict online performance with their proposed methods. Maximizing the information rate favors the selection of stimulus presentation patterns with increased target presentation frequency, which exacerbates refractory effects and negatively impacts performance within the context of an oddball paradigm. An information-theoretic approach that seeks to understand the fundamental trade-off between information rate and reliability is desirable. Approach. We developed a performance-based paradigm (PBP) by tuning specific parameters of the stimulus presentation paradigm to maximize performance while minimizing refractory effects. We used a probabilistic-based performance prediction method as an evaluation criterion to select a final configuration of the PBP. Main results. With our PBP, we demonstrate statistically significant improvements in online performance, both in accuracy and spelling rate, compared to the conventional row-column paradigm. Significance. By accounting for refractory effects, an information-theoretic approach can be exploited to significantly improve BCI performance across a wide range of performance levels.

40 CFR 123.42 - Receipt and use of Federal information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... administering the permit program any relevant information which was collected by EPA. The Memorandum of... pending permit applications or any other relevant information collected before the approval of the State...), relevant information includes support files for permit issuance, compliance reports and records of...

Task-Driven Dictionary Learning Based on Mutual Information for Medical Image Classification.

PubMed

Diamant, Idit; Klang, Eyal; Amitai, Michal; Konen, Eli; Goldberger, Jacob; Greenspan, Hayit

2017-06-01

We present a novel variant of the bag-of-visual-words (BoVW) method for automated medical image classification. Our approach improves the BoVW model by learning a task-driven dictionary of the most relevant visual words per task using a mutual information-based criterion. Additionally, we generate relevance maps to visualize and localize the decision of the automatic classification algorithm. These maps demonstrate how the algorithm works and show the spatial layout of the most relevant words. We applied our algorithm to three different tasks: chest x-ray pathology identification (of four pathologies: cardiomegaly, enlarged mediastinum, right consolidation, and left consolidation), liver lesion classification into four categories in computed tomography (CT) images and benign/malignant clusters of microcalcifications (MCs) classification in breast mammograms. Validation was conducted on three datasets: 443 chest x-rays, 118 portal phase CT images of liver lesions, and 260 mammography MCs. The proposed method improves the classical BoVW method for all tested applications. For chest x-ray, area under curve of 0.876 was obtained for enlarged mediastinum identification compared to 0.855 using classical BoVW (with p-value 0.01). For MC classification, a significant improvement of 4% was achieved using our new approach (with p-value = 0.03). For liver lesion classification, an improvement of 6% in sensitivity and 2% in specificity were obtained (with p-value 0.001). We demonstrated that classification based on informative selected set of words results in significant improvement. Our new BoVW approach shows promising results in clinically important domains. Additionally, it can discover relevant parts of images for the task at hand without explicit annotations for training data. This can provide computer-aided support for medical experts in challenging image analysis tasks.

Molecular Survey of Microbial Communities Involved in Concrete Corrosion in Wastewater Collection Systems

EPA Science Inventory

This information is relevant to the development of condition assessment tools associated with the aging water infrastructure research program Corrosion of wastewater collection infrastructure, especially concrete sewers, is a significant cause of deterioration and premature failu...

47 CFR 1.65 - Substantial and significant changes in information furnished by applicants to the Commission.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-10-01

... reportable adjudicated misconduct. Note: The terms adverse finding and adverse final action as used in... time for taking such review has expired under the relevant procedural rules. The pendency of an appeal...

47 CFR 1.65 - Substantial and significant changes in information furnished by applicants to the Commission.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-10-01

... reportable adjudicated misconduct. Note: The terms adverse finding and adverse final action as used in... time for taking such review has expired under the relevant procedural rules. The pendency of an appeal...

Improving Web Searches: Case Study of Quit-Smoking Web Sites for Teenagers

PubMed Central

Skinner, Harvey

2003-01-01

Background The Web has become an important and influential source of health information. With the vast number of Web sites on the Internet, users often resort to popular search sites when searching for information. However, little is known about the characteristics of Web sites returned by simple Web searches for information about smoking cessation for teenagers. Objective To determine the characteristics of Web sites retrieved by search engines about smoking cessation for teenagers and how information quality correlates with the search ranking. Methods The top 30 sites returned by 4 popular search sites in response to the search terms "teen quit smoking" were examined. The information relevance and quality characteristics of these sites were evaluated by 2 raters. Objective site characteristics were obtained using a page-analysis Web site. Results Only 14 of the 30 Web sites are of direct relevance to smoking cessation for teenagers. The readability of about two-thirds of the 14 sites is below an eighth-grade school level and they ranked significantly higher (Kendall rank correlation, tau = -0.39, P= .05) in search-site results than sites with readability above or equal to that grade level. Sites that ranked higher were significantly associated with the presence of e-mail address for contact (tau = -0.46, P= .01), annotated hyperlinks to external sites (tau = -0.39, P= .04), and the presence of meta description tag (tau = -0.48, P= .002). The median link density (number of external sites that have a link to that site) of the Web pages was 6 and the maximum was 735. A higher link density was significantly associated with a higher rank (tau = -0.58, P= .02). Conclusions Using simple search terms on popular search sites to look for information on smoking cessation for teenagers resulted in less than half of the sites being of direct relevance. To improve search efficiency, users could supplement results obtained from simple Web searches with human-maintained Web directories and learn to refine their searches with more advanced search syntax. PMID:14713656

Why relevant chemical information cannot be exchanged without disclosing structures

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Filimonov, Dmitry; Poroikov, Vladimir

2005-09-01

Both society and industry are interested in increasing the safety of pharmaceuticals. Potentially dangerous compounds could be filtered out at early stages of R&D by computer prediction of biological activity and ADMET characteristics. Accuracy of such predictions strongly depends on the quality & quantity of information contained in a training set. Suggestion that some relevant chemical information can be added to such training sets without disclosing chemical structures was generated at the recent ACS Symposium. We presented arguments that such safety exchange of relevant chemical information is impossible. Any relevant information about chemical structures can be used for search of either a particular compound itself or its close analogues. Risk of identifying such structures is enough to prevent pharma industry from relevant chemical information exchange.

Not all choices are created equal: Task-relevant choices enhance motor learning compared to task-irrelevant choices.

PubMed

Carter, Michael J; Ste-Marie, Diane M

2017-12-01

Lewthwaite et al. (2015) reported that the learning benefits of exercising choice (i.e., their self-controlled condition) are not restricted to task-relevant features (e.g., feedback). They found that choosing one's golf ball color (Exp. 1) or choosing which of two tasks to perform at a later time plus which of two artworks to hang (Exp. 2) resulted in better retention than did being denied these same choices (i.e., yoked condition). The researchers concluded that the learning benefits derived from choice, whether irrelevant or relevant to the to-be-learned task, are predominantly motivational because choice is intrinsically rewarding and satisfies basic psychological needs. However, the absence of a group that made task-relevant choices and the lack of psychological measures significantly weakened their conclusions. Here, we investigated how task-relevant and task-irrelevant choices affect motor-skill learning. Participants practiced a spatiotemporal motor task in either a task-relevant group (choice over feedback schedule), a task-irrelevant group (choice over the color of an arm-wrap plus game selection), or a no-choice group. The results showed significantly greater learning in the task-relevant group than in both the task-irrelevant and no-choice groups, who did not differ significantly. Critically, these learning differences were not attributed to differences in perceptions of competence or autonomy, but instead to superior error-estimation abilities. These results challenge the perspective that motivational influences are the root cause of self-controlled learning advantages. Instead, the findings add to the growing evidence highlighting that the informational value gained from task-relevant choices makes a greater relative contribution to these advantages than motivational influences do.

Testing the idea of privileged awareness of self-relevant information.

PubMed

Stein, Timo; Siebold, Alisha; van Zoest, Wieske

2016-03-01

Self-relevant information is prioritized in processing. Some have suggested the mechanism driving this advantage is akin to the automatic prioritization of physically salient stimuli in information processing (Humphreys & Sui, 2015). Here we investigate whether self-relevant information is prioritized for awareness under continuous flash suppression (CFS), as has been found for physical salience. Gabor patches with different orientations were first associated with the labels You or Other. Participants were more accurate in matching the self-relevant association, replicating previous findings of self-prioritization. However, breakthrough into awareness from CFS did not differ between self- and other-associated Gabors. These findings demonstrate that self-relevant information has no privileged access to awareness. Rather than modulating the initial visual processes that precede and lead to awareness, the advantage of self-relevant information may better be characterized as prioritization at later processing stages. (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

ERP C250 Shows the Elderly (Cognitively Normal, Alzheimer’s Disease) Store More Stimuli in Short-Term Memory than Young Adults Do

PubMed Central

Chapman, Robert M.; Gardner, Margaret N.; Mapstone, Mark; Klorman, Rafael; Porsteinsson, Anton P.; Dupree, Haley M.; Antonsdottir, Inga M.; Kamalyan, Lily

2016-01-01

Objective To determine how aging and dementia affect the brain’s initial storing of task-relevant and irrelevant information in short-term memory. Methods We used brain Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to measure short-term memory storage (ERP component C250) in 36 Young Adults, 36 Normal Elderly, and 36 early-stage AD subjects. Participants performed the Number-Letter task, a cognitive paradigm requiring memory storage of a first relevant stimulus to compare it with a second stimulus. Results In Young Adults, C250 was more positive for the first task-relevant stimulus compared to all other stimuli. C250 in Normal Elderly and AD subjects was roughly the same to relevant and irrelevant stimuli in intratrial parts 1–3 but not 4. The AD group had lower C250 to relevant stimuli in part 1. Conclusions Both normal aging and dementia cause less differentiation of relevant from irrelevant information in initial storage. There was a large aging effect involving differences in the pattern of C250 responses of the Young Adult versus the Normal Elderly/AD groups. Also, a potential dementia effect was obtained. Significance C250 is a candidate tool for measuring short-term memory performance on a biological level, as well as a potential marker for memory changes due to normal aging and dementia. PMID:27178862

Coal to methanol feasiblity study: Beluga methanol project. Volume 4: Environmental

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

1981-09-01

The major environmental issues relevant to development of a coal gasification and methanol fuels production facility and related coal mining activities and transportation systems in the west Cook Inlet area, Alaska were assessed. An extensive review into existing information on the Beluga region of west Cook Inlet was conducted and updated with the findings of land resource projects. Specific field activities then were initiated to expand the environmental data base in areas relevant to this project where there was a paucity of information. Based on these findings the project was reviewed in detail to identify significant environmental issues and to outline the state and federal permit requirements to ensure that these element are an integral component of all subsequent project planning and management decisions.

The Intestinal Microbiome in Infectious Diseases: The Clinical Relevance of a Rapidly Emerging Field.

PubMed

Harris, Vanessa C; Haak, Bastiaan W; Boele van Hensbroek, Michaël; Wiersinga, Willem J

2017-01-01

The field of infectious disease is undergoing a paradigm shift as the intestinal microbiome is becoming understood. The aim of this review is to inform infectious disease physicians of the potential relevance of the intestinal microbiome to their practice. We searched Medline using both index and text words relating to infectious diseases, microbiome, and probiotics. Relevant articles published up through 2017 were reviewed within Rayyan. The review illustrates pathophysiologic concepts linking the microbiome and infectious diseases; specifically, the intestinal microbiome's relevance to early immune development, the microbiome and enteric infections, the microbiome's relevance in compromised hosts, and antimicrobial resistance. Within each subject, there are specific examples of diseases and at-risk patient populations where a role for the microbiome has been strongly established. This provides an overview of the significance of the intestinal microbiome to microbiology, pediatric and adult infectious diseases with an underpinning of concepts useful for the practicing clinician.

Access to Attitude-Relevant Information in Memory as a Determinant of Persuasion: The Role of Message and Communicator Attributes.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wood, Wendy; And Others

Research literature shows that people with access to attitude-relevant information in memory are able to draw on relevant beliefs and prior experiences when analyzing a persuasive message. This suggests that people who can retrieve little attitude-relevant information should be less able to engage in systematic processing. Two experiments were…

Relevant climate response tests for stratospheric aerosol injection: A combined ethical and scientific analysis

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lenferna, Georges Alexandre; Russotto, Rick D.; Tan, Amanda; Gardiner, Stephen M.; Ackerman, Thomas P.

2017-06-01

In this paper, we focus on stratospheric sulfate injection as a geoengineering scheme, and provide a combined scientific and ethical analysis of climate response tests, which are a subset of outdoor tests that would seek to impose detectable and attributable changes to climate variables on global or regional scales. We assess the current state of scientific understanding on the plausibility and scalability of climate response tests. Then, we delineate a minimal baseline against which to consider whether certain climate response tests would be relevant for a deployment scenario. Our analysis shows that some climate response tests, such as those attempting to detect changes in regional climate impacts, may not be deployable in time periods relevant to realistic geoengineering scenarios. This might pose significant challenges for justifying stratospheric sulfate aerosol injection deployment overall. We then survey some of the major ethical challenges that proposed climate response tests face. We consider what levels of confidence would be required to ethically justify approving a proposed test; whether the consequences of tests are subject to similar questions of justice, compensation, and informed consent as full-scale deployment; and whether questions of intent and hubris are morally relevant for climate response tests. We suggest further research into laboratory-based work and modeling may help to narrow the scientific uncertainties related to climate response tests, and help inform future ethical debate. However, even if such work is pursued, the ethical issues raised by proposed climate response tests are significant and manifold.

Task-relevant perceptual features can define categories in visual memory too.

PubMed

Antonelli, Karla B; Williams, Carrick C

2017-11-01

Although Konkle, Brady, Alvarez, and Oliva (2010, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139(3), 558) claim that visual long-term memory (VLTM) is organized on underlying conceptual, not perceptual, information, visual memory results from visual search tasks are not well explained by this theory. We hypothesized that when viewing an object, any task-relevant visual information is critical to the organizational structure of VLTM. In two experiments, we examined the organization of VLTM by measuring the amount of retroactive interference created by objects possessing different combinations of task-relevant features. Based on task instructions, only the conceptual category was task relevant or both the conceptual category and a perceptual object feature were task relevant. Findings indicated that when made task relevant, perceptual object feature information, along with conceptual category information, could affect memory organization for objects in VLTM. However, when perceptual object feature information was task irrelevant, it did not contribute to memory organization; instead, memory defaulted to being organized around conceptual category information. These findings support the theory that a task-defined organizational structure is created in VLTM based on the relevance of particular object features and information.

Nematodes Relevance in Soil Quality Management and their Significance as Biomarkers in Aquatic Substrates: Review.

PubMed

Akpheokhai, Leonard I; Oribhabor, Blessing J

2016-01-01

The interaction of man with the ecosystem is a major factor causing environmental pollution and its attendant consequences such as climate change in our world today. Patents relating to nematodes' relevance in soil quality management and their significance as biomarkers in aquatic substrates were reviewed. Nematodes are useful in rapid, easy and inexpensive method for testing the toxicity of substance (e.g. aquatic substrates). This review paper sets out to examine and discuss the issue of soil pollution, functions of nematodes in soil and aquatic substrates as well as bio-indicators in soil health management in terrestrial ecology. The information used were on the basis of secondary sources from previous research. It is abundantly clear that the population dynamics of plant parasitic or free-living nematodes have useful potentials as biomonitor for soil health and other forms of environmental contamination through agricultural activities, industrial pollution and oil spillage, and the analysis of nematode community structure could be used as complementary information obtained from conventional soil testing approaches.

Pathway-based personalized analysis of cancer

PubMed Central

Drier, Yotam; Sheffer, Michal; Domany, Eytan

2013-01-01

We introduce Pathifier, an algorithm that infers pathway deregulation scores for each tumor sample on the basis of expression data. This score is determined, in a context-specific manner, for every particular dataset and type of cancer that is being investigated. The algorithm transforms gene-level information into pathway-level information, generating a compact and biologically relevant representation of each sample. We demonstrate the algorithm’s performance on three colorectal cancer datasets and two glioblastoma multiforme datasets and show that our multipathway-based representation is reproducible, preserves much of the original information, and allows inference of complex biologically significant information. We discovered several pathways that were significantly associated with survival of glioblastoma patients and two whose scores are predictive of survival in colorectal cancer: CXCR3-mediated signaling and oxidative phosphorylation. We also identified a subclass of proneural and neural glioblastoma with significantly better survival, and an EGF receptor-deregulated subclass of colon cancers. PMID:23547110

Perceptions of Information Relevance and Importance under Truel Stress.

DTIC Science & Technology

information relevance and importance was investigated. Control groups exposed to four periods of duel (two nation) conflict did not modify their...perception of information relevance and importance. Experimental groups exposed to four periods of duel conflict, threat of potential truel conflict, threat

Completeness of Reporting of Patient-Relevant Clinical Trial Outcomes: Comparison of Unpublished Clinical Study Reports with Publicly Available Data

PubMed Central

Wieseler, Beate; Wolfram, Natalia; McGauran, Natalie; Kerekes, Michaela F.; Vervölgyi, Volker; Kohlepp, Petra; Kamphuis, Marloes; Grouven, Ulrich

2013-01-01

Background Access to unpublished clinical study reports (CSRs) is currently being discussed as a means to allow unbiased evaluation of clinical research. The Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) routinely requests CSRs from manufacturers for its drug assessments. Our objective was to determine the information gain from CSRs compared to publicly available sources (journal publications and registry reports) for patient-relevant outcomes included in IQWiG health technology assessments (HTAs) of drugs. Methods and Findings We used a sample of 101 trials with full CSRs received for 16 HTAs of drugs completed by IQWiG between 15 January 2006 and 14 February 2011, and analyzed the CSRs and the publicly available sources of these trials. For each document type we assessed the completeness of information on all patient-relevant outcomes included in the HTAs (benefit outcomes, e.g., mortality, symptoms, and health-related quality of life; harm outcomes, e.g., adverse events). We dichotomized the outcomes as “completely reported” or “incompletely reported.” For each document type, we calculated the proportion of outcomes with complete information per outcome category and overall. We analyzed 101 trials with CSRs; 86 had at least one publicly available source, 65 at least one journal publication, and 50 a registry report. The trials included 1,080 patient-relevant outcomes. The CSRs provided complete information on a considerably higher proportion of outcomes (86%) than the combined publicly available sources (39%). With the exception of health-related quality of life (57%), CSRs provided complete information on 78% to 100% of the various benefit outcomes (combined publicly available sources: 20% to 53%). CSRs also provided considerably more information on harms. The differences in completeness of information for patient-relevant outcomes between CSRs and journal publications or registry reports (or a combination of both) were statistically significant for all types of outcomes. The main limitation of our study is that our sample is not representative because only CSRs provided voluntarily by pharmaceutical companies upon request could be assessed. In addition, the sample covered only a limited number of therapeutic areas and was restricted to randomized controlled trials investigating drugs. Conclusions In contrast to CSRs, publicly available sources provide insufficient information on patient-relevant outcomes of clinical trials. CSRs should therefore be made publicly available. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary PMID:24115912

Bringing science to the table: Case studies in science-informed decision making on climate change and beyond

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Goldman, G. T.; Phartiyal, P.; Mulvey, K.

2016-12-01

Federal government officials often rely on the research and advice of scientists to inform their decision making around climate change and other complex topics. Decision makers, however, are constrained by the time and accessibility needed to obtain and incorporate scientific information. At the same time, scientists have limited capacity and incentive to devote significant time to communicating their science to decision makers. The Union of Concerned Scientists has employed several strategies to produce policy-relevant scientific work and to facilitate engagement between scientists and decision makers across research areas. This talk will feature lessons learned and key strategies for science-informed decision making around climate change and other areas of the geosciences. Case studies will include conducting targeted sea level rise studies to inform rulemaking at federal agencies, bringing science to policy discussions on hydraulic fracturing, and leveraging the voice of the scientific community on specific policy proposals around climate change disclosure of companies. Recommendations and lessons learned for producing policy-relevant science and effectively communicating it with decision makers will be offered.

Acceptance of health information technology in health professionals: an application of the revised technology acceptance model.

PubMed

Ketikidis, Panayiotis; Dimitrovski, Tomislav; Lazuras, Lambros; Bath, Peter A

2012-06-01

The response of health professionals to the use of health information technology (HIT) is an important research topic that can partly explain the success or failure of any HIT application. The present study applied a modified version of the revised technology acceptance model (TAM) to assess the relevant beliefs and acceptance of HIT systems in a sample of health professionals (n = 133). Structured anonymous questionnaires were used and a cross-sectional design was employed. The main outcome measure was the intention to use HIT systems. ANOVA was employed to examine differences in TAM-related variables between nurses and medical doctors, and no significant differences were found. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to assess the predictors of HIT usage intentions. The findings showed that perceived ease of use, but not usefulness, relevance and subjective norms directly predicted HIT usage intentions. The present findings suggest that a modification of the original TAM approach is needed to better understand health professionals' support and endorsement of HIT. Perceived ease of use, relevance of HIT to the medical and nursing professions, as well as social influences, should be tapped by information campaigns aiming to enhance support for HIT in healthcare settings.

Software Helps Retrieve Information Relevant to the User

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Mathe, Natalie; Chen, James

2003-01-01

The Adaptive Indexing and Retrieval Agent (ARNIE) is a code library, designed to be used by an application program, that assists human users in retrieving desired information in a hypertext setting. Using ARNIE, the program implements a computational model for interactively learning what information each human user considers relevant in context. The model, called a "relevance network," incrementally adapts retrieved information to users individual profiles on the basis of feedback from the users regarding specific queries. The model also generalizes such knowledge for subsequent derivation of relevant references for similar queries and profiles, thereby, assisting users in filtering information by relevance. ARNIE thus enables users to categorize and share information of interest in various contexts. ARNIE encodes the relevance and structure of information in a neural network dynamically configured with a genetic algorithm. ARNIE maintains an internal database, wherein it saves associations, and from which it returns associated items in response to a query. A C++ compiler for a platform on which ARNIE will be utilized is necessary for creating the ARNIE library but is not necessary for the execution of the software.

40 CFR 1502.22 - Incomplete or unavailable information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... approaches or research methods generally accepted in the scientific community. For the purposes of this... credible scientific evidence which is relevant to evaluating the reasonably foreseeable significant adverse... scientific evidence, is not based on pure conjecture, and is within the rule of reason. (c) The amended...

40 CFR 1502.22 - Incomplete or unavailable information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... approaches or research methods generally accepted in the scientific community. For the purposes of this... credible scientific evidence which is relevant to evaluating the reasonably foreseeable significant adverse... scientific evidence, is not based on pure conjecture, and is within the rule of reason. (c) The amended...

40 CFR 1502.22 - Incomplete or unavailable information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... approaches or research methods generally accepted in the scientific community. For the purposes of this... credible scientific evidence which is relevant to evaluating the reasonably foreseeable significant adverse... scientific evidence, is not based on pure conjecture, and is within the rule of reason. (c) The amended...

Determinant Behavior Characteristics of Older Consumers.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tongren, Hale N.

1988-01-01

The behavior variables in 67 studies of marketing and consumer behavior were analyzed; significant variables relevant to satisfying the needs of older consumers were identified. Meta analysis revealed such factors as price consciousness, use of information sources, habituated shopping, and age-related concerns useful in predicting the consumer…

40 CFR 1502.22 - Incomplete or unavailable information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... approaches or research methods generally accepted in the scientific community. For the purposes of this... credible scientific evidence which is relevant to evaluating the reasonably foreseeable significant adverse... scientific evidence, is not based on pure conjecture, and is within the rule of reason. (c) The amended...

40 CFR 1502.22 - Incomplete or unavailable information.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-07-01

... approaches or research methods generally accepted in the scientific community. For the purposes of this... credible scientific evidence which is relevant to evaluating the reasonably foreseeable significant adverse... scientific evidence, is not based on pure conjecture, and is within the rule of reason. (c) The amended...

TYPES OF INTEGRATION IN RISK ASSESSMENT AND MANAGEMENT, AND WHY THEY ARE NEEDED

EPA Science Inventory

Risk-based decision making requires that the decision makers and stakeholders are informed of all risks that are potentially significant and relevant to the decision. The International Programme on Chemical Safety of the World Health Organization has developed a framework for int...

Entorhinal-Hippocampal Neuronal Circuits Bridge Temporally Discontiguous Events

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kitamura, Takashi; Macdonald, Christopher J.; Tonegawa, Susumu

2015-01-01

The entorhinal cortex (EC)-hippocampal (HPC) network plays an essential role for episodic memory, which preserves spatial and temporal information about the occurrence of past events. Although there has been significant progress toward understanding the neural circuits underlying the spatial dimension of episodic memory, the relevant circuits…

Enhancing Information Awareness Through Directed Qualification of Semantic Relevancy Scoring Operations

DTIC Science & Technology

2014-06-01

analytics to evaluate document relevancy and order query results. 4 Background • Information environment complexity • Relevancy solutions for big data ...027 Primary Topic: Data , Information and Knowledge Alternatives: Organizational Concepts and Approaches; Experimentation, Metrics, and Analysis...instructions, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send

Phase synchronization of delta and theta oscillations increase during the detection of relevant lexical information.

PubMed

Brunetti, Enzo; Maldonado, Pedro E; Aboitiz, Francisco

2013-01-01

During monitoring of the discourse, the detection of the relevance of incoming lexical information could be critical for its incorporation to update mental representations in memory. Because, in these situations, the relevance for lexical information is defined by abstract rules that are maintained in memory, a central aspect to elucidate is how an abstract level of knowledge maintained in mind mediates the detection of the lower-level semantic information. In the present study, we propose that neuronal oscillations participate in the detection of relevant lexical information, based on "kept in mind" rules deriving from more abstract semantic information. We tested our hypothesis using an experimental paradigm that restricted the detection of relevance to inferences based on explicit information, thus controlling for ambiguities derived from implicit aspects. We used a categorization task, in which the semantic relevance was previously defined based on the congruency between a kept in mind category (abstract knowledge), and the lexical semantic information presented. Our results show that during the detection of the relevant lexical information, phase synchronization of neuronal oscillations selectively increases in delta and theta frequency bands during the interval of semantic analysis. These increments occurred irrespective of the semantic category maintained in memory, had a temporal profile specific for each subject, and were mainly induced, as they had no effect on the evoked mean global field power. Also, recruitment of an increased number of pairs of electrodes was a robust observation during the detection of semantic contingent words. These results are consistent with the notion that the detection of relevant lexical information based on a particular semantic rule, could be mediated by increasing the global phase synchronization of neuronal oscillations, which may contribute to the recruitment of an extended number of cortical regions.

Passage relevance models for genomics search.

PubMed

Urbain, Jay; Frieder, Ophir; Goharian, Nazli

2009-03-19

We present a passage relevance model for integrating syntactic and semantic evidence of biomedical concepts and topics using a probabilistic graphical model. Component models of topics, concepts, terms, and document are represented as potential functions within a Markov Random Field. The probability of a passage being relevant to a biologist's information need is represented as the joint distribution across all potential functions. Relevance model feedback of top ranked passages is used to improve distributional estimates of query concepts and topics in context, and a dimensional indexing strategy is used for efficient aggregation of concept and term statistics. By integrating multiple sources of evidence including dependencies between topics, concepts, and terms, we seek to improve genomics literature passage retrieval precision. Using this model, we are able to demonstrate statistically significant improvements in retrieval precision using a large genomics literature corpus.

Point-of-Care Diagnostics for Niche Applications

PubMed Central

Cummins, Brian M.; Ligler, Frances S.; Walker, Glenn M.

2016-01-01

Point-of-care or point-of-use diagnostics are analytical devices that provide clinically relevant information without the need for a core clinical laboratory. In this review we define point-of-care diagnostics as portable versions of assays performed in a traditional clinical chemistry laboratory. This review discusses five areas relevant to human and animal health where increased attention could produce significant impact: veterinary medicine, space travel, sports medicine, emergency medicine, and operating room efficiency. For each of these areas, clinical need, available commercial products, and ongoing research into new devices are highlighted. PMID:26837054

Learned predictiveness training modulates biases towards using boundary or landmark cues during navigation

PubMed Central

Buckley, Matthew G.; Smith, Alastair D.; Haselgrove, Mark

2015-01-01

A number of navigational theories state that learning about landmark information should not interfere with learning about shape information provided by the boundary walls of an environment. A common test of such theories has been to assess whether landmark information will overshadow, or restrict, learning about shape information. Whilst a number of studies have shown that landmarks are not able to overshadow learning about shape information, some have shown that landmarks can, in fact, overshadow learning about shape information. Given the continued importance of theories that grant the shape information that is provided by the boundary of an environment a special status during learning, the experiments presented here were designed to assess whether the relative salience of shape and landmark information could account for the discrepant results of overshadowing studies. In Experiment 1, participants were first trained that either the landmarks within an arena (landmark-relevant), or the shape information provided by the boundary walls of an arena (shape-relevant), were relevant to finding a hidden goal. In a subsequent stage, when novel landmark and shape information were made relevant to finding the hidden goal, landmarks dominated behaviour for those given landmark-relevant training, whereas shape information dominated behaviour for those given shape-relevant training. Experiment 2, which was conducted without prior relevance training, revealed that the landmark cues, unconditionally, dominated behaviour in our task. The results of the present experiments, and the conflicting results from previous overshadowing experiments, are explained in terms of associative models that incorporate an attention variant. PMID:25409751

Evaluating automatic attentional capture by self-relevant information.

PubMed

Ocampo, Brenda; Kahan, Todd A

2016-01-01

Our everyday decisions and memories are inadvertently influenced by self-relevant information. For example, we are faster and more accurate at making perceptual judgments about stimuli associated with ourselves, such as our own face or name, as compared with familiar non-self-relevant stimuli. Humphreys and Sui propose a "self-attention network" to account for these effects, wherein self-relevant stimuli automatically capture our attention and subsequently enhance the perceptual processing of self-relevant information. We propose that the masked priming paradigm and continuous flash suppression represent two ways to experimentally examine these controversial claims.

Optimizing the stimulus presentation paradigm design for the P300-based brain-computer interface using performance prediction.

PubMed

Mainsah, B O; Reeves, G; Collins, L M; Throckmorton, C S

2017-08-01

The role of a brain-computer interface (BCI) is to discern a user's intended message or action by extracting and decoding relevant information from brain signals. Stimulus-driven BCIs, such as the P300 speller, rely on detecting event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to a user attending to relevant or target stimulus events. However, this process is error-prone because the ERPs are embedded in noisy electroencephalography (EEG) data, representing a fundamental problem in communication of the uncertainty in the information that is received during noisy transmission. A BCI can be modeled as a noisy communication system and an information-theoretic approach can be exploited to design a stimulus presentation paradigm to maximize the information content that is presented to the user. However, previous methods that focused on designing error-correcting codes failed to provide significant performance improvements due to underestimating the effects of psycho-physiological factors on the P300 ERP elicitation process and a limited ability to predict online performance with their proposed methods. Maximizing the information rate favors the selection of stimulus presentation patterns with increased target presentation frequency, which exacerbates refractory effects and negatively impacts performance within the context of an oddball paradigm. An information-theoretic approach that seeks to understand the fundamental trade-off between information rate and reliability is desirable. We developed a performance-based paradigm (PBP) by tuning specific parameters of the stimulus presentation paradigm to maximize performance while minimizing refractory effects. We used a probabilistic-based performance prediction method as an evaluation criterion to select a final configuration of the PBP. With our PBP, we demonstrate statistically significant improvements in online performance, both in accuracy and spelling rate, compared to the conventional row-column paradigm. By accounting for refractory effects, an information-theoretic approach can be exploited to significantly improve BCI performance across a wide range of performance levels.

ERP investigation of attentional disengagement from suicide-relevant information in patients with major depressive disorder.

PubMed

Baik, Seung Yeon; Jeong, Minkyung; Kim, Hyang Sook; Lee, Seung-Hwan

2018-01-01

Previous studies suggest the presence of attentional bias towards suicide-relevant information in suicidal individuals. However, the findings are limited by their reliance on behavioral measures. This study investigates the role of difficulty in disengaging attention from suicide-relevant stimuli using the P300 component of event-related potentials (ERPs). Forty-four adults with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) were administered the spatial cueing task using suicide-relevant and negatively-valenced words as cue stimuli. Disengagement difficulty was measured using reaction time and P300 during invalid trials. P300 amplitudes at Pz were higher in suicide-relevant compared to negatively-valenced word condition on invalid trials for participants with low rates of suicidal behavior. However, no such difference was found among participants with high rates of suicidal behavior. P300 amplitudes for suicide-relevant word condition were negatively correlated with "lifetime suicide ideation and attempt" at Pz. No significant results were found for the reaction time data, indicating that the ERP may be more sensitive in capturing the attentional disengagement effect. The groups were divided according to Suicidal Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised (SBQ-R) total score. Neutral stimulus was not included as cue stimuli. Most participants were under medication during the experiment. Our results indicate that patients with MDD and low rates of suicidal behavior show difficulty in disengaging attention from suicide-relevant stimuli. We suggest that suicide-specific disengagement difficulties may be related to recentness of suicide attempt and that acquired capability for suicide may contribute to reduced disengagement difficulties. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Read-out of emotional information from iconic memory: the longevity of threatening stimuli.

PubMed

Kuhbandner, Christof; Spitzer, Bernhard; Pekrun, Reinhard

2011-05-01

Previous research has shown that emotional stimuli are more likely than neutral stimuli to be selected by attention, indicating that the processing of emotional information is prioritized. In this study, we examined whether the emotional significance of stimuli influences visual processing already at the level of transient storage of incoming information in iconic memory, before attentional selection takes place. We used a typical iconic memory task in which the delay of a poststimulus cue, indicating which of several visual stimuli has to be reported, was varied. Performance decreased rapidly with increasing cue delay, reflecting the fast decay of information stored in iconic memory. However, although neutral stimulus information and emotional stimulus information were initially equally likely to enter iconic memory, the subsequent decay of the initially stored information was slowed for threatening stimuli, a result indicating that fear-relevant information has prolonged availability for read-out from iconic memory. This finding provides the first evidence that emotional significance already facilitates stimulus processing at the stage of iconic memory.

Intelligent medical information filtering.

PubMed

Quintana, Y

1998-01-01

This paper describes an intelligent information filtering system to assist users to be notified of updates to new and relevant medical information. Among the major problems users face is the large volume of medical information that is generated each day, and the need to filter and retrieve relevant information. The Internet has dramatically increased the amount of electronically accessible medical information and reduced the cost and time needed to publish. The opportunity of the Internet for the medical profession and consumers is to have more information to make decisions and this could potentially lead to better medical decisions and outcomes. However, without the assistance from professional medical librarians, retrieving new and relevant information from databases and the Internet remains a challenge. Many physicians do not have access to the services of a medical librarian. Most physicians indicate on surveys that they do not prefer to retrieve the literature themselves, or visit libraries because of the lack of recent materials, poor organisation and indexing of materials, lack of appropriate and available material, and lack of time. The information filtering system described in this paper records the online web browsing behaviour of each user and creates a user profile of the index terms found on the web pages visited by the user. A relevance-ranking algorithm then matches the user profiles to the index terms of new health care web pages that are added each day. The system creates customised summaries of new information for each user. A user can then connect to the web site to read the new information. Relevance feedback buttons on each page ask the user to rate the usefulness of the page to their immediate information needs. Errors in relevance ranking are reduced in this system by having both the user profile and medical information represented in the same representation language using a controlled vocabulary. This system also updates the user profiles, automatically relieving this burden from the user, but also allowing the user to explicitly state preferences. An initial evaluation of this system was done with health consumers using a web site on consumer health. It was found that users often modified their criteria for what they considered relevant not only between browsing sessions but also during a session. A user's criteria for what is relevant is constantly changing as they interact with the information. New revised metrics of recall and precision are needed to account for the partially relevant judgements and the dynamically changing criteria of users. Future research, development, and evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems will need to take into account the users' dynamically changing criteria of relevance.

[Evaluation of Contextual Factors in Psychosomatic Rehabilitation].

PubMed

Bülau, N I; Kessemeier, F; Petermann, F; Bassler, M; Kobelt, A

2016-12-01

Objectives: Although individualized and ICF-oriented implementation of rehabilitation treatment requires knowledge of relevant contextual factors, there is a lack of operationalized documentation and measurement tools to evaluate these factors. Therefore, an ICF-oriented semi-structured interview was designed. Methods: 20 contextual factors were externally assessed whether they negatively affected mental functioning and participation of psychosomatic patients. Additionally, psychometric scales were applied. Results: Six relevant impairing contextual factors were identified. Contextual factors significantly correlated with psychometric scales. Patients with higher contextual impairment showed significantly higher psychological stress levels. Conclusions: Anamnesis of contextual factors at the beginning of psychosomatic rehabilitation yields important information for therapy planning. Further research on contextual factors in medical rehabilitation is needed. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart · New York.

The Summary of Performance as Transition "Passport" to Employment and Independent Living

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kochhar-Bryant, Carol A.

2007-01-01

Individuals with moderate to significant disabilities experience the most serious challenges in accessing employment and independent living when they exit high school. Therefore, the process of transition assessment conducted in school should be structured to provide relevant information for adult service providers and employers. For individuals…

Anthropology in the Pre-Collegiate Curriculum.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Collier, Malcolm; Dethlefsen, Edwin S.

1968-01-01

The paper suggests steps for developing an anthropology curriculum at the secondary level and offers an excerpt from an experimental teacher's guide. The development involves four steps: selection of the most significant topics from the rich mass of anthropological information, identification of the relevance of each topic to the high school…

Incorporating Non-Relevance Information in the Estimation of Query Models

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-11-01

experiments in relevance feedback. In Salton , G., editor, The SMART Retrieval System – Exper- iments in Automatic Document Processing, pages 337– 354...W. (2001). Relevance based lan- guage models. In SIGIR ’01. Rocchio, J. (1971). Relevance feedback in information re- trieval. In Salton , G., editor

49 CFR 209.111 - Informal response and assessment.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

..., information or materials, submitted by the respondent and relevant information presented during any conference... consideration of an informal response, including any relevant information presented at a conference, the Chief... written explanations, information or other materials as respondent may desire in answer to the charges or...

The use of stereotypes and individuating information in political person perception.

PubMed

Crawford, Jarret T; Jussim, Lee; Madon, Stephanie; Cain, Thomas R; Stevens, Sean T

2011-04-01

This article introduces the political person perception model, which identifies conditions under which perceivers rely on stereotypes (party membership), individuating information (issue position), or both in political person perception. Three studies supported the model's predictions. Study 1 showed that perceivers gave primacy to target information that was narrowly relevant to a judgment, whether that information was stereotypic or individuating. Study 2 found that perceivers relied exclusively on individuating information when it was narrowly relevant to the judgment and relied on both stereotype and individuating information when individuating information was not narrowly relevant to the judgment but did imply a political ideology. Study 3 replicated these findings in a more ecologically valid context and showed that people relied on party information in the absence of narrowly relevant policy positions and when individuating information did not imply a political ideology. Implications for political person perception and theories of stereotyping are discussed.

Pathway-GPS and SIGORA: identifying relevant pathways based on the over-representation of their gene-pair signatures

PubMed Central

Foroushani, Amir B.K.; Brinkman, Fiona S.L.

2013-01-01

Motivation. Predominant pathway analysis approaches treat pathways as collections of individual genes and consider all pathway members as equally informative. As a result, at times spurious and misleading pathways are inappropriately identified as statistically significant, solely due to components that they share with the more relevant pathways. Results. We introduce the concept of Pathway Gene-Pair Signatures (Pathway-GPS) as pairs of genes that, as a combination, are specific to a single pathway. We devised and implemented a novel approach to pathway analysis, Signature Over-representation Analysis (SIGORA), which focuses on the statistically significant enrichment of Pathway-GPS in a user-specified gene list of interest. In a comparative evaluation of several published datasets, SIGORA outperformed traditional methods by delivering biologically more plausible and relevant results. Availability. An efficient implementation of SIGORA, as an R package with precompiled GPS data for several human and mouse pathway repositories is available for download from http://sigora.googlecode.com/svn/. PMID:24432194

Objective and automated protocols for the evaluation of biomedical search engines using No Title Evaluation protocols.

PubMed

Campagne, Fabien

2008-02-29

The evaluation of information retrieval techniques has traditionally relied on human judges to determine which documents are relevant to a query and which are not. This protocol is used in the Text Retrieval Evaluation Conference (TREC), organized annually for the past 15 years, to support the unbiased evaluation of novel information retrieval approaches. The TREC Genomics Track has recently been introduced to measure the performance of information retrieval for biomedical applications. We describe two protocols for evaluating biomedical information retrieval techniques without human relevance judgments. We call these protocols No Title Evaluation (NT Evaluation). The first protocol measures performance for focused searches, where only one relevant document exists for each query. The second protocol measures performance for queries expected to have potentially many relevant documents per query (high-recall searches). Both protocols take advantage of the clear separation of titles and abstracts found in Medline. We compare the performance obtained with these evaluation protocols to results obtained by reusing the relevance judgments produced in the 2004 and 2005 TREC Genomics Track and observe significant correlations between performance rankings generated by our approach and TREC. Spearman's correlation coefficients in the range of 0.79-0.92 are observed comparing bpref measured with NT Evaluation or with TREC evaluations. For comparison, coefficients in the range 0.86-0.94 can be observed when evaluating the same set of methods with data from two independent TREC Genomics Track evaluations. We discuss the advantages of NT Evaluation over the TRels and the data fusion evaluation protocols introduced recently. Our results suggest that the NT Evaluation protocols described here could be used to optimize some search engine parameters before human evaluation. Further research is needed to determine if NT Evaluation or variants of these protocols can fully substitute for human evaluations.

76 FR 77312 - Information Collection Activities

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-12-12

... a merger or common-control arrangement. The relevant information collections are described in more... available through the Federal Information Relay Service (FIRS) at 1-(800) 877- 8339. Relevant STB... DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION Surface Transportation Board Information Collection Activities AGENCY...

[Pitfalls in informed consent: a statistical analysis of malpractice law suits].

PubMed

Echigo, Junko

2014-05-01

In medical malpractice law suits, the notion of informed consent is often relevant in assessing whether negligence can be attributed to the medical practitioner who has caused injury to a patient. Furthermore, it is not rare that courts award damages for a lack of appropriate informed consent alone. In this study, two results were arrived at from a statistical analysis of medical malpractice law suits. One, unexpectedly, was that the severity of a patient's illness made no significant difference to whether damages were awarded. The other was that cases of typical medical treatment that national medical insurance does not cover were involved significantly more often than insured treatment cases. In cases where damages were awarded, the courts required more disclosure and written documents of information by medical practitioners, especially about complications and adverse effects that the patient might suffer.

Orangutans (Pongo abelii) seek information about tool functionality in a metacognition tubes task.

PubMed

Mulcahy, Nicholas J

2016-11-01

Nonhuman primates appear to engage in metacognition by knowing when they need to search for relevant information for solving the tubes task. The task involves presenting subjects with a number of tubes with only 1 having food hidden inside. Before choosing, subjects look inside the tubes more often when they do not know which 1 contains the food (hidden trials) compared to when they do know this information (visible trials). It is argued, however, that nonmetacognitive general food searching strategies can explain this looking behavior. To address this issue, 3 orangutans were tested with a novel tubes task in which they were only required to seek information about tool functionality. The results showed that subjects had the ability to search for tool functionality but no subject looked significantly more in hidden trials compared to visible trials. Subjects were retested with the same condition and given a second condition in which the cost of a wrong choice was increased. In both conditions, 2 subjects looked significantly more inside the hidden trials compared to the visible trials. Subjects were also tested with the traditional tubes task in which food was hidden inside 1 tube. All subjects looked inside the tubes significantly more in the hidden trials compared to the visible trials. However, subjects conducted more excessive looks compared to when looking for tool functionality. I suggest that excessive searches may be caused by food being a strong stimulus and discuss the relevance of this possibility for metacognitive research involving the tubes task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Use and perceived relevance of health-related Internet sites and online contact with peers among young people with juvenile idiopathic arthritis.

PubMed

van Pelt, Philomine A; Drossaert, Constance H C; Kruize, Aike A; Huisman, Jaap; Dolhain, Radboud J E M; Wulffraat, Nico M

2015-10-01

To evaluate the frequency of use and relevance of health-related Internet (HRI) sites and online peer support groups and their association with demographic, disease-related and psychosocial variables in young people with JIA. In a cross-sectional study, 176 young people (10-27 years of age) with JIA were asked to complete a questionnaire. The frequency of using HRI sites (regarding information, medication use and aspects of JIA relating to social life), online peer contact and perceived relevance of HRI sites and online peer communication were determined. Associations with demographic variables, disease activity, medication, emotional behaviour and coping were also examined. Seventy-one per cent of the 142 respondents had used the Internet to search for general information on JIA, but specific topics, such as medication, were searched for less often. Twenty-five per cent of respondents had visited a forum or had contacted peers online. The perceived relevance of HRI sites and online peer contact was rated low (median 2.0 and 1.0, respectively; scale 0-10). Apart from female gender (P < 0.01), none of the demographic and disease-related factors were associated with HRI site use. Coping styles, confrontation and reassuring thoughts were associated with increased HRI site use, but only in males. Internalizing and externalizing problem behaviour were not significantly associated. The frequency of HRI site use among young people with JIA was less than expected and was considered of low relevance. HRI sites in their present form cannot replace traditional information as an additional source to increase knowledge. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Rheumatology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Persistent recruitment of somatosensory cortex during active maintenance of hand images in working memory.

PubMed

Galvez-Pol, A; Calvo-Merino, B; Capilla, A; Forster, B

2018-07-01

Working memory (WM) supports temporary maintenance of task-relevant information. This process is associated with persistent activity in the sensory cortex processing the information (e.g., visual stimuli activate visual cortex). However, we argue here that more multifaceted stimuli moderate this sensory-locked activity and recruit distinctive cortices. Specifically, perception of bodies recruits somatosensory cortex (SCx) beyond early visual areas (suggesting embodiment processes). Here we explore persistent activation in processing areas beyond the sensory cortex initially relevant to the modality of the stimuli. Using visual and somatosensory evoked-potentials in a visual WM task, we isolated different levels of visual and somatosensory involvement during encoding of body and non-body-related images. Persistent activity increased in SCx only when maintaining body images in WM, whereas visual/posterior regions' activity increased significantly when maintaining non-body images. Our results bridge WM and embodiment frameworks, supporting a dynamic WM process where the nature of the information summons specific processing resources. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Divided attention selectively impairs memory for self-relevant information.

PubMed

Turk, David J; Brady-van den Bos, Mirjam; Collard, Philip; Gillespie-Smith, Karri; Conway, Martin A; Cunningham, Sheila J

2013-05-01

Information that is relevant to oneself tends to be remembered more than information that relates to other people, but the role of attention in eliciting this "self-reference effect" is unclear. In the present study, we assessed the importance of attention in self-referential encoding using an ownership paradigm, which required participants to encode items under conditions of imagined ownership by themselves or by another person. Previous work has established that this paradigm elicits a robust self-reference effect, with more "self-owned" items being remembered than "other-owned" items. Access to attentional resources was manipulated using divided-attention tasks at encoding. A significant self-reference effect emerged under full-attention conditions and was related to an increase in episodic recollection for self-owned items, but dividing attention eliminated this memory advantage. These findings are discussed in relation to the nature of self-referential cognition and the importance of attentional resources at encoding in the manifestation of the self-reference effect in memory.

Active glass-type human augmented cognition system considering attention and intention

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kim, Bumhwi; Ojha, Amitash; Lee, Minho

2015-10-01

Human cognition is the result of an interaction of several complex cognitive processes with limited capabilities. Therefore, the primary objective of human cognitive augmentation is to assist and expand these limited human cognitive capabilities independently or together. In this study, we propose a glass-type human augmented cognition system, which attempts to actively assist human memory functions by providing relevant, necessary and intended information by constantly assessing intention of the user. To achieve this, we exploit selective attention and intention processes. Although the system can be used in various real-life scenarios, we test the performance of the system in a person identity scenario. To detect the intended face, the system analyses the gaze points and change in pupil size to determine the intention of the user. An assessment of the gaze points and change in pupil size together indicates that the user intends to know the identity and information about the person in question. Then, the system retrieves several clues through speech recognition system and retrieves relevant information about the face, which is finally displayed through head-mounted display. We present the performance of several components of the system. Our results show that the active and relevant assistance based on users' intention significantly helps the enhancement of memory functions.

Sex Differences in Memory for Sexually-Relevant Information

PubMed Central

McCall, Katie M.; Rellini, Alessandra H.; Seal, Brooke N.

2010-01-01

The present study was conducted in an attempt to examine potential differences between men and women in memory for sexually relevant information. A total of 77 undergraduate students (31 men, 46 women) read a sexual story and completed memory tasks in response to the story. Based on previous research, we hypothesized that differences would exist between men and women for different types of sexual information and we hoped to understand whether specific variables (sexual experiences, sexual functioning, and reactions to the sexual story) could explain such differences. Men were more likely to remember erotic or explicit details of the story, whereas women were more likely to remember love and emotional bonding details of the story. Additionally, women were more likely to recall information referencing the characters in the story. Results from regression analyses indicated that sexual desire and satisfaction were related to differences in recall and recognition of the love and emotional bonding aspects of the story, and that frequency of sexual intercourse was related to differences in the recall of erotic or explicit details of the story. The significant results obtained in this study correspond to previously established sex differences in memory for sexual information. PMID:17186127

Determinants of feedback retention in soccer players.

PubMed

Januário, Nuno; Rosado, António; Mesquita, Isabel; Gallego, José; Aguilar-Parra, José M

2016-06-01

This study analyzed soccer players' retention of coaches' feedback during training sessions. We intended to determine if the retention of information was influenced by the athletes' personal characteristic (age, gender and the sports level), the quantity of information included in coach's feedback (the number of ideas and redundancy), athletes' perception of the relevance of the feedback information and athletes' motivation as well as the attention level. The study that was conducted over the course of 18 sessions of soccer practice, involved 12 coaches (8 males, 4 females) and 342 athletes (246 males, 96 females), aged between 10 and 18 years old. All coach and athlete interventions were transposed to a written protocol and submitted to content analysis. Descriptive statistics and multiple linear regression were calculated. The results showed that a substantial part of the information was not retained by the athletes; in 65.5% of cases, athletes experienced difficulty in completely reproducing the ideas of the coaches and, on average, the value of feedback retention was 57.0%. Six variables with a statistically significant value were found: gender, the athletes' sports level, redundancy, the number of transmitted ideas, athletes' perception of the relevance of the feedback information and the athletes' motivation level.

Understanding the effectiveness of the entertainment-education strategy: an investigation of how audience involvement, message processing, and message design influence health information recall.

PubMed

Quintero Johnson, Jessie M; Harrison, Kristen; Quick, Brian L

2013-01-01

A growing body of evidence suggests that entertainment-education (EE) is a promising health communication strategy. The purpose of this study was to identify some of the factors that facilitate and hinder audience involvement with EE messages. Using confirmatory factor analysis, the authors introduce a construct they call experiential involvement, which describes the experience of being cognitively and emotionally involved with EE messages and is a product of transportation into an EE text and identification with EE characters. Using an experimental design, the authors also investigated how reports of experiential involvement and health information recall varied depending on the degree to which the educational content was well integrated with the narrative content in EE messages. Findings indicated that integration significantly influenced health information recall. Results indicated that experiential involvement and the perception that the health topic in EE messages was personally relevant predicted participants' systematic processing of the information in EE messages. Contrary to expectation, personal relevance did not predict experiential involvement, and systematic message processing was negatively related to health information recall. Implications for the construction of EE messages and the study of the EE strategy are discussed.

[Framework for the strengthening of health information systems in Peru].

PubMed

Curioso, Walter H; Espinoza-Portilla, Elizabeth

2015-01-01

In this article we present the essential components and policies that are most relevant regarding the conceptual framework to strengthen the health information systems in Peru. The article also presents the main policies, actions and strategies made in the field of electronic health in Peru that are most significant. The health information systems in Peru play a key role and are expected to achieve an integrated and interoperable information system. This will allow health information to be complete, efficient, of good quality and available in a timely manner to achieve better quality of life for people and allow meaningful modernization of public health in the context of health reform in Peru.

A survey of the neuroscience resource landscape: perspectives from the neuroscience information framework.

PubMed

Cachat, Jonathan; Bandrowski, Anita; Grethe, Jeffery S; Gupta, Amarnath; Astakhov, Vadim; Imam, Fahim; Larson, Stephen D; Martone, Maryann E

2012-01-01

The number of available neuroscience resources (databases, tools, materials, and networks) available via the Web continues to expand, particularly in light of newly implemented data sharing policies required by funding agencies and journals. However, the nature of dense, multifaceted neuroscience data and the design of classic search engine systems make efficient, reliable, and relevant discovery of such resources a significant challenge. This challenge is especially pertinent for online databases, whose dynamic content is largely opaque to contemporary search engines. The Neuroscience Information Framework was initiated to address this problem of finding and utilizing neuroscience-relevant resources. Since its first production release in 2008, NIF has been surveying the resource landscape for the neurosciences, identifying relevant resources and working to make them easily discoverable by the neuroscience community. In this chapter, we provide a survey of the resource landscape for neuroscience: what types of resources are available, how many there are, what they contain, and most importantly, ways in which these resources can be utilized by the research community to advance neuroscience research. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Enhanced Polarimetric Radar Imaging Using Cross-Channel Coupling Constraints

DTIC Science & Technology

2014-06-19

4 2.2 Polarimetry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2.2.1 Scattering Matrix...significant advances in polarimetry , the study of target aspects that can be determined by changing the transmitted and received wave polarization state...constraints. 1.2 Layout Chapter 2 presents relevant background information on polarimetry , SAR, and current image enhancement techniques. The Sinclair

Spatial dependence of predictions from image segmentation: A variogram-based method to determine appropriate scales for producing land-management information

USDA-ARS?s Scientific Manuscript database

A significant challenge in ecological studies has been defining scales of observation that correspond to the relevant ecological scales for organisms or processes of interest. Remote sensing has become commonplace in ecological studies and management, but the default resolution of imagery often used...

G-Bean: an ontology-graph based web tool for biomedical literature retrieval

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

Background Currently, most people use NCBI's PubMed to search the MEDLINE database, an important bibliographical information source for life science and biomedical information. However, PubMed has some drawbacks that make it difficult to find relevant publications pertaining to users' individual intentions, especially for non-expert users. To ameliorate the disadvantages of PubMed, we developed G-Bean, a graph based biomedical search engine, to search biomedical articles in MEDLINE database more efficiently. Methods G-Bean addresses PubMed's limitations with three innovations: (1) Parallel document index creation: a multithreaded index creation strategy is employed to generate the document index for G-Bean in parallel; (2) Ontology-graph based query expansion: an ontology graph is constructed by merging four major UMLS (Version 2013AA) vocabularies, MeSH, SNOMEDCT, CSP and AOD, to cover all concepts in National Library of Medicine (NLM) database; a Personalized PageRank algorithm is used to compute concept relevance in this ontology graph and the Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting scheme is used to re-rank the concepts. The top 500 ranked concepts are selected for expanding the initial query to retrieve more accurate and relevant information; (3) Retrieval and re-ranking of documents based on user's search intention: after the user selects any article from the existing search results, G-Bean analyzes user's selections to determine his/her true search intention and then uses more relevant and more specific terms to retrieve additional related articles. The new articles are presented to the user in the order of their relevance to the already selected articles. Results Performance evaluation with 106 OHSUMED benchmark queries shows that G-Bean returns more relevant results than PubMed does when using these queries to search the MEDLINE database. PubMed could not even return any search result for some OHSUMED queries because it failed to form the appropriate Boolean query statement automatically from the natural language query strings. G-Bean is available at http://bioinformatics.clemson.edu/G-Bean/index.php. Conclusions G-Bean addresses PubMed's limitations with ontology-graph based query expansion, automatic document indexing, and user search intention discovery. It shows significant advantages in finding relevant articles from the MEDLINE database to meet the information need of the user. PMID:25474588

G-Bean: an ontology-graph based web tool for biomedical literature retrieval.

PubMed

Wang, James Z; Zhang, Yuanyuan; Dong, Liang; Li, Lin; Srimani, Pradip K; Yu, Philip S

2014-01-01

Currently, most people use NCBI's PubMed to search the MEDLINE database, an important bibliographical information source for life science and biomedical information. However, PubMed has some drawbacks that make it difficult to find relevant publications pertaining to users' individual intentions, especially for non-expert users. To ameliorate the disadvantages of PubMed, we developed G-Bean, a graph based biomedical search engine, to search biomedical articles in MEDLINE database more efficiently. G-Bean addresses PubMed's limitations with three innovations: (1) Parallel document index creation: a multithreaded index creation strategy is employed to generate the document index for G-Bean in parallel; (2) Ontology-graph based query expansion: an ontology graph is constructed by merging four major UMLS (Version 2013AA) vocabularies, MeSH, SNOMEDCT, CSP and AOD, to cover all concepts in National Library of Medicine (NLM) database; a Personalized PageRank algorithm is used to compute concept relevance in this ontology graph and the Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) weighting scheme is used to re-rank the concepts. The top 500 ranked concepts are selected for expanding the initial query to retrieve more accurate and relevant information; (3) Retrieval and re-ranking of documents based on user's search intention: after the user selects any article from the existing search results, G-Bean analyzes user's selections to determine his/her true search intention and then uses more relevant and more specific terms to retrieve additional related articles. The new articles are presented to the user in the order of their relevance to the already selected articles. Performance evaluation with 106 OHSUMED benchmark queries shows that G-Bean returns more relevant results than PubMed does when using these queries to search the MEDLINE database. PubMed could not even return any search result for some OHSUMED queries because it failed to form the appropriate Boolean query statement automatically from the natural language query strings. G-Bean is available at http://bioinformatics.clemson.edu/G-Bean/index.php. G-Bean addresses PubMed's limitations with ontology-graph based query expansion, automatic document indexing, and user search intention discovery. It shows significant advantages in finding relevant articles from the MEDLINE database to meet the information need of the user.

Point-of-care diagnostics for niche applications.

PubMed

Cummins, Brian M; Ligler, Frances S; Walker, Glenn M

2016-01-01

Point-of-care or point-of-use diagnostics are analytical devices that provide clinically relevant information without the need for a core clinical laboratory. In this review we define point-of-care diagnostics as portable versions of assays performed in a traditional clinical chemistry laboratory. This review discusses five areas relevant to human and animal health where increased attention could produce significant impact: veterinary medicine, space travel, sports medicine, emergency medicine, and operating room efficiency. For each of these areas, clinical need, available commercial products, and ongoing research into new devices are highlighted. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

High-speed data search

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Driscoll, James N.

1994-01-01

The high-speed data search system developed for KSC incorporates existing and emerging information retrieval technology to help a user intelligently and rapidly locate information found in large textual databases. This technology includes: natural language input; statistical ranking of retrieved information; an artificial intelligence concept called semantics, where 'surface level' knowledge found in text is used to improve the ranking of retrieved information; and relevance feedback, where user judgements about viewed information are used to automatically modify the search for further information. Semantics and relevance feedback are features of the system which are not available commercially. The system further demonstrates focus on paragraphs of information to decide relevance; and it can be used (without modification) to intelligently search all kinds of document collections, such as collections of legal documents medical documents, news stories, patents, and so forth. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of statistical ranking, our semantic improvement, and relevance feedback.

A Markov chain model for image ranking system in social networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zin, Thi Thi; Tin, Pyke; Toriu, Takashi; Hama, Hiromitsu

2014-03-01

In today world, different kinds of networks such as social, technological, business and etc. exist. All of the networks are similar in terms of distributions, continuously growing and expanding in large scale. Among them, many social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and many others provides a powerful abstraction of the structure and dynamics of diverse kinds of inter personal connection and interaction. Generally, the social network contents are created and consumed by the influences of all different social navigation paths that lead to the contents. Therefore, identifying important and user relevant refined structures such as visual information or communities become major factors in modern decision making world. Moreover, the traditional method of information ranking systems cannot be successful due to their lack of taking into account the properties of navigation paths driven by social connections. In this paper, we propose a novel image ranking system in social networks by using the social data relational graphs from social media platform jointly with visual data to improve the relevance between returned images and user intentions (i.e., social relevance). Specifically, we propose a Markov chain based Social-Visual Ranking algorithm by taking social relevance into account. By using some extensive experiments, we demonstrated the significant and effectiveness of the proposed social-visual ranking method.

FRATIS concept of operations : assessment of relevant prior and ongoing research and industry practices.

DOT National Transportation Integrated Search

2012-08-01

This report summarizes the state of the practice in freight-related advanced traveler information systems (ATIS) and assesses their relevance to the development of a Freight Advanced Traveler Information System (FRATIS). The report includes relevant ...

[Abortion and medical education in Mexico].

PubMed

de León-Aguirre, Deyanira González; Billings, Deborah L; Ramírez-Sánchez, Rubén

2008-01-01

Medical education in Mexico has significant deficiencies in the area of sexual and reproductive health and does not offer students the information needed for dealing with abortion as a relevant problem in the professional practice of medicine. Medical education does not offer options for the clinical training of future physicians in integrated models for abortion care, which include the use of safe and effective technologies as well as a range of services to respond to women's needs. These limitations are especially relevant in countries such as Mexico where unsafe abortion continues to be a significant public health problem. In addition, the legal context for abortion has begun to change during the current decade; therefore, the search for alternatives to incorporate a broad approach to abortion in medical school programs is a task that cannot be postponed.

Risk and safety perception on urban and rural roads: Effects of environmental features, driver age and risk sensitivity.

PubMed

Cox, Jolene A; Beanland, Vanessa; Filtness, Ashleigh J

2017-10-03

The ability to detect changing visual information is a vital component of safe driving. In addition to detecting changing visual information, drivers must also interpret its relevance to safety. Environmental changes considered to have high safety relevance will likely demand greater attention and more timely responses than those considered to have lower safety relevance. The aim of this study was to explore factors that are likely to influence perceptions of risk and safety regarding changing visual information in the driving environment. Factors explored were the environment in which the change occurs (i.e., urban vs. rural), the type of object that changes, and the driver's age, experience, and risk sensitivity. Sixty-three licensed drivers aged 18-70 years completed a hazard rating task, which required them to rate the perceived hazardousness of changing specific elements within urban and rural driving environments. Three attributes of potential hazards were systematically manipulated: the environment (urban, rural); the type of object changed (road sign, car, motorcycle, pedestrian, traffic light, animal, tree); and its inherent safety risk (low risk, high risk). Inherent safety risk was manipulated by either varying the object's placement, on/near or away from the road, or altering an infrastructure element that would require a change to driver behavior. Participants also completed two driving-related risk perception tasks, rating their relative crash risk and perceived risk of aberrant driving behaviors. Driver age was not significantly associated with hazard ratings, but individual differences in perceived risk of aberrant driving behaviors predicted hazard ratings, suggesting that general driving-related risk sensitivity plays a strong role in safety perception. In both urban and rural scenes, there were significant associations between hazard ratings and inherent safety risk, with low-risk changes perceived as consistently less hazardous than high-risk impact changes; however, the effect was larger for urban environments. There were also effects of object type, with certain objects rated as consistently more safety relevant. In urban scenes, changes involving pedestrians were rated significantly more hazardous than all other objects, and in rural scenes, changes involving animals were rated as significantly more hazardous. Notably, hazard ratings were found to be higher in urban compared with rural driving environments, even when changes were matched between environments. This study demonstrates that drivers perceive rural roads as less risky than urban roads, even when similar scenarios occur in both environments. Age did not affect hazard ratings. Instead, the findings suggest that the assessment of risk posed by hazards is influenced more by individual differences in risk sensitivity. This highlights the need for driver education to account for appraisal of hazards' risk and relevance, in addition to hazard detection, when considering factors that promote road safety.

Autism, Attention, and Alpha Oscillations: An Electrophysiological Study of Attentional Capture.

PubMed

Keehn, Brandon; Westerfield, Marissa; Müller, Ralph-Axel; Townsend, Jeanne

2017-09-01

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with deficits in adaptively orienting attention to behaviorally-relevant information. Neural oscillatory activity plays a key role in brain function and provides a high-resolution temporal marker of attention dynamics. Alpha band (8-12 Hz) activity is associated with both selecting task-relevant stimuli and filtering task-irrelevant information. The present study used electroencephalography (EEG) to examine alpha-band oscillatory activity associated with attentional capture in nineteen children with ASD and twenty-one age- and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) children. Participants completed a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm designed to investigate responses to behaviorally-relevant targets and contingent attention capture by task-irrelevant distractors, which either did or did not share a behaviorally-relevant feature. Participants also completed six minutes of eyes-open resting EEG. In contrast to their TD peers, children with ASD did not evidence posterior alpha desynchronization to behaviorally-relevant targets. Additionally, reduced target-related desynchronization and poorer target detection were associated with increased ASD symptomatology. TD children also showed behavioral and electrophysiological evidence of contingent attention capture, whereas children with ASD showed no behavioral facilitation or alpha desynchronization to distractors that shared a task-relevant feature. Lastly, children with ASD had significantly decreased resting alpha power, and for all participants increased resting alpha levels were associated with greater task-related alpha desynchronization. These results suggest that in ASD under-responsivity and impairments in orienting to salient events within their environment are reflected by atypical EEG oscillatory neurodynamics, which may signify atypical arousal levels and/or an excitatory/inhibitory imbalance.

Comment on "Properties of (26)Mg and (26)Si in the sd shell model and the determination of the (25)Al(p,gamma) (26) Si reaction rate"

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

Chipps, K.; Bardayan, Daniel W; Liang, J Felix

2011-01-01

A recent discussion of theoretical work on the {sup 25}Al(p,{gamma}){sup 26}Si astrophysical reaction rate [W.A. Richter, B. Alex Brown, A. Signoracci and M. Wiescher Phys. Rev. C 83 065803 (2011)] omits some current and relevant experimental information in forming its scientific conclusions. Accounting for this new information has the potential to significantly alter the reaction rate derived in the paper.

Tool for Constructing Data Albums for Significant Weather Events

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kulkarni, A.; Ramachandran, R.; Conover, H.; McEniry, M.; Goodman, H.; Zavodsky, B. T.; Braun, S. A.; Wilson, B. D.

2012-12-01

Case study analysis and climatology studies are common approaches used in Atmospheric Science research. Research based on case studies involves a detailed description of specific weather events using data from different sources, to characterize physical processes in play for a given event. Climatology-based research tends to focus on the representativeness of a given event, by studying the characteristics and distribution of a large number of events. To gather relevant data and information for case studies and climatology analysis is tedious and time consuming; current Earth Science data systems are not suited to assemble multi-instrument, multi mission datasets around specific events. For example, in hurricane science, finding airborne or satellite data relevant to a given storm requires searching through web pages and data archives. Background information related to damages, deaths, and injuries requires extensive online searches for news reports and official storm summaries. We will present a knowledge synthesis engine to create curated "Data Albums" to support case study analysis and climatology studies. The technological challenges in building such a reusable and scalable knowledge synthesis engine are several. First, how to encode domain knowledge in a machine usable form? This knowledge must capture what information and data resources are relevant and the semantic relationships between the various fragments of information and data. Second, how to extract semantic information from various heterogeneous sources including unstructured texts using the encoded knowledge? Finally, how to design a structured database from the encoded knowledge to store all information and to support querying? The structured database must allow both knowledge overviews of an event as well as drill down capability needed for detailed analysis. An application ontology driven framework is being used to design the knowledge synthesis engine. The knowledge synthesis engine is being applied to build a portal for hurricane case studies at the Global Hydrology and Resource Center (GHRC), a NASA Data Center. This portal will auto-generate Data Albums for specific hurricane events, compiling information from distributed resources such as NASA field campaign collections, relevant data sets, storm reports, pictures, videos and other useful sources.

Accelerating global access to plant diversity information.

PubMed

Lughadha, Eimear Nic; Miller, Chuck

2009-11-01

Botanic gardens play key roles in the development and dissemination of plant information resources. Drivers for change have included progress in information technology, growing public expectations of electronic access and international conservation policy. Great advances have been made in the quantity, quality and accessibility of plant information in digital form and the extent to which information from multiple providers can be accessed through a single portal. However, significant challenges remain to be addressed in making botanic gardens resources maximally accessible and impactful, not least the overwhelming volume of material which still awaits digitisation. The year 2010 represents an opportunity for botanic gardens to showcase their collaborative achievements in delivery of electronic plant information and reinforce their relevance to pressing environmental issues.

Prioritizing biological pathways by recognizing context in time-series gene expression data.

PubMed

Lee, Jusang; Jo, Kyuri; Lee, Sunwon; Kang, Jaewoo; Kim, Sun

2016-12-23

The primary goal of pathway analysis using transcriptome data is to find significantly perturbed pathways. However, pathway analysis is not always successful in identifying pathways that are truly relevant to the context under study. A major reason for this difficulty is that a single gene is involved in multiple pathways. In the KEGG pathway database, there are 146 genes, each of which is involved in more than 20 pathways. Thus activation of even a single gene will result in activation of many pathways. This complex relationship often makes the pathway analysis very difficult. While we need much more powerful pathway analysis methods, a readily available alternative way is to incorporate the literature information. In this study, we propose a novel approach for prioritizing pathways by combining results from both pathway analysis tools and literature information. The basic idea is as follows. Whenever there are enough articles that provide evidence on which pathways are relevant to the context, we can be assured that the pathways are indeed related to the context, which is termed as relevance in this paper. However, if there are few or no articles reported, then we should rely on the results from the pathway analysis tools, which is termed as significance in this paper. We realized this concept as an algorithm by introducing Context Score and Impact Score and then combining the two into a single score. Our method ranked truly relevant pathways significantly higher than existing pathway analysis tools in experiments with two data sets. Our novel framework was implemented as ContextTRAP by utilizing two existing tools, TRAP and BEST. ContextTRAP will be a useful tool for the pathway based analysis of gene expression data since the user can specify the context of the biological experiment in a set of keywords. The web version of ContextTRAP is available at http://biohealth.snu.ac.kr/software/contextTRAP .

In the Dark: Young Men's Stories of Sexual Initiation in the Absence of Relevant Sexual Health Information

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kubicek, Katrina; Beyer, William J.; Weiss, George; Iverson, Ellen; Kipke, Michele D.

2010-01-01

A growing body of research has investigated the effectiveness of abstinence-only sexual education. There remains a dearth of research on the relevant sexual health information available to young men who have sex with men (YMSM). Drawing on a mixed-methods study with 526 YMSM, this study explores how and where YMSM receive relevant information on…

Local versus Global Information Relevance in Website Use: A Case Study with the Information Literacy Portal AlfinEEES

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Marco, Francisco Javier Garcia; Pinto, Maria

2010-01-01

Introduction: A model to explore the relations among local and global relevance-based information behaviour is proposed that is based on objective and subjective measures of the relevance of the Website contents. Method: Global interest for the Website was researched using data on visits, while local use was explored with two surveys on the…

The impact of written information and counseling (WOMAN-PRO II Program) on symptom outcomes in women with vulvar neoplasia: A multicenter randomized controlled phase II study.

PubMed

Raphaelis, Silvia; Mayer, Hanna; Ott, Stefan; Mueller, Michael D; Steiner, Enikö; Joura, Elmar; Senn, Beate

2017-07-01

To determine whether written information and/or counseling based on the WOMAN-PRO II Program decreases symptom prevalence in women with vulvar neoplasia by a clinically relevant degree, and to explore the differences between the 2 interventions in symptom prevalence, symptom distress prevalence, and symptom experience. A multicenter randomized controlled parallel-group phase II trial with 2 interventions provided to patients after the initial diagnosis was performed in Austria and Switzerland. Women randomized to written information received a predefined set of leaflets concerning wound care and available healthcare services. Women allocated to counseling were additionally provided with 5 consultations by an Advanced Practice Nurse (APN) between the initial diagnosis and 6months post-surgery that focused on symptom management, utilization of healthcare services, and health-related decision-making. Symptom outcomes were simultaneously measured 5 times to the counseling time points. A total of 49 women with vulvar neoplasia participated in the study. Symptom prevalence decreased in women with counseling by a clinically relevant degree, but not in women with written information. Sporadically, significant differences between the 2 interventions could be observed in individual items, but not in the total scales or subscales of the symptom outcomes. The results indicate that counseling may reduce symptom prevalence in women with vulvar neoplasia by a clinically relevant extent. The observed group differences between the 2 interventions slightly favor counseling over written information. The results justify testing the benefit of counseling thoroughly in a comparative phase III trial. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Data Albums: An Event Driven Search, Aggregation and Curation Tool for Earth Science

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ramachandran, Rahul; Kulkarni, Ajinkya; Maskey, Manil; Bakare, Rohan; Basyal, Sabin; Li, Xiang; Flynn, Shannon

2014-01-01

One of the largest continuing challenges in any Earth science investigation is the discovery and access of useful science content from the increasingly large volumes of Earth science data and related information available. Approaches used in Earth science research such as case study analysis and climatology studies involve gathering discovering and gathering diverse data sets and information to support the research goals. Research based on case studies involves a detailed description of specific weather events using data from different sources, to characterize physical processes in play for a specific event. Climatology-based research tends to focus on the representativeness of a given event, by studying the characteristics and distribution of a large number of events. This allows researchers to generalize characteristics such as spatio-temporal distribution, intensity, annual cycle, duration, etc. To gather relevant data and information for case studies and climatology analysis is both tedious and time consuming. Current Earth science data systems are designed with the assumption that researchers access data primarily by instrument or geophysical parameter. Those who know exactly the datasets of interest can obtain the specific files they need using these systems. However, in cases where researchers are interested in studying a significant event, they have to manually assemble a variety of datasets relevant to it by searching the different distributed data systems. In these cases, a search process needs to be organized around the event rather than observing instruments. In addition, the existing data systems assume users have sufficient knowledge regarding the domain vocabulary to be able to effectively utilize their catalogs. These systems do not support new or interdisciplinary researchers who may be unfamiliar with the domain terminology. This paper presents a specialized search, aggregation and curation tool for Earth science to address these existing challenges. The search tool automatically creates curated "Data Albums", aggregated collections of information related to a specific science topic or event, containing links to relevant data files (granules) from different instruments; tools and services for visualization and analysis; and information about the event contained in news reports, images or videos to supplement research analysis. Curation in the tool is driven via an ontology based relevancy ranking algorithm to filter out non-relevant information and data.

Developing topic-specific search filters for PubMed with click-through data.

PubMed

Li, J; Lu, Z

2013-01-01

Search filters have been developed and demonstrated for better information access to the immense and ever-growing body of publications in the biomedical domain. However, to date the number of filters remains quite limited because the current filter development methods require significant human efforts in manual document review and filter term selection. In this regard, we aim to investigate automatic methods for generating search filters. We present an automated method to develop topic-specific filters on the basis of users' search logs in PubMed. Specifically, for a given topic, we first detect its relevant user queries and then include their corresponding clicked articles to serve as the topic-relevant document set accordingly. Next, we statistically identify informative terms that best represent the topic-relevant document set using a background set composed of topic irrelevant articles. Lastly, the selected representative terms are combined with Boolean operators and evaluated on benchmark datasets to derive the final filter with the best performance. We applied our method to develop filters for four clinical topics: nephrology, diabetes, pregnancy, and depression. For the nephrology filter, our method obtained performance comparable to the state of the art (sensitivity of 91.3%, specificity of 98.7%, precision of 94.6%, and accuracy of 97.2%). Similarly, high-performing results (over 90% in all measures) were obtained for the other three search filters. Based on PubMed click-through data, we successfully developed a high-performance method for generating topic-specific search filters that is significantly more efficient than existing manual methods. All data sets (topic-relevant and irrelevant document sets) used in this study and a demonstration system are publicly available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Lu/downloads/CQ_filter/

Developing Topic-Specific Search Filters for PubMed with Click-Through Data

PubMed Central

Li, Jiao; Lu, Zhiyong

2013-01-01

Summary Objectives Search filters have been developed and demonstrated for better information access to the immense and ever-growing body of publications in the biomedical domain. However, to date the number of filters remains quite limited because the current filter development methods require significant human efforts in manual document review and filter term selection. In this regard, we aim to investigate automatic methods for generating search filters. Methods We present an automated method to develop topic-specific filters on the basis of users’ search logs in PubMed. Specifically, for a given topic, we first detect its relevant user queries and then include their corresponding clicked articles to serve as the topic-relevant document set accordingly. Next, we statistically identify informative terms that best represent the topic-relevant document set using a background set composed of topic irrelevant articles. Lastly, the selected representative terms are combined with Boolean operators and evaluated on benchmark datasets to derive the final filter with the best performance. Results We applied our method to develop filters for four clinical topics: nephrology, diabetes, pregnancy, and depression. For the nephrology filter, our method obtained performance comparable to the state of the art (sensitivity of 91.3%, specificity of 98.7%, precision of 94.6%, and accuracy of 97.2%). Similarly, high-performing results (over 90% in all measures) were obtained for the other three search filters. Conclusion Based on PubMed click-through data, we successfully developed a high-performance method for generating topic-specific search filters that is significantly more efficient than existing manual methods. All data sets (topic-relevant and irrelevant document sets) used in this study and a demonstration system are publicly available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Lu/downloads/CQ_filter/ PMID:23666447

16 CFR 1101.21 - Form of notice and opportunity to comment.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... other relevant information the Commission intends to include with the disclosure. If the Commission... information, including a request for explanatory data or other relevant information for the Commission's... ACT REGULATIONS INFORMATION DISCLOSURE UNDER SECTION 6(b) OF THE CONSUMER PRODUCT SAFETY ACT Procedure...

Term Relevance Weights in On-Line Information Retrieval

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Salton, G.; Waldstein, R. K.

1978-01-01

Term relevance weighting systems in interactive information retrieval are reviewed. An experiment in which information retrieval users ranked query terms in decreasing order of presumed importance prior to actual search and retrieval is described. (Author/KP)

aCGH-MAS: Analysis of aCGH by means of Multiagent System

PubMed Central

Benito, Rocío; Bajo, Javier; Rodríguez, Ana Eugenia; Abáigar, María

2015-01-01

There are currently different techniques, such as CGH arrays, to study genetic variations in patients. CGH arrays analyze gains and losses in different regions in the chromosome. Regions with gains or losses in pathologies are important for selecting relevant genes or CNVs (copy-number variations) associated with the variations detected within chromosomes. Information corresponding to mutations, genes, proteins, variations, CNVs, and diseases can be found in different databases and it would be of interest to incorporate information of different sources to extract relevant information. This work proposes a multiagent system to manage the information of aCGH arrays, with the aim of providing an intuitive and extensible system to analyze and interpret the results. The agent roles integrate statistical techniques to select relevant variations and visualization techniques for the interpretation of the final results and to extract relevant information from different sources of information by applying a CBR system. PMID:25874203

Spatially characterizing visitor use and its association with informal trails in Yosemite Valley meadows.

PubMed

Walden-Schreiner, Chelsey; Leung, Yu-Fai

2013-07-01

Ecological impacts associated with nature-based recreation and tourism can compromise park and protected area goals if left unrestricted. Protected area agencies are increasingly incorporating indicator-based management frameworks into their management plans to address visitor impacts. Development of indicators requires empirical evaluation of indicator measures and examining their ecological and social relevance. This study addresses the development of the informal trail indicator in Yosemite National Park by spatially characterizing visitor use in open landscapes and integrating use patterns with informal trail condition data to examine their spatial association. Informal trail and visitor use data were collected concurrently during July and August of 2011 in three, high-use meadows of Yosemite Valley. Visitor use was clustered at statistically significant levels in all three study meadows. Spatial data integration found no statistically significant differences between use patterns and trail condition class. However, statistically significant differences were found between the distance visitors were observed from informal trails and visitor activity type with active activities occurring closer to trail corridors. Gender was also found to be significant with male visitors observed further from trail corridors. Results highlight the utility of integrated spatial analysis in supporting indicator-based monitoring and informing management of open landscapes. Additional variables for future analysis and methodological improvements are discussed.

Spatially Characterizing Visitor Use and Its Association with Informal Trails in Yosemite Valley Meadows

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Walden-Schreiner, Chelsey; Leung, Yu-Fai

2013-07-01

Ecological impacts associated with nature-based recreation and tourism can compromise park and protected area goals if left unrestricted. Protected area agencies are increasingly incorporating indicator-based management frameworks into their management plans to address visitor impacts. Development of indicators requires empirical evaluation of indicator measures and examining their ecological and social relevance. This study addresses the development of the informal trail indicator in Yosemite National Park by spatially characterizing visitor use in open landscapes and integrating use patterns with informal trail condition data to examine their spatial association. Informal trail and visitor use data were collected concurrently during July and August of 2011 in three, high-use meadows of Yosemite Valley. Visitor use was clustered at statistically significant levels in all three study meadows. Spatial data integration found no statistically significant differences between use patterns and trail condition class. However, statistically significant differences were found between the distance visitors were observed from informal trails and visitor activity type with active activities occurring closer to trail corridors. Gender was also found to be significant with male visitors observed further from trail corridors. Results highlight the utility of integrated spatial analysis in supporting indicator-based monitoring and informing management of open landscapes. Additional variables for future analysis and methodological improvements are discussed.

Farmers' Options to Address Water Scarcity in a Changing Climate: Case Studies from two Basins in Mediterranean Chile.

PubMed

Roco, Lisandro; Poblete, David; Meza, Francisco; Kerrigan, George

2016-12-01

Irrigated agriculture in Mediterranean areas faces tremendous challenges because of its exposure to hydroclimatic variability, increasing competition for water from different sectors, and the possibility of a climatic change. In this context, efficient management of water resources emerges as a critical issue. This requires the adoption of technological innovations, investment in infrastructure, adequate institutional arrangements, and informed decision makers. To understand farmers' perceptions and their implementation of climate change adaptation strategies with regards to water management, primary information was captured in the Limarí and Maule river basins in Chile. Farmers identified stressors for agriculture; climate change, droughts, and lack of water appeared as the most relevant stressors compared to others productive, economic, and institutional factors; revealing a rising relevance of climate related factors. While most producers perceived climate changes in recent years (92.9 %), a significant proportion (61.1 %) claim to have experienced drought, whereas only a fraction (31.9 %) have implemented a strategy to deal with this situation. Identified actions were classified in four groups: investments for water accumulation, modernization of irrigation systems, rationalization of water use, and partnership activities. Using a multinomial logit model these strategies were related to socioeconomic and productive characteristics. Results show that gender and farm size are relevant for investments, implementation and improvement of irrigation systems. For all the strategies described, access to weather information was a relevant element. The study provides empirical evidence of a recent increase in the importance assigned to climate factors by producers and adaptation options that can be supported by agricultural policy.

Farmers' Options to Address Water Scarcity in a Changing Climate: Case Studies from two Basins in Mediterranean Chile

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Roco, Lisandro; Poblete, David; Meza, Francisco; Kerrigan, George

2016-12-01

Irrigated agriculture in Mediterranean areas faces tremendous challenges because of its exposure to hydroclimatic variability, increasing competition for water from different sectors, and the possibility of a climatic change. In this context, efficient management of water resources emerges as a critical issue. This requires the adoption of technological innovations, investment in infrastructure, adequate institutional arrangements, and informed decision makers. To understand farmers' perceptions and their implementation of climate change adaptation strategies with regards to water management, primary information was captured in the Limarí and Maule river basins in Chile. Farmers identified stressors for agriculture; climate change, droughts, and lack of water appeared as the most relevant stressors compared to others productive, economic, and institutional factors; revealing a rising relevance of climate related factors. While most producers perceived climate changes in recent years (92.9 %), a significant proportion (61.1 %) claim to have experienced drought, whereas only a fraction (31.9 %) have implemented a strategy to deal with this situation. Identified actions were classified in four groups: investments for water accumulation, modernization of irrigation systems, rationalization of water use, and partnership activities. Using a multinomial logit model these strategies were related to socioeconomic and productive characteristics. Results show that gender and farm size are relevant for investments, implementation and improvement of irrigation systems. For all the strategies described, access to weather information was a relevant element. The study provides empirical evidence of a recent increase in the importance assigned to climate factors by producers and adaptation options that can be supported by agricultural policy.

Climate change as an ecosystem architect: implications to rare plant ecology, conservation, and restoration

Treesearch

Constance I. Millar

2003-01-01

Recent advances in earth system sciences have revealed significant new information relevant to rare plant ecology and conservation. Analysis of climate change at high resolution with new and precise proxies of paleotemperatures reveals a picture over the past two million years of oscillatory climate change operating simultaneously at multiple timescales. Low-frequency...

Succeed or Else!: Reflections on the 50th Anniversary of the "Journal of Educational Administration"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Thomas, A. Ross

2012-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the key individuals, associations and significant events contributing to the establishment and first 50 years of successful publication of the "Journal of Educational Administration". Design/methodology/approach: This paper is historical in design. Information relevant to its 50 years of…

Mediating Policy-Relevant Evidence at Speed: Are Systematic Reviews of Systematic Reviews a Useful Approach?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Caird, Jenny; Sutcliffe, Katy; Kwan, Irene; Dickson, Kelly; Thomas, James

2015-01-01

When swift, accurate appraisal of evidence is required to inform policy concerning broad research questions, and budgetary constraints limit the employment of large research teams, researchers face a significant challenge which is sometimes met by reviewing existing systematic reviews. In this paper we highlight the challenges inherent in the…

How To Evaluate Lessons from the Past with Illustrations from the Case of Pearl Harbor.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Durfee, Mary

Policy makers use past experience and history to think about current and potential problems and to explain policies and problems to others. Decision makers may be overly influenced by significant personally-experienced events that loom so large in their eyes that details and related relevant information may pale in comparison. Deficiencies in…

Permutation importance: a corrected feature importance measure.

PubMed

Altmann, André; Toloşi, Laura; Sander, Oliver; Lengauer, Thomas

2010-05-15

In life sciences, interpretability of machine learning models is as important as their prediction accuracy. Linear models are probably the most frequently used methods for assessing feature relevance, despite their relative inflexibility. However, in the past years effective estimators of feature relevance have been derived for highly complex or non-parametric models such as support vector machines and RandomForest (RF) models. Recently, it has been observed that RF models are biased in such a way that categorical variables with a large number of categories are preferred. In this work, we introduce a heuristic for normalizing feature importance measures that can correct the feature importance bias. The method is based on repeated permutations of the outcome vector for estimating the distribution of measured importance for each variable in a non-informative setting. The P-value of the observed importance provides a corrected measure of feature importance. We apply our method to simulated data and demonstrate that (i) non-informative predictors do not receive significant P-values, (ii) informative variables can successfully be recovered among non-informative variables and (iii) P-values computed with permutation importance (PIMP) are very helpful for deciding the significance of variables, and therefore improve model interpretability. Furthermore, PIMP was used to correct RF-based importance measures for two real-world case studies. We propose an improved RF model that uses the significant variables with respect to the PIMP measure and show that its prediction accuracy is superior to that of other existing models. R code for the method presented in this article is available at http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/ approximately altmann/download/PIMP.R CONTACT: altmann@mpi-inf.mpg.de, laura.tolosi@mpi-inf.mpg.de Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Is Information Still Relevant?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ma, Lia

2013-01-01

Introduction: The term "information" in information science does not share the characteristics of those of a nomenclature: it does not bear a generally accepted definition and it does not serve as the bases and assumptions for research studies. As the data deluge has arrived, is the concept of information still relevant for information…

Anticipation by basketball defenders: an explanation based on the three-dimensional inverted pendulum model.

PubMed

Fujii, Keisuke; Shinya, Masahiro; Yamashita, Daichi; Kouzaki, Motoki; Oda, Shingo

2014-01-01

We previously estimated the timing when ball game defenders detect relevant information through visual input for reacting to an attacker's running direction after a cutting manoeuvre, called cue timing. The purpose of this study was to investigate what specific information is relevant for defenders, and how defenders process this information to decide on their opponents' running direction. In this study, we hypothesised that defenders extract information regarding the position and velocity of the attackers' centre of mass (CoM) and the contact foot. We used a model which simulates the future trajectory of the opponent's CoM based upon an inverted pendulum movement. The hypothesis was tested by comparing observed defender's cue timing, model-estimated cue timing using the inverted pendulum model (IPM cue timing) and cue timing using only the current CoM position (CoM cue timing). The IPM cue timing was defined as the time when the simulated pendulum falls leftward or rightward given the initial values for position and velocity of the CoM and the contact foot at the time. The model-estimated IPM cue timing and the empirically observed defender's cue timing were comparable in median value and were significantly correlated, whereas the CoM cue timing was significantly more delayed than the IPM and the defender's cue timings. Based on these results, we discuss the possibility that defenders may be able to anticipate the future direction of an attacker by forwardly simulating inverted pendulum movement.

Remote evaluation of remote console information retrieval system (NASA/RECON)

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Coles, V. L.

1971-01-01

The technique is described for NASA user evaluation. It consists of sending out an evaluation form with each literature search. The results are presented which are derived from a compilation of user responses. In an eleven-month period in which evaluation forms went out with 3,001 searches, 33.6% of the forms were completed and returned. The returns showed that 88.5% of the respondents found the searches suitable to their needs, 81% learned of valuable new references from the searches, and 93.5% received the searches in time to meet their needs. The significance of relevance or precision ratio in relation to user satisfaction is discussed, and an extrapolation from user responses resulted in a relevance ratio of 49.3%. Some of the general comments found in the responses are analyzed as indicators of what the users expected from the information retrieval service.

Meta-analytically informed network analysis of resting state FMRI reveals hyperconnectivity in an introspective socio-affective network in depression.

PubMed

Schilbach, Leonhard; Müller, Veronika I; Hoffstaedter, Felix; Clos, Mareike; Goya-Maldonado, Roberto; Gruber, Oliver; Eickhoff, Simon B

2014-01-01

Alterations of social cognition and dysfunctional interpersonal expectations are thought to play an important role in the etiology of depression and have, thus, become a key target of psychotherapeutic interventions. The underlying neurobiology, however, remains elusive. Based upon the idea of a close link between affective and introspective processes relevant for social interactions and alterations thereof in states of depression, we used a meta-analytically informed network analysis to investigate resting-state functional connectivity in an introspective socio-affective (ISA) network in individuals with and without depression. Results of our analysis demonstrate significant differences between the groups with depressed individuals showing hyperconnectivity of the ISA network. These findings demonstrate that neurofunctional alterations exist in individuals with depression in a neural network relevant for introspection and socio-affective processing, which may contribute to the interpersonal difficulties that are linked to depressive symptomatology.

Meta-Analytically Informed Network Analysis of Resting State fMRI Reveals Hyperconnectivity in an Introspective Socio-Affective Network in Depression

PubMed Central

Schilbach, Leonhard; Müller, Veronika I.; Hoffstaedter, Felix; Clos, Mareike; Goya-Maldonado, Roberto

2014-01-01

Alterations of social cognition and dysfunctional interpersonal expectations are thought to play an important role in the etiology of depression and have, thus, become a key target of psychotherapeutic interventions. The underlying neurobiology, however, remains elusive. Based upon the idea of a close link between affective and introspective processes relevant for social interactions and alterations thereof in states of depression, we used a meta-analytically informed network analysis to investigate resting-state functional connectivity in an introspective socio-affective (ISA) network in individuals with and without depression. Results of our analysis demonstrate significant differences between the groups with depressed individuals showing hyperconnectivity of the ISA network. These findings demonstrate that neurofunctional alterations exist in individuals with depression in a neural network relevant for introspection and socio-affective processing, which may contribute to the interpersonal difficulties that are linked to depressive symptomatology. PMID:24759619

Longitudinal Analysis of New Information Types in Clinical Notes

PubMed Central

Zhang, Rui; Pakhomov, Serguei; Melton, Genevieve B.

2014-01-01

It is increasingly recognized that redundant information in clinical notes within electronic health record (EHR) systems is ubiquitous, significant, and may negatively impact the secondary use of these notes for research and patient care. We investigated several automated methods to identify redundant versus relevant new information in clinical reports. These methods may provide a valuable approach to extract clinically pertinent information and further improve the accuracy of clinical information extraction systems. In this study, we used UMLS semantic types to extract several types of new information, including problems, medications, and laboratory information. Automatically identified new information highly correlated with manual reference standard annotations. Methods to identify different types of new information can potentially help to build up more robust information extraction systems for clinical researchers as well as aid clinicians and researchers in navigating clinical notes more effectively and quickly identify information pertaining to changes in health states. PMID:25717418

Effects of Knowledge and Display Design on Comprehension of Complex Graphics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Canham, Matt; Hegarty, Mary

2010-01-01

In two experiments, participants made inferences from weather maps, before and after they received instruction about relevant meteorological principles. Different versions of the maps showed either task-relevant information alone, or both task-relevant and task-irrelevant information. Participants improved on the inference task after instruction,…

Adaptive Memory: Survival Processing Enhances Retention

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Nairne, James S.; Thompson, Sarah R.; Pandeirada, Josefa N. S.

2007-01-01

The authors investigated the idea that memory systems might have evolved to help us remember fitness-relevant information--specifically, information relevant to survival. In 4 incidental learning experiments, people were asked to rate common nouns for their survival relevance (e.g., in securing food, water, or protection from predators); in…

Physicians’ duty to recontact and update genetic advice

PubMed Central

Stevens, Yvonne A; Senner, Grant D; Marchant, Gary E

2017-01-01

This perspective addresses whether physicians have a duty to recontact former or current patients to update clinical advice based on newly discovered genomic information. Genetic information is unique compared with other medical data in that the underlying data do not appreciably change during the patients’ lifetime, but the clinical significance of that information will continue to evolve. Based on relevant case law and guidelines, there is no general, established legal duty for physicians to affirmatively recontact former or current patients to update clinical advice based on newly discovered genetic information. However, integration of genomics into clinical practice is advancing quickly, and there may be limited, specific situations where a physician may have a duty to provide updated genetic information. PMID:29158769

Prioritising the relevant information for learning and decision making within orbital and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

PubMed

Walton, Mark E; Chau, Bolton K H; Kennerley, Steven W

2015-02-01

Our environment and internal states are frequently complex, ambiguous and dynamic, meaning we need to have selection mechanisms to ensure we are basing our decisions on currently relevant information. Here, we review evidence that orbitofrontal (OFC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) play conserved, critical but distinct roles in this process. While OFC may use specific sensory associations to enhance task-relevant information, particularly in the context of learning, VMPFC plays a role in ensuring irrelevant information does not impinge on the decision in hand.

CERES Web Links

Atmospheric Science Data Center

2013-03-21

...   Web Links to Relevant CERES Information Relevant information about CERES, CERES references, ... Instrument Working Group Home Page Aerosol Retrieval Web Page  (Center for Satellite Applications and Research) ...

Effects of Information Availability on Command-and-Control Decision Making: Performance, Trust, and Situation Awareness.

PubMed

Marusich, Laura R; Bakdash, Jonathan Z; Onal, Emrah; Yu, Michael S; Schaffer, James; O'Donovan, John; Höllerer, Tobias; Buchler, Norbou; Gonzalez, Cleotilde

2016-03-01

We investigated how increases in task-relevant information affect human decision-making performance, situation awareness (SA), and trust in a simulated command-and-control (C2) environment. Increased information is often associated with an improvement of SA and decision-making performance in networked organizations. However, previous research suggests that increasing information without considering the task relevance and the presentation can impair performance. We used a simulated C2 task across two experiments. Experiment 1 varied the information volume provided to individual participants and measured the speed and accuracy of decision making for task performance. Experiment 2 varied information volume and information reliability provided to two participants acting in different roles and assessed decision-making performance, SA, and trust between the paired participants. In both experiments, increased task-relevant information volume did not improve task performance. In Experiment 2, increased task-relevant information volume reduced self-reported SA and trust, and incorrect source reliability information led to poorer task performance and SA. These results indicate that increasing the volume of information, even when it is accurate and task relevant, is not necessarily beneficial to decision-making performance. Moreover, it may even be detrimental to SA and trust among team members. Given the high volume of available and shared information and the safety-critical and time-sensitive nature of many decisions, these results have implications for training and system design in C2 domains. To avoid decrements to SA, interpersonal trust, and decision-making performance, information presentation within C2 systems must reflect human cognitive processing limits and capabilities. © 2016, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

Attention Increases Spike Count Correlations between Visual Cortical Areas

PubMed Central

Cohen, Marlene R.

2016-01-01

Visual attention, which improves perception of attended locations or objects, has long been known to affect many aspects of the responses of neuronal populations in visual cortex. There are two nonmutually exclusive hypotheses concerning the neuronal mechanisms that underlie these perceptual improvements. The first hypothesis, that attention improves the information encoded by a population of neurons in a particular cortical area, has considerable physiological support. The second hypothesis is that attention improves perception by selectively communicating relevant visual information. This idea has been tested primarily by measuring interactions between neurons on very short timescales, which are mathematically nearly independent of neuronal interactions on longer timescales. We tested the hypothesis that attention changes the way visual information is communicated between cortical areas on longer timescales by recording simultaneously from neurons in primary visual cortex (V1) and the middle temporal area (MT) in rhesus monkeys. We used two independent and complementary approaches. Our correlative experiment showed that attention increases the trial-to-trial response variability that is shared between the two areas. In our causal experiment, we electrically microstimulated V1 and found that attention increased the effect of stimulation on MT responses. Together, our results suggest that attention affects both the way visual stimuli are encoded within a cortical area and the extent to which visual information is communicated between areas on behaviorally relevant timescales. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Visual attention dramatically improves the perception of attended stimuli. Attention has long been thought to act by selecting relevant visual information for further processing. It has been hypothesized that this selection is accomplished by increasing communication between neurons that encode attended information in different cortical areas. We recorded simultaneously from neurons in primary visual cortex and the middle temporal area while rhesus monkeys performed an attention task. We found that attention increased shared variability between neurons in the two areas and that attention increased the effect of microstimulation in V1 on the firing rates of MT neurons. Our results provide support for the hypothesis that attention increases communication between neurons in different brain areas on behaviorally relevant timescales. PMID:27413161

Information extraction for enhanced access to disease outbreak reports.

PubMed

Grishman, Ralph; Huttunen, Silja; Yangarber, Roman

2002-08-01

Document search is generally based on individual terms in the document. However, for collections within limited domains it is possible to provide more powerful access tools. This paper describes a system designed for collections of reports of infectious disease outbreaks. The system, Proteus-BIO, automatically creates a table of outbreaks, with each table entry linked to the document describing that outbreak; this makes it possible to use database operations such as selection and sorting to find relevant documents. Proteus-BIO consists of a Web crawler which gathers relevant documents; an information extraction engine which converts the individual outbreak events to a tabular database; and a database browser which provides access to the events and, through them, to the documents. The information extraction engine uses sets of patterns and word classes to extract the information about each event. Preparing these patterns and word classes has been a time-consuming manual operation in the past, but automated discovery tools now make this task significantly easier. A small study comparing the effectiveness of the tabular index with conventional Web search tools demonstrated that users can find substantially more documents in a given time period with Proteus-BIO.

Technological Advances in Cardiovascular Safety Assessment Decrease Preclinical Animal Use and Improve Clinical Relevance.

PubMed

Berridge, Brian R; Schultze, A Eric; Heyen, Jon R; Searfoss, George H; Sarazan, R Dustan

2016-12-01

Cardiovascular (CV) safety liabilities are significant concerns for drug developers and preclinical animal studies are predominately where those liabilities are characterized before patient exposures. Steady progress in technology and laboratory capabilities is enabling a more refined and informative use of animals in those studies. The application of surgically implantable and telemetered instrumentation in the acute assessment of drug effects on CV function has significantly improved historical approaches that involved anesthetized or restrained animals. More chronically instrumented animals and application of common clinical imaging assessments like echocardiography and MRI extend functional and in-life structural assessments into the repeat-dose setting. A growing portfolio of circulating CV biomarkers is allowing longitudinal and repeated measures of cardiac and vascular injury and dysfunction better informing an understanding of temporal pathogenesis and allowing earlier detection of undesirable effects. In vitro modeling systems of the past were limited by their lack of biological relevance to the in vivo human condition. Advances in stem cell technology and more complex in vitro modeling platforms are quickly creating more opportunity to supplant animals in our earliest assessments for liabilities. Continuing improvement in our capabilities in both animal and nonanimal modeling should support a steady decrease in animal use for primary liability identification and optimize the translational relevance of the animal studies we continue to do. © The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Child Decision-Making: On the Burden of Predecisional Information Search

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lindow, Stefanie; Betsch, Tilmann

2018-01-01

In many decision situations, individuals must actively search information before they can make a satisfying choice. In such instances, individuals must be aware of the fact that not all information may be equally relevant for the choice at hand--thus, individuals should weight information by its respective relevance. We compared children's and…

When Do Children Trust the Expert? Benevolence Information Influences Children's Trust More than Expertise

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Landrum, Asheley R.; Mills, Candice M.; Johnston, Angie M.

2013-01-01

How do children use informant niceness, meanness, and expertise when choosing between informant claims and crediting informants with knowledge? In Experiment 1, preschoolers met two experts providing conflicting claims for which only one had relevant expertise. Five-year-olds endorsed the relevant expert's claim and credited him with knowledge…

The impact of napping on memory for future-relevant stimuli: Prioritization among multiple salience cues.

PubMed

Bennion, Kelly A; Payne, Jessica D; Kensinger, Elizabeth A

2016-06-01

Prior research has demonstrated that sleep enhances memory for future-relevant information, including memory for information that is salient due to emotion, reward, or knowledge of a later memory test. Although sleep has been shown to prioritize information with any of these characteristics, the present study investigates the novel question of how sleep prioritizes information when multiple salience cues exist. Participants encoded scenes that were future-relevant based on emotion (emotional vs. neutral), reward (rewarded vs. unrewarded), and instructed learning (intentionally vs. incidentally encoded), preceding a delay consisting of a nap, an equivalent time period spent awake, or a nap followed by wakefulness (to control for effects of interference). Recognition testing revealed that when multiple dimensions of future relevance co-occur, sleep prioritizes top-down, goal-directed cues (instructed learning, and to a lesser degree, reward) over bottom-up, stimulus-driven characteristics (emotion). Further, results showed that these factors interact; the effect of a nap on intentionally encoded information was especially strong for neutral (relative to emotional) information, suggesting that once one cue for future relevance is present, there are diminishing returns with additional cues. Sleep may binarize information based on whether it is future-relevant or not, preferentially consolidating memory for the former category. Potential neural mechanisms underlying these selective effects and the implications of this research for educational and vocational domains are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Memory retrieval of everyday information under stress.

PubMed

Stock, Lisa-Marie; Merz, Christian J

2018-07-01

Psychosocial stress is known to crucially influence learning and memory processes. Several studies have already shown an impairing effect of elevated cortisol concentrations on memory retrieval. These studies mainly used learning material consisting of stimuli with a limited ecological validity. When using material with a social contextual component or with educational relevant material both impairing and enhancing stress effects on memory retrieval could be observed. In line with these latter studies, the present experiment also used material with a higher ecological validity (a coherent text consisting of daily relevant numeric, figural and verbal information). After encoding, retrieval took place 24 h later after exposure to psychosocial stress or a control procedure (20 healthy men per group). The stress group was further subdivided into cortisol responders and non-responders. Results showed a significantly impaired retrieval of everyday information in non-responders compared to responders and controls. Altogether, the present findings indicate the need of an appropriate cortisol response for the successful memory retrieval of everyday information. Thus, the present findings suggest that cortisol increases - contrary to a stressful experience per se - seem to play a protective role for retrieving everyday information. Additionally, it could be speculated that the previously reported impairing stress effects on memory retrieval might depend on the used learning material. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

5 CFR 1201.72 - Explanation and scope of discovery.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... obtain relevant information, including the identification of potential witnesses, from another person or a party, that the other person or party has not otherwise provided. Relevant information includes information that appears reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence. This...

Exploring the Connections between Self, Cognition, and Behavior.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hull, Jay G.; And Others

Much research has found that information encoded according to its self-relevance is more easily recalled than information encoded according to other formats. Two experiments were conducted to examine potential moderators of the processes involved in self-relevant memory. In the first study, the hypothesis was tested that self-relevant encoding is…

A Study of Adaptive Relevance Feedback - UIUC TREC-2008 Relevance Feedback Experiments

DTIC Science & Technology

2008-11-01

terms. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 27(3):129–146, 1976. [7] J . J . Rocchio. Relevance feedback in information retrieval. In...In The SMART Retrieval System: Experiments in Automatic Document Processing, pages 313–323. Prentice-Hall Inc., 1971. [8] Gerard Salton and Chris

Medical care providers' perspectives on dental information needs in electronic health records.

PubMed

Acharya, Amit; Shimpi, Neel; Mahnke, Andrea; Mathias, Richard; Ye, Zhan

2017-05-01

The authors conducted this study to identify the most relevant patient dental information in a medical-dental integrated electronic health record (iEHR) necessary for medical care providers to inform holistic treatment. The authors collected input from a diverse sample of 65 participants from a large, regional health system representing 13 medical specialties and administrative units. The authors collected feedback from participants through 11 focus group sessions. Two independent reviewers analyzed focus group transcripts to identify major and minor themes. The authors identified 336 of 385 annotations that most medical care providers coded as relevant. Annotations strongly supporting relevancy to clinical practice aligned with 18 major thematic categories, with the top 6 categories being communication, appointments, system design, medications, treatment plan, and dental alerts. Study participants identified dental data of highest relevance to medical care providers and recommended implementation of user-friendly access to dental data in iEHRs as crucial to holistic care delivery. Identification of the patients' dental information most relevant to medical care providers will inform strategies for improving the integration of that information into the medical-dental iEHR. Copyright © 2017 American Dental Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Cogito ergo video: Task-relevant information is involuntarily boosted into awareness.

PubMed

Gayet, Surya; Brascamp, Jan W; Van der Stigchel, Stefan; Paffen, Chris L E

2015-01-01

Only part of the visual information that impinges on our retinae reaches visual awareness. In a series of three experiments, we investigated how the task relevance of incoming visual information affects its access to visual awareness. On each trial, participants were instructed to memorize one of two presented hues, drawn from different color categories (e.g., red and green), for later recall. During the retention interval, participants were presented with a differently colored grating in each eye such as to elicit binocular rivalry. A grating matched either the task-relevant (memorized) color category or the task-irrelevant (nonmemorized) color category. We found that the rivalrous stimulus that matched the task-relevant color category tended to dominate awareness over the rivalrous stimulus that matched the task-irrelevant color category. This effect of task relevance persisted when participants reported the orientation of the rivalrous stimuli, even though in this case color information was completely irrelevant for the task of reporting perceptual dominance during rivalry. When participants memorized the shape of a colored stimulus, however, its color category did not affect predominance of rivalrous stimuli during retention. Taken together, these results indicate that the selection of task-relevant information is under volitional control but that visual input that matches this information is boosted into awareness irrespective of whether this is useful for the observer.

Under-reactive but easily distracted: An fMRI investigation of attentional capture in autism spectrum disorder.

PubMed

Keehn, Brandon; Nair, Aarti; Lincoln, Alan J; Townsend, Jeanne; Müller, Ralph-Axel

2016-02-01

For individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), salient behaviorally-relevant information often fails to capture attention, while subtle behaviorally-irrelevant details commonly induce a state of distraction. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neurocognitive networks underlying attentional capture in sixteen high-functioning children and adolescents with ASD and twenty-one typically developing (TD) individuals. Participants completed a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm designed to investigate activation of attentional networks to behaviorally-relevant targets and contingent attention capture by task-irrelevant distractors. In individuals with ASD, target stimuli failed to trigger bottom-up activation of the ventral attentional network and the cerebellum. Additionally, the ASD group showed no differences in behavior or occipital activation associated with contingent attentional capture. Rather, results suggest that to-be-ignored distractors that shared either task-relevant or irrelevant features captured attention in ASD. Results indicate that individuals with ASD may be under-reactive to behaviorally-relevant stimuli, unable to filter irrelevant information, and that both top-down and bottom-up attention networks function atypically in ASD. Lastly, deficits in target-related processing were associated with autism symptomatology, providing further support for the hypothesis that non-social attentional processes and their neurofunctional underpinnings may play a significant role in the development of sociocommunicative impairments in ASD. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Auditory cueing in Parkinson's patients with freezing of gait. What matters most: Action-relevance or cue-continuity?

PubMed

Young, William R; Shreve, Lauren; Quinn, Emma Jane; Craig, Cathy; Bronte-Stewart, Helen

2016-07-01

Gait disturbances are a common feature of Parkinson's disease, one of the most severe being freezing of gait. Sensory cueing is a common method used to facilitate stepping in people with Parkinson's. Recent work has shown that, compared to walking to a metronome, Parkinson's patients without freezing of gait (nFOG) showed reduced gait variability when imitating recorded sounds of footsteps made on gravel. However, it is not known if these benefits are realised through the continuity of the acoustic information or the action-relevance. Furthermore, no study has examined if these benefits extend to PD with freezing of gait. We prepared four different auditory cues (varying in action-relevance and acoustic continuity) and asked 19 Parkinson's patients (10 nFOG, 9 with freezing of gait (FOG)) to step in place to each cue. Results showed a superiority of action-relevant cues (regardless of cue-continuity) for inducing reductions in Step coefficient of variation (CV). Acoustic continuity was associated with a significant reduction in Swing CV. Neither cue-continuity nor action-relevance was independently sufficient to increase the time spent stepping before freezing. However, combining both attributes in the same cue did yield significant improvements. This study demonstrates the potential of using action-sounds as sensory cues for Parkinson's patients with freezing of gait. We suggest that the improvements shown might be considered audio-motor 'priming' (i.e., listening to the sounds of footsteps will engage sensorimotor circuitry relevant to the production of that same action, thus effectively bypassing the defective basal ganglia). Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Relevance of ERTS-1 to the State of Ohio. [agriculture, forestry, land use, mining, and environmental quality management

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Sweet, D. C.; Pincura, P. G.; Wukelic, G. E. (Principal Investigator)

1974-01-01

The author has identified the following significant results. During the first year of project effort the ability of ERTS-1 imagery to be used for mapping and inventorying strip-mined areas in south eastern Ohio, the potential of using ERTS-1 imagery in water quality and coastal zone management in the Lake Erie region, and the extent that ERTS-1 imagery could contribute to localized (metropolitan/urban), multicounty, and overall state land use needs were experimentally demonstrated and reported as significant project results. Significant research accomplishments were achieved in the technological development of manual and computerized methods to extract multi-feature information as well as singular feature information from ERTS-1 data as is exemplified by the forestry transparency overlay. Fabrication of an image transfer device to superimpose ERTS-1 data onto existing maps and other data sources was also a significant analytical accomplishment.

Perceptual Decisions in the Presence of Relevant and Irrelevant Sensory Evidence

PubMed Central

Anders, Ursula M.; McLean, Charlotte S.; Ouyang, Bowen; Ditterich, Jochen

2017-01-01

Perceptual decisions in the presence of decision-irrelevant sensory information require a selection of decision-relevant sensory evidence. To characterize the mechanism that is responsible for separating decision-relevant from irrelevant sensory information we asked human subjects to make judgments about one of two simultaneously present motion components in a random dot stimulus. Subjects were able to ignore the decision-irrelevant component to a large degree, but their decisions were still influenced by the irrelevant sensory information. Computational modeling revealed that this influence was not simply the consequence of subjects forgetting at times which stimulus component they had been instructed to base their decision on. Instead, residual irrelevant information always seems to be leaking through, and the decision process is captured by a net sensory evidence signal being accumulated to a decision threshold. This net sensory evidence is a linear combination of decision-relevant and irrelevant sensory information. The selection process is therefore well-described by a strong linear gain modulation, which, in our experiment, resulted in the relevant sensory evidence having at least 10 times more impact on the decision than the irrelevant evidence. PMID:29176941

Perceptual Decisions in the Presence of Relevant and Irrelevant Sensory Evidence.

PubMed

Anders, Ursula M; McLean, Charlotte S; Ouyang, Bowen; Ditterich, Jochen

2017-01-01

Perceptual decisions in the presence of decision-irrelevant sensory information require a selection of decision-relevant sensory evidence. To characterize the mechanism that is responsible for separating decision-relevant from irrelevant sensory information we asked human subjects to make judgments about one of two simultaneously present motion components in a random dot stimulus. Subjects were able to ignore the decision-irrelevant component to a large degree, but their decisions were still influenced by the irrelevant sensory information. Computational modeling revealed that this influence was not simply the consequence of subjects forgetting at times which stimulus component they had been instructed to base their decision on. Instead, residual irrelevant information always seems to be leaking through, and the decision process is captured by a net sensory evidence signal being accumulated to a decision threshold. This net sensory evidence is a linear combination of decision-relevant and irrelevant sensory information. The selection process is therefore well-described by a strong linear gain modulation, which, in our experiment, resulted in the relevant sensory evidence having at least 10 times more impact on the decision than the irrelevant evidence.

The clinical trial landscape in oncology and connectivity of somatic mutational profiles to targeted therapies.

PubMed

Patterson, Sara E; Liu, Rangjiao; Statz, Cara M; Durkin, Daniel; Lakshminarayana, Anuradha; Mockus, Susan M

2016-01-16

Precision medicine in oncology relies on rapid associations between patient-specific variations and targeted therapeutic efficacy. Due to the advancement of genomic analysis, a vast literature characterizing cancer-associated molecular aberrations and relative therapeutic relevance has been published. However, data are not uniformly reported or readily available, and accessing relevant information in a clinically acceptable time-frame is a daunting proposition, hampering connections between patients and appropriate therapeutic options. One important therapeutic avenue for oncology patients is through clinical trials. Accordingly, a global view into the availability of targeted clinical trials would provide insight into strengths and weaknesses and potentially enable research focus. However, data regarding the landscape of clinical trials in oncology is not readily available, and as a result, a comprehensive understanding of clinical trial availability is difficult. To support clinical decision-making, we have developed a data loader and mapper that connects sequence information from oncology patients to data stored in an in-house database, the JAX Clinical Knowledgebase (JAX-CKB), which can be queried readily to access comprehensive data for clinical reporting via customized reporting queries. JAX-CKB functions as a repository to house expertly curated clinically relevant data surrounding our 358-gene panel, the JAX Cancer Treatment Profile (JAX CTP), and supports annotation of functional significance of molecular variants. Through queries of data housed in JAX-CKB, we have analyzed the landscape of clinical trials relevant to our 358-gene targeted sequencing panel to evaluate strengths and weaknesses in current molecular targeting in oncology. Through this analysis, we have identified patient indications, molecular aberrations, and targeted therapy classes that have strong or weak representation in clinical trials. Here, we describe the development and disseminate system methods for associating patient genomic sequence data with clinically relevant information, facilitating interpretation and providing a mechanism for informing therapeutic decision-making. Additionally, through customized queries, we have the capability to rapidly analyze the landscape of targeted therapies in clinical trials, enabling a unique view into current therapeutic availability in oncology.

Patient subjective experience and satisfaction during the perioperative period in the day surgery setting: a systematic review.

PubMed

Rhodes, Lenore; Miles, Gail; Pearson, Alan

2006-08-01

This systematic review used the Joanna Briggs Institute Qualitative Assessment and Review Instrument to manage, appraise, analyse and synthesize textual data in order to present the best available information in relation to how patients experience nursing interventions and care during the perioperative period in the day surgery setting. Some of the significant findings that emerged from the systematic review include the importance of pre-admission contact, provision of relevant, specific education and information, improving communication skills and maintaining patient privacy throughout their continuum of care.

25 CFR 62.10 - Action by the Director.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... Secretary for final action together with any relevant information or records; the recommendations of the... to the Assistant Secretary for final action together with any relevant information or records; the... record as presented together with such additional information as may be considered pertinent. Any...

Message Processing Research from Psychology to Communication.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Basil, Michael D.

Information processing theories have been very useful in psychology. The application of information processing literature to communication, however, requires definitions of audiences and definitions of messages relevant to information-processing theories. In order to establish the relevant aspect of audiences, a multiple-stage model of audiences…

A Planetary Defense Gateway for Smart Discovery of relevant Information for Decision Support

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bambacus, Myra; Yang, Chaowei Phil; Leung, Ronald Y.; Barbee, Brent; Nuth, Joseph A.; Seery, Bernard; Jiang, Yongyao; Qin, Han; Li, Yun; Yu, Manzhu;

Learning to Explain Astronomy across Moving Frames of Reference: Exploring the Role of Classroom and Planetarium-Based Instructional Contexts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Plummer, Julia Diane; Kocareli, Alicia; Slagle, Cynthia

2014-01-01

Learning astronomy involves significant spatial reasoning, such as learning to describe Earth-based phenomena and understanding space-based explanations for those phenomena as well as using the relevant size and scale information to interpret these frames of reference. This study examines daily celestial motion (DCM) as one case of how children…

Ancillary health effects of climate mitigation scenarios as drivers of policy uptake: a review of air quality, transportation and diet co-benefits modeling studies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chang, Kelly M.; Hess, Jeremy J.; Balbus, John M.; Buonocore, Jonathan J.; Cleveland, David A.; Grabow, Maggie L.; Neff, Roni; Saari, Rebecca K.; Tessum, Christopher W.; Wilkinson, Paul; Woodward, Alistair; Ebi, Kristie L.

2017-11-01

Background: Significant mitigation efforts beyond the Nationally Determined Commitments (NDCs) coming out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement are required to avoid warming of 2 °C above pre-industrial temperatures. Health co-benefits represent selected near term, positive consequences of climate policies that can offset mitigation costs in the short term before the beneficial impacts of those policies on the magnitude of climate change are evident. The diversity of approaches to modeling mitigation options and their health effects inhibits meta-analyses and syntheses of results useful in policy-making. Methods/Design: We evaluated the range of methods and choices in modeling health co-benefits of climate mitigation to identify opportunities for increased consistency and collaboration that could better inform policy-making. We reviewed studies quantifying the health co-benefits of climate change mitigation related to air quality, transportation, and diet published since the 2009 Lancet Commission ‘Managing the health effects of climate change’ through January 2017. We documented approaches, methods, scenarios, health-related exposures, and health outcomes. Results/Synthesis: Forty-two studies met the inclusion criteria. Air quality, transportation, and diet scenarios ranged from specific policy proposals to hypothetical scenarios, and from global recommendations to stakeholder-informed local guidance. Geographic and temporal scope as well as validity of scenarios determined policy relevance. More recent studies tended to use more sophisticated methods to address complexity in the relevant policy system. Discussion: Most studies indicated significant, nearer term, local ancillary health benefits providing impetus for policy uptake and net cost savings. However, studies were more suited to describing the interaction of climate policy and health and the magnitude of potential outcomes than to providing specific accurate estimates of health co-benefits. Modeling the health co-benefits of climate policy provides policy-relevant information when the scenarios are reasonable, relevant, and thorough, and the model adequately addresses complexity. Greater consistency in selected modeling choices across the health co-benefits of climate mitigation research would facilitate evaluation of mitigation options particularly as they apply to the NDCs and promote policy uptake.

Cross-modal pattern of brain activations associated with the processing of self- and significant other's name.

PubMed

Tacikowski, Pawel; Brechmann, André; Nowicka, Anna

2013-09-01

Previous neuroimaging studies have shown that the patterns of brain activity during the processing of personally relevant names (e.g., own name, friend's name, partner's name, etc.) and the names of famous people (e.g., celebrities) are different. However, it is not known how the activity in this network is influenced by the modality of the presented stimuli. In this fMRI study, we investigated the pattern of brain activations during the recognition of aurally and visually presented full names of the subject, a significant other, a famous person and unknown individuals. In both modalities, we found that the processing of self-name and the significant other's name was associated with increased activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). Acoustic presentations of these names also activated bilateral inferior frontal gyri (IFG). This pattern of results supports the role of MPFC in the processing of personally relevant information, irrespective of their modality. Copyright © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., a Wiley company.

22 CFR 95.3 - Procedures.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... legal offices review and analyze information relevant to the case in preparing a recommendation to the... relevant information, the Secretary may decide to surrender the fugitive to the requesting State, to deny...

Individuals with Low Working Memory Spans Show Greater Interference from Irrelevant Information Because of Poor Source Monitoring, Not Greater Activation

PubMed Central

Lilienthal, Lindsey; Rose, Nathan S.; Tamez, Elaine; Myerson, Joel; Hale, Sandra

2014-01-01

Although individuals with high and low working memory (WM) span appear to differ in the extent to which irrelevant information interferes with their performance on WM tasks, the locus of this interference is not clear. The present study investigated whether, when performing a WM task, high- and low-span individuals differ in the activation of formerly relevant, but now irrelevant items, and/or in their ability to correctly identify such irrelevant items. This was done in two experiments, both of which used modified complex WM span tasks. In Experiment 1, the span task included an embedded lexical decision task designed to obtain an implicit measure of the activation of both currently and formerly relevant items. In Experiment 2, the span task included an embedded recognition judgment task designed to obtain an explicit measure of both item and source recognition ability. The results of these experiments indicate that low-span individuals do not hold irrelevant information in a more active state in memory than high-span individuals, but rather that low-span individuals are significantly poorer at identifying such information as irrelevant at the time of retrieval. These results suggest that differences in the ability to monitor the source of information, rather than differences in the activation of irrelevant information, are the more important determinant of performance on WM tasks. PMID:25921723

Data mining for personal navigation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hariharan, Gurushyam; Franti, Pasi; Mehta, Sandeep

2002-03-01

Relevance is the key in defining what data is to be extracted from the Internet. Traditionally, relevance has been defined mainly by keywords and user profiles. In this paper we discuss a fairly untouched dimension to relevance: location. Any navigational information sought by a user at large on earth is evidently governed by his location. We believe that task oriented data mining of the web amalgamated with location information is the key to providing relevant information for personal navigation. We explore the existential hurdles and propose novel approaches to tackle them. We also present naive, task-oriented data mining based approaches and their implementations in Java, to extract location based information. Ad-hoc pairing of data with coordinates (x, y) is very rare on the web. But if the same co-ordinates are converted to a logical address (state/city/street), a wide spectrum of location-based information base opens up. Hence, given the coordinates (x, y) on the earth, the scheme points to the logical address of the user. Location based information could either be picked up from fixed and known service providers (e.g. Yellow Pages) or from any arbitrary website on the Web. Once the web servers providing information relevant to the logical address are located, task oriented data mining is performed over these sites keeping in mind what information is interesting to the contemporary user. After all this, a simple data stream is provided to the user with information scaled to his convenience. The scheme has been implemented for cities of Finland.

Support Vector Machines: Relevance Feedback and Information Retrieval.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Drucker, Harris; Shahrary, Behzad; Gibbon, David C.

2002-01-01

Compares support vector machines (SVMs) to Rocchio, Ide regular and Ide dec-hi algorithms in information retrieval (IR) of text documents using relevancy feedback. If the preliminary search is so poor that one has to search through many documents to find at least one relevant document, then SVM is preferred. Includes nine tables. (Contains 24…

Extracting Social Information from Chemosensory Cues: Consideration of Several Scenarios and Their Functional Implications

PubMed Central

Ben-Shaul, Yoram

2015-01-01

Across all sensory modalities, stimuli can vary along multiple dimensions. Efficient extraction of information requires sensitivity to those stimulus dimensions that provide behaviorally relevant information. To derive social information from chemosensory cues, sensory systems must embed information about the relationships between behaviorally relevant traits of individuals and the distributions of the chemical cues that are informative about these traits. In simple cases, the mere presence of one particular compound is sufficient to guide appropriate behavior. However, more generally, chemosensory information is conveyed via relative levels of multiple chemical cues, in non-trivial ways. The computations and networks needed to derive information from multi-molecule stimuli are distinct from those required by single molecule cues. Our current knowledge about how socially relevant information is encoded by chemical blends, and how it is extracted by chemosensory systems is very limited. This manuscript explores several scenarios and the neuronal computations required to identify them. PMID:26635515

Design and usability study of an iconic user interface to ease information retrieval of medical guidelines.

PubMed

Griffon, Nicolas; Kerdelhué, Gaétan; Hamek, Saliha; Hassler, Sylvain; Boog, César; Lamy, Jean-Baptiste; Duclos, Catherine; Venot, Alain; Darmoni, Stéfan J

2014-10-01

Doc'CISMeF (DC) is a semantic search engine used to find resources in CISMeF-BP, a quality controlled health gateway, which gathers guidelines available on the internet in French. Visualization of Concepts in Medicine (VCM) is an iconic language that may ease information retrieval tasks. This study aimed to describe the creation and evaluation of an interface integrating VCM in DC in order to make this search engine much easier to use. Focus groups were organized to suggest ways to enhance information retrieval tasks using VCM in DC. A VCM interface was created and improved using the ergonomic evaluation approach. 20 physicians were recruited to compare the VCM interface with the non-VCM one. Each evaluator answered two different clinical scenarios in each interface. The ability and time taken to select a relevant resource were recorded and compared. A usability analysis was performed using the System Usability Scale (SUS). The VCM interface contains a filter based on icons, and icons describing each resource according to focus group recommendations. Some ergonomic issues were resolved before evaluation. Use of VCM significantly increased the success of information retrieval tasks (OR=11; 95% CI 1.4 to 507). Nonetheless, it took significantly more time to find a relevant resource with VCM interface (101 vs 65 s; p=0.02). SUS revealed 'good' usability with an average score of 74/100. VCM was successfully implemented in DC as an option. It increased the success rate of information retrieval tasks, despite requiring slightly more time, and was well accepted by end-users. Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. For permission to use (where not already granted under a licence) please go to http://group.bmj.com/group/rights-licensing/permissions.

Recommendations about Pregnancy from Women with Mobility Disability to Their Peers.

PubMed

Iezzoni, Lisa I; Wint, Amy J; Smeltzer, Suzanne C; Ecker, Jeffrey L

Although growing numbers of women with mobility disability are becoming pregnant and desiring motherhood, relatively little is known about their pregnancy experiences or what they might recommend to other women with mobility disability contemplating pregnancy. Using a semistructured, open-ended interview protocol, we conducted 2-hour telephone interviews with 22 women who had a significant mobility disability before becoming pregnant and had delivered babies within the prior 10 years. We recruited most interviewees through online social networks. We used NVivo software to sort interview transcript texts and performed conventional content analyses to identify major themes. Participants' mean ± standard deviation age was 34.8 ± 5.3 years; most were White, well-educated, and middle income and 18 used wheeled mobility aids. Recommendations for other women with mobility disability coalesced around five themes: recognizing the possibility of giving birth, advocacy and support, being informed, approaches toward obstetrical practitioners, and managing fears about losing custody of their child. Lacking information about what to expect during their pregnancy was a significant problem. Women got information about pregnancy from diverse sources, but questions arose about accuracy and relevance of this information to individual circumstances. Women urged their peers to advocate for their preferences and needs with obstetrical practitioners. Women with mobility disability who had delivered babies offered constructive advice for their peers who desire pregnancy. Increasing availability of accurate and relevant information about pregnancy among women with mobility disability is critically important, as is training obstetrical practitioners to provide patient-centered care to these women during pregnancy. Copyright © 2016 Jacobs Institute of Women's Health. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

COM5/443: Health Portals, Search Engines and Intranets: Making order of the chaos - A review article

PubMed Central

Maini, P

1999-01-01

Effective use of technology has led to medical advances that have not only extended life expectancy, but also fuelled an increasingly well informed public's desires to expect more and more from today's healthcare providers. A phenomenal amount of medical information is now present, facilitated by the virtually unrestricted ability to publish on the Internet. The WWW grows by roughly a million pages per day with a significant number devoted to some element of healthcare. As a consequence of the web's rapid, chaotic growth, the resulting network of information lacks organisation and structure and the quest for a method of finding relevant and reliable information quickly is spawning the growth of the Internet Portal Sites. The use of intranets confers some degree of organisation, allowing for structured growth of an organisation's web site but the majority of sites are not sheltered within an intranet. Millions of dollars are being invested in researching the technologies powering search engines and well designed portals, in the hope of imposing some kind of order on the existing chaos. The winner will most likely reap huge financial rewards as advertisers climb on board, hoping to gain massive exposure and the public will undoubtedly gain from relevant and timely answers to their searches and queries. Information is a valuable commodity, but the true value is seen only when it is organised into an accessible and useable form. The coming of age of the Internet has heralded radical changes in the fabric and economics of healthcare and as a consequence our expectations from professionals involved in this industry are greatly increased. Although significant challenges need to be overcome, there are huge benefits to be gained for consumers, although it remains to be seen whether the world becomes a more healthy place.

Construction inspection manual of procedures

DOT National Transportation Integrated Search

2009-01-01

This manual provides highway construction personnel with relevant, practical information in order to perform accurate inspections and provide relevant construction procedural information for the various roadway and structures items of work. It is the...

Adaptation of a paradigm for examining the development of fear beliefs through the verbal information pathway in preschool-age children.

PubMed

Rifkin, Lara S; Schofield, Casey A; Beard, Courtney; Armstrong, Thomas

2016-12-01

Verbal threat information has been shown to induce fear beliefs in school-age children (i.e. 6-12 years; for a review see Muris & Field, 2010). The current study adapted an existing paradigm (Field & Lawson, 2003) to examine the impact of verbal threat information on self-report and behavioral measures of fear in preschool-age children. Thirty children (aged 3-5) were provided with threat, positive, or no information about three novel Australian marsupials. There was a significant increase in fear belief for the animal associated with threat information compared to the animal associated with positive or no information. Verbal threat information did not impact behavioral avoidance in the complete sample; however, findings from an exploratory subgroup analysis excluding three-year-olds indicated that children demonstrated significant behavioral avoidance for the threat condition compared to the positive condition. These findings provide additional support for Rachman's theory of fear acquisition (1977, 1991) and suggest this paradigm may be used to examine the age at which verbal threat information becomes a relevant mode of fear acquisition for young children. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

On the Role of Working Memory in Spatial Contextual Cueing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Travis, Susan L.; Mattingley, Jason B.; Dux, Paul E.

2013-01-01

The human visual system receives more information than can be consciously processed. To overcome this capacity limit, we employ attentional mechanisms to prioritize task-relevant (target) information over less relevant (distractor) information. Regularities in the environment can facilitate the allocation of attention, as demonstrated by the…

A Parallel Relational Database Management System Approach to Relevance Feedback in Information Retrieval.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lundquist, Carol; Frieder, Ophir; Holmes, David O.; Grossman, David

1999-01-01

Describes a scalable, parallel, relational database-drive information retrieval engine. To support portability across a wide range of execution environments, all algorithms adhere to the SQL-92 standard. By incorporating relevance feedback algorithms, accuracy is enhanced over prior database-driven information retrieval efforts. Presents…

A robot control formalism based on an information quality concept

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ekman, A.; Torne, A.; Stromberg, D.

1994-01-01

A relevance measure based on Jaynes maximum entropy principle is introduced. Information quality is the conjunction of accuracy and relevance. The formalism based on information quality is developed for one-agent applications. The robot requires a well defined working environment where properties of each object must be accurately specified.

Behavioral and Event-Related-Potential Correlates of Processing Congruent and Incongruent Self-Relevant Information

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Clark, Sheri L.

2013-01-01

People want to be viewed by others as they view themselves. Being confronted with self-relevant information that is either congruent or incongruent with one's self-view has been shown to differentially affect subsequent behavior, memory for the information, and evaluation of the source of the information. However, no research has examined…

40 CFR 233.14 - Memorandum of Agreement with the Secretary.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... applications for discharges in State regulated waters and other relevant information not already in the... procedures for the prompt transmission from the Secretary to the Director of relevant information not already...

41. DISCOVERY, SEARCH, AND COMMUNICATION OF TEXTUAL KNOWLEDGE RESOURCES IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS a. Discovering and Utilizing Knowledge Sources for Metasearch Knowledge Systems

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

Zamora, Antonio

Advanced Natural Language Processing Tools for Web Information Retrieval, Content Analysis, and Synthesis. The goal of this SBIR was to implement and evaluate several advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools and techniques to enhance the precision and relevance of search results by analyzing and augmenting search queries and by helping to organize the search output obtained from heterogeneous databases and web pages containing textual information of interest to DOE and the scientific-technical user communities in general. The SBIR investigated 1) the incorporation of spelling checkers in search applications, 2) identification of significant phrases and concepts using a combination of linguisticmore » and statistical techniques, and 3) enhancement of the query interface and search retrieval results through the use of semantic resources, such as thesauri. A search program with a flexible query interface was developed to search reference databases with the objective of enhancing search results from web queries or queries of specialized search systems such as DOE's Information Bridge. The DOE ETDE/INIS Joint Thesaurus was processed to create a searchable database. Term frequencies and term co-occurrences were used to enhance the web information retrieval by providing algorithmically-derived objective criteria to organize relevant documents into clusters containing significant terms. A thesaurus provides an authoritative overview and classification of a field of knowledge. By organizing the results of a search using the thesaurus terminology, the output is more meaningful than when the results are just organized based on the terms that co-occur in the retrieved documents, some of which may not be significant. An attempt was made to take advantage of the hierarchy provided by broader and narrower terms, as well as other field-specific information in the thesauri. The search program uses linguistic morphological routines to find relevant entries regardless of whether terms are stored in singular or plural form. Implementation of additional inflectional morphology processes for verbs can enhance retrieval further, but this has to be balanced by the possibility of broadening the results too much. In addition to the DOE energy thesaurus, other sources of specialized organized knowledge such as the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), and Wikipedia were investigated. The supporting role of the NLP thesaurus search program was enhanced by incorporating spelling aid and a part-of-speech tagger to cope with misspellings in the queries and to determine the grammatical roles of the query words and identify nouns for special processing. To improve precision, multiple modes of searching were implemented including Boolean operators, and field-specific searches. Programs to convert a thesaurus or reference file into searchable support files can be deployed easily, and the resulting files are immediately searchable to produce relevance-ranked results with builtin spelling aid, morphological processing, and advanced search logic. Demonstration systems were built for several databases, including the DOE energy thesaurus.« less

Earlier saccades to task-relevant targets irrespective of relative gain between peripheral and foveal information.

PubMed

Wolf, Christian; Schütz, Alexander C

2017-06-01

Saccades bring objects of interest onto the fovea for high-acuity processing. Saccades to rewarded targets show shorter latencies that correlate negatively with expected motivational value. Shorter latencies are also observed when the saccade target is relevant for a perceptual discrimination task. Here we tested whether saccade preparation is equally influenced by informational value as it is by motivational value. We defined informational value as the probability that information is task-relevant times the ratio between postsaccadic foveal and presaccadic peripheral discriminability. Using a gaze-contingent display, we independently manipulated peripheral and foveal discriminability of the saccade target. Latencies of saccades with perceptual task were reduced by 36 ms in general, but they were not modulated by the information saccades provide (Experiments 1 and 2). However, latencies showed a clear negative linear correlation with the probability that the target is task-relevant (Experiment 3). We replicated that the facilitation by a perceptual task is spatially specific and not due to generally heightened arousal (Experiment 4). Finally, the facilitation only emerged when the perceptual task is in the visual but not in the auditory modality (Experiment 5). Taken together, these results suggest that saccade latencies are not equally modulated by informational value as by motivational value. The facilitation by a perceptual task only arises when task-relevant visual information is foveated, irrespective of whether the foveation is useful or not.

Electronic patient records in action: Transforming information into professionally relevant knowledge.

PubMed

Winman, Thomas; Rystedt, Hans

2011-03-01

The implementation of generic models for organizing information in complex institutions like those in healthcare creates a gap between standardization and the need for locally relevant knowledge. The present study addresses how this gap can be bridged by focusing on the practical work of healthcare staff in transforming information in EPRs into knowledge that is useful for everyday work. Video recording of shift handovers on a rehabilitation ward serves as the empirical case. The results show how extensive selections and reorganizations of information in EPRs are carried out in order to transform information into professionally relevant accounts. We argue that knowledge about the institutional obligations and professional ways of construing information are fundamental for these transitions. The findings point to the need to consider the role of professional knowledge inherent in unpacking information in efforts to develop information systems intended to bridge between institutional and professional boundaries in healthcare. © The Author(s) 2011.

Effective pollutant emission heights for atmospheric transport modelling based on real-world information.

PubMed

Pregger, Thomas; Friedrich, Rainer

2009-02-01

Emission data needed as input for the operation of atmospheric models should not only be spatially and temporally resolved. Another important feature is the effective emission height which significantly influences modelled concentration values. Unfortunately this information, which is especially relevant for large point sources, is usually not available and simple assumptions are often used in atmospheric models. As a contribution to improve knowledge on emission heights this paper provides typical default values for the driving parameters stack height and flue gas temperature, velocity and flow rate for different industrial sources. The results were derived from an analysis of the probably most comprehensive database of real-world stack information existing in Europe based on German industrial data. A bottom-up calculation of effective emission heights applying equations used for Gaussian dispersion models shows significant differences depending on source and air pollutant and compared to approaches currently used for atmospheric transport modelling.

Achieving Service Change Through the Implementation of a Trauma-Informed Care Training Program Within a Mental Health Service.

PubMed

Palfrey, Nicola; Reay, Rebecca E; Aplin, Velissa; Cubis, Jeffery C; McAndrew, Virginia; Riordan, Denise M; Raphael, Beverley

2018-04-28

As evidence continues to accumulate for the association between childhood trauma and long-term adverse outcomes, Trauma-Informed Care (TIC) approaches are emerging as fundamental to contemporary mental health services. To evaluate a workshop designed to influence mental health practitioners in TIC principles and practices. Nursing, medical and allied health professionals completed pre and post measures of confidence, awareness and attitudes towards TIC practice. The workshop was rated as highly relevant and useful to clinician's practice. Participants' self-reported confidence, awareness and attitudes towards TIC significantly increased (p < .001) and the perceived number of barriers to working within a TIC framework significantly decreased (p < .05). Child and Adolescent Mental Health clinicians routinely screened for trauma and 80% had received training in a trauma specific intervention at follow-up. This brief training provides an important foundation for the development of trauma-informed, evidence-based mental health services.

Linking attentional processes and conceptual problem solving: visual cues facilitate the automaticity of extracting relevant information from diagrams

PubMed Central

Rouinfar, Amy; Agra, Elise; Larson, Adam M.; Rebello, N. Sanjay; Loschky, Lester C.

2014-01-01

This study investigated links between visual attention processes and conceptual problem solving. This was done by overlaying visual cues on conceptual physics problem diagrams to direct participants’ attention to relevant areas to facilitate problem solving. Participants (N = 80) individually worked through four problem sets, each containing a diagram, while their eye movements were recorded. Each diagram contained regions that were relevant to solving the problem correctly and separate regions related to common incorrect responses. Problem sets contained an initial problem, six isomorphic training problems, and a transfer problem. The cued condition saw visual cues overlaid on the training problems. Participants’ verbal responses were used to determine their accuracy. This study produced two major findings. First, short duration visual cues which draw attention to solution-relevant information and aid in the organizing and integrating of it, facilitate both immediate problem solving and generalization of that ability to new problems. Thus, visual cues can facilitate re-representing a problem and overcoming impasse, enabling a correct solution. Importantly, these cueing effects on problem solving did not involve the solvers’ attention necessarily embodying the solution to the problem, but were instead caused by solvers attending to and integrating relevant information in the problems into a solution path. Second, this study demonstrates that when such cues are used across multiple problems, solvers can automatize the extraction of problem-relevant information extraction. These results suggest that low-level attentional selection processes provide a necessary gateway for relevant information to be used in problem solving, but are generally not sufficient for correct problem solving. Instead, factors that lead a solver to an impasse and to organize and integrate problem information also greatly facilitate arriving at correct solutions. PMID:25324804

Linking attentional processes and conceptual problem solving: visual cues facilitate the automaticity of extracting relevant information from diagrams.

PubMed

Rouinfar, Amy; Agra, Elise; Larson, Adam M; Rebello, N Sanjay; Loschky, Lester C

2014-01-01

This study investigated links between visual attention processes and conceptual problem solving. This was done by overlaying visual cues on conceptual physics problem diagrams to direct participants' attention to relevant areas to facilitate problem solving. Participants (N = 80) individually worked through four problem sets, each containing a diagram, while their eye movements were recorded. Each diagram contained regions that were relevant to solving the problem correctly and separate regions related to common incorrect responses. Problem sets contained an initial problem, six isomorphic training problems, and a transfer problem. The cued condition saw visual cues overlaid on the training problems. Participants' verbal responses were used to determine their accuracy. This study produced two major findings. First, short duration visual cues which draw attention to solution-relevant information and aid in the organizing and integrating of it, facilitate both immediate problem solving and generalization of that ability to new problems. Thus, visual cues can facilitate re-representing a problem and overcoming impasse, enabling a correct solution. Importantly, these cueing effects on problem solving did not involve the solvers' attention necessarily embodying the solution to the problem, but were instead caused by solvers attending to and integrating relevant information in the problems into a solution path. Second, this study demonstrates that when such cues are used across multiple problems, solvers can automatize the extraction of problem-relevant information extraction. These results suggest that low-level attentional selection processes provide a necessary gateway for relevant information to be used in problem solving, but are generally not sufficient for correct problem solving. Instead, factors that lead a solver to an impasse and to organize and integrate problem information also greatly facilitate arriving at correct solutions.

Addiction treatment dropout: exploring patients' characteristics.

PubMed

López-Goñi, José J; Fernández-Montalvo, Javier; Arteaga, Alfonso

2012-01-01

This study explored the characteristics associated with treatment dropout in substance dependence patients. A sample of 122 addicted patients (84 treatment completers and 38 treatment dropouts) who sought outpatient treatment was assessed to collect information on sociodemographic, consumption (assessed by EuropASI), psychopathological (assessed by SCL-90-R), and personality variables (assessed by MCMI-II). Completers and dropouts were compared on all studied variables. According to the results, dropouts scored significantly higher on the EuropASI variables measuring employment/support, alcohol consumption, and family/social problems, as well as on the schizotypal scale of MCMI-II. Because most of the significant differences were found in EuropASI variables, three clusters analyses (2, 3, and 4 groups) based on EuropASI mean scores were carried out to determine clinically relevant information predicting dropout. The most relevant results were obtained when four groups were used. Comparisons between the four groups derived from cluster analysis showed statistically significant differences in the rate of dropout, with one group exhibiting the highest dropout rate. The distinctive characteristics of the group with highest dropout rate included the presence of an increased labor problem combined with high alcohol consumption. Furthermore, this group had the highest scores on three scales of the MCMI-II: phobic, dependent, and schizotypal. The implications of these results for further research and clinical practice are discussed.  Copyright © American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry.

[Patients' need for consultation after a geriatric assessment in family practice : Survey].

PubMed

Afshar, Kambiz; Bokhof, Beate; Wiese, Birgitt; Dierks, Marie-Luise; Junius-Walker, Ulrike

2016-10-01

During a doctor-patient consultation patients usually seek information by disclosing their reasons for requesting the encounter. Geriatric assessment allows a proactive examination of patients' overall health and function and provides an opportunity to broach issues beyond the initial purposes of the consultation. The study aimed at investigating older patients' information seeking behavior following a geriatric assessment and the kind of topics they wished to discuss, taking a variety of patient and health-related factors into account. A total of 317 patients (≥ 70 years) underwent a geriatric assessment in 40 general practices. Subsequently they obtained a list of the problems uncovered and rated the relevance and information needs for each problem. Analyses consisted of determining the prevalence of information need for each health topic and identifying predictors in a mixed model (multilevel regression analysis). The 317 patients presented with a median of 11 health problems (interquartile range, IQR 8-14) and 80 % of the patients had information needs concerning only a few of the problems. High information needs were present for physical complaints and for vaccination issues. Little information seeking behavior was evident for unhealthy lifestyles, falls, limitations in daily activities and psychosocial problems. In the mixed model the personal relevance and the type of health problem both had a significant and independent effect on information seeking behavior. A geriatric assessment generates a moderate need for information. It provides physicians with an opportunity to focus on those health problems that are important to older patients but not usually addressed in normal consultations. This particularly applies to limitations in daily activities and psychosocial problems.

A clinical report demonstrating the significance of distinguishing a nasopalatine duct cyst from a radicular cyst

PubMed Central

Aparna, Manikkath; Chakravarthy, Arumugam; Acharya, Shashi Rashmi; Radhakrishnan, Raghu

2014-01-01

Endodontic diagnosis is challenging and depends on the organisation of information from the patient history, clinical examination and analysis of the pulp, radiographic and histopathological assessment. A 35-year-old man was endodontically treated for radiolucency in relation to the roots of maxillary central incisors as it was a provisionally diagnosed case of radicular cyst. Since the palatal swelling persisted, the lesion was re-evaluated using relevant diagnostic aids and a diagnosis of nasopalatine duct cyst (NPDC) was made, which was missed during the initial assessment. An erroneous interpretation of cystic radiolucency in relation to maxillary central incisors can often lead to inappropriate treatment planning. This case highlights the relevant aspects in the diagnosis of NPDC when it is mistaken for a radicular cyst and emphasises the need for thorough clinical examination and relevant investigations for periapical radiolucencies of questionable origin before initiating endodontic therapy. PMID:24642171

Validating the content of a brief informational intervention to empower patients and spouses facing breast cancer: perspectives of both couple members.

PubMed

Blais, Marie-Claude; Maunsell, Elizabeth; Grenier, Sophie; Lauzier, Sophie; Dorval, Michel; Pelletier, Sylvie; Guay, Stéphane; Robidoux, André; Provencher, Louise

2014-09-01

The study objectives were to identify key information components that would be the basic content of a brief informational intervention, developed from a population perspective, to empower individual couple members facing breast cancer and to validate the relevance and acceptability of these components. A review of information relevant to couples facing cancer presented in internet sites and documents of national cancer organizations was made to identify information components to include in a brief informational intervention. These information components were framed as messages, that is, very brief sentences or tips. To validate the relevance and acceptability of these messages, six focus groups were conducted in Quebec City and Montreal among women who had had breast cancer and their spouses. Reactions to the messages were synthesized by analyzing the verbatim transcripts. A total of 70 individuals (35 women with an average of 14 months since diagnosis and 35 spouses) participated in the groups. The content of almost all messages was seen as relevant, although nuances and improvements were discussed. However, the message format provoked irritation and will need improvement. Findings provide validation of the relevance, from the viewpoint of women and their spouses, of the message content to be part of a brief informational intervention intended to empower couples as they cope with breast cancer. Couples approved of the idea of being guided in their adjustment to breast cancer. However, the message format requires adaptation and further testing.

Parietal neurons encode expected gains in instrumental information

PubMed Central

Foley, Nicholas C.; Kelly, Simon P.; Mhatre, Himanshu; Gottlieb, Jacqueline

2017-01-01

In natural behavior, animals have access to multiple sources of information, but only a few of these sources are relevant for learning and actions. Beyond choosing an appropriate action, making good decisions entails the ability to choose the relevant information, but fundamental questions remain about the brain’s information sampling policies. Recent studies described the neural correlates of seeking information about a reward, but it remains unknown whether, and how, neurons encode choices of instrumental information, in contexts in which the information guides subsequent actions. Here we show that parietal cortical neurons involved in oculomotor decisions encode, before an information sampling saccade, the reduction in uncertainty that the saccade is expected to bring for a subsequent action. These responses were distinct from the neurons’ visual and saccadic modulations and from signals of expected reward or reward prediction errors. Therefore, even in an instrumental context when information and reward gains are closely correlated, individual cells encode decision variables that are based on informational factors and can guide the active sampling of action-relevant cues. PMID:28373569

After Action Review Tools For Team Training with Chat Communications

DTIC Science & Technology

2009-11-01

collaborative learning environments. The most relevant work is being done by the CALO ( Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes) project, a joint...emoticons, and other common stylistic practices. To a lesser degree, some research has yielded methods and tools to analyze or visualize chat...information sources, and overall cognitive effort. AAR Challenges The most significant challenge to conducting an effective after action review of

Partial and specific source memory for faces associated to other- and self-relevant negative contexts.

PubMed

Bell, Raoul; Giang, Trang; Buchner, Axel

2012-01-01

Previous research has shown a source memory advantage for faces presented in negative contexts. As yet it remains unclear whether participants remember the specific type of context in which the faces were presented or whether they can only remember that the face was associated with negative valence. In the present study, participants saw faces together with descriptions of two different types of negative behaviour and neutral behaviour. In Experiment 1, we examined whether the participants were able to discriminate between two types of other-relevant negative context information (cheating and disgusting behaviour) in a source memory test. In Experiment 2, we assessed source memory for other-relevant negative (threatening) context information (other-aggressive behaviour) and self-relevant negative context information (self-aggressive behaviour). A multinomial source memory model was used to separately assess partial source memory for the negative valence of the behaviour and specific source memory for the particular type of negative context the face was associated with. In Experiment 1, source memory was specific for the particular type of negative context presented (i.e., cheating or disgusting behaviour). Experiment 2 showed that source memory for other-relevant negative information was more specific than source memory for self-relevant information. Thus, emotional source memory may vary in specificity depending on the degree to which the negative emotional context is perceived as threatening.

Selective Attention with Separable Stimuli Using a Speeded Task.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kolbet, Lori L.; Garvey, Jackie

The ability to allocate attentional resources to relevant aspects of a stimulus event is a critical skill needed for efficient information processing. Evidence suggests that this ability to focus on relevant information without interference is dependent on the nature of the stimulus structure of the information to be processed. To test the…

Information-Processing and Perceptions of Control: How Attribution Style Affects Task-Relevant Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yeigh, Tony

2007-01-01

This study investigated the effects of perceived controllability on information processing within Weiner's (1985, 1986) attributional model of learning. Attributional style was used to identify trait patterns of controllability for 37 university students. Task-relevant feedback on an information-processing task was then manipulated to test for…

Assessment of efficiency of functioning the infocommunication systems a special purpose in the conditions of violation quality of relevance information

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Parinov, A. V.; Korotkikh, L. P.; Desyatov, D. B.; Stepanov, L. V.

2018-03-01

The uniqueness of information processing mechanisms in special-purpose infocommunication systems and the increased interest of intruders lead to an increase in the relevance of the problems associated with their protection. The paper considers the issues of building risk-models for the violation of the relevance and value of information in infocommunication systems for special purposes. Also, special attention is paid to the connection between the qualities of relevance and the value of information obtained as a result of the operation of infocommunication systems for special purposes. Analytical expressions for the risk and damage function in the time range in special-purpose infocommunication systems are obtained, which can serve as a mathematical basis for risk assessment. Further, an analytical expression is obtained to assess the chance of obtaining up-to-date information in the operation of infocommunication systems up to the time the information quality is violated. An analytical expression for estimating the chance can be used to calculate the effectiveness of a special-purpose infocommunication system.

Assessing clinical reasoning (ASCLIRE): Instrument development and validation.

PubMed

Kunina-Habenicht, Olga; Hautz, Wolf E; Knigge, Michel; Spies, Claudia; Ahlers, Olaf

2015-12-01

Clinical reasoning is an essential competency in medical education. This study aimed at developing and validating a test to assess diagnostic accuracy, collected information, and diagnostic decision time in clinical reasoning. A norm-referenced computer-based test for the assessment of clinical reasoning (ASCLIRE) was developed, integrating the entire clinical decision process. In a cross-sectional study participants were asked to choose as many diagnostic measures as they deemed necessary to diagnose the underlying disease of six different cases with acute or sub-acute dyspnea and provide a diagnosis. 283 students and 20 content experts participated. In addition to diagnostic accuracy, respective decision time and number of used relevant diagnostic measures were documented as distinct performance indicators. The empirical structure of the test was investigated using a structural equation modeling approach. Experts showed higher accuracy rates and lower decision times than students. In a cross-sectional comparison, the diagnostic accuracy of students improved with the year of study. Wrong diagnoses provided by our sample were comparable to wrong diagnoses in practice. We found an excellent fit for a model with three latent factors-diagnostic accuracy, decision time, and choice of relevant diagnostic information-with diagnostic accuracy showing no significant correlation with decision time. ASCLIRE considers decision time as an important performance indicator beneath diagnostic accuracy and provides evidence that clinical reasoning is a complex ability comprising diagnostic accuracy, decision time, and choice of relevant diagnostic information as three partly correlated but still distinct aspects.

A design for a ground-based data management system

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Lambird, Barbara A.; Lavine, David

1988-01-01

An initial design for a ground-based data management system which includes intelligent data abstraction and cataloging is described. The large quantity of data on some current and future NASA missions leads to significant problems in providing scientists with quick access to relevant data. Human screening of data for potential relevance to a particular study is time-consuming and costly. Intelligent databases can provide automatic screening when given relevent scientific parameters and constraints. The data management system would provide, at a minimum, information of availability of the range of data, the type available, specific time periods covered together with data quality information, and related sources of data. The system would inform the user about the primary types of screening, analysis, and methods of presentation available to the user. The system would then aid the user with performing the desired tasks, in such a way that the user need only specify the scientific parameters and objectives, and not worry about specific details for running a particular program. The design contains modules for data abstraction, catalog plan abstraction, a user-friendly interface, and expert systems for data handling, data evaluation, and application analysis. The emphasis is on developing general facilities for data representation, description, analysis, and presentation that will be easily used by scientists directly, thus bypassing the knowledge acquisition bottleneck. Expert system technology is used for many different aspects of the data management system, including the direct user interface, the interface to the data analysis routines, and the analysis of instrument status.

IRIS Update Project

EPA Science Inventory

EPA is conducting literature searches for these assessments in 2009. The overall purpose of these literature searches is to identify new and relevant information for each assessment. Relevant information is that which improves the scientific understanding of the agent’s toxicit...

California state information handbook: formerly utilized sites remedial action program

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

None

This volume is one of a series produced under contract with the DOE, by Politech Corporation to develop a legislative and regulatory data base to assist the FUSRAP management in addressing the institutional and socioeconomic issues involved in carrying out the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. This Information Handbook series contains information about all relevant government agencies at the Federal and state levels, the pertinent programs they administer, each affected state legislature, and current Federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives. This volume is a compilation of information about the state of California. It contains: a description of themore » state executive branch structure; a summary of relevant state statutes and regulations; a description of the structure of the state legislature, identification of the officers and committee chairmen, and a summary of recent relevant legislative action; the full text of relevant statutes and regulations.« less

Oregon state information handbook formerly utilized sites remedial action program

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

None

This volume is one of a series produced under contract with the DOE, by Politech Corporation to develop a legislative and regulatory data base to assist the FUSRAP management in addressing the institutional and socioeconomic issues involved in carrying out the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. This Information Handbook series contains information about all relevant government agencies at the Federal and state levels, the pertinent programs they administater, each affected state legislature, and current Federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives. This volume is a compilation of information about the State of Oregon. It contains: a description of themore » state executive branch structure; a summary of relevant state statutes and regulations; a description of the structure of the state legislature, identification of the officers and committee chairmen, and a summary of recent relevant legislative action; and the full text of relevant statutes and regulations.« less

Iowa state information handbook: formerly utilized sites remedial action program

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

None

This volume is one of a series produced under contract with the DOE, By Politech Corporation to develop a legislative and regulatory data base to assist the FUSRAP management in addressing the institutional and socioeconomic issues involved in carrying out the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. This Information Handbook series contains information about all relevant government agencies at the Federal and state levels, the pertinent programs they administer, each affected state legislature, and current Federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives. This volume is a compilation of information about the state of Iowa. It contains: a description of themore » state executive branch structure; a summary of relevant state statutes and regulations; a description of the structure of the state legislature, identification of the officers and committee chairmen, and a summary of recent relevant legislative action; the full test of relevant statutes and regulations.« less

Oregon state information handbook: formerly utilized sites remedial action program

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

None

This volume is one of a series produced under contract with the DOE, by Politech Corporation to develop a legislative and regulatory data base to assist the FUSRAP management in addressing the institutional and socioeconomic issues involved in carrying out the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. This Information Handbook series contains information about all relevant government agencies at the Federal and state levels, the pertinent programs they administer, each affected state legislature, and current Federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives. This volume is a compilation of information about the State of Oregon. It contains a description of themore » state executive branch structure; a summary of relevant state statutes and regulations; a description of the structure of the state legislature, identification of the officers and committee chairmen, and a summary of recent relevant legislative action; and the full text of relevant statutes and regulations.« less

Pennsylvania state information handbook: formerly utilized sites remedial action program

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

None

This volume is one of a series produced under contract with the DOE, by Politech Corporation to develop a legislative and regulatory data base to assist the FUSRAP management in addressing the institutional and socioeconomic issues involved in carrying out the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. This Information Handbook series contains information about all relevant government agencies at the Federal and State levels, the pertinent programs they administer, each affected state legislature, and current Federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives. This volume is a compilation of information about the State of Pennsylvania. It contains a description of themore » state executive branch structure; a summary of relevant state statutes and regulations; a description of the structure of the state legislature, identification of the officers and committee chairmen, and a summary of recent relevant legislative action; and the full text of relevant statutes and regulations.« less

Florida state information handbook: formerly utilized sites remedial action program

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

None

This volume is one of a series produced under contract with DOE, Office of Nuclear Waste Management, by Politech Corporation to develop a legislative and regulatory data base to assist the FUSRAP management in addressing the institutional and socioeconomic issues involved in carrying out the Remedial Action Program. This Information Handbook series contains information about all relevant government agencies at the federal and state levels, the pertinent programs they administer, each affected state legislature, and current federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives. This volume is a compilation of information about the State of Florida. It contains a description ofmore » the state executive branch structure; a summary of relevant state statutes and regulations; a description of the structure of the state legislature, identification of the officers and committee chairmen, and a summary of recent relevant legislative action; and the full text of relevant statutes and regulations.« less

New Mexico state information handbook: formerly utilized sites remedial action program

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

None

This volume is one of a series produced under contract with the DOE, by Politech Corporation to develop a legislative and regulatory data base to assist the FUSRAP management in addressing the institutional and socioeconomic issues involved in carrying out the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. This information Handbook series contains information about all relevant government agencies at the Federal and state levels, the pertinent programs they administer, each affected state legislature, and current Federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives. This volume is a compilation of information about the State of New Mexico. It contains a description ofmore » the state executive branch structure; a summary of relevant state statutes and regulations; a description of the structure of the state legislature, identification of the officers and committee chairmen, and a summary of recent relevant legislative action; and the full text of relevant statutes and regulations.« less

A framework for automatic information quality ranking of diabetes websites.

PubMed

Belen Sağlam, Rahime; Taskaya Temizel, Tugba

2015-01-01

Objective: When searching for particular medical information on the internet the challenge lies in distinguishing the websites that are relevant to the topic, and contain accurate information. In this article, we propose a framework that automatically identifies and ranks diabetes websites according to their relevance and information quality based on the website content. Design: The proposed framework ranks diabetes websites according to their content quality, relevance and evidence based medicine. The framework combines information retrieval techniques with a lexical resource based on Sentiwordnet making it possible to work with biased and untrusted websites while, at the same time, ensuring the content relevance. Measurement: The evaluation measurements used were Pearson-correlation, true positives, false positives and accuracy. We tested the framework with a benchmark data set consisting of 55 websites with varying degrees of information quality problems. Results: The proposed framework gives good results that are comparable with the non-automated information quality measuring approaches in the literature. The correlation between the results of the proposed automated framework and ground-truth is 0.68 on an average with p < 0.001 which is greater than the other proposed automated methods in the literature (r score in average is 0.33).

Information sharing during diagnostic assessments: what is relevant for parents?

PubMed

Klein, Sheryl; Wynn, Kerry; Ray, Lynne; Demeriez, Lori; LaBerge, Patricia; Pei, Jacqueline; St Pierre, Cherie

2011-05-01

ABSTRACT This descriptive qualitative study facilitates the application of family-centered care within a tertiary care interdisciplinary neurodevelopmental diagnostic assessment clinic by furthering an understanding of parent perceptions of the relevance of diagnostic information provision. An interdisciplinary assessment team completed an open-ended questionnaire to describe parent information provision. Parents from 9 families completed in-depth parent interviews following clinic attendance to discuss perceptions of information received. Interviews were audiotaped, transcribed, and coded by related themes. Parents did not perceive the information in the way professionals expected. Parents acknowledged receipt of comprehensive information relevant to the diagnosis but indicated that not all their needs were met. During the interviews, parents described the assessment process, preassessment information, and "steps in their journey." They noted that a strength-based approach and a focus on parental competency would support their coping efforts. Results underscore the need for professionals to be attentive to parents' individualized needs.

Mands for information using "who?" and "which?" in the presence of establishing and abolishing operations.

PubMed

Shillingsburg, M Alice; Bowen, Crystal N; Valentino, Amber L; Pierce, Laura E

2014-01-01

Treatments designed to teach mands for information have included prompting and differential reinforcement, as well as procedures to manipulate the relevant establishing operation (EO). However, previous studies have not included relevant abolishing operation (AO) conditions to ensure that the mand is under relevant antecedent control. Data on listener responses (i.e., use of the information) are also absent in the literature. The current study shows differential responding under EO and AO conditions and reports listener responses that demonstrate use of the provided information. Three participants, diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, learned to mand for information using "who?" and "which?" questions exclusively under EO conditions. In addition, each participant responded to the information provided to access a preferred item. Generalization of the "which?" mand for information was also demonstrated across novel stimuli. © Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior.

Improving the experiences and health of people with multimorbidity: exploratory research with policymakers and information providers on comorbid arthritis.

PubMed

Ryan, Rebecca E; Hill, Sophie J

2014-01-01

Multimorbidity has emerged as a complex health issue with the burden falling predominantly on patients, families and the primary health care sector. Evidence-informed communication and participation, activities informed by evidence and people's views and experiences, has the potential to improve health outcomes for people with multimorbidity. In recognition of their role in shaping future actions, we conducted focus groups with policymakers and information providers. The aim of this article is to report on the range and impacts of communication problems in multimorbidity, and identify points of intervention. To facilitate and focus dialogue, comorbid arthritis was selected as the case example. Two focus groups were held: one with policymakers and the other with health information providers. Participants were asked to discuss communication problems and possibilities relevant to multimorbidity, using examples from comorbid arthritis where relevant. Participants highlighted three main areas on which to focus future efforts to improve the health outcomes and experiences of people with multimorbidity: (1) make explicit the problems of multimorbidity and communication; (2) recognise that both multimorbidity and communication issues are compounding factors; and (3) consider actions at policy, service, community and individual levels. Examining multimorbidity through the lens of communication issues identified the significant burden across different domains of the health system. The focus on communication may facilitate a cross-disease perspective to emerge and assist with policy development.

Web information retrieval based on ontology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Jian

2013-03-01

The purpose of the Information Retrieval (IR) is to find a set of documents that are relevant for a specific information need of a user. Traditional Information Retrieval model commonly used in commercial search engine is based on keyword indexing system and Boolean logic queries. One big drawback of traditional information retrieval is that they typically retrieve information without an explicitly defined domain of interest to the users so that a lot of no relevance information returns to users, which burden the user to pick up useful answer from these no relevance results. In order to tackle this issue, many semantic web information retrieval models have been proposed recently. The main advantage of Semantic Web is to enhance search mechanisms with the use of Ontology's mechanisms. In this paper, we present our approach to personalize web search engine based on ontology. In addition, key techniques are also discussed in our paper. Compared to previous research, our works concentrate on the semantic similarity and the whole process including query submission and information annotation.

The role of retrieval practice in memory and analogical problem-solving.

PubMed

Hostetter, Autumn B; Penix, Elizabeth A; Norman, Mackenzie Z; Batsell, W Robert; Carr, Thomas H

2018-05-01

Retrieval practice (e.g., testing) has been shown to facilitate long-term retention of information. In two experiments, we examine whether retrieval practice also facilitates use of the practised information when it is needed to solve analogous problems. When retrieval practice was not limited to the information most relevant to the problems (Experiment 1), it improved memory for the information a week later compared with copying or rereading the information, although we found no evidence that it improved participants' ability to apply the information to the problems. In contrast, when retrieval practice was limited to only the information most relevant to the problems (Experiment 2), we found that retrieval practice enhanced memory for the critical information, the ability to identify the schematic similarities between the two sources of information, and the ability to apply that information to solve an analogous problem after a hint was given to do so. These results suggest that retrieval practice, through its effect on memory, can facilitate application of information to solve novel problems but has minimal effects on spontaneous realisation that the information is relevant.

Attachment anxiety moderates the relationship between childhood maltreatment and attention bias for emotion in adults

PubMed Central

Davis, Jennifer S; Fani, Negar; Ressler, Kerry; Jovanovic, Tanja; Tone, Erin B.; Bradley, Bekh

2014-01-01

Research indicates that some individuals who were maltreated in childhood demonstrate biases in social information processing. However, the mechanisms through which these biases develop remain unclear—one possible mechanism is via attachment-related processes. Childhood maltreatment increases risk for insecure attachment. The internal working models of self and others associated with insecure attachment may impact the processing of socially relevant information, particularly emotion conveyed in facial expressions. We investigated associations among child abuse, attachment anxiety and avoidance, and attention biases for emotion in an adult population. Specifically, we examined how self-reported attachment influences the relationship between childhood abuse and attention bias for emotion. A dot probe task consisting of happy, threatening, and neutral female facial stimuli was used to assess possible biases in attention for socially relevant stimuli. Our findings indicate that attachment anxiety moderated the relationship between maltreatment and attention bias for happy emotion; among individuals with a child abuse history, attachment anxiety significantly predicted an attention bias away from happy facial stimuli. PMID:24680873

It's All About You: An ERP Study of Emotion and Self-Relevance in Discourse

PubMed Central

Fields, Eric C.; Kuperberg, Gina R.

2013-01-01

Accurately communicating self-relevant and emotional information is a vital function of language, but we have little idea about how these factors impact normal discourse comprehension. In an event-related potential (ERP) study, we fully crossed self-relevance and emotion in a discourse context. Two-sentence social vignettes were presented either in the third or the second person (previous work has shown that this influences the perspective from which mental models are built). ERPs were time-locked to a critical word toward the end of the second sentence which was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant (e.g., A man knocks on Sandra's/your hotel room door. She/You see(s) that he has a gift/tray/gun in his hand.). We saw modulation of early components (P1, N1, and P2) by self-relevance, suggesting that a self-relevant context can lead to top-down attentional effects during early stages of visual processing. Unpleasant words evoked a larger late positivity than pleasant words, which evoked a larger positivity than neutral words, indicating that, regardless of self-relevance, emotional words are assessed as motivationally significant, triggering additional or deeper processing at post-lexical stages. Finally, self-relevance and emotion interacted on the late positivity: a larger late positivity was evoked by neutral words in self-relevant, but not in non-self-relevant, contexts. This may reflect prolonged attempts to disambiguate the emotional valence of ambiguous stimuli that are relevant to the self. More broadly, our findings suggest that the assessment of emotion and self-relevance are not independent, but rather that they interactively influence one another during word-by-word language comprehension. PMID:22584232

Sport science relevance and application: perceptions of UK coaches.

PubMed

Martindale, Russell; Nash, Christine

2013-01-01

While sport science can have significant and positive impact on coaches and athletes, there is still a general consensus that the transfer of sport science knowledge to coaching is poor. Given this apparent dilemma, this study investigated the perceptions of sport science from coaches across four different sports (football, rugby league, curling and judo) across three different levels (elite, developmental and novice). Specifically, 58 coaches (19 football; 21 rugby league; 9 curling; 9 judo) drawn evenly from novice, developmental and elite groups agreed to take part and were interviewed. Three key features emerged from the analysis 1) Practical application and relevance 2) Integration and access, 3) Language. In short, there was significant variability in the extent to which sport science was considered relevant and to whom, although interestingly this was not strongly related to coaching level. This inconsistency of understanding was a barrier to sport science engagement in some instances, as was the challenge of operationalising information for specific contexts. Furthermore, availability of opportunities and resources were often left to chance, while overuse of jargon and inability for research and practitioners to consider sport specific needs were also considered barriers to engagement. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Assessing physical functioning on pain management programmes: the unique contribution of directly assessed physical performance measures and their relationship to self-reports

PubMed Central

Guildford, Beth J; Jacobs, Clair M; Daly-Eichenhardt, Aisling; Scott, Whitney; McCracken, Lance M

2016-01-01

Physical functioning is a recommended outcome domain for pain management programmes. It can be assessed by self-report and by direct assessment of performance. Although physical performance measures may provide unique and useful information about patient functioning over and above self-report measures, it is not entirely clear which of the many possible performances to assess. This study investigated a battery of three directly assessed physical performance measures and their relationship to three currently used self-report measures of general health and functioning. The three performance measures were sensitive to treatment; patients performed significantly better on all three measures following completion of the pain management programme. The three performance measures were shown to represent a single underlying dimension, and there was a significant degree of overlap between them. The performance measures were shown to be relevant in explaining variation in the self-report measures, as well as to offer a clinically relevant different dimension of assessment to self-report. Future research could focus on developing performance-based measures that capture quality of movement and that are sensitive to relevant processes of therapeutic change. PMID:28386404

Beyond relevance and recall: testing new user-centred measures of database performance.

PubMed

Stokes, Peter; Foster, Allen; Urquhart, Christine

2009-09-01

Measures of the effectiveness of databases have traditionally focused on recall, precision, with some debate on how relevance can be assessed, and by whom. New measures of database performance are required when users are familiar with search engines, and expect full text availability. This research ascertained which of four bibliographic databases (BNI, CINAHL, MEDLINE and EMBASE) could be considered most useful to nursing and midwifery students searching for information for an undergraduate dissertation. Searches on title were performed for dissertation topics supplied by nursing students (n = 9), who made the relevance judgements. Measures of recall and precision were combined with additional factors to provide measures of effectiveness, while efficiency combined measures of novelty and originality and accessibility combined measures for availability and retrievability, based on obtainability. There were significant differences among the databases in precision, originality and availability, but other differences were not significant (Friedman test). Odds ratio tests indicated that BNI, followed by CINAHL were the most effective, CINAHL the most efficient, and BNI the most accessible. The methodology could help library services in purchase decisions as the measure for accessibility, and odds ratio testing helped to differentiate database performance.

Learning to rank-based gene summary extraction.

PubMed

Shang, Yue; Hao, Huihui; Wu, Jiajin; Lin, Hongfei

2014-01-01

In recent years, the biomedical literature has been growing rapidly. These articles provide a large amount of information about proteins, genes and their interactions. Reading such a huge amount of literature is a tedious task for researchers to gain knowledge about a gene. As a result, it is significant for biomedical researchers to have a quick understanding of the query concept by integrating its relevant resources. In the task of gene summary generation, we regard automatic summary as a ranking problem and apply the method of learning to rank to automatically solve this problem. This paper uses three features as a basis for sentence selection: gene ontology relevance, topic relevance and TextRank. From there, we obtain the feature weight vector using the learning to rank algorithm and predict the scores of candidate summary sentences and obtain top sentences to generate the summary. ROUGE (a toolkit for summarization of automatic evaluation) was used to evaluate the summarization result and the experimental results showed that our method outperforms the baseline techniques. According to the experimental result, the combination of three features can improve the performance of summary. The application of learning to rank can facilitate the further expansion of features for measuring the significance of sentences.

Wireless Network Communications Overview for Space Mission Operations

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Fink, Patrick W.

2009-01-01

The mission of the On-Board Wireless Working Group (WWG) is to serve as a general CCSDS focus group for intra-vehicle wireless technologies. The WWG investigates and makes recommendations pursuant to standardization of applicable wireless network protocols, ensuring the interoperability of independently developed wireless communication assets. This document presents technical background information concerning uses and applicability of wireless networking technologies for space missions. Agency-relevant driving scenarios, for which wireless network communications will provide a significant return-on-investment benefiting the participating international agencies, are used to focus the scope of the enclosed technical information.

There's an App for That? Highlighting the Difficulty in Finding Clinically Relevant Smartphone Applications.

PubMed

Wiechmann, Warren; Kwan, Daniel; Bokarius, Andrew; Toohey, Shannon L

2016-03-01

The use of personal mobile devices in the medical field has grown quickly, and a large proportion of physicians use their mobile devices as an immediate resource for clinical decision-making, prescription information and other medical information. The iTunes App Store (Apple, Inc.) contains approximately 20,000 apps in its "Medical" category, providing a robust repository of resources for clinicians; however, this represents only 2% of the entire App Store. The App Store does not have strict criteria for identifying content specific to practicing physicians, making the identification of clinically relevant content difficult. The objective of this study is to quantify the characteristics of existing medical applications in the iTunes App Store that could be used by emergency physicians, residents, or medical students. We found applications related to emergency medicine (EM) by searching the iTunes App Store for 21 terms representing core content areas of EM, such as "emergency medicine," "critical care," "orthopedics," and "procedures." Two physicians independently reviewed descriptions of these applications in the App Store and categorized each as the following: Clinically Relevant, Book/Published Source, Non-English, Study Tools, or Not Relevant. A third physician reviewer resolved disagreements about categorization. Descriptive statistics were calculated. We found a total of 7,699 apps from the 21 search terms, of which 17.8% were clinical, 9.6% were based on a book or published source, 1.6% were non-English, 0.7% were clinically relevant patient education resources, and 4.8% were study tools. Most significantly, 64.9% were considered not relevant to medical professionals. Clinically relevant apps make up approximately 6.9% of the App Store's "Medical" Category and 0.1% of the overall App Store. Clinically relevant apps represent only a small percentage (6.9%) of the total App volume within the Medical section of the App Store. Without a structured search-and-evaluation strategy, it may be difficult for the casual user to identify this potentially useful content. Given the increasing adoption of devices in healthcare, national EM associations should consider curating these resources for their members.

Differential dorsal and ventral medial prefrontal representations of the implicit self modulated by individualism and collectivism: An fMRI study.

PubMed

Harada, Tokiko; Li, Zhang; Chiao, Joan Y

2010-01-01

Individualism and collectivism, or self-construal style, refer to cultural values that influence how people think about themselves and their relation to the social and physical environment. Recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that cultural values of individualism and collectivism dynamically modulate neural response within cortical midline structures, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), during explicit self-evaluation. However, it remains unknown whether cultural priming modulates neural response during self-evaluation due to explicit task demands. Here we investigated how cultural priming of self-construal style affects neural activity within cortical midline structures during implicit self-evaluation in bicultural individuals. Results indicate that ventral MPFC showed relatively less deactivation during implicit evaluation of both self- and father-relevant information as compared to control condition (e.g., information of an unfamiliar person), irrespective of cultural priming. By contrast, dorsal MPFC showed relatively less deactivation during implicit evaluation of father-relevant information, but not self-relevant information, as compared to control condition, only when they were primed with individualism. Furthermore, dorsal MPFC showed relatively less deactivation during implicit evaluation of father-relevant information as compared to self-relevant condition only when they were primed with individualism. Hence, our results indicate that cultural priming modulates neural response within dorsal, but not ventral, portions of MPFC in a stimulus-driven rather than task-driven manner. More broadly, these findings suggest that cultural values dynamically shape neural representations during the evaluation, rather than the detection, of self-relevant information.

Learning to research in first grade: Bridging the transition from narrative to expository texts and tasks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Weise, Richard

Decades of research indicate that students at all academic grade and performance levels perform poorly with informational texts and tasks and particularly with locating assignment-relevant information in expository texts. Students have little understanding of the individual tasks required, the arc of the activity, the hierarchical structure of the information they seek, or how to reconstitute and interpret the information they extract. Poor performance begins with the introduction of textbooks and research assignments in fourth grade and continues into adulthood. However, to date, neither educators nor researchers have substantially addressed this problem. In this quasi-experimental study, we ask if first-grade children can perform essential tasks in identifying, extracting, and integrating assignment-relevant information and if instruction improves their performance. To answer this question, we conducted a 15-week, teacher-led, intervention in two first-grade classrooms in an inner-city Nashville elementary school. We created a computer learning environment (NoteTaker) to facilitate children's creation of a mental model of the research process and a narrative/expository bridge curriculum to support the children's transition from all narrative to all expository texts and tasks. We also created a new scaffolding taxonomy and a reading-to-research model to focus our research. Teachers participated in weekly professional development workshops. The results of this quasi-experimental study indicate that at-risk, first-grade children are able to (a) identify relevant information in an expository text, (b) categorize the information they identify, and (c) justify their choice of category. Children's performance in the first and last tasks significantly improved with instruction, and low-performing readers showed the greatest benefits from instruction. We find that the children's performance in categorizing information depended upon content-specific knowledge that was not taught, as well as on the process knowledge that was taught. We also find that children's narrative reading performance predicted their initial-performance for each assessment measure. We argue that first-grade children are developmentally ready to read expository texts and to learn reading-to-research tasks and that primary-school literacy instruction should not be limited to reading and writing stories.

Target detection in active polarization images perturbed with additive noise and illumination nonuniformity.

PubMed

Bénière, Arnaud; Goudail, François; Dolfi, Daniel; Alouini, Mehdi

2009-07-01

Active imaging systems that illuminate a scene with polarized light and acquire two images in two orthogonal polarizations yield information about the intensity contrast and the orthogonal state contrast (OSC) in the scene. Both contrasts are relevant for target detection. However, in real systems, the illumination is often spatially or temporally nonuniform. This creates artificial intensity contrasts that can lead to false alarms. We derive generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) detectors, for which intensity information is taken into account or not and determine the relevant expressions of the contrast in these two situations. These results are used to determine in which cases considering intensity information in addition to polarimetric information is relevant or not.

40 CFR 2.304 - Special rules governing certain information obtained under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

...) Contaminant means any physical, chemical, biological, or radiological substance or matter in water. (3... released by EPA because of the relevance of the information to a proceeding, notwithstanding the fact that... information to which this section applies because of its relevance to a proceeding shall be made only in...

40 CFR 2.304 - Special rules governing certain information obtained under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

...) Contaminant means any physical, chemical, biological, or radiological substance or matter in water. (3... released by EPA because of the relevance of the information to a proceeding, notwithstanding the fact that... information to which this section applies because of its relevance to a proceeding shall be made only in...

Relative importance of natural and anthropogenic factors influencing karst rocky desertification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xu, Erqi; Zhang, Hongqi

2017-04-01

As the most severe ecological issue in southwest China, karst rocky desertification (KRD) has both threatened and constrained regional sustainable development. Comprehensively understanding the relationship between the evolution of KRD and relevant driving data would provide more information to combat KRD in such complex karst environments. Past studies have been limited in quantifying the relative importance of driving factors influencing fine-scale KRD evolution, and have also lacked insight into their interactive impacts. To address these issues, we have used geographical information system techniques and a geographical detector model to explore the spatial consistency of driving factors and their interactions in relation to the evolution of KRD. Changshun County in China was selected as a representative area for the study. Nine relevant driving factors, including both natural and anthropogenic factors, were studied in regard to their relationships with KRD transformation between 2000 and 2010. Our results demonstrate the relative importance of driving data in influencing the improvement and deterioration of KRD. Lithology, soil type and road influence are identified as the leading factors. Interestingly, to our study at least, there is no significant difference between the impacts of natural and anthropogenic factors influencing KRD improvement, and even natural factors have a higher impact on KRD deterioration. Factors were found to enhance the influence of each other for KRD transformation. In particular, the results show a non-linearly enhanced effect between driving factors, which significantly aggravates KRD. New information found in our study helps to effectively control and restore areas afflicted by KRD.

Disconnects Between Audiences, Resources, and Initiatives: Key Findings of the Coastal Areas Climate Change Education Partnership

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Muller-Karger, F. E.; Ryan, J. G.; Feldman, A.; Gilbes, F.; Trotz, M.; McKayle, C.; Stone, D.; Plank, L.; Meisels, G.; Peterson, M.; Reynolds, C. J.

2012-12-01

The Coastal Areas Climate Change Education (CACCE) Partnership focused on defining a plan for effective education on climate change and its salient issues in coastal communities Florida and the US Caribbean territories. The approach included assessing perceptions and needs of stakeholders, evaluating the nature of available educational and information resources, and establishing a partnership that includes the public and professional organizations most relevant in planning and in addressing the resiliency of coastal communities. Information gathering activities included surveys among K-12 educators and students on climate change perceptions and current classroom activities in both Florida and the Caribbean territories; surveys of professional urban and land-use planners across Florida regarding their understanding of related in their professional practice; and conducting an inventory of relevant educational materials and information resources. Survey results showed a range of misperceptions about climate change, its causes and its likely impacts. At present, students and teachers in high and middle schools show poor understanding of climate science, and minimal time is spent in instruction on climate change in science courses in Florida and Puerto Rico schools. Also, there has to be professional development efforts and access to rich instructional content in a continuum spanning schools and professional communities including planners (which we surveyed). Architects and engineers are communities that also need to be surveyed and included in future efforts. A major obstacle to efforts at providing continuing education for planners and municipal officials is the lack of consensus on and access to regionally-specific scientific data regarding climate impacts and the relevant instructional content. It is difficult for professionals to prepare for climate change if they cannot define impacts in the Florida-Caribbean region and its coastal urban areas. Across over 1000 websites and online information resources on climate change reviewed for this project, less than a dozen items were identified that address climate change issues and impacts relevant to Florida and the US Caribbean Territories. This represents a serious issue for planners, who need to make effective arguments for climate adaptation strategies to the public and to public officials. These disconnects between stakeholder information and education needs, and available educational content and informational resources, is a significant obstacle to any future public education efforts on climate change in the US most vulnerable regions of the US.

Lateralized interactive social content and valence processing within the human amygdala

PubMed Central

Vrtička, Pascal; Sander, David; Vuilleumier, Patrik

2013-01-01

In the past, the amygdala has generally been conceptualized as a fear-processing module. Recently, however, it has been proposed to respond to all stimuli that are relevant with respect to the current needs, goals, and values of an individual. This raises the question of whether the human amygdala may differentiate between separate kinds of relevance. A distinction between emotional (vs. neutral) and social (vs. non-social) relevance is supported by previous studies showing that the human amygdala preferentially responds to both emotionally and socially significant information, and these factors might even display interactive encoding properties. However, no investigation has yet probed a full 2 (positive vs. negative valence) × 2 (social vs. non-social content) processing pattern, with neutral images as an additional baseline. Applying such an extended orthogonal factorial design, our fMRI study demonstrates that the human amygdala is (1) more strongly activated for neutral social vs. non-social information, (2) activated at a similar level when viewing social positive or negative images, but (3) displays a valence effect (negative vs. positive) for non-social images. In addition, this encoding pattern is not influenced by cognitive or behavioral emotion regulation mechanisms, and displays a hemispheric lateralization with more pronounced effects on the right side. Finally, the same valence × social content interaction was found in three additional cortical regions, namely the right fusiform gyrus, right anterior superior temporal gyrus, and medial orbitofrontal cortex. Overall, these findings suggest that valence and social content processing represent distinct kinds of relevance that interact within the human amygdala as well as in a more extensive cortical network, likely subserving a key role in relevance detection. PMID:23346054

Using in vitro models for expression profiling studies on ethanol and drugs of abuse.

PubMed

Thibault, Christelle; Hassan, Sajida; Miles, Michael

2005-03-01

The use of expression profiling with microarrays offers great potential for studying the mechanisms of action of drugs of abuse. Studies with the intact nervous system seem likely to be most relevant to understanding the mechanisms of drug abuse-related behaviours. However, the use of expression profiling with in vitro culture models offers significant advantages for identifying details of cellular signalling actions and toxicity for drugs of abuse. This study discusses general issues of the use of microarrays and cell culture models for studies on drugs of abuse. Specific results from existing studies are also discussed, providing clear examples of relevance for in vitro studies on ethanol, nicotine, opiates, cannabinoids and hallucinogens such as LSD. In addition to providing details on signalling mechanisms relevant to the neurobiology of drugs of abuse, microarray studies on a variety of cell culture systems have also provided important information on mechanisms of cellular/organ toxicity with drugs of abuse. Efforts to integrate genomic studies on drugs of abuse with both in vivo and in vitro models offer the potential for novel mechanistic rigor and physiological relevance.

A history in-care predicts unique characteristics in a homeless population with mental illness.

PubMed

Roos, Leslie E; Distasio, Jino; Bolton, Shay-Lee; Katz, Laurence Y; Afifi, Tracie O; Isaak, Corinne; Goering, Paula; Bruce, Lucille; Sareen, Jitender

2014-10-01

Multiple studies of homeless persons report an increased prevalence of a history in-care, but there is a dearth of information on associated outcomes or relevant demographic profiles. This information is critical to understanding if certain individuals are at elevated risk or might benefit from specific intervention. Here, we investigate how a history in-care relates to demographics and multiple outcome measures in a homeless population with mental illness. Using the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI), the Short-Form 12, and a trauma questionnaire, we investigated baseline differences in demographics and length of homelessness in the At Home/Chez Soi Trial (N=504) Winnipeg homeless population with and without a history in-care. Approximately 50% of the homeless sample reported a history in-care. This group was significantly more likely to be young, female, married or cohabitating, of Aboriginal heritage, have less education, and have longer lifetime homelessness. Individuals of Aboriginal heritage with a history in-care were significantly more likely to report a familial history of residential school. Individuals with a history in-care experienced different prevalence rates of Axis 1 mental disorders. Those with a history in-care also reported significantly more traumatic events (particularly interpersonal). A distinctive high-risk profile emerged for individuals with a history in-care. Sociocultural factors of colonization and intergenerational transmission of trauma appear to be particularly relevant in the trajectories for individuals of Aboriginal heritage. Given the high prevalence of a history in-care, interventions and policy should reflect the specific vulnerability of this population, particularly in regards to trauma-informed services. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Expert vs. novice differences in the detection of relevant information during a chess game: evidence from eye movements

PubMed Central

Sheridan, Heather; Reingold, Eyal M.

2014-01-01

The present study explored the ability of expert and novice chess players to rapidly distinguish between regions of a chessboard that were relevant to the best move on the board, and regions of the board that were irrelevant. Accordingly, we monitored the eye movements of expert and novice chess players, while they selected white's best move for a variety of chess problems. To manipulate relevancy, we constructed two different versions of each chess problem in the experiment, and we counterbalanced these versions across participants. These two versions of each problem were identical except that a single piece was changed from a bishop to a knight. This subtle change reversed the relevancy map of the board, such that regions that were relevant in one version of the board were now irrelevant (and vice versa). Using this paradigm, we demonstrated that both the experts and novices spent more time fixating the relevant relative to the irrelevant regions of the board. However, the experts were faster at detecting relevant information than the novices, as shown by the finding that experts (but not novices) were able to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information during the early part of the trial. These findings further demonstrate the domain-related perceptual processing advantage of chess experts, using an experimental paradigm that allowed us to manipulate relevancy under tightly controlled conditions. PMID:25202298

Expert vs. novice differences in the detection of relevant information during a chess game: evidence from eye movements.

PubMed

Sheridan, Heather; Reingold, Eyal M

2014-01-01

The present study explored the ability of expert and novice chess players to rapidly distinguish between regions of a chessboard that were relevant to the best move on the board, and regions of the board that were irrelevant. Accordingly, we monitored the eye movements of expert and novice chess players, while they selected white's best move for a variety of chess problems. To manipulate relevancy, we constructed two different versions of each chess problem in the experiment, and we counterbalanced these versions across participants. These two versions of each problem were identical except that a single piece was changed from a bishop to a knight. This subtle change reversed the relevancy map of the board, such that regions that were relevant in one version of the board were now irrelevant (and vice versa). Using this paradigm, we demonstrated that both the experts and novices spent more time fixating the relevant relative to the irrelevant regions of the board. However, the experts were faster at detecting relevant information than the novices, as shown by the finding that experts (but not novices) were able to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information during the early part of the trial. These findings further demonstrate the domain-related perceptual processing advantage of chess experts, using an experimental paradigm that allowed us to manipulate relevancy under tightly controlled conditions.

Framing research for state policymakers who place a priority on cancer.

PubMed

Brownson, Ross C; Dodson, Elizabeth A; Kerner, Jon F; Moreland-Russell, Sarah

2016-08-01

Despite the potential for reducing the cancer burden via state policy change, few data exist on how best to disseminate research information to influence state legislators' policy choices. We explored: (1) the relative importance of core framing issues (source, presentation, timeliness) among policymakers who prioritize cancer and those who do not prioritize cancer and (2) the predictors of use of research in policymaking. Cross-sectional data were collected from US state policymakers (i.e., legislators elected to state houses or senates) from January through October 2012 (n = 862). One-way analysis of variance was performed to investigate the association of the priority of cancer variable with outcome variables. Multivariate logistic regression models examined predictors of the influence of research information. Legislators who prioritized cancer tended to rate characteristics that make research information useful higher than those who did not prioritize cancer. Among differences that were statistically significant were three items in the "source" domain (relevance, delivered by someone respected, supports one's own position), one item in the "presentation" domain (telling a story related to constituents) and two items in the "timeliness" domain (high current state priority, feasible when information is received). Participants who prioritized cancer risk factors were 80 % more likely to rate research information as one of their top reasons for choosing an issue on which to work. Our results suggest the importance of narrative forms of communication and that research information needs to be relevant to the policymakers' constituents in a brief, concise format.

Informing the Human Plasma Protein Binding of ...

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

The free fraction of a xenobiotic in plasma (Fub) is an important determinant of chemical adsorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination, and toxicity, yet experimental plasma protein binding data is scarce for environmentally relevant chemicals. The presented work explores the merit of utilizing available pharmaceutical data to predict Fub for environmentally relevant chemicals via machine learning techniques. Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models were constructed with k nearest neighbors (kNN), support vector machines (SVM), and random forest (RF) machine learning algorithms from a training set of 1045 pharmaceuticals. The models were then evaluated with independent test sets of pharmaceuticals (200 compounds) and environmentally relevant ToxCast chemicals (406 total, in two groups of 238 and 168 compounds). The selection of a minimal feature set of 10-15 2D molecular descriptors allowed for both informative feature interpretation and practical applicability domain assessment via a bounded box of descriptor ranges and principal component analysis. The diverse pharmaceutical and environmental chemical sets exhibit similarities in terms of chemical space (99-82% overlap), as well as comparable bias and variance in constructed learning curves. All the models exhibit significant predictability with mean absolute errors (MAE) in the range of 0.10-0.18 Fub. The models performed best for highly bound chemicals (MAE 0.07-0.12), neutrals (MAE 0

Automatic Artifact Removal from Electroencephalogram Data Based on A Priori Artifact Information.

PubMed

Zhang, Chi; Tong, Li; Zeng, Ying; Jiang, Jingfang; Bu, Haibing; Yan, Bin; Li, Jianxin

2015-01-01

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is susceptible to various nonneural physiological artifacts. Automatic artifact removal from EEG data remains a key challenge for extracting relevant information from brain activities. To adapt to variable subjects and EEG acquisition environments, this paper presents an automatic online artifact removal method based on a priori artifact information. The combination of discrete wavelet transform and independent component analysis (ICA), wavelet-ICA, was utilized to separate artifact components. The artifact components were then automatically identified using a priori artifact information, which was acquired in advance. Subsequently, signal reconstruction without artifact components was performed to obtain artifact-free signals. The results showed that, using this automatic online artifact removal method, there were statistical significant improvements of the classification accuracies in both two experiments, namely, motor imagery and emotion recognition.

Automatic Artifact Removal from Electroencephalogram Data Based on A Priori Artifact Information

PubMed Central

Zhang, Chi; Tong, Li; Zeng, Ying; Jiang, Jingfang; Bu, Haibing; Li, Jianxin

2015-01-01

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is susceptible to various nonneural physiological artifacts. Automatic artifact removal from EEG data remains a key challenge for extracting relevant information from brain activities. To adapt to variable subjects and EEG acquisition environments, this paper presents an automatic online artifact removal method based on a priori artifact information. The combination of discrete wavelet transform and independent component analysis (ICA), wavelet-ICA, was utilized to separate artifact components. The artifact components were then automatically identified using a priori artifact information, which was acquired in advance. Subsequently, signal reconstruction without artifact components was performed to obtain artifact-free signals. The results showed that, using this automatic online artifact removal method, there were statistical significant improvements of the classification accuracies in both two experiments, namely, motor imagery and emotion recognition. PMID:26380294

From headache to tumour: An examination of health anxiety, health-related Internet use and 'query escalation'.

PubMed

Singh, Karmpaul; Brown, Richard J

2016-09-01

The current study aimed to explore the phenomenon of disease-related 'query escalation' in high/low health anxious Internet users (N = 40). During a 15-minute health-related Internet search, participants rated their anxiety and the perceived seriousness of information on each page. Post-search interviews determined the reasons for, and effects of, escalating queries to consider serious diseases. Both groups were found to be significantly more anxious after escalating queries. The high group was significantly more likely to escalate queries. Evaluating personal relevance of material was the main reason for escalations and moderated anxiety post-escalation. We conclude that searching for online disease information can increase anxiety, particularly for people worried about their health. © The Author(s) 2015.

The Quality of Clinical Information in Adverse Drug Reaction Reports by Patients and Healthcare Professionals: A Retrospective Comparative Analysis.

PubMed

Rolfes, Leàn; van Hunsel, Florence; van der Linden, Laura; Taxis, Katja; van Puijenbroek, Eugène

2017-07-01

Clinical information is needed to assess the causal relationship between a drug and an adverse drug reaction (ADR) in a reliable way. Little is known about the level of relevant clinical information about the ADRs reported by patients. The aim was to determine to what extent patients report relevant clinical information about an ADR compared with their healthcare professional. A retrospective analysis of all ADR reports on the same case, i.e., cases with a report from both the patient and the patient's healthcare professional, selected from the database of the Dutch Pharmacovigilance Center Lareb, was conducted. The extent to which relevant clinical information was reported was assessed by trained pharmacovigilance assessors, using a structured tool. The following four domains were assessed: ADR, chronology, suspected drug, and patient characteristics. For each domain, the proportion of reported information in relation to information deemed relevant was calculated. An average score of all relevant domains was determined and categorized as poorly (≤45%), moderately (from 46 to 74%) or well (≥75%) reported. Data were analyzed using a paired sample t test and Wilcoxon signed rank test. A total of 197 cases were included. In 107 cases (54.3%), patients and healthcare professionals reported a similar level of clinical information. Statistical analysis demonstrated no overall differences between the groups (p = 0.126). In a unique study of cases of ADRs reported by patients and healthcare professionals, we found that patients report clinical information at a similar level as their healthcare professional. For an optimal pharmacovigilance, both healthcare professionals and patient should be encouraged to report.

Probabilistic peak detection in CE-LIF for STR DNA typing.

PubMed

Woldegebriel, Michael; van Asten, Arian; Kloosterman, Ate; Vivó-Truyols, Gabriel

2017-07-01

In this work, we present a novel probabilistic peak detection algorithm based on a Bayesian framework for forensic DNA analysis. The proposed method aims at an exhaustive use of raw electropherogram data from a laser-induced fluorescence multi-CE system. As the raw data are informative up to a single data point, the conventional threshold-based approaches discard relevant forensic information early in the data analysis pipeline. Our proposed method assigns a posterior probability reflecting the data point's relevance with respect to peak detection criteria. Peaks of low intensity generated from a truly existing allele can thus constitute evidential value instead of fully discarding them and contemplating a potential allele drop-out. This way of working utilizes the information available within each individual data point and thus avoids making early (binary) decisions on the data analysis that can lead to error propagation. The proposed method was tested and compared to the application of a set threshold as is current practice in forensic STR DNA profiling. The new method was found to yield a significant improvement in the number of alleles identified, regardless of the peak heights and deviation from Gaussian shape. © 2017 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Temporal allocation of attention toward threat in individuals with posttraumatic stress symptoms.

PubMed

Amir, Nader; Taylor, Charles T; Bomyea, Jessica A; Badour, Christal L

2009-12-01

Research suggests that individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) selectively attend to threat-relevant information. However, little is known about how initial detection of threat influences the processing of subsequently encountered stimuli. To address this issue, we used a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm (RSVP; Raymond, J. E., Shapiro, K. L., & Arnell, K. M. (1992). Temporary suppression of visual processing in an RSVP task: An attentional blink? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 18, 849-860) to examine temporal allocation of attention to threat-related and neutral stimuli in individuals with PTSD symptoms (PTS), traumatized individuals without PTSD symptoms (TC), and non-anxious controls (NAC). Participants were asked to identify one or two targets in an RSVP stream. Typically processing of the first target decreases accuracy of identifying the second target as a function of the temporal lag between targets. Results revealed that the PTS group was significantly more accurate in detecting a neutral target when it was presented 300 or 500ms after threat-related stimuli compared to when the target followed neutral stimuli. These results suggest that individuals with PTSD may process trauma-relevant information more rapidly and efficiently than benign information.

Interviews with children about their mental health problems: The congruence and validity of information that children report.

PubMed

Macleod, Emily; Woolford, June; Hobbs, Linda; Gross, Julien; Hayne, Harlene; Patterson, Tess

2017-04-01

To obtain a child's perspective during a mental health assessment, he or she is usually interviewed. Although researchers and clinicians generally agree that it is beneficial to hear a child's account of his or her presenting issues, there is debate about whether children provide reliable or valid clinical information during these interviews. Here, we examined whether children provide clinically and diagnostically relevant information in a clinical setting. In all, 31 children aged 5-12-years undergoing mental health assessments were asked open-ended questions about their presenting problems during a semi-structured interview. We coded the information that children reported to determine whether it was clinically relevant and could be used to diagnose their problems and to formulate and plan treatment. We also coded children's information to determine whether it was congruent with the children's presenting problems and their eventual clinical diagnoses. Most of the information that children reported was clinically relevant and included information about behaviour, affect, temporal details, thoughts, people, the environment, and the child's physical experiences. The information that children reported was also clinically valid; it was congruent with the problems that were discussed (84%) and also with the eventual diagnosis that the child received after a complete assessment (74%). We conclude that children can contribute relevant, clinically useful, valid information during clinical psychological assessments.

Methodical principles of recognition different source types in an acoustic-emission testing of metal objects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bobrov, A. L.

2017-08-01

This paper presents issues of identification of various AE sources in order to increase the information value of AE method. This task is especially relevant for complex objects, when factors that affect an acoustic path on an object of testing significantly affect parameters of signals recorded by sensor. Correlation criteria, sensitive to type of AE source in metal objects is determined in the article.

E-waste issues in Sri Lanka and the Basel Convention.

PubMed

Suraweera, Inoka

2016-03-01

E-waste is hazardous, complex and expensive to treat in an environmentally sound manner. The management of e-waste is considered a serious challenge in both developed and developing countries and Sri Lanka is no exception. Due to significant growth in the economy and investments and other reasons the consumption of electronic and electrical equipment in Sri Lanka has increased over the years resulting in significant generation of e-waste. Several initiatives such as introduction of hazardous waste management rules, ratification of the Basel Convention in 1992 and the introduction of a National Corporate E-waste Management Program have been undertaken in Sri Lanka to manage e-waste. Strengthening policy and legislation, introducing methods for upstream reduction of e-waste, building capacity of relevant officers, awareness raising among school children and the general public and development of an e-waste information system are vital. Research on e-waste needs to be developed in Sri Lanka. The health sector could play a leading role in the provision of occupational health and safety for e-waste workers, advocacy, capacity building of relevant staff and raising awareness among the general public about e-waste. Improper e-waste management practices carried out by informal sector workers need to be addressed urgently in Sri Lanka.

Policy Implications of Achievement Testing Using Multilevel Models: The Case of Brazilian Elementary Schools.

PubMed

Menezes, Igor G; Duran, Victor R; Mendonça Filho, Euclides J; Veloso, Tainã J; Sarmento, Stella M S; Paget, Christine L; Ruggeri, Kai

2016-01-01

Large-scale educational assessment has been established as source of descriptive, evaluative and interpretative information that influence educational policies worldwide throughout the last third of the twentieth century. In the 1990s the Brazilian Ministry of Education developed the National Basic Education Assessment System (SAEB) that regularly measures management, resource and contextual school features and academic achievement in public and private institutions. In 2005, after significant piloting and review of the SAEB, a new sampling strategy was taken and Prova Brasil became the new instrument used by the Ministry to assess skills in Portuguese (reading comprehension) and Mathematics (problem solving), as well as collecting contextual information concerning the school, principal, teacher, and the students. This study aims to identify which variables are predictors of academic achievement of fifth grade students on Prova Brasil. Across a large sample of students, multilevel models tested a large number of variables relevant to student achievement. This approach uncovered critical variables not commonly seen as significant in light of other achievement determinants, including student habits, teacher ethnicity, and school technological resources. As such, this approach demonstrates the value of MLM to appropriately nuanced educational policies that reflect critical influences on student achievement. Its implications for wider application for psychology studies that may have relevant impacts for policy are also discussed.

Sound envelope processing in the developing human brain: A MEG study.

PubMed

Tang, Huizhen; Brock, Jon; Johnson, Blake W

2016-02-01

This study investigated auditory cortical processing of linguistically-relevant temporal modulations in the developing brains of young children. Auditory envelope following responses to white noise amplitude modulated at rates of 1-80 Hz in healthy children (aged 3-5 years) and adults were recorded using a paediatric magnetoencephalography (MEG) system and a conventional MEG system, respectively. For children, there were envelope following responses to slow modulations but no significant responses to rates higher than about 25 Hz, whereas adults showed significant envelope following responses to almost the entire range of stimulus rates. Our results show that the auditory cortex of preschool-aged children has a sharply limited capacity to process rapid amplitude modulations in sounds, as compared to the auditory cortex of adults. These neurophysiological results are consistent with previous psychophysical evidence for a protracted maturational time course for auditory temporal processing. The findings are also in good agreement with current linguistic theories that posit a perceptual bias for low frequency temporal information in speech during language acquisition. These insights also have clinical relevance for our understanding of language disorders that are associated with difficulties in processing temporal information in speech. Copyright © 2015 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Policy Implications of Achievement Testing Using Multilevel Models: The Case of Brazilian Elementary Schools

PubMed Central

Menezes, Igor G.; Duran, Victor R.; Mendonça Filho, Euclides J.; Veloso, Tainã J.; Sarmento, Stella M. S.; Paget, Christine L.; Ruggeri, Kai

2016-01-01

Large-scale educational assessment has been established as source of descriptive, evaluative and interpretative information that influence educational policies worldwide throughout the last third of the twentieth century. In the 1990s the Brazilian Ministry of Education developed the National Basic Education Assessment System (SAEB) that regularly measures management, resource and contextual school features and academic achievement in public and private institutions. In 2005, after significant piloting and review of the SAEB, a new sampling strategy was taken and Prova Brasil became the new instrument used by the Ministry to assess skills in Portuguese (reading comprehension) and Mathematics (problem solving), as well as collecting contextual information concerning the school, principal, teacher, and the students. This study aims to identify which variables are predictors of academic achievement of fifth grade students on Prova Brasil. Across a large sample of students, multilevel models tested a large number of variables relevant to student achievement. This approach uncovered critical variables not commonly seen as significant in light of other achievement determinants, including student habits, teacher ethnicity, and school technological resources. As such, this approach demonstrates the value of MLM to appropriately nuanced educational policies that reflect critical influences on student achievement. Its implications for wider application for psychology studies that may have relevant impacts for policy are also discussed. PMID:27933004

Sailing smoothly across the cultural divide: Constructing effective behavioral science presentations for medical audiences.

PubMed

Myerholtz, Linda; Schirmer, Julie; Carling, Mary Anne

2015-01-01

Beginning behavioral science faculty, who are critical residency program contributors, face significant immediate challenges that often diminish their effectiveness and increase the time it takes to translate and reformat their expertise into relevant and meaningful educational presentations. Residency program culture and competency-based learning are quite different from the educational objectives and teaching environments found in most behavioral health training programs. The goal of this article is to provide beginning behavior science faculty, who are typically on their own and learning on the job, with a guide to the core educational perspectives and skills required as well as key resources that are available to them. Since a significant portion of behavioral science faculty's teaching time revolves around small and large group presentations, our guide focuses on how to incorporate key strategies and resources into relevant, evidenced-based and, most importantly, effective behavioral health presentations for the program's resident physicians. Specifically, our recommendations include selection of content, methods of content organization, techniques for actively engaging resident physicians in discussing the significance of the topics, and descriptions of numerous Internet resources for the primary mental health topics that concern family medicine trainees. Finally, it is emphasized that the relevant and effective use of these recommendations is dependent upon the behavioral science faculty educator's first understanding and appreciating how physicians' think, speak, and prioritize information while caring for their patients. © The Author(s) 2015.

A similarity learning approach to content-based image retrieval: application to digital mammography.

PubMed

El-Naqa, Issam; Yang, Yongyi; Galatsanos, Nikolas P; Nishikawa, Robert M; Wernick, Miles N

2004-10-01

In this paper, we describe an approach to content-based retrieval of medical images from a database, and provide a preliminary demonstration of our approach as applied to retrieval of digital mammograms. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) refers to the retrieval of images from a database using information derived from the images themselves, rather than solely from accompanying text indices. In the medical-imaging context, the ultimate aim of CBIR is to provide radiologists with a diagnostic aid in the form of a display of relevant past cases, along with proven pathology and other suitable information. CBIR may also be useful as a training tool for medical students and residents. The goal of information retrieval is to recall from a database information that is relevant to the user's query. The most challenging aspect of CBIR is the definition of relevance (similarity), which is used to guide the retrieval machine. In this paper, we pursue a new approach, in which similarity is learned from training examples provided by human observers. Specifically, we explore the use of neural networks and support vector machines to predict the user's notion of similarity. Within this framework we propose using a hierarchal learning approach, which consists of a cascade of a binary classifier and a regression module to optimize retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. We also explore how to incorporate online human interaction to achieve relevance feedback in this learning framework. Our experiments are based on a database consisting of 76 mammograms, all of which contain clustered microcalcifications (MCs). Our goal is to retrieve mammogram images containing similar MC clusters to that in a query. The performance of the retrieval system is evaluated using precision-recall curves computed using a cross-validation procedure. Our experimental results demonstrate that: 1) the learning framework can accurately predict the perceptual similarity reported by human observers, thereby serving as a basis for CBIR; 2) the learning-based framework can significantly outperform a simple distance-based similarity metric; 3) the use of the hierarchical two-stage network can improve retrieval performance; and 4) relevance feedback can be effectively incorporated into this learning framework to achieve improvement in retrieval precision based on online interaction with users; and 5) the retrieved images by the network can have predicting value for the disease condition of the query.

Behaviorally Relevant Abstract Object Identity Representation in the Human Parietal Cortex

PubMed Central

Jeong, Su Keun

2016-01-01

The representation of object identity is fundamental to human vision. Using fMRI and multivoxel pattern analysis, here we report the representation of highly abstract object identity information in human parietal cortex. Specifically, in superior intraparietal sulcus (IPS), a region previously shown to track visual short-term memory capacity, we found object identity representations for famous faces varying freely in viewpoint, hairstyle, facial expression, and age; and for well known cars embedded in different scenes, and shown from different viewpoints and sizes. Critically, these parietal identity representations were behaviorally relevant as they closely tracked the perceived face-identity similarity obtained in a behavioral task. Meanwhile, the task-activated regions in prefrontal and parietal cortices (excluding superior IPS) did not exhibit such abstract object identity representations. Unlike previous studies, we also failed to observe identity representations in posterior ventral and lateral visual object-processing regions, likely due to the greater amount of identity abstraction demanded by our stimulus manipulation here. Our MRI slice coverage precluded us from examining identity representation in anterior temporal lobe, a likely region for the computing of identity information in the ventral region. Overall, we show that human parietal cortex, part of the dorsal visual processing pathway, is capable of holding abstract and complex visual representations that are behaviorally relevant. These results argue against a “content-poor” view of the role of parietal cortex in attention. Instead, the human parietal cortex seems to be “content rich” and capable of directly participating in goal-driven visual information representation in the brain. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The representation of object identity (including faces) is fundamental to human vision and shapes how we interact with the world. Although object representation has traditionally been associated with human occipital and temporal cortices, here we show, by measuring fMRI response patterns, that a region in the human parietal cortex can robustly represent task-relevant object identities. These representations are invariant to changes in a host of visual features, such as viewpoint, and reflect an abstract level of representation that has not previously been reported in the human parietal cortex. Critically, these neural representations are behaviorally relevant as they closely track the perceived object identities. Human parietal cortex thus participates in the moment-to-moment goal-directed visual information representation in the brain. PMID:26843642

Visual Experience Enhances Infants' Use of Task-Relevant Information in an Action Task

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wang, Su-hua; Kohne, Lisa

2007-01-01

Four experiments examined whether infants' use of task-relevant information in an action task could be facilitated by visual experience in the laboratory. Twelve- but not 9-month-old infants spontaneously used height information and chose an appropriate (taller) cover in search of a hidden tall toy. After watching examples of covering events in a…

The Effect of Task and Personal Relevance on Credibility Judgements while Searching on the Internet

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kirkyla, Adrius Viktoras

2010-01-01

People can view the Internet as an endless source of information although it is not known how individuals might evaluate the credibility of information that is presented on websites. A methodology is needed to incorporate how the information seeking task, as well as the level of personal relevance, influences the criteria individuals use to…

Breast cancer: patient information needs reflected in English and German web sites.

PubMed

Weissenberger, C; Jonassen, S; Beranek-Chiu, J; Neumann, M; Müller, D; Bartelt, S; Schulz, S; Mönting, J S; Henne, K; Gitsch, G; Witucki, G

2004-10-18

Individual belief and knowledge about cancer were shown to influence coping and compliance of patients. Supposing that the Internet information both has impact on patients and reflects patients' information needs, breast cancer web sites in English and German language were evaluated to assess the information quality and were compared with each other to identify intercultural differences. Search engines returned 10 616 hits related to breast cancer. Of these, 4590 relevant hits were analysed. In all, 1888 web pages belonged to 132 English-language web sites and 2702 to 65 German-language web sites. Results showed that palliative therapy (4.5 vs 16.7%; P=0.004), alternative medicine (18.2 vs 46.2%; P<0.001), and disease-related information (prognosis, cancer aftercare, self-help groups, and epidemiology) were significantly more often found on German-language web sites. Therapy-related information (including the side effects of therapy and new studies) was significantly more often given by English-language web sites: for example, details about surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, hormone therapy, immune therapy, and stem cell transplantation. In conclusion, our results have implications for patient education by physicians and may help to improve patient support by tailoring information, considering the weak points in information provision by web sites and intercultural differences in patient needs.

A UML-based ontology for describing hospital information system architectures.

PubMed

Winter, A; Brigl, B; Wendt, T

2001-01-01

To control the heterogeneity inherent to hospital information systems the information management needs appropriate hospital information systems modeling methods or techniques. This paper shows that, for several reasons, available modeling approaches are not able to answer relevant questions of information management. To overcome this major deficiency we offer an UML-based ontology for describing hospital information systems architectures. This ontology views at three layers: the domain layer, the logical tool layer, and the physical tool layer, and defines the relevant components. The relations between these components, especially between components of different layers make the answering of our information management questions possible.

Information transmission and detection thresholds in the vestibular nuclei: single neurons vs. population encoding

PubMed Central

Massot, Corentin; Chacron, Maurice J.

2011-01-01

Understanding how sensory neurons transmit information about relevant stimuli remains a major goal in neuroscience. Of particular relevance are the roles of neural variability and spike timing in neural coding. Peripheral vestibular afferents display differential variability that is correlated with the importance of spike timing; regular afferents display little variability and use a timing code to transmit information about sensory input. Irregular afferents, conversely, display greater variability and instead use a rate code. We studied how central neurons within the vestibular nuclei integrate information from both afferent classes by recording from a group of neurons termed vestibular only (VO) that are known to make contributions to vestibulospinal reflexes and project to higher-order centers. We found that, although individual central neurons had sensitivities that were greater than or equal to those of individual afferents, they transmitted less information. In addition, their velocity detection thresholds were significantly greater than those of individual afferents. This is because VO neurons display greater variability, which is detrimental to information transmission and signal detection. Combining activities from multiple VO neurons increased information transmission. However, the information rates were still much lower than those of equivalent afferent populations. Furthermore, combining responses from multiple VO neurons led to lower velocity detection threshold values approaching those measured from behavior (∼2.5 vs. 0.5–1°/s). Our results suggest that the detailed time course of vestibular stimuli encoded by afferents is not transmitted by VO neurons. Instead, they suggest that higher vestibular pathways must integrate information from central vestibular neuron populations to give rise to behaviorally observed detection thresholds. PMID:21307329

49 CFR 240.215 - Retaining information supporting determinations.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-10-01

...; (3) Any relevant data furnished by a governmental agency concerning the person's motor vehicle... administered. (e) The information concerning demonstrated performance skills that the railroad shall retain... the performance skills test(s) that documents the relevant operating facts on which the evaluation is...

Is hospital information system relevant to detect surgical site infection? Findings from a prospective surveillance study in posterior instrumented spinal surgery.

PubMed

Boetto, J; Chan-Seng, E; Lonjon, G; Pech, J; Lotthé, A; Lonjon, N

2015-11-01

Spinal instrumentation has a high rate of surgical site infection (SSI), but results greatly vary depending on surveillance methodology, surgical procedures, or quality of follow-up. Our aim was to study true incidence of SSI in spinal surgery by significant data collection, and to compare it with the results obtained through the hospital information system. This work is a single center prospective cohort study that included all patients consecutively operated on for spinal instrumentation by posterior approach over a six-month period regardless the etiology. For all patients, a "high definition" prospective method of surveillance was performed by the infection control (IC) department during at least 12 months after surgery. Results were then compared with findings from automatic surveillance though the hospital information system (HIS). One hundred and fifty-four patients were included. We found no hardly difference between "high definition" and automatic surveillance through the HIS, even if HIS tended to under-estimate the infection rate: rate of surgical site infection was 2.60% and gross SSI incidence rate via the hospital information system was 1.95%. Smoking and alcohol consumption were significantly related to a SSI. Our SSI rates to reflect the true incidence of infectious complications in posterior instrumented adult spinal surgery in our hospital and these results were consistent with the lower levels of published infection rate. In-house surveillance by surgeons only is insufficiently sensitive. Further studies with more patients and a longer inclusion time are needed to conclude if SSI case detection through the HIS could be a relevant and effective alternative method. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.

Impedance-based cellular assay technologies: recent advances, future promise.

PubMed

McGuinness, Ryan

2007-10-01

Cell-based assays are continuing to grow in importance in the drug discovery workflow. Their early introduction holds the promise of limiting attrition in the later, more costly phases of the process. This article reviews recent advances in the development of impedance technologies for label-free cell-based assays. These systems are capable of monitoring endogenous receptor activation, and thus generate more physiologically relevant measures of pharmacological endpoints. Primary cells can be investigated as well, thus producing disease relevant information. Label-free assays significantly decrease assay development efforts and avoid many complications inherent in recombinant readout systems. Impedance-based systems have great potential to advance the utility of cell-based assays as they are applied to drug discovery and pharmacology.

Impaired information sampling in mild dementia of Alzheimer's type but not in healthy aging.

PubMed

Zamarian, Laura; Benke, Thomas; Brand, Matthias; Djamshidian, Atbin; Delazer, Margarete

2015-05-01

It is unknown whether aging affects predecisional processing, that is, gathering information and evaluating options before making a decision. Here, we investigated information sampling in mild Dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) and healthy aging by using the Information Sampling Task (IST). In a first investigation, we compared patients with mild DAT (n = 20) with healthy controls (n = 20) on the IST and several neuropsychological background tests. In a second investigation, healthy older adults (n = 30) were compared with younger adults (n = 30) on the IST and executive-function tasks. Results of the first investigation demonstrated that, in the IST, patients gathered significantly less information, made riskier and less accurate decisions, and showed less reward sensitivity relative to controls. We found a significant correlation between performance on the IST and performance on tests of verbal fluency, working memory, and recognition in patients but not in controls. Results of the second investigation indicated a largely similar performance pattern between healthy older adults and younger adults. There were no significant correlations for both groups between the IST and executive-function tasks. There are no relevant changes with healthy aging in predecisional processing. In contrast, mild DAT significantly affects predecisional information sampling. Thus, the problems shown in patients with mild DAT in decision making might be related to the patients' difficulties in predecisional processing. Decision-making performance in mild DAT might be improved by helping the patients at a predecisional stage to gather sufficient information and evaluate options more accurately. (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Scene Configuration and Object Reliability Affect the Use of Allocentric Information for Memory-Guided Reaching

PubMed Central

Klinghammer, Mathias; Blohm, Gunnar; Fiehler, Katja

2017-01-01

Previous research has shown that egocentric and allocentric information is used for coding target locations for memory-guided reaching movements. Especially, task-relevance determines the use of objects as allocentric cues. Here, we investigated the influence of scene configuration and object reliability as a function of task-relevance on allocentric coding for memory-guided reaching. For that purpose, we presented participants images of a naturalistic breakfast scene with five objects on a table and six objects in the background. Six of these objects served as potential reach-targets (= task-relevant objects). Participants explored the scene and after a short delay, a test scene appeared with one of the task-relevant objects missing, indicating the location of the reach target. After the test scene vanished, participants performed a memory-guided reaching movement toward the target location. Besides removing one object from the test scene, we also shifted the remaining task-relevant and/or task-irrelevant objects left- or rightwards either coherently in the same direction or incoherently in opposite directions. By varying object coherence, we manipulated the reliability of task-relevant and task-irrelevant objects in the scene. In order to examine the influence of scene configuration (distributed vs. grouped arrangement of task-relevant objects) on allocentric coding, we compared the present data with our previously published data set (Klinghammer et al., 2015). We found that reaching errors systematically deviated in the direction of object shifts, but only when the objects were task-relevant and their reliability was high. However, this effect was substantially reduced when task-relevant objects were distributed across the scene leading to a larger target-cue distance compared to a grouped configuration. No deviations of reach endpoints were observed in conditions with shifts of only task-irrelevant objects or with low object reliability irrespective of task-relevancy. Moreover, when solely task-relevant objects were shifted incoherently, the variability of reaching endpoints increased compared to coherent shifts of task-relevant objects. Our results suggest that the use of allocentric information for coding targets for memory-guided reaching depends on the scene configuration, in particular the average distance of the reach target to task-relevant objects, and the reliability of task-relevant allocentric information. PMID:28450826

Scene Configuration and Object Reliability Affect the Use of Allocentric Information for Memory-Guided Reaching.

PubMed

Klinghammer, Mathias; Blohm, Gunnar; Fiehler, Katja

2017-01-01

Previous research has shown that egocentric and allocentric information is used for coding target locations for memory-guided reaching movements. Especially, task-relevance determines the use of objects as allocentric cues. Here, we investigated the influence of scene configuration and object reliability as a function of task-relevance on allocentric coding for memory-guided reaching. For that purpose, we presented participants images of a naturalistic breakfast scene with five objects on a table and six objects in the background. Six of these objects served as potential reach-targets (= task-relevant objects). Participants explored the scene and after a short delay, a test scene appeared with one of the task-relevant objects missing, indicating the location of the reach target. After the test scene vanished, participants performed a memory-guided reaching movement toward the target location. Besides removing one object from the test scene, we also shifted the remaining task-relevant and/or task-irrelevant objects left- or rightwards either coherently in the same direction or incoherently in opposite directions. By varying object coherence, we manipulated the reliability of task-relevant and task-irrelevant objects in the scene. In order to examine the influence of scene configuration (distributed vs. grouped arrangement of task-relevant objects) on allocentric coding, we compared the present data with our previously published data set (Klinghammer et al., 2015). We found that reaching errors systematically deviated in the direction of object shifts, but only when the objects were task-relevant and their reliability was high. However, this effect was substantially reduced when task-relevant objects were distributed across the scene leading to a larger target-cue distance compared to a grouped configuration. No deviations of reach endpoints were observed in conditions with shifts of only task-irrelevant objects or with low object reliability irrespective of task-relevancy. Moreover, when solely task-relevant objects were shifted incoherently, the variability of reaching endpoints increased compared to coherent shifts of task-relevant objects. Our results suggest that the use of allocentric information for coding targets for memory-guided reaching depends on the scene configuration, in particular the average distance of the reach target to task-relevant objects, and the reliability of task-relevant allocentric information.

Descriptions of Adverse Drug Reactions Are Less Informative in Forums Than in the French Pharmacovigilance Database but Provide More Unexpected Reactions

PubMed Central

Karapetiantz, Pierre; Bellet, Florelle; Audeh, Bissan; Lardon, Jérémy; Leprovost, Damien; Aboukhamis, Rim; Morlane-Hondère, François; Grouin, Cyril; Burgun, Anita; Katsahian, Sandrine; Jaulent, Marie-Christine; Beyens, Marie-Noëlle; Lillo-Le Louët, Agnès; Bousquet, Cédric

2018-01-01

Background: Social media have drawn attention for their potential use in Pharmacovigilance. Recent work showed that it is possible to extract information concerning adverse drug reactions (ADRs) from posts in social media. The main objective of the Vigi4MED project was to evaluate the relevance and quality of the information shared by patients on web forums about drug safety and its potential utility for pharmacovigilance. Methods: After selecting websites of interest, we manually evaluated the relevance of the content of posts for pharmacovigilance related to six drugs (agomelatine, baclofen, duloxetine, exenatide, strontium ranelate, and tetrazepam). We compared forums to the French Pharmacovigilance Database (FPVD) to (1) evaluate whether they contained relevant information to characterize a pharmacovigilance case report (patient’s age and sex; treatment indication, dose and duration; time-to-onset (TTO) and outcome of the ADR, and drug dechallenge and rechallenge) and (2) perform impact analysis (nature, seriousness, unexpectedness, and outcome of the ADR). Results: The cases in the FPVD were significantly more informative than posts in forums for patient description (age, sex), treatment description (dose, duration, TTO), and outcome of the ADR, but the indication for the treatment was more often found in forums. Cases were more often serious in the FPVD than in forums (46% vs. 4%), but forums more often contained an unexpected ADR than the FPVD (24% vs. 17%). Moreover, 197 unexpected ADRs identified in forums were absent from the FPVD and the distribution of the MedDRA System Organ Classes (SOCs) was different between the two data sources. Discussion: This study is the first to evaluate if patients’ posts may qualify as potential and informative case reports that should be stored in a pharmacovigilance database in the same way as case reports submitted by health professionals. The posts were less informative (except for the indication) and focused on less serious ADRs than the FPVD cases, but more unexpected ADRs were presented in forums than in the FPVD and their SOCs were different. Thus, web forums should be considered as a secondary, but complementary source for pharmacovigilance. PMID:29765326

Federal government information handbook: formerly utilized sites remedial action program

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

Not Available

This volume is one of a series produced under contract with the DOE, by Politech Corporation to develop a legislative and regulatory data base to assist the FUSRAP management in addressing the institutional and socioeconomic issues involved in carrying out the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. This Information Handbook series contains information about all relevant government agencies at the Federal and state levels, the pertinent programs they administer, each affected state legislature, and current Federal and state legislative and regulatory initiatives. This volume is a compilation of information about the Federal Government. It contains a summary of the organizationmore » and responsibilities of agencies within the executive branch of the Federal government which may be relevant to FUSRAP activities; a brief summary of relevant Federal statutes and regulations; a description of the structure of the US Congress, identification of the officers, relevant committees and committee chairmen; a description of the Federal legislative process; a summary of legislation enacted and considered in the recently-adjourned 96th Congress; a description of the Federal budgetary process; a summary of the Carter Administration's comprehensive radioactive waste management program; and excerpts from the text of relevant federal statutes and regulations.« less

Operationalizing Semantic Medline for meeting the information needs at point of care.

PubMed

Rastegar-Mojarad, Majid; Li, Dingcheng; Liu, Hongfang

2015-01-01

Scientific literature is one of the popular resources for providing decision support at point of care. It is highly desirable to bring the most relevant literature to support the evidence-based clinical decision making process. Motivated by the recent advance in semantically enhanced information retrieval, we have developed a system, which aims to bring semantically enriched literature, Semantic Medline, to meet the information needs at point of care. This study reports our work towards operationalizing the system for real time use. We demonstrate that the migration of a relational database implementation to a NoSQL (Not only SQL) implementation significantly improves the performance and makes the use of Semantic Medline at point of care decision support possible.

Operationalizing Semantic Medline for meeting the information needs at point of care

PubMed Central

Rastegar-Mojarad, Majid; Li, Dingcheng; Liu, Hongfang

2015-01-01

Scientific literature is one of the popular resources for providing decision support at point of care. It is highly desirable to bring the most relevant literature to support the evidence-based clinical decision making process. Motivated by the recent advance in semantically enhanced information retrieval, we have developed a system, which aims to bring semantically enriched literature, Semantic Medline, to meet the information needs at point of care. This study reports our work towards operationalizing the system for real time use. We demonstrate that the migration of a relational database implementation to a NoSQL (Not only SQL) implementation significantly improves the performance and makes the use of Semantic Medline at point of care decision support possible. PMID:26306259

The perspectives and experiences of African American students in an informal science program

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bulls, Domonique L.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields are the fastest growing sectors of the economy, nationally and globally. In order for the United States (U.S.) to maintain its competitiveness, it is important to address STEM experiences at the precollege level. In early years, science education serves as a foundation and pipeline for students to pursue STEM in college and beyond. Alternative approaches to instruction in formal classrooms have been introduced to engage more students in science. One alternative is informal science education. Informal science education is an avenue used to promote science education literacy. Because it is less regulated than science teaching in formal classroom settings, it allows for the incorporation of culture into science instruction. Culturally relevant science teaching is one way to relate science to African American students, a population that continually underperforms in K-12 science education. This study explores the science perspectives and experiences of African American middle school students participating in an informal science program. The research is framed by the tenets of culturally relevant pedagogy and shaped by the following questions: (1) What specific aspects of the Carver Program make it unique to African American students? (2) How is culturally relevant pedagogy incorporated into the informal science program? (3) How does the incorporation of culturally relevant pedagogy into the informal science program influence African American students' perceptions about science? The findings to the previously stated questions add to the limited research on African American students in informal science learning environments and contribute to the growing research on culturally relevant science. This study is unique in that it explores the cultural components of an informal science program.

77 FR 42339 - Improving Contracting Officers' Access to Relevant Integrity Information

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2012-07-18

... OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET Office of Federal Procurement Policy Improving Contracting Officers' Access to Relevant Integrity Information AGENCY: Office of Federal Procurement Policy, Office of Management and Budget. ACTION: Notice of Request for Comment. SUMMARY: The Office of Federal Procurement...

50 CFR 424.13 - Sources of information and relevant data.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-10-01

... ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE); ENDANGERED SPECIES COMMITTEE REGULATIONS SUBCHAPTER A LISTING ENDANGERED AND THREATENED SPECIES AND DESIGNATING CRITICAL HABITAT Revision of the Lists § 424.13 Sources of information and relevant data. When considering any revision of the lists, the Secretary shall...

50 CFR 424.13 - Sources of information and relevant data.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-10-01

... ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION, DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE); ENDANGERED SPECIES COMMITTEE REGULATIONS SUBCHAPTER A LISTING ENDANGERED AND THREATENED SPECIES AND DESIGNATING CRITICAL HABITAT Revision of the Lists § 424.13 Sources of information and relevant data. When considering any revision of the lists, the Secretary shall...

76 FR 25725 - Final Regulatory Guide: Issuance, Availability

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-05-05

....18, Revision 2, ``Information Relevant to Ensuring that Occupational Radiation Exposures at Medical..., techniques that the staff uses in evaluating specific problems or postulated accidents, and data that the..., ``Information Relevant to Ensuring that Occupational Radiation Exposures at Medical Institutions will be As Low...

Clinicians’ perceptions and the relevant computer-based information needs towards the practice of evidence based medicine

PubMed Central

Jiang, Guoqian; Ogasawara, Katsuhiko; Endoh, Akira; Sakurai, Tsunetaro

2003-01-01

We conducted a survey among 100 clinicians in a university hospital to determine the clinician’s attitudes and the relevant computer-based information needs towards the practice of evidence-based medicine in outpatient setting. PMID:14728387

Tactical Versus Strategic Behavior: General Aviation Piloting in Convective Weather Scenarios

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Latorella, Kara A.; Chamberlain, James P.

2002-01-01

We commonly describe environments and behavioral responses to environmental conditions as 'tactical' and 'strategic.' However theoretical research defining relevant environmental characteristics is rare, as are empirical investigations that would inform such theory. This paper discusses General Aviation (GA) pilots' descriptions of tactical/strategic conditions with respect to weather flying, and evaluates their ratings along a tactical/strategic scale in response to real convective weather scenarios experienced during a flight experiment with different weather information cues. Perceived risk was significantly associated with ratings for all experimental conditions. In addition, environmental characteristics were found to be predictive of ratings for Traditional IMC (instrument meteorological conditions), i.e., aural weather information only, and Traditional VMC (visual meteorological conditions), i.e., aural information and an external view. The paper also presents subjects' comments regarding use of Graphical Weather Information Systems (GWISs) to support tactical and strategic weather flying decisions and concludes with implications for the design and use of GWISs.

System for selecting relevant information for decision support.

PubMed

Kalina, Jan; Seidl, Libor; Zvára, Karel; Grünfeldová, Hana; Slovák, Dalibor; Zvárová, Jana

2013-01-01

We implemented a prototype of a decision support system called SIR which has a form of a web-based classification service for diagnostic decision support. The system has the ability to select the most relevant variables and to learn a classification rule, which is guaranteed to be suitable also for high-dimensional measurements. The classification system can be useful for clinicians in primary care to support their decision-making tasks with relevant information extracted from any available clinical study. The implemented prototype was tested on a sample of patients in a cardiological study and performs an information extraction from a high-dimensional set containing both clinical and gene expression data.

Physiological Parameters for Oral Delivery and In vitro Testing

PubMed Central

Mudie, Deanna M.; Amidon, Gordon L.; Amidon, Gregory E.

2010-01-01

Pharmaceutical solid oral dosage forms must undergo dissolution in the intestinal fluids of the gastrointestinal tract before they can be absorbed and reach the systemic circulation. Therefore, dissolution is a critical part of the drug-delivery process. The rate and extent of drug dissolution and absorption depend on the characteristics of the active ingredient as well as properties of the dosage form. Just as importantly, characteristics of the physiological environment such as buffer species, pH, bile salts, gastric emptying rate, intestinal motility, and hydrodynamics can significantly impact dissolution and absorption. While significant progress has been made since 1970 when the first compendial dissolution test was introduced (USP Apparatus 1), current dissolution testing does not take full advantage of the extensive physiologic information that is available. For quality control purposes, where the question is one of lot-to-lot consistency in performance, using nonphysiologic test conditions that match drug and dosage form properties with practical dissolution media and apparatus may be appropriate. However, where in vitro – in vivo correlations are desired, it is logical to consider and utilize knowledge of the in vivo condition. This publication critically reviews the literature that is relevant to oral human drug delivery. Physiologically relevant information must serve as a basis for the design of dissolution test methods and systems that are more representative of the human condition. As in vitro methods advance in their physiological relevance, better in vitro - in vivo correlations will be possible. This will, in turn, lead to in vitro systems that can be utilized to more effectively design dosage forms that have improved and more consistent oral bioperformance. PMID:20822152

OLEM Calendar Information

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

This asset includes the Office of Land and Emergency Management (OLEM) Calendar Information, which comprises three OLEM Calendars: the OLEM Calendar, the OLEM Meetings and Conference Calls Calendar and the OLEM Training and Development Calendar. --The OLEM Calendar is used as a means of sharing information about OLEM activities, due dates, meetings, conferences, audit followups, and other relevant internal information. Specific OLEM personnel have access to add and edit information. --The OLEM Meetings and Conference Calls Calendar contains national meetings and conference calls with Regions and other relevant personnel. --The OLEM Training and Development Calendar tracks OLEM training opportunities.

The Effect of Enumeration of Self-Relevant Words on Self-Focused Attention and Repetitive Negative Thoughts

PubMed Central

Muranaka, Seiji; Sasaki, Jun

2018-01-01

Self-focused attention refers to awareness of self-referent, internally generated information. It can be categorized into dysfunctional (i.e., self-rumination) and functional (self-reflection) aspects. According to theory on cognitive resource limitations (e.g., Moreno, 2006), there is a difference in cognitive resource allocation between these two aspects of self-focused attention. We propose a new task, self-relevant word (SRW) enumeration, that can aid in behaviorally identifying individuals’ use of self-rumination and self-reflection. The present study has two purposes: to determine the association between self-focus and SRW enumeration, and to examine the effect of dysfunctional SRW enumeration on repetitive negative thinking. One hundred forty-six undergraduate students participated in this study. They completed a measure of state anxiety twice, before and after imagining a social failure situation. They also completed the SRW enumeration task, Repetitive Thinking Questionnaire, Short Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale, and Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire. A correlational analysis indicated a significant positive correlation between self-reflection and the number of SRWs. Furthermore, individuals high in self-reflection had a tendency to pay more attention to problems than did those high in self-rumination. A significant positive correlation was found between self-rumination and the strength of self-relevance of negative SRWs. Through a path analysis, we found a significant positive effect of the self-relevance of negative SRWs on repetitive negative thinking. Notably, however, the model that excluded self-rumination as an explanatory variable showed a better fit to the data than did the model that included it. In summary, SRW enumeration might enable selective and independent detection of the degree of self-reflection and self-rumination, and therefore should be examined in future research in order to design new behavioral procedures. PMID:29896140

Sudden early-morning awakening impairs immediate tactical planning in a changing 'emergency' scenario.

PubMed

Horne, Jim; Moseley, Robert

2011-06-01

This was a realistic military-type exercise assessing unexpected, abrupt early-morning awakening effects on immediate 'executive function' and the ability to comprehend and deal with a sudden emergency under a changing situation. Twenty (average age 21years) healthy, highly motivated junior officer reservists were assigned randomly to two equal, independent groups, unforewarned as to what would happen. The experimental group was woken abruptly at 03:00h (<3h sleep) and confronted immediately with a 'paper exercise' of an enemy attack, requiring a feasible plan of engagement with minimal loss of resources, to be completed within 15min. A control group slept until 07:30h; they were then presented with the identical emergency 1h later. Participants worked individually, under time pressure, receiving written information, map and other details, all containing relevant, irrelevant and misleading information. Halfway through, they were given (unexpectedly) a critical update necessitating a change of tactics. Performance was scored blind by instructors, under five categories. Eight of the experimental group versus three controls failed overall, with significant group differences on three specific categories relying on flexible decision-making: 'identification of available cover', 'use of available assets' and 'extraction of relevant from irrelevant information'. Other, logical and highly trained skills were unimpaired. Ours was a 'worst case scenario', combining short sleep, circadian 'trough' and sleep inertia, all of which differentiated the two groups, unlike typical laboratory studies. Nevertheless, it was relevant to real-life situations involving highly motivated, trained individuals making critical innovative decisions in the early morning versus the normal waking day. © 2010 European Sleep Research Society.

Overview of ICRP Committee 5: protection of the environment.

PubMed

Larsson, C-M

2016-06-01

Protection of the environment is integral to the system of radiological protection, as outlined in the 2007 Recommendations of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP, Publication 103). The Commission's activities in this area are mainly pursued by Committee 5 and its associated Task Groups. Publication 91 broadly outlines the approach to radiological protection of the environment, and its alignment with approaches to environmental protection from hazardous substances in general. Publications 108 and 114 provide the cornerstones of the environmental protection system and relevant databases. Publication 124 considers its application in planned, existing, and emergency exposure situations. The system centres on 12 Reference Animals and Plants (RAPs) with broad relevance for environmental protection based on their ubiquity and significance as well as other criteria, as described in Publication 108 The databases comprise general biology of the RAPs, transfer parameters, dose conversion coefficients, and effects data. Derived Consideration Reference Levels (DCRLs) were established for each RAP; a DCRL represents a band of dose rates that might result in some deleterious effects in individuals of that type of RAP. Newly established Task Group 99 will compile the RAP-specific reference information into monographs, with the view of updating information and improving the applicability of the system in different exposure situations. For certain scenarios, more precise and ecosystem-specific protection benchmarks may be justified, which would have to be informed by consideration of representative organisms (i.e. representative of a particular ecosystem and relevant to the specific scenario; Publication 124). Committee 5 will explore this further, making use of a limited number of case studies. © The International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics.

Significance of perceptually relevant image decolorization for scene classification

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Viswanathan, Sowmya; Divakaran, Govind; Soman, Kutti Padanyl

2017-11-01

Color images contain luminance and chrominance components representing the intensity and color information, respectively. The objective of this paper is to show the significance of incorporating chrominance information to the task of scene classification. An improved color-to-grayscale image conversion algorithm that effectively incorporates chrominance information is proposed using the color-to-gray structure similarity index and singular value decomposition to improve the perceptual quality of the converted grayscale images. The experimental results based on an image quality assessment for image decolorization and its success rate (using the Cadik and COLOR250 datasets) show that the proposed image decolorization technique performs better than eight existing benchmark algorithms for image decolorization. In the second part of the paper, the effectiveness of incorporating the chrominance component for scene classification tasks is demonstrated using a deep belief network-based image classification system developed using dense scale-invariant feature transforms. The amount of chrominance information incorporated into the proposed image decolorization technique is confirmed with the improvement to the overall scene classification accuracy. Moreover, the overall scene classification performance improved by combining the models obtained using the proposed method and conventional decolorization methods.

Molecular subtype and tumor characteristics of breast cancer metastases as assessed by gene expression significantly influence patient post-relapse survival

PubMed Central

Tobin, N. P.; Harrell, J. C.; Lövrot, J.; Egyhazi Brage, S.; Frostvik Stolt, M.; Carlsson, L.; Einbeigi, Z.; Linderholm, B.; Loman, N.; Malmberg, M.; Walz, T.; Fernö, M.; Perou, C. M.; Bergh, J.; Hatschek, T.; Lindström, L. S.; Hatschek, Thomas; Fernö, Mårten; Lindström, Linda Sofie; Hedenfalk, Ingrid; Brandberg, Yvonne; Carstensen, John; Egyhazy, Suzanne; Stolt, Marianne Frostvik; Skoog, Lambert; Hellström, Mats; Maliniemi, Maarit; Svensson, Helene; Åström, Gunnar; Bergh, Jonas; Bjöhle, Judith; Lidbrink, Elisabet; Rotstein, Sam; Wallberg, Birgitta; Einbeigi, Zakaria; Carlsson, Per; Linderholm, Barbro; Walz, Thomas; Loman, Niklas; Malmström, Per; Söderberg, Martin; Malmberg, Martin; Carlsson, Lena; Umeå; Lindh, Birgitta; Sundqvist, Marie; Malmberg, Lena

2015-01-01

Background We and others have recently shown that tumor characteristics are altered throughout tumor progression. These findings emphasize the need for re-examination of tumor characteristics at relapse and have led to recommendations from ESMO and the Swedish Breast Cancer group. Here, we aim to determine whether tumor characteristics and molecular subtypes in breast cancer metastases confer clinically relevant prognostic information for patients. Patients and methods The translational aspect of the Swedish multicenter randomized trial called TEX included 111 patients with at least one biopsy from a morphologically confirmed locoregional or distant breast cancer metastasis diagnosed from December 2002 until June 2007. All patients had detailed clinical information, complete follow-up, and metastasis gene expression information (Affymetrix array GPL10379). We assessed the previously published gene expression modules describing biological processes [proliferation, apoptosis, human epidermal receptor 2 (HER2) and estrogen (ER) signaling, tumor invasion, immune response, and angiogenesis] and pathways (Ras, MAPK, PTEN, AKT-MTOR, PI3KCA, IGF1, Src, Myc, E2F3, and β-catenin) and the intrinsic subtypes (PAM50). Furthermore, by contrasting genes expressed in the metastases in relation to survival, we derived a poor metastasis survival signature. Results A significant reduction in post-relapse breast cancer-specific survival was associated with low-ER receptor signaling and apoptosis gene module scores, and high AKT-MTOR, Ras, and β-catenin module scores. Similarly, intrinsic subtyping of the metastases provided statistically significant post-relapse survival information with the worst survival outcome in the basal-like [hazard ratio (HR) 3.7; 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.3–10.9] and HER2-enriched (HR 4.4; 95% CI 1.5–12.8) subtypes compared with the luminal A subtype. Overall, 25% of the metastases were basal-like, 32% HER2-enriched, 10% luminal A, 28% luminal B, and 5% normal-like. Conclusions We show that tumor characteristics and molecular subtypes of breast cancer metastases significantly influence post-relapse patient survival, emphasizing that molecular investigations at relapse provide prognostic and clinically relevant information. ClinicalTrials.gov This is the translational part of the Swedish multicenter and randomized trial TEX, clinicaltrials.gov identifier nct01433614 (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/nct01433614). PMID:25361981

Assessing conservation relevance of organism-environment relations using predicted changes in response variables

USGS Publications Warehouse

Gutzwiller, Kevin J.; Barrow, Wylie C.; White, Joseph D.; Johnson-Randall, Lori; Cade, Brian S.; Zygo, Lisa M.

2010-01-01

1. Organism–environment models are used widely in conservation. The degree to which they are useful for informing conservation decisions – the conservation relevance of these relations – is important because lack of relevance may lead to misapplication of scarce conservation resources or failure to resolve important conservation dilemmas. Even when models perform well based on model fit and predictive ability, conservation relevance of associations may not be clear without also knowing the magnitude and variability of predicted changes in response variables. 2. We introduce a method for evaluating the conservation relevance of organism–environment relations that employs confidence intervals for predicted changes in response variables. The confidence intervals are compared to a preselected magnitude of change that marks a threshold (trigger) for conservation action. To demonstrate the approach, we used a case study from the Chihuahuan Desert involving relations between avian richness and broad-scale patterns of shrubland. We considered relations for three winters and two spatial extents (1- and 2-km-radius areas) and compared predicted changes in richness to three thresholds (10%, 20% and 30% change). For each threshold, we examined 48 relations. 3. The method identified seven, four and zero conservation-relevant changes in mean richness for the 10%, 20% and 30% thresholds respectively. These changes were associated with major (20%) changes in shrubland cover, mean patch size, the coefficient of variation for patch size, or edge density but not with major changes in shrubland patch density. The relative rarity of conservation-relevant changes indicated that, overall, the relations had little practical value for informing conservation decisions about avian richness. 4. The approach we illustrate is appropriate for various response and predictor variables measured at any temporal or spatial scale. The method is broadly applicable across ecological environments, conservation objectives, types of statistical predictive models and levels of biological organization. By focusing on magnitudes of change that have practical significance, and by using the span of confidence intervals to incorporate uncertainty of predicted changes, the method can be used to help improve the effectiveness of conservation efforts.

Relevance: The Search for a Definition.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schamber, Linda; Eisenberg, Michael

Arguing that relevance judgments are fundamental to the design and evaluation of all information retrieval systems, and that a consensus on the definition of the central concept of relevance has not been reached, this paper begins by critically reviewing four approaches to the problem of defining relevance: (1) the system-oriented approach…

AHIMSA - Ad hoc histogram information measure sensing algorithm for feature selection in the context of histogram inspired clustering techniques

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dasarathy, B. V.

1976-01-01

An algorithm is proposed for dimensionality reduction in the context of clustering techniques based on histogram analysis. The approach is based on an evaluation of the hills and valleys in the unidimensional histograms along the different features and provides an economical means of assessing the significance of the features in a nonparametric unsupervised data environment. The method has relevance to remote sensing applications.

Clinical Utility of Blood Cell Histogram Interpretation

PubMed Central

Bhagya, S.; Majeed, Abdul

2017-01-01

An automated haematology analyser provides blood cell histograms by plotting the sizes of different blood cells on X-axis and their relative number on Y-axis. Histogram interpretation needs careful analysis of Red Blood Cell (RBC), White Blood Cell (WBC) and platelet distribution curves. Histogram analysis is often a neglected part of the automated haemogram which if interpreted well, has significant potential to provide diagnostically relevant information even before higher level investigations are ordered. PMID:29207767

Clinical Utility of Blood Cell Histogram Interpretation.

PubMed

Thomas, E T Arun; Bhagya, S; Majeed, Abdul

2017-09-01

An automated haematology analyser provides blood cell histograms by plotting the sizes of different blood cells on X-axis and their relative number on Y-axis. Histogram interpretation needs careful analysis of Red Blood Cell (RBC), White Blood Cell (WBC) and platelet distribution curves. Histogram analysis is often a neglected part of the automated haemogram which if interpreted well, has significant potential to provide diagnostically relevant information even before higher level investigations are ordered.

Sampling criteria in multicollection searching.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gilio, A.; Scozzafava, R.; Marchetti, P. G.

In the first stage of the document retrieval process, no information concerning relevance of a particular document is available. On the other hand, computer implementation requires that the analysis be made only for a sample of retrieved documents. This paper addresses the significance and suitability of two different sampling criteria for a multicollection online search facility. The inevitability of resorting to a logarithmic criterion in order to achieve a "spread of representativeness" from the multicollection is demonstrated.

Impact of distributions on the archetypes and prototypes in heterogeneous nanoparticle ensembles.

PubMed

Fernandez, Michael; Wilson, Hugh F; Barnard, Amanda S

2017-01-05

The magnitude and complexity of the structural and functional data available on nanomaterials requires data analytics, statistical analysis and information technology to drive discovery. We demonstrate that multivariate statistical analysis can recognise the sets of truly significant nanostructures and their most relevant properties in heterogeneous ensembles with different probability distributions. The prototypical and archetypal nanostructures of five virtual ensembles of Si quantum dots (SiQDs) with Boltzmann, frequency, normal, Poisson and random distributions are identified using clustering and archetypal analysis, where we find that their diversity is defined by size and shape, regardless of the type of distribution. At the complex hull of the SiQD ensembles, simple configuration archetypes can efficiently describe a large number of SiQDs, whereas more complex shapes are needed to represent the average ordering of the ensembles. This approach provides a route towards the characterisation of computationally intractable virtual nanomaterial spaces, which can convert big data into smart data, and significantly reduce the workload to simulate experimentally relevant virtual samples.

Should non-disclosures be considered as morally equivalent to lies within the doctor–patient relationship?

PubMed Central

Cox, Caitriona L; Fritz, Zoe

2016-01-01

In modern practice, doctors who outright lie to their patients are often condemned, yet those who employ non-lying deceptions tend to be judged less critically. Some areas of non-disclosure have recently been challenged: not telling patients about resuscitation decisions; inadequately informing patients about risks of alternative procedures and withholding information about medical errors. Despite this, there remain many areas of clinical practice where non-disclosures of information are accepted, where lies about such information would not be. Using illustrative hypothetical situations, all based on common clinical practice, we explore the extent to which we should consider other deceptive practices in medicine to be morally equivalent to lying. We suggest that there is no significant moral difference between lying to a patient and intentionally withholding relevant information: non-disclosures could be subjected to Bok's ‘Test of Publicity’ to assess permissibility in the same way that lies are. The moral equivalence of lying and relevant non-disclosure is particularly compelling when the agent's motivations, and the consequences of the actions (from the patient's perspectives), are the same. We conclude that it is arbitrary to claim that there is anything inherently worse about lying to a patient to mislead them than intentionally deceiving them using other methods, such as euphemism or non-disclosure. We should question our intuition that non-lying deceptive practices in clinical practice are more permissible and should thus subject non-disclosures to the same scrutiny we afford to lies. PMID:27451425

What's New in the Medicine Cabinet?: A Panoramic Review of Clinically Relevant Information for the Busy Dermatologist.

PubMed

Del Rosso, James Q; Zeichner, Joshua

2014-01-01

This article is the first in a periodic series of therapeutic topics with short reviews gleaned from major dermatology meetings, especially Scientific Poster Sessions, and is designed to provide information that may assist the readers in adapting information from the literature to their clinical practice. The topics covered in this issue are discussions of the clinical relevance of newer information about acne pathophysiology, acne in adult women, and topical corticosteroid spray formulations for chronic plaque psoriasis.

Extraction of CT dose information from DICOM metadata: automated Matlab-based approach.

PubMed

Dave, Jaydev K; Gingold, Eric L

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study was to extract exposure parameters and dose-relevant indexes of CT examinations from information embedded in DICOM metadata. DICOM dose report files were identified and retrieved from a PACS. An automated software program was used to extract from these files information from the structured elements in the DICOM metadata relevant to exposure. Extracting information from DICOM metadata eliminated potential errors inherent in techniques based on optical character recognition, yielding 100% accuracy.

DOD Commissaries and Exchanges: Plan and Additional Information Needed on Cost Savings and Metrics for DOD Efforts to Achieve Budget Neutrality

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-11-14

the best practices in project management related to the establishment of goals and time frames.9 We obtained documentary and testimonial evidence...have created new incentives for DOD to assess its approach for managing the commissaries and exchanges. Congress identified $1.3 billion in fiscal...have relevant and reliable information to help management make informed decisions.8 We also reviewed relevant information in the report compared with

Infectious Cognition: Risk Perception Affects Socially Shared Retrieval-Induced Forgetting of Medical Information.

PubMed

Coman, Alin; Berry, Jessica N

2015-12-01

When speakers selectively retrieve previously learned information, listeners often concurrently, and covertly, retrieve their memories of that information. This concurrent retrieval typically enhances memory for mentioned information (the rehearsal effect) and impairs memory for unmentioned but related information (socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting, SSRIF), relative to memory for unmentioned and unrelated information. Building on research showing that anxiety leads to increased attention to threat-relevant information, we explored whether concurrent retrieval is facilitated in high-anxiety real-world contexts. Participants first learned category-exemplar facts about meningococcal disease. Following a manipulation of perceived risk of infection (low vs. high risk), they listened to a mock radio show in which some of the facts were selectively practiced. Final recall tests showed that the rehearsal effect was equivalent between the two risk conditions, but SSRIF was significantly larger in the high-risk than in the low-risk condition. Thus, the tendency to exaggerate consequences of news events was found to have deleterious consequences. © The Author(s) 2015.

PATIENT'S RIGHT TO INFORMED CONSENT IN REPUBLIC SRPSKA: LEGAL AND ETHICAL ASPECTS (WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO PHYSICAL REHABILITATION).

PubMed

Milinkovic, Igor; Majstorovic, Biljana

2014-12-01

The principle of informed consent, which requires a patient's fully-informed consent prior to the medical treatment, is closely connected with the value of human dignity. The realization and protection of a patient's dignity is not possible without his/her right to choose the character and scope of medical treatment. This goal cannot be adequately achieved within the traditional model of medical paternalism characterized by the physician's authoritative position. The first part of the article deals with the content and ethical significance of the informed consent doctrine. The legal framework of informed consent in Republic Srpska (RS), one of the two Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH)entities, is analyzed. Special reference is made to the relevance of the informed consent principle within the physical rehabilitation process. Although ethical aspects of physical rehabilitation are often overlooked, this medical field possesses a strong ethical dimension (including an appropriate realization of the patient's right to informed consent).

The socioeconomic impacts of the 2004-2008 drought in the Ebro river basin (Spain): A comprehensive and critical assessment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hernández-Mora, N.; Garrido, A.; Gil, M.

2012-04-01

Water scarcity and drought are particularly relevant phenomena in Spain, a country with a Mediterranean climate and intense pressure on existing water resources. Spain's drought management policies have evolved significantly over time, and today Spain is at the forefront of drought management and mitigation planning in Europe. However, drought management policies are not informed by comprehensive or accurate estimations of the socioeconomic impacts of drought, nor by the efficiency or efficacy of drought management and mitigation measures. Previous studies attempting to estimate on the impacts of drought are based on direct economic users of water, primarily irrigated agriculture and hydropower. Existing analyses do not take into consideration the impacts on other economic sectors, such as recreational uses, which have a growing importance from a socioeconomic perspective. Additionally, the intangible or non-market impacts (on social welfare and wellbeing and on the environment) are not considered or measured, although they can be significant. This paper presents the mid-point results of the PREEMPT project (Policy relevant assessment of the socioeconomic effects of droughts and floods, ECHO - grant agreement # 070401/2010/579119/SUB/C4), an effort to provide a comprehensive assessment of the socioeconomic impacts of the 2004-2008 drought in the Ebro river basin. The study gathers existing information on direct and indirect economic impacts of drought on different sectors, completing existing gaps and comparing the results of studies that use different methodologies. It also estimates the welfare losses resulting from domestic water use restrictions and environmental degradation as a result of the drought using a value transfer approach from results derived from value choice experiments developed for other Spanish and international river basins. Results indicate that there is a clear need to improve our knowledge of the direct and indirect impacts of drought and to devise simple methodological and institutional approaches that allow for more effective and harmonized information gathering. We propose more accurate and policy relevant methodological alternatives. In terms of the welfare and environmental impacts of drought, we use different and complementary approaches and discuss possible limitations of existing methodologies. In spite of these limitations, we argue that an improved knowledge of the risks and costs of extreme meteorological events will help inform and improve decision making for effective and cost-efficient risk mitigation practices. Comparing our results of the Ebro drought 2004-2008 with previous academic and official analyses reveals significant biases, resulting from impacts overestimation and from omitting non-market water uses, indirect effects and intangible effects.

Video Skimming and Characterization through the Combination of Image and Language Understanding Techniques

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Smith, Michael A.; Kanade, Takeo

1997-01-01

Digital video is rapidly becoming important for education, entertainment, and a host of multimedia applications. With the size of the video collections growing to thousands of hours, technology is needed to effectively browse segments in a short time without losing the content of the video. We propose a method to extract the significant audio and video information and create a "skim" video which represents a very short synopsis of the original. The goal of this work is to show the utility of integrating language and image understanding techniques for video skimming by extraction of significant information, such as specific objects, audio keywords and relevant video structure. The resulting skim video is much shorter, where compaction is as high as 20:1, and yet retains the essential content of the original segment.

The right parietal cortex and time perception: back to Critchley and the Zeitraffer phenomenon.

PubMed

Alexander, Iona; Cowey, Alan; Walsh, Vincent

2005-05-01

We investigated the involvement of the posterior parietal cortex in time perception by temporarily disrupting normal functioning in this region, in subjects making prospective judgements of time or pitch. Disruption of the right posterior parietal cortex significantly slowed reaction times when making time, but not pitch, judgements. Similar interference with the left parietal cortex and control stimulation over the vertex did not significantly change performance on either pitch or time tasks. The results show that the information processing necessary for temporal judgements involves the parietal cortex, probably to optimise spatiotemporal accuracy in voluntary action. The results are in agreement with a recent neuroimaging study and are discussed with regard to a psychological model of temporal processing and a recent proposal that time is part of a parietal cortex system for encoding magnitude information relevant for action.

The Prototype of Indicators of a Responsive Partner Shapes Information Processing: A False Recognition Study.

PubMed

Turan, Bulent

2016-01-01

When judging whether a relationship partner can be counted on to "be there" when needed, people may draw upon knowledge structures to process relevant information. We examined one such knowledge structure using the prototype methodology: indicators of a partner who is likely to be there when needed. In the first study (N = 91), the structure, content, and reliability of the prototype of indicators were examined. Then, using a false recognition study (N = 77), we demonstrated that once activated, the prototype of indicators of a partner who is likely to be there when needed affects information processing. Thus, the prototype of indicators may shape how people process support-relevant information in everyday life, affecting relationship outcomes. Using this knowledge structure may help a person process relevant information quickly and with cognitive economy. However, it may also lead to biases in judgments in certain situations.

Environmental monitoring for public access and community tracking (EMPACT): Discussion of the program

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

Engel-Cox, J.A.

1999-07-01

The Environmental Monitoring for Public Access and Community Tracking (EMPACT) program is a unique initiative to provide time-relevant environmental information that is easily accessible and clearly communicated to residents in 86 of the nation's largest metropolitan areas. EMPACT is a US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program to use innovative and time-relevant monitoring and communication technologies. President Clinton articulated his vision for right-to-know programs when he directed the EPA to provide local environmental information to communities. EPA Administrator Carol Browner created EMPACT and other programs to meet this vision, giving EMPACT the goal of providing timely, useful and accurate environmental andmore » public health information to all Americans. This paper is an analysis of the status of the EMPACT program during its first 2 years. EMPACT has launched 27 environmental monitoring and communication projects, including metropolitan grants, EPA Headquarter and Regional projects, and research activities. These projects are located in 37 states and 68 cities throughout the United States, and represent significant progress towards EMPACT's goal of reaching 86 major metropolitan areas throughout all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico by 2001. These projects focus on five principles established by EPA Administrator Browner: using advanced technology and science, establishing partnerships, increasing public access to data, communicating useful action-oriented information, and establishing a framework for sharing monitoring techniques and data between projects.« less

The Role of Reader Characteristics in Processing and Learning from Informational Text

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fox, Emily

2009-01-01

This article considers the role of reader characteristics in processing and learning from informational text, as revealed in think-aloud research. A theoretical framework for relevant aspects of readers' processing and products was developed. These relevant aspects included three attentional foci for processing (comprehension, monitoring, and…

37 CFR 351.5 - Discovery in royalty rate proceedings.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

... proceedings. 351.5 Section 351.5 Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights COPYRIGHT ROYALTY BOARD, LIBRARY OF... matter, not privileged, that is relevant to the claim or defense of any party. Relevant information need... information and materials. (1) In any royalty rate proceeding scheduled to commence prior to January 1, 2011...

Epistemic Authority of Professors and Researchers: Differential Perceptions by Students from Two Cultural-Educational Systems

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hornikx, Jos

2011-01-01

Teachers and researchers are considered epistemic authorities that provide reliable information if that information is relevant to their discipline. Students differentiate between relevant and irrelevant disciplines when assessing teachers' expertise. In this paper, it is investigated whether students' cultural-educational background plays a role…

49 CFR 240.215 - Retaining information supporting determinations.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-10-01

... controls those who have access to such information; (2) The railroad employs a system for data storage that... concerning eligibility that the railroad shall retain includes: (1) Any relevant data from the railroad's records concerning the person's prior safety conduct; (2) Any relevant data furnished by another railroad...

49 CFR 240.215 - Retaining information supporting determinations.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-10-01

... controls those who have access to such information; (2) The railroad employs a system for data storage that... concerning eligibility that the railroad shall retain includes: (1) Any relevant data from the railroad's records concerning the person's prior safety conduct; (2) Any relevant data furnished by another railroad...

49 CFR 240.215 - Retaining information supporting determinations.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-10-01

... controls those who have access to such information; (2) The railroad employs a system for data storage that... concerning eligibility that the railroad shall retain includes: (1) Any relevant data from the railroad's records concerning the person's prior safety conduct; (2) Any relevant data furnished by another railroad...

49 CFR 240.215 - Retaining information supporting determinations.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-10-01

... controls those who have access to such information; (2) The railroad employs a system for data storage that... concerning eligibility that the railroad shall retain includes: (1) Any relevant data from the railroad's records concerning the person's prior safety conduct; (2) Any relevant data furnished by another railroad...

Redundancy of einselected information in quantum Darwinism: The irrelevance of irrelevant environment bits

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zwolak, Michael; Zurek, Wojciech H.

2017-03-01

The objective, classical world emerges from the underlying quantum substrate via the proliferation of redundant copies of selected information into the environment, which acts as a communication channel, transmitting that information to observers. These copies are independently accessible, allowing many observers to reach consensus about the state of a quantum system via its imprints in the environment. Quantum Darwinism recognizes that the redundancy of information is thus central to the emergence of objective reality in the quantum world. However, in addition to the "quantum system of interest," there are many other systems "of no interest" in the Universe that can imprint information on the common environment. There is therefore a danger that the information of interest will be diluted with irrelevant bits, suppressing the redundancy responsible for objectivity. We show that mixing of the relevant (the "wheat") and irrelevant (the "chaff") bits of information makes little quantitative difference to the redundancy of the information of interest. Thus, we demonstrate that it does not matter whether one separates the wheat (relevant information) from the (irrelevant) chaff: The large redundancy of the relevant information survives dilution, providing evidence of the objective, effectively classical world.

Behavior analysis and public policy

PubMed Central

Fawcett, Stephen B.; Bernstein, Gail S.; Czyzewski, Mare J.; Greene, Brandon F.; Hannah, Gerald T.; Iwata, Brian A.; Jason, Leonard A.; Mathews, R. Mark; Morris, Edward K.; Otis-Wilborn, Amy; Seekins, Tom; Winett, Richard A.

1988-01-01

The Task Force on Public Policy was created to examine ways for behavior analysts to be more functional citizen scientists in the policymaking arena. This report informs readers about the contexts and processes of policymaking; and it outlines issues regarding the roles of behavior analysts in crating policy-relevant conceptual analyses, generating research data, and communicating policy-relevant information. We also discuss a possible role for the professional association in enhancing analysis, research, and advocacy on policies relevant to the public interest. PMID:22477991

Comparing Web search engine performance in searching consumer health information: evaluation and recommendations.

PubMed Central

Wu, G; Li, J

1999-01-01

Identifying and accessing reliable, relevant consumer health information rapidly on the Internet may challenge the health sciences librarian and layperson alike. In this study, seven search engines are compared using representative consumer health topics for their content relevancy, system features, and attributes. The paper discusses evaluation criteria; systematically compares relevant results; analyzes performance in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of the search engines; and illustrates effective search engine selection, search formulation, and strategies. PMID:10550031

Recording and submitting specimen history data

USGS Publications Warehouse

Bodenstein, Barbara L.; Franson, J. Christian; Friend, Milton; Gibbs, Samantha E.J.; Wild, Margaret A.

2016-06-14

SummaryIn wildlife disease investigations, determining the history or background of a problem is the first significant step toward establishing a diagnosis and aiding agencies with management considerations. The diagnostic process and overall investigation is often greatly expedited by a chronological record accompanying specimens submitted for laboratory evaluation. Knowing where and when the outbreak is taking place, what the environmental conditions and species involved are, and clinical signs in sick animals, along with necropsy findings and diagnostic test results are important for understanding the natural history or epizootiology of disease outbreaks. It becomes increasingly difficult to retrospectively obtain all of the pertinent history as time passes. The most helpful information is that which is obtained at the time of the die-off event by perceptive field biologists and other observers. Significant events preceding morbidity and/or mortality also provide valuable information on which to base corrective actions. In this chapter, readers will find information regarding what type of information should be recorded, how it should be recorded and why it is relevant to a disease investigation. A thoughtful approach in providing as much information as possible surrounding the situation including about host species and the biotic and abiotic environment, greatly aids in determining the most likely causative agent(s).

Social and Political Event Data to Support Army Requirements: Volume 1

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-11-01

available information . Geographic data at the city level is not enough spatial fidelity for tactical-level analyses. Vi- olent Events Socio-Cultural...analyze and/or visualize the data to produce mission-relevant information . Hand-coded datasets can be more precise, but they require added time and labor...Figure 4. Process to transform event data into mission-relevant information . ................... 35 Tables Table 1. Sources of event data

Development and evaluation of a biomedical search engine using a predicate-based vector space model.

PubMed

Kwak, Myungjae; Leroy, Gondy; Martinez, Jesse D; Harwell, Jeffrey

2013-10-01

Although biomedical information available in articles and patents is increasing exponentially, we continue to rely on the same information retrieval methods and use very few keywords to search millions of documents. We are developing a fundamentally different approach for finding much more precise and complete information with a single query using predicates instead of keywords for both query and document representation. Predicates are triples that are more complex datastructures than keywords and contain more structured information. To make optimal use of them, we developed a new predicate-based vector space model and query-document similarity function with adjusted tf-idf and boost function. Using a test bed of 107,367 PubMed abstracts, we evaluated the first essential function: retrieving information. Cancer researchers provided 20 realistic queries, for which the top 15 abstracts were retrieved using a predicate-based (new) and keyword-based (baseline) approach. Each abstract was evaluated, double-blind, by cancer researchers on a 0-5 point scale to calculate precision (0 versus higher) and relevance (0-5 score). Precision was significantly higher (p<.001) for the predicate-based (80%) than for the keyword-based (71%) approach. Relevance was almost doubled with the predicate-based approach-2.1 versus 1.6 without rank order adjustment (p<.001) and 1.34 versus 0.98 with rank order adjustment (p<.001) for predicate--versus keyword-based approach respectively. Predicates can support more precise searching than keywords, laying the foundation for rich and sophisticated information search. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Framing research for state policymakers who place a priority on cancer

PubMed Central

Brownson, Ross C.; Dodson, Elizabeth A.; Kerner, Jon F.; Moreland-Russell, Sarah

2016-01-01

Purpose Despite the potential for reducing the cancer burden via state policy change, few data exist on how best to disseminate research information to influence state legislators' policy choices. We explored: 1) the relative importance of core framing issues (source, presentation, timeliness) among policymakers who prioritize cancer and those who do not prioritize cancer and 2) the predictors of use of research in policymaking. Methods Cross-sectional data were collected from US state policymakers (i.e., legislators elected to state Houses or Senates) from January through October 2012 (n=862). One-way analysis of variance was performed to investigate the association of the priority of cancer variable with outcome variables. Multivariate logistic regression models examined predictors of the influence of research information. Results Legislators who prioritized cancer tended to rate characteristics that make research information useful higher than those who did not prioritize cancer. Among differences that were statistically significant were three items in the “source” domain (relevance, delivered by someone respected, supports one's own position), one item in the “presentation” domain (telling a story related to constituents), and two items in the “timeliness” domain (high current state priority, feasible when information is received). Participants who prioritized cancer risk factors were 80% more likely to rate research information as one of their top reasons for choosing an issue on which to work. Conclusions Our results suggest the importance of narrative forms of communication and that research information needs to be relevant to the policymakers' constituents in a brief, concise format. PMID:27299656

Assessing information content and interactive relationships of subgenomic DNA sequences of the MHC using complexity theory approaches based on the non-extensive statistical mechanics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Karakatsanis, L. P.; Pavlos, G. P.; Iliopoulos, A. C.; Pavlos, E. G.; Clark, P. M.; Duke, J. L.; Monos, D. S.

2018-09-01

This study combines two independent domains of science, the high throughput DNA sequencing capabilities of Genomics and complexity theory from Physics, to assess the information encoded by the different genomic segments of exonic, intronic and intergenic regions of the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) and identify possible interactive relationships. The dynamic and non-extensive statistical characteristics of two well characterized MHC sequences from the homozygous cell lines, PGF and COX, in addition to two other genomic regions of comparable size, used as controls, have been studied using the reconstructed phase space theorem and the non-extensive statistical theory of Tsallis. The results reveal similar non-linear dynamical behavior as far as complexity and self-organization features. In particular, the low-dimensional deterministic nonlinear chaotic and non-extensive statistical character of the DNA sequences was verified with strong multifractal characteristics and long-range correlations. The nonlinear indices repeatedly verified that MHC sequences, whether exonic, intronic or intergenic include varying levels of information and reveal an interaction of the genes with intergenic regions, whereby the lower the number of genes in a region, the less the complexity and information content of the intergenic region. Finally we showed the significance of the intergenic region in the production of the DNA dynamics. The findings reveal interesting content information in all three genomic elements and interactive relationships of the genes with the intergenic regions. The results most likely are relevant to the whole genome and not only to the MHC. These findings are consistent with the ENCODE project, which has now established that the non-coding regions of the genome remain to be of relevance, as they are functionally important and play a significant role in the regulation of expression of genes and coordination of the many biological processes of the cell.

Adolescent fertility and family planning in East Asia and the Pacific: a review of DHS reports

PubMed Central

2011-01-01

Background Adolescent pregnancy has significant health and socio-economic consequences for women, their families and communities. Efforts to prevent too-early pregnancy rely on accurate information about adolescents' knowledge, behaviours and access to family planning, however available data are limited in some settings. Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) reports are recognised as providing nationally representative data that are accessible to policymakers and programmers. This paper reviews DHS reports for low and lower middle income countries in East Asia and the Pacific to determine what information regarding adolescent fertility and family planning is available, and summarises key findings. Methods The most recent DHS reports were sought for the 33 low and lower middle income countries in the East Asia and Pacific region as defined by UNICEF and World Bank. Age-disaggregated data for all indicators relevant to fertility and current use, knowledge and access to family planning information and services were sought to identify accessible information. Reported data were analysed using an Excel database to determine outcomes for adolescents and compare with adult women. Results DHS reports were available for eleven countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu and Vietnam. Twenty seven of 40 relevant DHS indicators reported outcomes for adolescent women aged 15-19 years. There were limited data for unmarried adolescents. A significant proportion of women commence sexual activity and childbearing during adolescence in the context of low contraceptive prevalence and high unmet need for contraception. Adolescent women have lower use of contraception, poorer knowledge of family planning and less access to information and services than adult women. Conclusion DHS reports provide useful and accessible data, however, they are limited by the failure to report data for unmarried adolescents and report age-disaggregated data for some indicators. Further research is required to better understand the barriers that both married and unmarried adolescents face accessing reproductive health information and services, and their information and service delivery preferences. PMID:21545708

The role of inhibition for working memory processes: ERP evidence from a short-term storage task.

PubMed

Getzmann, Stephan; Wascher, Edmund; Schneider, Daniel

2018-05-01

Human working memory is the central unit for short-term storage of information. In addition to the selection and adequate storage of relevant information, the suppression of irrelevant stimuli from the environment seems to be of importance for working memory processes. To learn more about the interplay of information uptake and inhibition of irrelevant information, the present study used ERP measures and a short-term storage and retrieval task, in which pairs of either numbers or letters had to be compared. Random sequences of four stimuli (two numbers and two letters) were presented, with either the numbers or the letters being relevant for comparison. The analysis of ERPs to each of the four stimuli indicated more pronounced P2 and P3b amplitudes for relevant than irrelevant stimuli. In contrast, the N2 (reflecting inhibitory control) was only elicited by irrelevant stimuli. Moreover, the N2 amplitude of the second irrelevant stimulus was associated with behavioral performance, indicating the importance of inhibition of task-irrelevant stimuli for working memory processes. In sum, the findings demonstrate the role of cognitive control mechanisms for protecting relevant contents in working memory against irrelevant information. © 2017 Society for Psychophysiological Research.

Information presentation format moderates the unconscious-thought effect: The role of recollection.

PubMed

Abadie, Marlène; Waroquier, Laurent; Terrier, Patrice

2016-09-01

The unconscious-thought effect occurs when distraction improves complex decision-making. In two experiments using the unconscious-thought paradigm, we investigated the effect of presentation format of decision information (i) on memory for decision-relevant information and (ii) on the quality of decisions made after distraction, conscious deliberation or immediately. We used the process-dissociation procedure to measure recollection and familiarity. The two studies showed that presenting information blocked per criterion led participants to recollect more decision-relevant details compared to a presentation by option. Moreover, a Bayesian meta-analysis of the two studies provided strong evidence that conscious deliberation resulted in better decisions when the information was presented blocked per criterion and substantial evidence that distraction improved decision quality when the information was presented blocked per option. Finally, Study 2 revealed that the recollection of decision-relevant details mediated the effect of presentation format on decision quality in the deliberation condition. This suggests that recollection contributes to conscious deliberation efficacy.

Is there room in the DSM for consideration of deaf people?

PubMed

Lala, F J

1998-10-01

Recent changes to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM (4th ed., American Psychiatric Association, 1994), show recognition that cultural factors are relevant to assessment; thus, including specific information relevant to Deaf culture should help DSM users understand their deaf clients. For the present article, literature was surveyed on the psychological needs of the Deaf, and specifically how the Deaf views those needs. The review focused on four articles (Carver, 1995, 1997; Chapman, 1994; Dolnick, 1993). These articles suggest consensus on the thesis that the Deaf, as a minority culture, should provide information on Deaf culture to members of the helping professions. In addition to enhancing care providers' understanding, this would help society do a better job of including the Deaf in planning relevant to their needs. In particular, culturally deaf people should urge inclusion of relevant information about the Deaf in the next DSM revision.

For the General Internist: A Summary of Key Innovations in Medical Education.

PubMed

Roy, Brita; Chheda, Shobhina G; Bates, Carol; Dunn, Kathel; Karani, Reena; Willett, Lisa L

2016-08-01

We conducted a review of published medical education articles to identify high-quality research and innovation relevant to educators in general medicine. Our review team consisted of six general internists with expertise in medical education and a professional medical librarian. We manually searched 15 journals in pairs (a total of 3062 citations) for original research articles in medical education published in 2014. Each pair of reviewers independently rated the relevance, importance, and generalizability of articles on medical education in their assigned journals using a 27-point scale (maximum of 9 points for each characteristic). From this list, each team member independently reviewed the 22 articles that received a score of 20 or higher from both initial reviewers, and for each selected article rated the quality and global relevance for the generalist educator. We included the seven top-rated articles for presentation in this review, and categorized the studies into four general themes: continuity clinic scheduling, remediation, interprofessional education, and quality improvement and patient safety. We summarized key findings and identified significant limitations of each study. Further studies assessing patient outcomes are needed to strengthen the literature in medical education. This summary of relevant medical education articles can inform future research, teaching, and practice.

Learning the preferences of physicians for the organization of result lists of medical evidence articles.

PubMed

O'Sullivan, D; Wilk, S; Michalowski, W; Slowinski, R; Thomas, R; Kadzinski, M; Farion, K

2014-01-01

Online medical knowledge repositories such as MEDLINE and The Cochrane Library are increasingly used by physicians to retrieve articles to aid with clinical decision making. The prevailing approach for organizing retrieved articles is in the form of a rank-ordered list, with the assumption that the higher an article is presented on a list, the more relevant it is. Despite this common list-based organization, it is seldom studied how physicians perceive the association between the relevance of articles and the order in which articles are presented. In this paper we describe a case study that captured physician preferences for 3-element lists of medical articles in order to learn how to organize medical knowledge for decision-making. Comprehensive relevance evaluations were developed to represent 3-element lists of hypothetical articles that may be retrieved from an online medical knowledge source such as MEDLINE or The Cochrane Library. Comprehensive relevance evaluations asses not only an article's relevance for a query, but also whether it has been placed on the correct list position. In other words an article may be relevant and correctly placed on a result list (e.g. the most relevant article appears first in the result list), an article may be relevant for a query but placed on an incorrect list position (e.g. the most relevant article appears second in a result list), or an article may be irrelevant for a query yet still appear in the result list. The relevance evaluations were presented to six senior physicians who were asked to express their preferences for an article's relevance and its position on a list by pairwise comparisons representing different combinations of 3-element lists. The elicited preferences were assessed using a novel GRIP (Generalized Regression with Intensities of Preference) method and represented as an additive value function. Value functions were derived for individual physicians as well as the group of physicians. The results show that physicians assign significant value to the 1st position on a list and they expect that the most relevant article is presented first. Whilst physicians still prefer obtaining a correctly placed article on position 2, they are also quite satisfied with misplaced relevant article. Low consideration of the 3rd position was uniformly confirmed. Our findings confirm the importance of placing the most relevant article on the 1st position on a list and the importance paid to position on a list significantly diminishes after the 2nd position. The derived value functions may be used by developers of clinical decision support applications to decide how best to organize medical knowledge for decision making and to create personalized evaluation measures that can augment typical measures used to evaluate information retrieval systems.

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

Na, Man Gyun; Oh, Seungrohk

A neuro-fuzzy inference system combined with the wavelet denoising, principal component analysis (PCA), and sequential probability ratio test (SPRT) methods has been developed to monitor the relevant sensor using the information of other sensors. The parameters of the neuro-fuzzy inference system that estimates the relevant sensor signal are optimized by a genetic algorithm and a least-squares algorithm. The wavelet denoising technique was applied to remove noise components in input signals into the neuro-fuzzy system. By reducing the dimension of an input space into the neuro-fuzzy system without losing a significant amount of information, the PCA was used to reduce themore » time necessary to train the neuro-fuzzy system, simplify the structure of the neuro-fuzzy inference system, and also, make easy the selection of the input signals into the neuro-fuzzy system. By using the residual signals between the estimated signals and the measured signals, the SPRT is applied to detect whether the sensors are degraded or not. The proposed sensor-monitoring algorithm was verified through applications to the pressurizer water level, the pressurizer pressure, and the hot-leg temperature sensors in pressurized water reactors.« less

Social marketing: should it be used to promote evidence-based health information?

PubMed

Formoso, Giulio; Marata, Anna Maria; Magrini, Nicola

2007-02-01

The implementation of public health knowledge is a complex process; researchers focus on organizational barriers but generally give little attention to the format and validity of relevant information. Primary and secondary papers and practice guidelines should represent valid and relevant sources of knowledge for clinicians and others involved in public health. However, this information is usually targeted at researchers rather than practitioners; it is often not completely intelligible, does not explain what it really adds to existing knowledge or which clinical/organizational context to place it in, and often lacks 'appeal' for those who are less informed. Moreover, this information is sometimes founded on biased research, shaped by sponsors to give scientific plausibility to market-driven messages. A "social marketing" approach can help public health researchers make evidence-based information clear and appealing. The validity and relevance of this information can be explained to target readers in light of their own knowledge levels and in terms of how this information could help their practice. In this paper we analyse the barriers to knowledge transfer that are often inherent in the format of the information, and propose a more user-friendly, enriched and non-research-article format.

Keyword extraction by entropy difference between the intrinsic and extrinsic mode

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Yang, Zhen; Lei, Jianjun; Fan, Kefeng; Lai, Yingxu

2013-10-01

This paper proposes a new metric to evaluate and rank the relevance of words in a text. The method uses the Shannon’s entropy difference between the intrinsic and extrinsic mode, which refers to the fact that relevant words significantly reflect the author’s writing intention, i.e., their occurrences are modulated by the author’s purpose, while the irrelevant words are distributed randomly in the text. By using The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin as a representative text sample, the performance of our detector is demonstrated and compared to previous proposals. Since a reference text “corpus” is all of an author’s writings, books, papers, etc. his collected works is not needed. Our approach is especially suitable for single documents of which there is no a priori information available.

Dynamic Grouping of Hippocampal Neural Activity During Cognitive Control of Two Spatial Frames

PubMed Central

Kelemen, Eduard; Fenton, André A.

2010-01-01

Cognitive control is the ability to coordinate multiple streams of information to prevent confusion and select appropriate behavioral responses, especially when presented with competing alternatives. Despite its theoretical and clinical significance, the neural mechanisms of cognitive control are poorly understood. Using a two-frame place avoidance task and partial hippocampal inactivation, we confirmed that intact hippocampal function is necessary for coordinating two streams of spatial information. Rats were placed on a continuously rotating arena and trained to organize their behavior according to two concurrently relevant spatial frames: one stationary, the other rotating. We then studied how information about locations in these two spatial frames is organized in the action potential discharge of ensembles of hippocampal cells. Both streams of information were represented in neuronal discharge—place cell activity was organized according to both spatial frames, but almost all cells preferentially represented locations in one of the two spatial frames. At any given time, most coactive cells tended to represent locations in the same spatial frame, reducing the risk of interference between the two information streams. An ensemble's preference to represent locations in one or the other spatial frame alternated within a session, but at each moment, location in the more behaviorally relevant spatial frame was more likely to be represented. This discharge organized into transient groups of coactive neurons that fired together within 25 ms to represent locations in the same spatial frame. These findings show that dynamic grouping, the transient coactivation of neural subpopulations that represent the same stream of information, can coordinate representations of concurrent information streams and avoid confusion, demonstrating neural-ensemble correlates of cognitive control in hippocampus. PMID:20585373

Developing User-Driven Climate Information Services to Build Resilience Amongst Groups at Risk of Drought and Flood in Arid and Semi-Arid Land Counties in Kenya

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Githungo, W. N.; Shaka, A.; Kniveton, D.; Muithya, L.; Powell, R.; Visman, E. L.

2014-12-01

The Arid and Semi-Arid Land (ASAL) counties of Kitui and Makueni in Kenya are experiencing increasing climate variability in seasonal rainfall, including changes in the onset, cessation and distribution of the two principal rains upon which the majority of the population's small-holder farmers and livestock keepers depend. Food insecurity is prevalent with significant numbers also affected by flooding during periods of intense rainfall. As part of a multi-partner Adaptation Consortium, Kenya Meteorological Services (KMS) are developing Climate Information Services (CIS) which can better support decision making amongst the counties' principal livelihoods groups and across County Government ministries. Building on earlier pilots and stakeholder discussion, the system combines the production of climate information tailored for transmission via regional and local radio stations with the establishment of a new SMS service. SMS are provided through a network of CIS intermediaries drawn from across key government ministries, religious networks, non-governmental and community groups, aiming to achieve one SMS recipient per 3-500 people. It also introduces a demand-led, premium-rate SMS weather information service which is designed to be self-financing in the long term. Supporting the ongoing process of devolution, KMS is downscaling national forecasts for each county, and providing seasonal, monthly, weekly and daily forecasts, as well as warnings of weather-related hazards. Through collaboration with relevant ministries, government bodies and research institutions, including livestock, agriculture, drought management and health, technical advisories are developed to provide guidance on application of the climate information. The system seeks to provide timely, relevant information which can enable people to use weather and climate information to support decisions which protect life and property and build resilience to ongoing climate variability and future change.

[Toxoplasmosis and Pregnancy: Reliability of Internet Sources of Information].

PubMed

Bobić, Branko; Štajner, Tijana; Nikolić, Aleksandra; Klun, Ivana; Srbljanović, Jelena; Djurković-Djaković, Olgica

2015-01-01

Health education of women of childbearing age has been shown to be an acceptable approach to the prevention of toxoplasmosis, the most frequent congenitally transmitted parasitic infection. The aim of this study was to evaluate the Internet as a source of health education on toxoplasmosis in pregnancy. A group of 100 pregnant women examined in the National Reference Laboratory for Toxoplasmosis was surveyed by a questionnaire on the source of their information on toxoplasmosis. We also analyzed information offered by websites in the Serbian and Croatian languages through the Google search engine, using "toxoplasmosis" as a keyword. The 23 top websites were evaluated for comprehensiveness and accuracy of information on the impact of toxoplasmosis on the course of pregnancy, diagnosis and prevention. Having knowledge on toxoplasmosis was confirmed by 64 (64.0%) examined women, 40.6% (26/64) of whom learned about toxoplasmosis through the Internet, 48.4% from physicians, and 10.9% from friends. Increase in the degree of education was found to be associated with the probability that pregnant women would be informed via the Internet (RR=3.15, 95% CI=1.27-7.82, p=0.013). Analysis of four interactive websites (allowing users to ask questions) showed that routes of infection were the most common concern, particularly the risk presented by pet cats and dogs, followed by the diagnosis of infection (who and when should be tested, and how should the results be interpreted). Of 20 sites containing educational articles, only seven were authorized and two listed sources. Evaluation confirmed that information relevant to pregnant women was significantly more accurate than comprehensive, but no site gave both comprehensive and completely accurate information. Only four sites (20%) were good sources of information for pregnant women. Internet has proved itself as an important source of information. However, despite numerous websites, only a few offer reliable information to the Serbian (or Croat) speaking community, and none present complete and accurate information relevant to pregnant women.

Benchmarking and Its Relevance to the Library and Information Sector. Interim Findings of "Best Practice Benchmarking in the Library and Information Sector," a British Library Research and Development Department Project.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kinnell, Margaret; Garrod, Penny

This British Library Research and Development Department study assesses current activities and attitudes toward quality management in library and information services (LIS) in the academic sector as well as the commercial/industrial sector. Definitions and types of benchmarking are described, and the relevance of benchmarking to LIS is evaluated.…

Feature-Based Memory-Driven Attentional Capture: Visual Working Memory Content Affects Visual Attention

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Olivers, Christian N. L.; Meijer, Frank; Theeuwes, Jan

2006-01-01

In 7 experiments, the authors explored whether visual attention (the ability to select relevant visual information) and visual working memory (the ability to retain relevant visual information) share the same content representations. The presence of singleton distractors interfered more strongly with a visual search task when it was accompanied by…

Age Differences in Attention toward Decision-Relevant Information: Education Matters

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Xing, Cai; Isaacowitz, Derek

2011-01-01

Previous studies suggested that older adults are more likely to engage in heuristic decision-making than young adults. This study used eye tracking technique to examine young adults' and highly educated older adults' attention toward two types of decision-relevant information: heuristic cue vs. factual cues. Surprisingly, highly educated older…

Trade-Offs between Gaze and Working Memory Use

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Droll, Jason A.; Hayhoe, Mary M.

2007-01-01

Eye movements during natural tasks suggest that observers do not use working memory to capacity but instead use eye movements to acquire relevant information immediately before needed. Results here however, show that this strategy is sensitive to memory load and to observers' expectations about what information will be relevant. Depending upon the…

76 FR 44337 - Comments and Information Relevant to Mid Decade Review of NORA

Federal Register 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

2011-07-25

... NIOSH-244] Comments and Information Relevant to Mid Decade Review of NORA AGENCY: Department of Health...) is conducting a review of the processes of the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA). In 2006, NORA entered its second decade with an industry sector-based structure. In 2011, as NORA reaches the...

The Impact of Advanced Greenhouse Gas Measurement Science on Policy Goals and Research Strategies

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Abrahams, L.; Clavin, C.; McKittrick, A.

2016-12-01

In support of the Paris agreement, accurate characterizations of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions estimates have been area of increased scientific focus. Over the last several years, the scientific community has placed significant emphasis on understanding, quantifying, and reconciling measurement and modeling methods that characterize methane emissions from petroleum and natural gas sources. This work has prompted national policy discussions and led to the improvement of regional and national methane emissions estimates. Research campaigns focusing on reconciling atmospheric measurements ("top-down") and process-based emissions estimates ("bottom-up") have sought to identify where measurement technology advances could inform policy objectives. A clear next step is development and deployment of advanced detection capabilities that could aid U.S. emissions mitigation and verification goals. The breadth of policy-relevant outcomes associated with advances in GHG measurement science are demonstrated by recent improvements in the petroleum and natural gas sector emission estimates in the EPA Greenhouse Gas Inventory, ambitious efforts to apply inverse modeling results to inform or validate national GHG inventory, and outcomes from federal GHG measurement science technology development programs. In this work, we explore the variety of policy-relevant outcomes impacted by advances in GHG measurement science, with an emphasis on improving GHG inventory estimates, identifying emissions mitigation strategies, and informing technology development requirements.

Curation of food-relevant chemicals in ToxCast.

PubMed

Karmaus, Agnes L; Trautman, Thomas D; Krishan, Mansi; Filer, Dayne L; Fix, Laurel A

2017-05-01

High-throughput in vitro assays and exposure prediction efforts are paving the way for modeling chemical risk; however, the utility of such extensive datasets can be limited or misleading when annotation fails to capture current chemical usage. To address this data gap and provide context for food-use in the United States (US), manual curation of food-relevant chemicals in ToxCast was conducted. Chemicals were categorized into three food-use categories: (1) direct food additives, (2) indirect food additives, or (3) pesticide residues. Manual curation resulted in 30% of chemicals having new annotation as well as the removal of 319 chemicals, most due to cancellation or only foreign usage. These results highlight that manual curation of chemical use information provided significant insight affecting the overall inventory and chemical categorization. In total, 1211 chemicals were confirmed as current day food-use in the US by manual curation; 1154 of these chemicals were also identified as food-related in the globally sourced chemical use information from Chemical/Product Categories database (CPCat). The refined list of food-use chemicals and the sources highlighted for compiling annotated information required to confirm food-use are valuable resources for providing needed context when evaluating large-scale inventories such as ToxCast. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

Are attributes of organizational performance in large health care organizations relevant in primary care practices?

PubMed

Orzano, A John; Tallia, Alfred F; Nutting, Paul A; Scott-Cawiezell, Jill; Crabtree, Benjamin F

2006-01-01

Are organizational attributes associated with better health outcomes in large health care organizations applicable to primary care practices? In comparative case studies of two community family practices, it was found that attributes of organizational performance identified in larger health care organizations must be tailored to their unique context of primary care. Further work is required to adapt or establish the significance of the attributes of management infrastructure and information mastery.

Constructing Data Albums for Significant Severe Weather Events

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Greene, Ethan; Zavodsky, Bradley; Ramachandran, Rahul; Kulkarni, Ajinkya; Li, Xiang; Bakare, Rohan; Basyal, Sabin; Conover, Helen

2014-01-01

There is need in the research community for weather-related case studies to improve prediction of and recovery after convective thunderstorms that produce damaging winds, hail, and tornadoes. One of the largest continuing challenges in any Earth Science investigation is the discovery of and access to useful science content from the increasingly large volumes of available Earth Science data. The Information Technology and Systems Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville has developed a software system called Noesis 2.0 that can be used to produce Data Albums for weather events relevant to NASA Earth Science researchers. Noesis is an Internet search tool that combines relevant storm research, pictures and videos of an event or event aftermath, web pages containing news reports and official storm summaries, background information about damage, injuries, and deaths, and NASA datasets from field campaigns and satellites into a "one-stop shop" database. The Data Album concept has been previously applied to hurricane cases from 2010 to present. The objective of this paper is to extend that Hurricane Data Album concept to focus on development of an ontology for significant severe weather to aid in selecting appropriate NASA datasets for inclusion in a severe weather Data Album. Recent severe weather events in Moore and El Reno, Oklahoma will be analyzed as an example of how these events can be incorporated into a Data Album.

Categories, diversity, and relevance of memory strategies reported by community-dwelling seniors.

PubMed

Haché, Marie-Michèle; Lussier, Maxime; Parisien, Manon; Langlois, Francis; Bier, Nathalie

2018-01-01

Memory strategies help seniors remember information that is essential for the performance of their daily activities and contribute to their independence in the context of declining memory skills. This study aimed to analyze the categories, the diversity, and relevance of memory strategies known by seniors, and to identify individual characteristics that correlated with these variables. The sample consisted of 294 participants aged 60 and over who decided to take part in a cognitive vitality promotion program. An adapted version of the memory situation questionnaire (Troyer, 2001) was administered to identify the memory strategies that seniors would use in five daily life situations. A scoring grid, also adapted from the questionnaire's original version (Troyer, 2001), was used to quantify the relevance of the strategies that were reported by participants. All participants mentioned at least once that they would use a strategy from the physical category of memory strategies. Out of a possible range of 26 strategies, participants answered an average of 6.14 (SD = 1.7) different answers across the five situations. Based on expert consensus, 67.7% of the mentioned memory strategies were relevant. Diversity and relevance were significantly higher when trying to remember appointments, things to bring or phone numbers (p ≤ 0.05). The level of education, cognitive skills, and participation in leisure activities were related to diversity and relevance of reported strategies. Seniors know various and relevant memory strategies to perform daily activities. The advantages of integrating strategies that they already know in cognitive health promotion programs should be considered in further studies.

Statistical approach for selection of biologically informative genes.

PubMed

Das, Samarendra; Rai, Anil; Mishra, D C; Rai, Shesh N

2018-05-20

Selection of informative genes from high dimensional gene expression data has emerged as an important research area in genomics. Many gene selection techniques have been proposed so far are either based on relevancy or redundancy measure. Further, the performance of these techniques has been adjudged through post selection classification accuracy computed through a classifier using the selected genes. This performance metric may be statistically sound but may not be biologically relevant. A statistical approach, i.e. Boot-MRMR, was proposed based on a composite measure of maximum relevance and minimum redundancy, which is both statistically sound and biologically relevant for informative gene selection. For comparative evaluation of the proposed approach, we developed two biological sufficient criteria, i.e. Gene Set Enrichment with QTL (GSEQ) and biological similarity score based on Gene Ontology (GO). Further, a systematic and rigorous evaluation of the proposed technique with 12 existing gene selection techniques was carried out using five gene expression datasets. This evaluation was based on a broad spectrum of statistically sound (e.g. subject classification) and biological relevant (based on QTL and GO) criteria under a multiple criteria decision-making framework. The performance analysis showed that the proposed technique selects informative genes which are more biologically relevant. The proposed technique is also found to be quite competitive with the existing techniques with respect to subject classification and computational time. Our results also showed that under the multiple criteria decision-making setup, the proposed technique is best for informative gene selection over the available alternatives. Based on the proposed approach, an R Package, i.e. BootMRMR has been developed and available at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/BootMRMR. This study will provide a practical guide to select statistical techniques for selecting informative genes from high dimensional expression data for breeding and system biology studies. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Reality = Relevance? Insights from Spontaneous Modulations of the Brain's Default Network when Telling Apart Reality from Fiction

PubMed Central

Abraham, Anna; von Cramon, D. Yves

2009-01-01

Background Although human beings regularly experience fictional worlds through activities such as reading novels and watching movies, little is known about what mechanisms underlie our implicit knowledge of the distinction between reality and fiction. The first neuroimaging study to address this issue revealed that the mere exposure to contexts involving real entities compared to fictional characters led to engagement of regions in the anterior medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices (amPFC, PCC). As these core regions of the brain's default network are involved during self-referential processing and autobiographical memory retrieval, it was hypothesized that real entities may be conceptually coded as being more personally relevant to us than fictional characters. Methodology/Principal Findings In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we directly test the hypothesis that entity-associated personal relevance is the critical factor underlying the differential engagement of these brain regions by comparing the brain's response when processing contexts involving family or friends (high relevance), famous people (medium relevance), or fictional characters (low relevance). In line with predictions, a gradient pattern of activation was observed such that higher entity-associated personal relevance was associated with stronger activation in the amPFC and the PCC. Conclusions/Significance The results of the study have several important implications. Firstly, they provide informed grounds for characterizing the dynamics of reality-fiction distinction. Secondly, they provide further insights into the functions of the amPFC and the PCC. Thirdly, in view of the current debate related to the functional relevance and specificity of brain's default network, they reveal a novel approach by which the functions of this network can be further explored. PMID:19277108

When Educational Material Is Delivered: A Mixed Methods Content Validation Study of the Information Assessment Method

PubMed Central

2017-01-01

Background The Information Assessment Method (IAM) allows clinicians to report the cognitive impact, clinical relevance, intention to use, and expected patient health benefits associated with clinical information received by email. More than 15,000 Canadian physicians and pharmacists use the IAM in continuing education programs. In addition, information providers can use IAM ratings and feedback comments from clinicians to improve their products. Objective Our general objective was to validate the IAM questionnaire for the delivery of educational material (ecological and logical content validity). Our specific objectives were to measure the relevance and evaluate the representativeness of IAM items for assessing information received by email. Methods A 3-part mixed methods study was conducted (convergent design). In part 1 (quantitative longitudinal study), the relevance of IAM items was measured. Participants were 5596 physician members of the Canadian Medical Association who used the IAM. A total of 234,196 ratings were collected in 2012. The relevance of IAM items with respect to their main construct was calculated using descriptive statistics (relevance ratio R). In part 2 (qualitative descriptive study), the representativeness of IAM items was evaluated. A total of 15 family physicians completed semistructured face-to-face interviews. For each construct, we evaluated the representativeness of IAM items using a deductive-inductive thematic qualitative data analysis. In part 3 (mixing quantitative and qualitative parts), results from quantitative and qualitative analyses were reviewed, juxtaposed in a table, discussed with experts, and integrated. Thus, our final results are derived from the views of users (ecological content validation) and experts (logical content validation). Results Of the 23 IAM items, 21 were validated for content, while 2 were removed. In part 1 (quantitative results), 21 items were deemed relevant, while 2 items were deemed not relevant (R=4.86% [N=234,196] and R=3.04% [n=45,394], respectively). In part 2 (qualitative results), 22 items were deemed representative, while 1 item was not representative. In part 3 (mixing quantitative and qualitative results), the content validity of 21 items was confirmed, and the 2 nonrelevant items were excluded. A fully validated version was generated (IAM-v2014). Conclusions This study produced a content validated IAM questionnaire that is used by clinicians and information providers to assess the clinical information delivered in continuing education programs. PMID:28292738

Bridging the Gap: research informing practice and policy for healthy youth behavior.

PubMed

Chaloupka, Frank J; Johnston, Lloyd D

2007-10-01

Bridging the Gap (BTG) is a collaborative research initiative supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Ten years ago, BTG was created to assess the impact of policies, programs, and other environmental influences on adolescent alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drug use and related outcomes. This multidisciplinary, multisite initiative examines these factors at multiple levels of social organization, including schools, communities, and states. More recently, the significant increases in obesity among children, adolescents, and adults led BTG to expand its efforts to include research on the role of policies, programs, and other factors on adolescent obesity and the physical inactivity and dietary habits that contribute to this growing problem. Eleven papers resulting from BTG's obesity-related research are contained in this supplement, along with two papers describing the National Cancer Institute-supported efforts to track relevant state policies. Bridging the Gap involves a variety of data-collection efforts built largely around the Monitoring the Future (MTF) surveys of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students. These include: surveys of administrators in the MTF schools that gather extensive information on the school food environment, physical education in schools, and other relevant information; collection of contextual information from the communities in which the MTF schools are located; tracking of relevant state policies; and gathering of a wide variety of data from archival and commercial databases. These databases are analyzed individually and in various combinations. Bridging the Gap's extensive research has shown the importance of a range of school, community, state, and other influences in affecting adolescent substance use and related outcomes. BTG's early research on adolescent diet, physical activity, and obesity--much of which is contained in this supplement--similarly demonstrates the role of environmental factors in influencing these outcomes and in explaining observed racial/ethnic and socioeconomic-related disparities in them. The growing recognition of the public health and economic consequences of childhood, adolescent, and adult obesity has led to a variety of policies, programs, and other interventions to stimulate healthy eating and physical activity, often despite the lack of evidence on their impact. BTG and others are working to build the evidence base for effective interventions to address this significant problem, but much remains to be learned.

Helping patients to reach decisions regarding their treatment: Do 'non-directive' approaches cause systematic bias?

PubMed

MacInnes, Joy Anne; Salkovskis, Paul M; Wroe, Abigail; Hope, Tony

2015-11-01

Many patients want help in considering medical information relevant to treatment decisions they have to make or agree to. The present research investigated whether focussing on particular issues relevant to a medical treatment decision (using an apparently non-directive procedure) could systematically bias a treatment decision. In a randomized design, participants (community volunteers, n = 146) were given standard information about treatment of cardiac risk factors by medication (statins). There were four experimental interventions in which the participants focussed on the likely personal relevance of subsets of the information previously given (positive, negative, or mixed aspects) or on irrelevant information. Participants were asked to rate their anticipated likelihood of accepting treatment before and after the experimental intervention. The rating of acceptance of treatment was significantly increased by positive focussing; negative focussing did not significantly alter the decision rating. The results partially replicate similar studies in health screening decisions. Reasons for the differences in results from those obtained in screening studies are considered. It is suggested that negative focussing may have less effect in decisions in which there are few risks. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Decision-making in the context of health behaviour change has been widely described, but there are few experimental studies testing hypothesised strategies. 'Non-directiveness' is often regarded as desirable because it supposedly allows exploration of the decision without influencing it. Previous studies on health screening (but not treatment) have shown that health decision outcomes can be systematically influenced by the way in which a 'non-directive' intervention is implemented. This can be accounted for by a modified subjective expected utility theory previously applied to both health screening and child vaccination decisions. What does this study add? The hypothetical decision about whether or not, in future, to take statins for elevated cholesterol levels was influenced by positive but not by negative focussing. Results were consistent with the theoretical framework. This study extends previous work on influences on the decision to undertake health screening and vaccination to treatment offered as secondary prevention. 'Non-directive' approaches to helping facilitate decisions can modify those decisions, and as such cannot be regarded as non-directive. © 2015 The British Psychological Society.

Retrieving clinical evidence: a comparison of PubMed and Google Scholar for quick clinical searches.

PubMed

Shariff, Salimah Z; Bejaimal, Shayna Ad; Sontrop, Jessica M; Iansavichus, Arthur V; Haynes, R Brian; Weir, Matthew A; Garg, Amit X

2013-08-15

Physicians frequently search PubMed for information to guide patient care. More recently, Google Scholar has gained popularity as another freely accessible bibliographic database. To compare the performance of searches in PubMed and Google Scholar. We surveyed nephrologists (kidney specialists) and provided each with a unique clinical question derived from 100 renal therapy systematic reviews. Each physician provided the search terms they would type into a bibliographic database to locate evidence to answer the clinical question. We executed each of these searches in PubMed and Google Scholar and compared results for the first 40 records retrieved (equivalent to 2 default search pages in PubMed). We evaluated the recall (proportion of relevant articles found) and precision (ratio of relevant to nonrelevant articles) of the searches performed in PubMed and Google Scholar. Primary studies included in the systematic reviews served as the reference standard for relevant articles. We further documented whether relevant articles were available as free full-texts. Compared with PubMed, the average search in Google Scholar retrieved twice as many relevant articles (PubMed: 11%; Google Scholar: 22%; P<.001). Precision was similar in both databases (PubMed: 6%; Google Scholar: 8%; P=.07). Google Scholar provided significantly greater access to free full-text publications (PubMed: 5%; Google Scholar: 14%; P<.001). For quick clinical searches, Google Scholar returns twice as many relevant articles as PubMed and provides greater access to free full-text articles.

Clinically relevant safety issues associated with St. John's wort product labels.

PubMed

Clauson, Kevin A; Santamarina, Marile L; Rutledge, Jennifer C

2008-07-17

St. John's wort (SJW), used to treat depression, is popular in the USA, Canada, and parts of Europe. However, there are documented interactions between SJW and prescription medications including warfarin, cyclosporine, indinavir, and oral contraceptives. One source of information about these safety considerations is the product label. The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinically relevant safety information included on labeling in a nationally representative sample of SJW products from the USA. Eight clinically relevant safety issues were identified: drug interactions (SJW-HIV medications, SJW-immunosupressants, SJW-oral contraceptives, and SJW-warfarin), contraindications (bipolar disorder), therapeutic duplication (antidepressants), and general considerations (phototoxicity and advice to consult a healthcare professional (HCP)). A list of SJW products was identified to assess their labels. Percentages and totals were used to present findings. Of the seventy-four products evaluated, no product label provided information for all 8 evaluation criteria. Three products (4.1%) provided information on 7 of the 8 criteria. Four products provided no safety information whatsoever. Percentage of products with label information was: SJW-HIV (8.1%), SJW-immunosupressants (5.4%), SJW-OCPs (8.1%), SJW-warfarin (5.4%), bipolar (1.4%), antidepressants (23.0%), phototoxicity (51.4%), and consult HCP (87.8%). Other safety-related information on labels included warnings about pregnancy (74.3%), lactation (64.9%), discontinue if adverse reaction (23.0%), and not for use in patients under 18 years old (13.5%). The average number of a priori safety issues included on a product label was 1.91 (range 0-8) for 23.9% completeness. The vast majority of SJW products fail to adequately address clinically relevant safety issues on their labeling. A few products do provide an acceptable amount of information on clinically relevant safety issues which could enhance the quality of counseling by HCPs and health store clerks. HCPs and consumers may benefit if the FDA re-examined labeling requirements for dietary supplements.

Clinically relevant safety issues associated with St. John's wort product labels

PubMed Central

Clauson, Kevin A; Santamarina, Marile L; Rutledge, Jennifer C

2008-01-01

Background St. John's wort (SJW), used to treat depression, is popular in the USA, Canada, and parts of Europe. However, there are documented interactions between SJW and prescription medications including warfarin, cyclosporine, indinavir, and oral contraceptives. One source of information about these safety considerations is the product label. The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinically relevant safety information included on labeling in a nationally representative sample of SJW products from the USA. Methods Eight clinically relevant safety issues were identified: drug interactions (SJW-HIV medications, SJW-immunosupressants, SJW-oral contraceptives, and SJW-warfarin), contraindications (bipolar disorder), therapeutic duplication (antidepressants), and general considerations (phototoxicity and advice to consult a healthcare professional (HCP)). A list of SJW products was identified to assess their labels. Percentages and totals were used to present findings. Results Of the seventy-four products evaluated, no product label provided information for all 8 evaluation criteria. Three products (4.1%) provided information on 7 of the 8 criteria. Four products provided no safety information whatsoever. Percentage of products with label information was: SJW-HIV (8.1%), SJW-immunosupressants (5.4%), SJW-OCPs (8.1%), SJW-warfarin (5.4%), bipolar (1.4%), antidepressants (23.0%), phototoxicity (51.4%), and consult HCP (87.8%). Other safety-related information on labels included warnings about pregnancy (74.3%), lactation (64.9%), discontinue if adverse reaction (23.0%), and not for use in patients under 18 years old (13.5%). The average number of a priori safety issues included on a product label was 1.91 (range 0–8) for 23.9% completeness. Conclusion The vast majority of SJW products fail to adequately address clinically relevant safety issues on their labeling. A few products do provide an acceptable amount of information on clinically relevant safety issues which could enhance the quality of counseling by HCPs and health store clerks. HCPs and consumers may benefit if the FDA re-examined labeling requirements for dietary supplements. PMID:18637192

Multiagency Initiative to Provide Greenhouse Gas Information

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Boland, Stacey W.; Duren, Riley M.

2009-11-01

Global Greenhouse Gas Information System Workshop; Albuquerque, New Mexico, 20-22 May 2009; The second Greenhouse Gas Information System (GHGIS) workshop brought together 74 representatives from 28 organizations including U.S. government agencies, national laboratories, and members of the academic community to address issues related to the understanding, operational monitoring, and tracking of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon offsets. The workshop was held at Sandia National Laboratories and organized by an interagency collaboration among NASA centers, Department of Energy laboratories, and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It was motivated by the perceived need for an integrated interagency, community-wide initiative to provide information about greenhouse gas sources and sinks at policy-relevant temporal and spatial scales. Such an initiative could significantly enhance the ability of national and regional governments, industry, and private citizens to implement and evaluate effective climate change mitigation policies.

DeepStack: Expert-level artificial intelligence in heads-up no-limit poker.

PubMed

Moravčík, Matej; Schmid, Martin; Burch, Neil; Lisý, Viliam; Morrill, Dustin; Bard, Nolan; Davis, Trevor; Waugh, Kevin; Johanson, Michael; Bowling, Michael

2017-05-05

Artificial intelligence has seen several breakthroughs in recent years, with games often serving as milestones. A common feature of these games is that players have perfect information. Poker, the quintessential game of imperfect information, is a long-standing challenge problem in artificial intelligence. We introduce DeepStack, an algorithm for imperfect-information settings. It combines recursive reasoning to handle information asymmetry, decomposition to focus computation on the relevant decision, and a form of intuition that is automatically learned from self-play using deep learning. In a study involving 44,000 hands of poker, DeepStack defeated, with statistical significance, professional poker players in heads-up no-limit Texas hold'em. The approach is theoretically sound and is shown to produce strategies that are more difficult to exploit than prior approaches. Copyright © 2017, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Learning in the informal spaces and re-signification of the existence of undergraduate students of nursing

PubMed Central

de Jesus, Isabel Silva; Sena, Edite Lago da Silva; Andrade, Luana Machado

2014-01-01

OBJECTIVE: to describe the perception of lecturers and undergraduate nursing students regarding the dialogic experience in the informal spaces and its relationship with training in health. METHOD: experiential descriptions were collected in the context of a public university in the non-metropolitan region of the state of Bahia, Brazil, using open interviews. These descriptions were analyzed according to the principles of the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. RESULTS: it was revealed that the informal spaces contribute significantly to the construction of knowledge and professional training strengthening teaching and promoting the re-signification of the subjects' experience. CONCLUSION: it is evidenced that the dialogic experience has relevancy for rethinking the teaching-learning process in the university, such that the informal spaces should be included and valued as producers of meanings for the personal and academic life of lecturers and students, with the ability to re-signify existence. PMID:25493667

Suppression of no-longer relevant information in Working Memory: An alpha-power related mechanism?

PubMed

Poch, Claudia; Valdivia, María; Capilla, Almudena; Hinojosa, José Antonio; Campo, Pablo

2018-03-27

Selective attention can enhance Working Memory (WM) performance by selecting relevant information, while preventing distracting items from encoding or from further maintenance. Alpha oscillatory modulations are a correlate of visuospatial attention. Specifically, an enhancement of alpha power is observed in the ipsilateral posterior cortex to the locus of attention, along with a suppression in the contralateral hemisphere. An influential model proposes that the alpha enhancement is functionally related to the suppression of information. However, whether ipsilateral alpha power represents a mechanism through which no longer relevant WM representations are inhibited has yet not been explored. Here we examined whether the amount of distractors to be suppressed during WM maintenance is functionally related to alpha power lateralized activity. We measure EEG activity while participants (N = 36) performed a retro-cue task in which the WM load was varied across the relevant/irrelevant post-cue hemifield. We found that alpha activity was lateralized respect to the locus of attention, but did not track post-cue irrelevant load. Additionally, non-lateralized alpha activity increased with post-cue relevant load. We propose that alpha lateralization associated to retro-cuing might be related to a general orienting mechanism toward relevant representation. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Understanding the menstrual hygiene management challenges facing displaced girls and women: findings from qualitative assessments in Myanmar and Lebanon.

PubMed

Schmitt, Margaret L; Clatworthy, David; Ratnayake, Ruwan; Klaesener-Metzner, Nicole; Roesch, Elizabeth; Wheeler, Erin; Sommer, Marni

2017-01-01

There is a significant gap in empirical evidence on the menstrual hygiene management (MHM) challenges faced by adolescent girls and women in emergency contexts, and on appropriate humanitarian response approaches to meet their needs in diverse emergency contexts. To begin filling the gap in the evidence, we conducted a study in two diverse contexts (Myanmar and Lebanon), exploring the MHM barriers facing girls and women, and the various relevant sectoral responses being conducted (e.g. water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), Protection, Health, Education and Camp Management). Two qualitative assessments were conducted: one in camps for internally displaced populations in Myanmar, and one with refugees living in informal settlements and host communities in Lebanon. Key informant interviews were conducted with emergency response staff in both sites, and focus group discussion and participatory mapping activities conducted with adolescent girls and women. Key findings included that there was insufficient access to safe and private facilities for MHM coupled with displacement induced shifts in menstrual practices by girls and women. Among staff, there was a narrow interpretation of what an MHM response includes, with a focus on supplies; significant interest in understanding what an improved MHM response would include and acknowledgement of limited existing MHM guidance across various sectors; and insufficient consultation with beneficiaries, related to discomfort asking about menstruation, and limited coordination between sectors. There is a significant need for improved guidance across all relevant sectors for improving MHM response in emergency context, along with increased evidence on effective approaches for integrating MHM into existing responses.

[Handover between home and respite care facilities : Delphi survey within the context of continuity of care for people with dementia].

PubMed

Kuske, S; Roes, M; Bartholomeyczik, S

2016-07-01

Criteria for the handover between healthcare settings were identified based on a review and on results of empirical data. This study was carried out to select the most relevant criteria for defining the quality of continuity of care of people with dementia (PwD) in the context of the handover between care at home and respite care facilities. A modified classical two-step Delphi design was used in combination with a group Delphi design. A total of 28 core criteria with a consensus strength of > 60 % are presented. Safety-relevant information, especially the personal habits of PwD and the role of informal caregivers in the handover between care settings are important. Furthermore, the following general principles to ensure the quality of continuity of the care of PwD were deduced: completeness, verification, multipath communication, timeliness and topicality, accessibility and defined responsibilities, roles and standardization. A successful transition of PwD to respite care facilities relies on the provision of relevant information, considering personal habits, before the day of transition. Furthermore, a timely preparation for discharge is important. The individual needs of the informal caregivers with regard to their support should be considered. Professionals who are responsible in handover processes should have solid communication competence in order to collect relevant information from informal caregivers, who have a strong individual care experience with the PwD.

Neural suppression of irrelevant information underlies optimal working memory performance.

PubMed

Zanto, Theodore P; Gazzaley, Adam

2009-03-11

Our ability to focus attention on task-relevant information and ignore distractions is reflected by differential enhancement and suppression of neural activity in sensory cortex (i.e., top-down modulation). Such selective, goal-directed modulation of activity may be intimately related to memory, such that the focus of attention biases the likelihood of successfully maintaining relevant information by limiting interference from irrelevant stimuli. Despite recent studies elucidating the mechanistic overlap between attention and memory, the relationship between top-down modulation of visual processing during working memory (WM) encoding, and subsequent recognition performance has not yet been established. Here, we provide neurophysiological evidence in healthy, young adults that top-down modulation of early visual processing (< 200 ms from stimulus onset) is intimately related to subsequent WM performance, such that the likelihood of successfully remembering relevant information is associated with limiting interference from irrelevant stimuli. The consequences of a failure to ignore distractors on recognition performance was replicated for two types of feature-based memory, motion direction and color. Moreover, attention to irrelevant stimuli was reflected neurally during the WM maintenance period as an increased memory load. These results suggest that neural enhancement of relevant information is not the primary determinant of high-level performance, but rather optimal WM performance is dependent on effectively filtering irrelevant information through neural suppression to prevent overloading a limited memory capacity.

Differences in carbon source usage by dental plaque in children with and without early childhood caries

PubMed Central

Zhao, Yan; Zhong, Wen-Jie; Xun, Zhe; Zhang, Qian; Song, Ye-Qing; Liu, Yun-Song; Chen, Feng

2017-01-01

Early childhood caries (ECC) is a considerable pediatric and public health problem worldwide. Preceding studies have focused primarily on bacterial diversity at the taxonomic level. Although these studies have provided significant information regarding the connection between dental caries and oral microbiomes, further comprehension of this microbial community’s ecological relevance is limited. This study identified the carbon source metabolic differences in dental plaque between children with and without ECC. We compared the microbial community functional diversity in 18 caries-free subjects with 18 severe ECC patients based on sole carbon source usage using a Biolog assay. The anaerobic microbial community in the ECC patients displayed greater metabolic activity than that of the control group. Specific carbon source metabolism differed significantly between the two groups. Subjects from the two groups were well distinguished by cluster and principal component analyses based on discriminative carbon sources. Our results implied that the microbial functional diversity between the ECC patients and healthy subjects differed significantly. In addition, the Biolog assay furthered our understanding of oral microbiomes as a composite of functional abilities, thus enabling us to identify the ecologically relevant functional differences among oral microbial communities.

The role of information in supporting self-care in vascular conditions: a conceptual and empirical review.

PubMed

Blickem, Christian; Bower, Peter; Protheroe, Joanne; Kennedy, Anne; Vassilev, Ivaylo; Sanders, Caroline; Kirk, Sue; Chew-Graham, Carolyn; Rogers, Anne

2011-09-01

Self-care has the potential to make a significant contribution to vascular conditions, but engagement with self-care support has been limited. Lack of relevant information is highlighted by patients and policy-makers as an important barrier to effective self-care, and information provides a potentially efficient platform for changing behaviour. However, work within the social sciences has generally seen information as a necessary but insufficient driver of health behaviours. Furthermore, some groups (such as the socially disadvantaged) are expected to be less amenable to information interventions. We conducted an integrated conceptual and empirical review on information-based interventions for people with vascular disease (diabetes, heart disease and kidney disease). We reviewed conceptual and empirical work concerning the role and impact of information in self-care support to generate an explanatory framework to determine why information was effective or ineffective in encouraging self-care in patients with vascular conditions. This involved mapping relevant theories and models linking information and self-care. We also explored published systematic reviews of educational interventions in diabetes, coronary heart disease and chronic kidney disease to examine the role of information and evidence concerning its effectiveness and impact in different patient populations. The conceptual review identified variation among information interventions in terms of type, function, and their relationship to behaviour change techniques and psychological mediators of behaviour change. Key moderators of the effect of information included types of disorder, and patient capacity and resources. A wealth of educational interventions exists for diabetes and heart conditions, but the precise components of these interventions that are effective are difficult to identify. There is little evidence concerning optimal ways of tailoring interventions for socially disadvantaged groups other than ethnic minorities. A focus on printed information may not provide access to effective methods of information delivery (e.g. tailored information, use of narratives and user generated content). Developing a framework for the effective use of information needs to take account the full range of the factors identified. © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Cognitive mechanisms associated with auditory sensory gating

PubMed Central

Jones, L.A.; Hills, P.J.; Dick, K.M.; Jones, S.P.; Bright, P.

2016-01-01

Sensory gating is a neurophysiological measure of inhibition that is characterised by a reduction in the P50 event-related potential to a repeated identical stimulus. The objective of this work was to determine the cognitive mechanisms that relate to the neurological phenomenon of auditory sensory gating. Sixty participants underwent a battery of 10 cognitive tasks, including qualitatively different measures of attentional inhibition, working memory, and fluid intelligence. Participants additionally completed a paired-stimulus paradigm as a measure of auditory sensory gating. A correlational analysis revealed that several tasks correlated significantly with sensory gating. However once fluid intelligence and working memory were accounted for, only a measure of latent inhibition and accuracy scores on the continuous performance task showed significant sensitivity to sensory gating. We conclude that sensory gating reflects the identification of goal-irrelevant information at the encoding (input) stage and the subsequent ability to selectively attend to goal-relevant information based on that previous identification. PMID:26716891

Novel Method For Low-Rate Ddos Attack Detection

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chistokhodova, A. A.; Sidorov, I. D.

2018-05-01

The relevance of the work is associated with an increasing number of advanced types of DDoS attacks, in particular, low-rate HTTP-flood. Last year, the power and complexity of such attacks increased significantly. The article is devoted to the analysis of DDoS attacks detecting methods and their modifications with the purpose of increasing the accuracy of DDoS attack detection. The article details low-rate attacks features in comparison with conventional DDoS attacks. During the analysis, significant shortcomings of the available method for detecting low-rate DDoS attacks were found. Thus, the result of the study is an informal description of a new method for detecting low-rate denial-of-service attacks. The architecture of the stand for approbation of the method is developed. At the current stage of the study, it is possible to improve the efficiency of an already existing method by using a classifier with memory, as well as additional information.

LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE SHAPES PROCESSING OF PITCH RELEVANT INFORMATION IN THE HUMAN BRAINSTEM AND AUDITORY CORTEX: ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE.

PubMed

Krishnan, Ananthanarayan; Gandour, Jackson T

2014-12-01

Pitch is a robust perceptual attribute that plays an important role in speech, language, and music. As such, it provides an analytic window to evaluate how neural activity relevant to pitch undergo transformation from early sensory to later cognitive stages of processing in a well coordinated hierarchical network that is subject to experience-dependent plasticity. We review recent evidence of language experience-dependent effects in pitch processing based on comparisons of native vs. nonnative speakers of a tonal language from electrophysiological recordings in the auditory brainstem and auditory cortex. We present evidence that shows enhanced representation of linguistically-relevant pitch dimensions or features at both the brainstem and cortical levels with a stimulus-dependent preferential activation of the right hemisphere in native speakers of a tone language. We argue that neural representation of pitch-relevant information in the brainstem and early sensory level processing in the auditory cortex is shaped by the perceptual salience of domain-specific features. While both stages of processing are shaped by language experience, neural representations are transformed and fundamentally different at each biological level of abstraction. The representation of pitch relevant information in the brainstem is more fine-grained spectrotemporally as it reflects sustained neural phase-locking to pitch relevant periodicities contained in the stimulus. In contrast, the cortical pitch relevant neural activity reflects primarily a series of transient temporal neural events synchronized to certain temporal attributes of the pitch contour. We argue that experience-dependent enhancement of pitch representation for Chinese listeners most likely reflects an interaction between higher-level cognitive processes and early sensory-level processing to improve representations of behaviorally-relevant features that contribute optimally to perception. It is our view that long-term experience shapes this adaptive process wherein the top-down connections provide selective gating of inputs to both cortical and subcortical structures to enhance neural responses to specific behaviorally-relevant attributes of the stimulus. A theoretical framework for a neural network is proposed involving coordination between local, feedforward, and feedback components that can account for experience-dependent enhancement of pitch representations at multiple levels of the auditory pathway. The ability to record brainstem and cortical pitch relevant responses concurrently may provide a new window to evaluate the online interplay between feedback, feedforward, and local intrinsic components in the hierarchical processing of pitch relevant information.

LANGUAGE EXPERIENCE SHAPES PROCESSING OF PITCH RELEVANT INFORMATION IN THE HUMAN BRAINSTEM AND AUDITORY CORTEX: ELECTROPHYSIOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

PubMed Central

Krishnan, Ananthanarayan; Gandour, Jackson T.

2015-01-01

Pitch is a robust perceptual attribute that plays an important role in speech, language, and music. As such, it provides an analytic window to evaluate how neural activity relevant to pitch undergo transformation from early sensory to later cognitive stages of processing in a well coordinated hierarchical network that is subject to experience-dependent plasticity. We review recent evidence of language experience-dependent effects in pitch processing based on comparisons of native vs. nonnative speakers of a tonal language from electrophysiological recordings in the auditory brainstem and auditory cortex. We present evidence that shows enhanced representation of linguistically-relevant pitch dimensions or features at both the brainstem and cortical levels with a stimulus-dependent preferential activation of the right hemisphere in native speakers of a tone language. We argue that neural representation of pitch-relevant information in the brainstem and early sensory level processing in the auditory cortex is shaped by the perceptual salience of domain-specific features. While both stages of processing are shaped by language experience, neural representations are transformed and fundamentally different at each biological level of abstraction. The representation of pitch relevant information in the brainstem is more fine-grained spectrotemporally as it reflects sustained neural phase-locking to pitch relevant periodicities contained in the stimulus. In contrast, the cortical pitch relevant neural activity reflects primarily a series of transient temporal neural events synchronized to certain temporal attributes of the pitch contour. We argue that experience-dependent enhancement of pitch representation for Chinese listeners most likely reflects an interaction between higher-level cognitive processes and early sensory-level processing to improve representations of behaviorally-relevant features that contribute optimally to perception. It is our view that long-term experience shapes this adaptive process wherein the top-down connections provide selective gating of inputs to both cortical and subcortical structures to enhance neural responses to specific behaviorally-relevant attributes of the stimulus. A theoretical framework for a neural network is proposed involving coordination between local, feedforward, and feedback components that can account for experience-dependent enhancement of pitch representations at multiple levels of the auditory pathway. The ability to record brainstem and cortical pitch relevant responses concurrently may provide a new window to evaluate the online interplay between feedback, feedforward, and local intrinsic components in the hierarchical processing of pitch relevant information. PMID:25838636

30 CFR 100.6 - Procedures for review of citations and orders; procedures for assessment of civil penalties and...

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-07-01

..., the parties may submit any additional relevant information relating to the violation, either prior to... to submit additional information or request a safety and health conference with the District Manager... parties to discuss the issues involved prior to the conference. (d) MSHA will consider all relevant...

What Drives Memory-Driven Attentional Capture? The Effects of Memory Type, Display Type, and Search Type

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Olivers, Christian N. L.

2009-01-01

An important question is whether visual attention (the ability to select relevant visual information) and visual working memory (the ability to retain relevant visual information) share the same content representations. Some past research has indicated that they do: Singleton distractors interfered more strongly with a visual search task when they…

Accurate Monitoring Leads to Effective Control and Greater Learning of Patient Education Materials

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Rawson, Katherine A.; O'Neil, Rochelle; Dunlosky, John

2011-01-01

Effective management of chronic diseases (e.g., diabetes) can depend on the extent to which patients can learn and remember disease-relevant information. In two experiments, we explored a technique motivated by theories of self-regulated learning for improving people's learning of information relevant to managing a chronic disease. Materials were…

Communicating the Value of Program-Level Accreditation for Information Systems in a College of Business

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Babb, Jeffry S.; Abdullat, Amjad

2014-01-01

Undergraduate programs in Information Systems are challenged to offer a curriculum that is both rigorous and relevant. Specialized college-level accreditation, such as AACSB, and program-level accreditation, such as ABET, offer an opportunity to signal quality in academics while also remaining relevant to local stakeholders and constituents.…

Sound Continuing Bonds with the Deceased: The Relevance of Music, Including Preloss Music Therapy, for Eight Bereaved Caregivers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

O'Callaghan, Clare C.; McDermott, Fiona; Hudson, Peter; Zalcberg, John R.

2013-01-01

This study examines music's relevance, including preloss music therapy, for 8 informal caregivers of people who died from cancer. The design was informed by constructivist grounded theory and included semistructured interviews. Bereaved caregivers were supported or occasionally challenged as their musical lives enabled a connection with the…

Development of the Updating Executive Function: From 7-Year-Olds to Young Adults

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Carriedo, Nuria; Corral, Antonio; Montoro, Pedro R.; Herrero, Laura; Rucián, Mercedes

2016-01-01

Updating information in working memory (WM) is a critical executive function responsible both for continuously replacing outdated information with new relevant data and to suppress or inhibit content that is no longer relevant according to task demands. The goal of the present research is twofold: First, we aimed to study updating development in…

Covariation assessment for neutral and emotional verbal stimuli in paranoid delusions.

PubMed

Díez-Alegría, Cristina; Vázquez, Carmelo; Hernández-Lloreda, María J

2008-11-01

Selective processing of emotion-relevant information is considered a central feature in various types of psychopathology, yet the mechanisms underlying these biases are not well understood. One of the first steps in processing information is to gather data to judge the covariation or association of events. The aim of this study was to explore whether patients with persecutory delusions would show a covariation bias when processing stimuli related to social threat. We assessed estimations of covariation in-patients with current persecutory (CP) beliefs (N=40), patients with past persecutory (PP) beliefs (N=25), and a non-clinical control (NC) group (N=36). Covariation estimations were assessed under three different experimental conditions. The first two conditions focused on neutral behaviours (Condition 1) and psychological traits (Condition 2) for two distant cultural groups, while the third condition included self-relevant material by exposing the participant to either protective social (positive) or threatening social (negative) statements about the participant or a third person. Our results showed that all participants were precise in their covariation estimations. However, when judging covariation for self-relevant sentences related to social statements (Condition 3), all groups showed a significant tendency to associate positive social interaction (protection themed) sentences to the self. Yet, when using sentences related to social-threat, the CP group showed a bias consisting of overestimating the number of self-referent sentences. Our results showed that there was no specific covariation assessment bias related to paranoid beliefs. Both NCs and participants with persecutory beliefs showed a similar pattern of results when processing neutral or social threat-related sentences. The implications for understanding of the role of self-referent information processing biases in delusion formation are discussed.

[Examination of the criterion validity of the MMPI-2 Depression, Anxiety, and Anger Content scales].

PubMed

Uluç, Sait

2008-01-01

Examination of the psychometric properties and content areas of the revised MMPI's (MMPI-2 [Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2]) content scales is required. In this study the criterion-related validity of the MMPI-2 Depression, Anxiety, and Anger Content scales was examined using the following conceptually relevant scales: The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), and State Triad Anger Scale (STAS). MMPI-2 Depression, Anxiety, and Anger Content scales, and BDI, BAI, and STAS were administered to a sample of 196 students at Middle East Technical University (n= 196; 122 female, 74 male). Regression analyses were performed to determine if these conceptually relevant scales contributed significantly beyond the content scales. The MMPI-2 Depression Content Scale was compared to BDI, the MMPI-2 Anxiety Scale was compared to BAI, and the MMPI-2 Anger Content Scale was compared to STAS. The internal consistency of the MMPI-2 Depression Content Scale (alpha = 0.82), the MMPI-2 Anxiety Content Scale (alpha = 0.73), and the MMPI-2 Anger Content Scale (alpha = 0.72) was obtained. Criterion validity of the 3 analyzed content scales was demonstrated for both males and females. The findings indicated that (1) the MMPI-2 Depression Content Scale provides information about the general level of depression, (2) the MMPI-2 Anxiety Content Scale assesses subjective anxiety rather than somatic anxiety, and (3) the MMPI-2 Anger Content Scale may provide information about the potential to act out. The findings also provide further evidence that the 3 conceptually relevant scales aid in the interpretation of MMPI-2 scores by contributing additional information beyond the clinical scales.

Patients' Perspectives on Information and Communication About Sexual and Relational Issues in Rheumatology Health Care.

PubMed

Helland, Ylva; Dagfinrud, Hanne; Haugen, Mona-Iren; Kjeken, Ingvild; Zangi, Heidi

2017-06-01

Men and women with rheumatic diseases report a significantly negative impact on multiple areas of life, including sexuality. Research indicates that patients want to discuss sexual issues with health professionals (HPs) in rheumatology care but these issues are rarely addressed in consultations. The objective of the present study was to explore patients' experiences of communication with HPs about disease-related sexual issues, their perceptions of the relevance of these issues in rheumatology care and their preferences for how these topics should be handled. A qualitative design was used and 18 semi-structured interviews were performed, including eight women and ten men with inflammatory rheumatic joint diseases, aged 29-62 years. The interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Data were analysed thematically. Four main themes were derived from the interviews: (i) relevance of sexual issues; (ii) vital conditions for communication; (iii) individual preferences in mode and timing of information and communication; and (iv) benefits of information and communication. The participants expressed that, although sexual issues are relevant, necessary conditions for good communication are largely lacking. HPs' knowledge, experience and personal skills, as well as having sufficient time were essential. HPs lack of initiating sexual topics contributed to uncertainty about whether their sexual challenges were disease related and whether it was a legitimate topic to discuss in rheumatology care. Patients wanted HPs to possess knowledge about possible disease-related challenges in sexual life and intimate relationships, and to facilitate communication about these aspects. There is a need to develop practice guidelines to enable HPs to integrate sexual issues as an aspect of healthcare delivery in a patient-friendly manner. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Personal Genome Project Canada: findings from whole genome sequences of the inaugural 56 participants

PubMed Central

Reuter, Miriam S.; Walker, Susan; Thiruvahindrapuram, Bhooma; Whitney, Joe; Cohn, Iris; Sondheimer, Neal; Yuen, Ryan K.C.; Trost, Brett; Paton, Tara A.; Pereira, Sergio L.; Herbrick, Jo-Anne; Wintle, Richard F.; Merico, Daniele; Howe, Jennifer; MacDonald, Jeffrey R.; Lu, Chao; Nalpathamkalam, Thomas; Sung, Wilson W.L.; Wang, Zhuozhi; Patel, Rohan V.; Pellecchia, Giovanna; Wei, John; Strug, Lisa J.; Bell, Sherilyn; Kellam, Barbara; Mahtani, Melanie M.; Bassett, Anne S.; Bombard, Yvonne; Weksberg, Rosanna; Shuman, Cheryl; Cohn, Ronald D.; Stavropoulos, Dimitri J.; Bowdin, Sarah; Hildebrandt, Matthew R.; Wei, Wei; Romm, Asli; Pasceri, Peter; Ellis, James; Ray, Peter; Meyn, M. Stephen; Monfared, Nasim; Hosseini, S. Mohsen; Joseph-George, Ann M.; Keeley, Fred W.; Cook, Ryan A.; Fiume, Marc; Lee, Hin C.; Marshall, Christian R.; Davies, Jill; Hazell, Allison; Buchanan, Janet A.; Szego, Michael J.; Scherer, Stephen W.

2018-01-01

BACKGROUND: The Personal Genome Project Canada is a comprehensive public data resource that integrates whole genome sequencing data and health information. We describe genomic variation identified in the initial recruitment cohort of 56 volunteers. METHODS: Volunteers were screened for eligibility and provided informed consent for open data sharing. Using blood DNA, we performed whole genome sequencing and identified all possible classes of DNA variants. A genetic counsellor explained the implication of the results to each participant. RESULTS: Whole genome sequencing of the first 56 participants identified 207 662 805 sequence variants and 27 494 copy number variations. We analyzed a prioritized disease-associated data set (n = 1606 variants) according to standardized guidelines, and interpreted 19 variants in 14 participants (25%) as having obvious health implications. Six of these variants (e.g., in BRCA1 or mosaic loss of an X chromosome) were pathogenic or likely pathogenic. Seven were risk factors for cancer, cardiovascular or neurobehavioural conditions. Four other variants — associated with cancer, cardiac or neurodegenerative phenotypes — remained of uncertain significance because of discrepancies among databases. We also identified a large structural chromosome aberration and a likely pathogenic mitochondrial variant. There were 172 recessive disease alleles (e.g., 5 individuals carried mutations for cystic fibrosis). Pharmacogenomics analyses revealed another 3.9 potentially relevant genotypes per individual. INTERPRETATION: Our analyses identified a spectrum of genetic variants with potential health impact in 25% of participants. When also considering recessive alleles and variants with potential pharmacologic relevance, all 56 participants had medically relevant findings. Although access is mostly limited to research, whole genome sequencing can provide specific and novel information with the potential of major impact for health care. PMID:29431110

Analysis of PubMed User Sessions Using a Full-Day PubMed Query Log: A Comparison of Experienced and Nonexperienced PubMed Users

PubMed Central

2015-01-01

Background PubMed is the largest biomedical bibliographic information source on the Internet. PubMed has been considered one of the most important and reliable sources of up-to-date health care evidence. Previous studies examined the effects of domain expertise/knowledge on search performance using PubMed. However, very little is known about PubMed users’ knowledge of information retrieval (IR) functions and their usage in query formulation. Objective The purpose of this study was to shed light on how experienced/nonexperienced PubMed users perform their search queries by analyzing a full-day query log. Our hypotheses were that (1) experienced PubMed users who use system functions quickly retrieve relevant documents and (2) nonexperienced PubMed users who do not use them have longer search sessions than experienced users. Methods To test these hypotheses, we analyzed PubMed query log data containing nearly 3 million queries. User sessions were divided into two categories: experienced and nonexperienced. We compared experienced and nonexperienced users per number of sessions, and experienced and nonexperienced user sessions per session length, with a focus on how fast they completed their sessions. Results To test our hypotheses, we measured how successful information retrieval was (at retrieving relevant documents), represented as the decrease rates of experienced and nonexperienced users from a session length of 1 to 2, 3, 4, and 5. The decrease rate (from a session length of 1 to 2) of the experienced users was significantly larger than that of the nonexperienced groups. Conclusions Experienced PubMed users retrieve relevant documents more quickly than nonexperienced PubMed users in terms of session length. PMID:26139516

The Personal Genome Project Canada: findings from whole genome sequences of the inaugural 56 participants.

PubMed

Reuter, Miriam S; Walker, Susan; Thiruvahindrapuram, Bhooma; Whitney, Joe; Cohn, Iris; Sondheimer, Neal; Yuen, Ryan K C; Trost, Brett; Paton, Tara A; Pereira, Sergio L; Herbrick, Jo-Anne; Wintle, Richard F; Merico, Daniele; Howe, Jennifer; MacDonald, Jeffrey R; Lu, Chao; Nalpathamkalam, Thomas; Sung, Wilson W L; Wang, Zhuozhi; Patel, Rohan V; Pellecchia, Giovanna; Wei, John; Strug, Lisa J; Bell, Sherilyn; Kellam, Barbara; Mahtani, Melanie M; Bassett, Anne S; Bombard, Yvonne; Weksberg, Rosanna; Shuman, Cheryl; Cohn, Ronald D; Stavropoulos, Dimitri J; Bowdin, Sarah; Hildebrandt, Matthew R; Wei, Wei; Romm, Asli; Pasceri, Peter; Ellis, James; Ray, Peter; Meyn, M Stephen; Monfared, Nasim; Hosseini, S Mohsen; Joseph-George, Ann M; Keeley, Fred W; Cook, Ryan A; Fiume, Marc; Lee, Hin C; Marshall, Christian R; Davies, Jill; Hazell, Allison; Buchanan, Janet A; Szego, Michael J; Scherer, Stephen W

2018-02-05

The Personal Genome Project Canada is a comprehensive public data resource that integrates whole genome sequencing data and health information. We describe genomic variation identified in the initial recruitment cohort of 56 volunteers. Volunteers were screened for eligibility and provided informed consent for open data sharing. Using blood DNA, we performed whole genome sequencing and identified all possible classes of DNA variants. A genetic counsellor explained the implication of the results to each participant. Whole genome sequencing of the first 56 participants identified 207 662 805 sequence variants and 27 494 copy number variations. We analyzed a prioritized disease-associated data set ( n = 1606 variants) according to standardized guidelines, and interpreted 19 variants in 14 participants (25%) as having obvious health implications. Six of these variants (e.g., in BRCA1 or mosaic loss of an X chromosome) were pathogenic or likely pathogenic. Seven were risk factors for cancer, cardiovascular or neurobehavioural conditions. Four other variants - associated with cancer, cardiac or neurodegenerative phenotypes - remained of uncertain significance because of discrepancies among databases. We also identified a large structural chromosome aberration and a likely pathogenic mitochondrial variant. There were 172 recessive disease alleles (e.g., 5 individuals carried mutations for cystic fibrosis). Pharmacogenomics analyses revealed another 3.9 potentially relevant genotypes per individual. Our analyses identified a spectrum of genetic variants with potential health impact in 25% of participants. When also considering recessive alleles and variants with potential pharmacologic relevance, all 56 participants had medically relevant findings. Although access is mostly limited to research, whole genome sequencing can provide specific and novel information with the potential of major impact for health care. © 2018 Joule Inc. or its licensors.

Age differences in attention toward decision-relevant information: education matters.

PubMed

Xing, Cai; Isaacowitz, Derek

2011-01-01

Previous studies suggested that older adults are more likely to engage in heuristic decision-making than young adults. This study used eye tracking technique to examine young adults' and highly educated older adults' attention toward two types of decision-relevant information: heuristic cue vs. factual cues. Surprisingly, highly educated older adults showed the reversed age pattern-they looked more toward factual cues than did young adults. This age difference disappeared after controlling for educational level. Additionally, education correlated with attentional pattern to decision-relevant information. We interpret this finding as an indication of the power of education: education may modify what are thought to be "typical" age differences in decision-making, and education may influence young and older people's decision-making via different paths.

Informing the Human Plasma Protein Binding of Environmental Chemicals by Machine Learning in the Pharmaceutical Space: Applicability Domain and Limits of Predictability.

PubMed

Ingle, Brandall L; Veber, Brandon C; Nichols, John W; Tornero-Velez, Rogelio

2016-11-28

The free fraction of a xenobiotic in plasma (F ub ) is an important determinant of chemical adsorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination, and toxicity, yet experimental plasma protein binding data are scarce for environmentally relevant chemicals. The presented work explores the merit of utilizing available pharmaceutical data to predict F ub for environmentally relevant chemicals via machine learning techniques. Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models were constructed with k nearest neighbors (kNN), support vector machines (SVM), and random forest (RF) machine learning algorithms from a training set of 1045 pharmaceuticals. The models were then evaluated with independent test sets of pharmaceuticals (200 compounds) and environmentally relevant ToxCast chemicals (406 total, in two groups of 238 and 168 compounds). The selection of a minimal feature set of 10-15 2D molecular descriptors allowed for both informative feature interpretation and practical applicability domain assessment via a bounded box of descriptor ranges and principal component analysis. The diverse pharmaceutical and environmental chemical sets exhibit similarities in terms of chemical space (99-82% overlap), as well as comparable bias and variance in constructed learning curves. All the models exhibit significant predictability with mean absolute errors (MAE) in the range of 0.10-0.18F ub . The models performed best for highly bound chemicals (MAE 0.07-0.12), neutrals (MAE 0.11-0.14), and acids (MAE 0.14-0.17). A consensus model had the highest accuracy across both pharmaceuticals (MAE 0.151-0.155) and environmentally relevant chemicals (MAE 0.110-0.131). The inclusion of the majority of the ToxCast test sets within the AD of the consensus model, coupled with high prediction accuracy for these chemicals, indicates the model provides a QSAR for F ub that is broadly applicable to both pharmaceuticals and environmentally relevant chemicals.

Attentional effects of self-affirmation in response to graphic antismoking images.

PubMed

Kessels, Loes T E; Harris, Peter R; Ruiter, Robert A C; Klein, William M P

2016-08-01

Self-affirmation has been shown to reduce defensive responding to threatening information. However, little is known about the cognitive and attentional processes underlying these effects. In the current eye-movement study, the authors explored whether self-affirmation affects attention allocation (i.e., number of fixations) among those for whom a threatening health message is self-relevant. After a self-affirmation manipulation, 47 smokers and 52 nonsmokers viewed a series of cigarette packs displaying high or low threat smoking-related images accompanied by a brief smoking message containing risk, coping or neutral textual information. Self-affirmed smokers made more fixations to the cigarette packs than did nonaffirmed smokers (across both high and low threat images), whereas self-affirmed nonsmokers made fewer fixations to the cigarette packs than did nonaffirmed nonsmokers (again across both image types). The textual information did not moderate responses. Findings indicate attention-increasing effects of self-affirmation among those for whom the information is self-relevant (smokers) and attention-decreasing effects of self-affirmation among those for whom the information is not self-relevant (nonsmokers). Such findings are consistent with the calibration model of self-affirmation (Griffin & Harris, 2011) in which self-affirmation increases sensitivity to the self-relevance of health-risk information. The use of an implicit measure of visual orienting informs our understanding of the working mechanisms of self-affirmation when encoding health information, and may also hold practical implications for the design and delivery of graphic warning labels. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

What Factors Impact Consumer Perception of the Effectiveness of Health Information Sites? An Investigation of the Korean National Health Information Portal

PubMed Central

2017-01-01

Lay public's concerns around health and health information are increasing. In response, governments and government agencies are establishing websites to address such concerns and improve health literacy by providing better access to validated health information. Since 2011, the Korean government has constructed the National Health Information Portal (NHIP) website run in collaboration with the Korean Academy of Medical Sciences (KAMS). This study therefore aimed to 1) examine consumer use of NHIP, with respect to the usage patterns, evaluation on health information provided, and perceived effectiveness of the site; and 2) identify factors that may impact perceived effectiveness of the site. An online survey was conducted with 164 NHIP users, recruited through a popup window on the main screen of the portal website from October to November 2015. The significant predicting factors supported by the data include the relevance of health information on the site, the usefulness of information in making health decisions, and the effective visualization of information. These factors can inform future efforts to design more effective health information websites, possibly based on metadata systems, to further advance the lay public's information seeking and health literacy. PMID:28581262

Prevalence and psychosocial correlates of depressive symptoms in urban Chinese women during midlife.

PubMed

Wong, Carmen K M; Liang, Jun; Chan, Man L; Chan, Yin H; Chan, Laam; Wan, Kwong Y; Ng, Ming S; Chan, Dicken C C; Wong, Samuel Y S; Wong, Martin C S

2014-01-01

Depression is common in women with much research focusing on hormonal changes and menopausal symptoms but with little exploration of psychosocial problems in midlife. This study investigates the prevalence of clinically relevant depressive symptoms in midlife Chinese women and its association with psychosocial factors. A cross-sectional, community-based household survey of women aged 45 to 64 years of age was conducted in Hong Kong from September 2010 to March 2011. The structured questionnaire included demographic data, educational status, marital status and household income, as well as perceived current stressful events and significant life events in the past 12 months. Information on clinically relevant depressive symptoms was measured by the validated chinese Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9). A total of 402 participants were recruited in the study period. Of the 393 women who completed the questionnaire, the prevalence of clinically relevant depressive symptoms (PHQ-9 score≧10) was 11.0%. In multiple regression analysis, being single/divorced/separated/widowed, having an educational level of primary school level or below, having multiple chronic diseases, loss of hobby or loss of close social support in the past 12 months in midlife were associated with clinically relevant depressive symptoms. Correlates of clinically relevant depressive symptoms in midlife Chinese women can be used to identify those at increased risk and potentiate further studies to explore early psychosocial and community interventions.

Back to the basics: Identifying and addressing underlying challenges in achieving high quality and relevant health statistics for indigenous populations in Canada

PubMed Central

Smylie, Janet; Firestone, Michelle

2015-01-01

Canada is known internationally for excellence in both the quality and public policy relevance of its health and social statistics. There is a double standard however with respect to the relevance and quality of statistics for Indigenous populations in Canada. Indigenous specific health and social statistics gathering is informed by unique ethical, rights-based, policy and practice imperatives regarding the need for Indigenous participation and leadership in Indigenous data processes throughout the spectrum of indicator development, data collection, management, analysis and use. We demonstrate how current Indigenous data quality challenges including misclassification errors and non-response bias systematically contribute to a significant underestimate of inequities in health determinants, health status, and health care access between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada. The major quality challenge underlying these errors and biases is the lack of Indigenous specific identifiers that are consistent and relevant in major health and social data sources. The recent removal of an Indigenous identity question from the Canadian census has resulted in further deterioration of an already suboptimal system. A revision of core health data sources to include relevant, consistent, and inclusive Indigenous self-identification is urgently required. These changes need to be carried out in partnership with Indigenous peoples and their representative and governing organizations. PMID:26793283

Interest in Integrative Medicine Among Postmenopausal Hormone Receptor–Positive Breast Cancer Patients in the EvAluate-TM Study

PubMed Central

Hack, Carolin C.; Fasching, Peter A.; Fehm, Tanja; de Waal, Johann; Rezai, Mahdi; Baier, Bernd; Baake, Gerold; Kolberg, Hans-Christian; Guggenberger, Martin; Warm, Mathias; Harbeck, Nadia; Wuerstlein, Rachel; Deuker, Jörg-Uwe; Dall, Peter; Richter, Barbara; Wachsmann, Grischa; Brucker, Cosima; Siebers, Jan W.; Fersis, Nikos; Kuhn, Thomas; Wolf, Christopher; Vollert, Hans-Walter; Breitbach, Georg-Peter; Janni, Wolfgang; Landthaler, Robert; Kohls, Andreas; Rezek, Daniela; Noesslet, Thomas; Fischer, Gunnar; Henschen, Stefan; Praetz, Thomas; Heyl, Volker; Kühn, Thorsten; Krauss, Thomas; Thomssen, Christoph; Hohn, Andre; Tesch, Hans; Mundhenke, Christoph; Hein, Alexander; Rauh, Claudia; Bayer, Christian M.; Jacob, Adib; Schmidt, Katja; Belleville, Erik; Hadji, Peyman; Brucker, Sara Y.; Wallwiener, Diethelm; Kümmel, Sherko; Beckmann, Matthias W.; Paepke, Daniela

2016-01-01

Background. Breast cancer patients often use complementary and alternative medicine, but few prospectively collected data on the topic are available specifically for postmenopausal breast cancer patients. A large prospective study was therefore conducted within a noninterventional study in order to identify the characteristics of patients interested in integrative medicine. Methods. The EvAluate-TM study is a prospective, multicenter noninterventional study in which treatment with the aromatase inhibitor letrozole was evaluated in postmenopausal women with hormone receptor–positive primary breast cancer. Between 2008 and 2009, 5045 postmenopausal patients were enrolled at 339 certified breast centers in Germany. As part of the data collection process, patients were asked at the baseline about their interest in and information needs relating to integrative medicine. Results. Of the 5045 patients recruited, 3411 responded to the questionnaire on integrative medicine and took part in the analysis, 1583 patients expressed an interest in integrative medicine, and 1828 patients declared no interest. Relevant predictors of interest in integrative medicine were age, body mass index, tumor size, previous chemotherapy, and use of concomitant medications for other medical conditions. Interest in integrative medicine declined highly significantly (P < .001) with age (<50 years, 74.1%; 50-60 years, 54.1%; >65 years, 38.0%). Patients in favor of integrative medicine were significantly less satisfied with the information received about individual treatments and antihormonal therapy. Patients with interest in integrative medicine were more often interested in rehabilitation and fitness, nutritional counseling, and additional support from self-help organizations. These women were mostly interested in receiving information about their disease and integrative medicine from a physician, rather than from other sources. Conclusions. This study shows that a considerable proportion of postmenopausal breast cancer patients are interested in integrative medicine. Information about integrative medicine should therefore be provided as part of patient care for this group. It was found that receiving concomitant medication for other medical conditions is one of the main predictors for women not being interested in integrative medicine. This group of patients may need special attention and individualized information about integrative medicine. Additionally, most patients were interested in obtaining the relevant information from their doctor. PMID:27627986

Interest in Integrative Medicine Among Postmenopausal Hormone Receptor-Positive Breast Cancer Patients in the EvAluate-TM Study.

PubMed

Hack, Carolin C; Fasching, Peter A; Fehm, Tanja; de Waal, Johann; Rezai, Mahdi; Baier, Bernd; Baake, Gerold; Kolberg, Hans-Christian; Guggenberger, Martin; Warm, Mathias; Harbeck, Nadia; Wuerstlein, Rachel; Deuker, Jörg-Uwe; Dall, Peter; Richter, Barbara; Wachsmann, Grischa; Brucker, Cosima; Siebers, Jan W; Fersis, Nikos; Kuhn, Thomas; Wolf, Christopher; Vollert, Hans-Walter; Breitbach, Georg-Peter; Janni, Wolfgang; Landthaler, Robert; Kohls, Andreas; Rezek, Daniela; Noesslet, Thomas; Fischer, Gunnar; Henschen, Stefan; Praetz, Thomas; Heyl, Volker; Kühn, Thorsten; Krauss, Thomas; Thomssen, Christoph; Hohn, Andre; Tesch, Hans; Mundhenke, Christoph; Hein, Alexander; Rauh, Claudia; Bayer, Christian M; Jacob, Adib; Schmidt, Katja; Belleville, Erik; Hadji, Peyman; Brucker, Sara Y; Wallwiener, Diethelm; Kümmel, Sherko; Beckmann, Matthias W; Paepke, Daniela

2017-06-01

Breast cancer patients often use complementary and alternative medicine, but few prospectively collected data on the topic are available specifically for postmenopausal breast cancer patients. A large prospective study was therefore conducted within a noninterventional study in order to identify the characteristics of patients interested in integrative medicine. The EvAluate-TM study is a prospective, multicenter noninterventional study in which treatment with the aromatase inhibitor letrozole was evaluated in postmenopausal women with hormone receptor-positive primary breast cancer. Between 2008 and 2009, 5045 postmenopausal patients were enrolled at 339 certified breast centers in Germany. As part of the data collection process, patients were asked at the baseline about their interest in and information needs relating to integrative medicine. Of the 5045 patients recruited, 3411 responded to the questionnaire on integrative medicine and took part in the analysis, 1583 patients expressed an interest in integrative medicine, and 1828 patients declared no interest. Relevant predictors of interest in integrative medicine were age, body mass index, tumor size, previous chemotherapy, and use of concomitant medications for other medical conditions. Interest in integrative medicine declined highly significantly ( P < .001) with age (<50 years, 74.1%; 50-60 years, 54.1%; >65 years, 38.0%). Patients in favor of integrative medicine were significantly less satisfied with the information received about individual treatments and antihormonal therapy. Patients with interest in integrative medicine were more often interested in rehabilitation and fitness, nutritional counseling, and additional support from self-help organizations. These women were mostly interested in receiving information about their disease and integrative medicine from a physician, rather than from other sources. This study shows that a considerable proportion of postmenopausal breast cancer patients are interested in integrative medicine. Information about integrative medicine should therefore be provided as part of patient care for this group. It was found that receiving concomitant medication for other medical conditions is one of the main predictors for women not being interested in integrative medicine. This group of patients may need special attention and individualized information about integrative medicine. Additionally, most patients were interested in obtaining the relevant information from their doctor.

Aspects of the media and their relevance to bulimic attitudes and tendencies among female college students.

PubMed

O'Riordan, Siobhan S; Zamboanga, Byron L

2008-04-01

We examined whether media pressures would mediate the association between two dimensions of the media (source of information and internalization) and bulimic attitudes/tendencies. The study sample consisted of 106 female college students (M age=19.9; range=18-22). Participants completed anonymous, self-report measures on media influences on body image and appearance as well as disordered eating attitudes/behaviors. Findings showed that the association between two dimensions of the media (source of information and internalization) and bulimic attitudes/tendencies was mediated by perceived media pressures. Such findings highlight the significant influence of media pressures on bulimic attitudes/tendencies. Future research and prevention implications are discussed.

Self-assembly concepts in the formation of nanostructured particles using a liquid-phase synthesis method

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nandiyanto, Asep Bayu Dani

2016-02-01

When synthesizing particles using a liquid-phase synthesis method, reactant components show interaction with the reaction system itself. However, current reports described successful synthesis of material with only partial information on the component-component interaction and possible self-assembly mechanism occurring during the material synthesis process. Here, self-assembly concepts in the formation of nanostructured particles are presented. Influences of self-assembly parameters (i.e., surface charge, size, and concentration of components involving the reaction) on self-organized material fabrication are described. Because understanding the interaction of the component provides significant information in regard to practical uses, this report can be relevant to further material development and fabrication.

The Health Significance of Positive Emotions in Adulthood and Later Life.

PubMed

Ong, Anthony D; Mroczek, Daniel K; Riffin, Catherine

2011-08-01

A growing body of literature supports a link between positive emotions and health in older adults. In this article, we review evidence of the effects of positive emotions on downstream biological processes and meaningful clinical endpoints, such as adult morbidity and mortality. We then present relevant predictions from lifespan theories that suggest changes in cognition and motivation may play an important role in explaining how positive emotions are well maintained in old age, despite pervasive declines in cognitive processes. We conclude by discussing how the application of psychological theory can inform greater understanding of the adaptive significance of positive emotions in adulthood and later life.

The Health Significance of Positive Emotions in Adulthood and Later Life

PubMed Central

Ong, Anthony D.; Mroczek, Daniel K.; Riffin, Catherine

2011-01-01

A growing body of literature supports a link between positive emotions and health in older adults. In this article, we review evidence of the effects of positive emotions on downstream biological processes and meaningful clinical endpoints, such as adult morbidity and mortality. We then present relevant predictions from lifespan theories that suggest changes in cognition and motivation may play an important role in explaining how positive emotions are well maintained in old age, despite pervasive declines in cognitive processes. We conclude by discussing how the application of psychological theory can inform greater understanding of the adaptive significance of positive emotions in adulthood and later life. PMID:21927620

Feature-Selective Attention Adaptively Shifts Noise Correlations in Primary Auditory Cortex.

PubMed

Downer, Joshua D; Rapone, Brittany; Verhein, Jessica; O'Connor, Kevin N; Sutter, Mitchell L

2017-05-24

Sensory environments often contain an overwhelming amount of information, with both relevant and irrelevant information competing for neural resources. Feature attention mediates this competition by selecting the sensory features needed to form a coherent percept. How attention affects the activity of populations of neurons to support this process is poorly understood because population coding is typically studied through simulations in which one sensory feature is encoded without competition. Therefore, to study the effects of feature attention on population-based neural coding, investigations must be extended to include stimuli with both relevant and irrelevant features. We measured noise correlations ( r noise ) within small neural populations in primary auditory cortex while rhesus macaques performed a novel feature-selective attention task. We found that the effect of feature-selective attention on r noise depended not only on the population tuning to the attended feature, but also on the tuning to the distractor feature. To attempt to explain how these observed effects might support enhanced perceptual performance, we propose an extension of a simple and influential model in which shifts in r noise can simultaneously enhance the representation of the attended feature while suppressing the distractor. These findings present a novel mechanism by which attention modulates neural populations to support sensory processing in cluttered environments. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Although feature-selective attention constitutes one of the building blocks of listening in natural environments, its neural bases remain obscure. To address this, we developed a novel auditory feature-selective attention task and measured noise correlations ( r noise ) in rhesus macaque A1 during task performance. Unlike previous studies showing that the effect of attention on r noise depends on population tuning to the attended feature, we show that the effect of attention depends on the tuning to the distractor feature as well. We suggest that these effects represent an efficient process by which sensory cortex simultaneously enhances relevant information and suppresses irrelevant information. Copyright © 2017 the authors 0270-6474/17/375378-15$15.00/0.

Feature-Selective Attention Adaptively Shifts Noise Correlations in Primary Auditory Cortex

PubMed Central

2017-01-01

Sensory environments often contain an overwhelming amount of information, with both relevant and irrelevant information competing for neural resources. Feature attention mediates this competition by selecting the sensory features needed to form a coherent percept. How attention affects the activity of populations of neurons to support this process is poorly understood because population coding is typically studied through simulations in which one sensory feature is encoded without competition. Therefore, to study the effects of feature attention on population-based neural coding, investigations must be extended to include stimuli with both relevant and irrelevant features. We measured noise correlations (rnoise) within small neural populations in primary auditory cortex while rhesus macaques performed a novel feature-selective attention task. We found that the effect of feature-selective attention on rnoise depended not only on the population tuning to the attended feature, but also on the tuning to the distractor feature. To attempt to explain how these observed effects might support enhanced perceptual performance, we propose an extension of a simple and influential model in which shifts in rnoise can simultaneously enhance the representation of the attended feature while suppressing the distractor. These findings present a novel mechanism by which attention modulates neural populations to support sensory processing in cluttered environments. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Although feature-selective attention constitutes one of the building blocks of listening in natural environments, its neural bases remain obscure. To address this, we developed a novel auditory feature-selective attention task and measured noise correlations (rnoise) in rhesus macaque A1 during task performance. Unlike previous studies showing that the effect of attention on rnoise depends on population tuning to the attended feature, we show that the effect of attention depends on the tuning to the distractor feature as well. We suggest that these effects represent an efficient process by which sensory cortex simultaneously enhances relevant information and suppresses irrelevant information. PMID:28432139

Computer-Assisted Search Of Large Textual Data Bases

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Driscoll, James R.

1995-01-01

"QA" denotes high-speed computer system for searching diverse collections of documents including (but not limited to) technical reference manuals, legal documents, medical documents, news releases, and patents. Incorporates previously available and emerging information-retrieval technology to help user intelligently and rapidly locate information found in large textual data bases. Technology includes provision for inquiries in natural language; statistical ranking of retrieved information; artificial-intelligence implementation of semantics, in which "surface level" knowledge found in text used to improve ranking of retrieved information; and relevance feedback, in which user's judgements of relevance of some retrieved documents used automatically to modify search for further information.

Citation analysis in journal rankings: medical informatics in the library and information science literature.

PubMed Central

Vishwanatham, R

1998-01-01

Medical informatics is an interdisciplinary field. Medical informatics articles will be found in the literature of various disciplines including library and information science publications. The purpose of this study was to provide an objectively ranked list of journals that publish medical informatics articles relevant to library and information science. Library Literature, Library and Information Science Abstracts, and Social Science Citation Index were used to identify articles published on the topic of medical informatics and to identify a ranked list of journals. This study also used citation analysis to identify the most frequently cited journals relevant to library and information science. PMID:9803294

The contribution of disengagement to temporal discriminability.

PubMed

Shipstead, Zach; Nespodzany, Ashley

2018-05-01

The present study examines the idea that time-based forgetting of outdated information can lead to better memory of currently relevant information. This was done using the visual arrays task, along with a between-subjects manipulation of both the retention interval (1 s vs. 4 s) and the time between two trials (1 s vs. 4 s). Consistent with prior work [Shipstead, Z., & Engle, R. W. (2013). Interference within the focus of attention: Working memory tasks reflect more than temporary maintenance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 39, 277-289; Experiment 1], longer retention intervals did not lead to diminished memory of currently relevant information. However, we did find that longer periods of time between two trials improved memory for currently relevant information. This replicates findings that indicate proactive interference affects visual arrays performance and extends previous findings to show that reduction of proactive interference can occur in a time-dependent manner.

Communicative mind-reading in preverbal infants.

PubMed

Tauzin, Tibor; Gergely, György

2018-06-22

Pragmatic theories of communication assume that humans evolved a species-unique inferential capacity to express and recognize intentions via communicative actions. We show that 13-month-old non-verbal infants can interpret the turn-taking exchange of variable tone sequences between unfamiliar agents as indicative of communicative transfer of goal-relevant information from a knowledgeable to a naïve agent pursuing the goal. No such inference of information transfer was drawn by the infants, however, when a) the agents exchanged fully predictable identical signal sequences, which does not enable transmission of new information, or b) when no goal-relevant contextual change was observed that would motivate its communicative transmission. These results demonstrate that young infants can recognize communicative interactions between third-party agents and possess an evolved capacity for communicative mind-reading that enables them to infer what contextually relevant information has been transmitted between the agents even without language.

The influence of open goals on the acquisition of problem-relevant information.

PubMed

Moss, Jarrod; Kotovsky, Kenneth; Cagan, Jonathan

2007-09-01

There have been a number of recent findings indicating that unsolved problems, or open goals more generally, influence cognition even when the current task has no relation to the task in which the goal was originally set. It was hypothesized that open goals would influence what information entered the problem-solving process. Three studies were conducted to establish the effect of open goals on the acquisition of problem-relevant information. It was found that problem-relevant information, or hints, presented implicitly in a 2nd task in between attempts at solving problems aided problem solving. This effect cannot be attributed to strategic behavior after participants caught on to the manipulation, as most participants were not aware of the relationship. The implications of this research are discussed, including potential contributions to our understanding of insight, incubation, transfer, and creativity. 2007 APA

Stimulus-response correspondence effect as a function of temporal overlap between relevant and irrelevant information processing.

PubMed

Wang, Dong-Yuan Debbie; Richard, F Dan; Ray, Brittany

2016-01-01

The stimulus-response correspondence (SRC) effect refers to advantages in performance when stimulus and response correspond in dimensions or features, even if the common features are irrelevant to the task. Previous research indicated that the SRC effect depends on the temporal course of stimulus information processing. The current study investigated how the temporal overlap between relevant and irrelevant stimulus processing influences the SRC effect. In this experiment, the irrelevant stimulus (a previously associated tone) preceded the relevant stimulus (a coloured rectangle). The irrelevant and relevant stimuli onset asynchrony was varied to manipulate the temporal overlap between the irrelevant and relevant stimuli processing. Results indicated that the SRC effect size varied as a quadratic function of the temporal overlap between the relevant stimulus and irrelevant stimulus. This finding extends previous experimental observations that the SRC effect size varies in an increasing or decreasing function with reaction time. The current study demonstrated a quadratic function between effect size and the temporal overlap.

Task relevance of emotional information affects anxiety-linked attention bias in visual search.

PubMed

Dodd, Helen F; Vogt, Julia; Turkileri, Nilgun; Notebaert, Lies

2017-01-01

Task relevance affects emotional attention in healthy individuals. Here, we investigate whether the association between anxiety and attention bias is affected by the task relevance of emotion during an attention task. Participants completed two visual search tasks. In the emotion-irrelevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of neutral, middle-aged faces was old or young. Irrelevant to the task, target faces displayed angry, happy, or neutral expressions. In the emotion-relevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of middle-aged neutral faces was happy or angry (target faces also varied in age). Trait anxiety was not associated with attention in the emotion-relevant task. However, in the emotion-irrelevant task, trait anxiety was associated with a bias for angry over happy faces. These findings demonstrate that the task relevance of emotional information affects conclusions about the presence of an anxiety-linked attention bias. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Relevance of Vocational High School Curriculum with the Requirement of the Heavy Equipment Industries

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Asfiyanur, E. P.; Sumardi, K.; Rahayu, Y.; Putra, R. C.

2018-02-01

This study aims to determine the relevance of competencies developed by vocational high schools with the needs of workers in the industrial world. This is to answer the statement from the world of industry that the competencies possessed by vocational secondary education graduates are not in accordance with industry standards. This research is a qualitative research conducted by collecting data, presenting accurate and objective information. Respondents of this research are industrial institutions in the field of heavy equipment, vocational education institutions and government agencies in charge of manpower. Selection of informants / sources of information used is purposive sample technique, which aims to give consideration to select informants who meet the criteria in providing accurate information. The results of this study provide insight and input to vocational secondary education managers about various information in developing vocational secondary education curriculum, major issues include curriculum content relevance, technological advances in the heavy equipment industry, updating of school facilities and collaboration between educational institutions and labor institutions and the industrial world in the development of vocational secondary education.

In the Dark: Young Men’s Stories of Sexual Initiation in the Absence of Relevant Sexual Health Information

PubMed Central

Kubicek, Katrina; Beyer, William; Weiss, George; Iverson, Ellen; Kipke, Michele D

2009-01-01

A growing body of research is investigating the effectiveness of abstinence only sexual education. There remains a dearth of research on the relevant sexual health information available to young men who have sex with men (YMSM). Drawing on a mixed-methods study with 526 YMSM, this study explores how and where YMSM receive relevant information on sexual health/behavior. Findings indicate that information related to gay men’s sexuality is not readily available from family, friends or schools. At initiation of anal intercourse, respondents generally had limited information about HIV and STIs. In some cases, this resulted in the perception that activities such as unprotected sex were “low risk”. Many mentioned they first learned about anal sex during their sexual debut, describing painful and/or unpleasant experiences. Some relied on older/more experienced partners, the internet and pornography for information. Findings are discussed in relation to how providers can help YMSM build solid foundations of sexual education to protect them from STI and HIV infection. PMID:19574587

Assessing quality of maternity care in Hungary: expert validation and testing of the mother-centered prenatal care (MCPC) survey instrument.

PubMed

Rubashkin, Nicholas; Szebik, Imre; Baji, Petra; Szántó, Zsuzsa; Susánszky, Éva; Vedam, Saraswathi

2017-11-16

Instruments to assess quality of maternity care in Central and Eastern European (CEE) region are scarce, despite reports of poor doctor-patient communication, non-evidence-based care, and informal cash payments. We validated and tested an online questionnaire to study maternity care experiences among Hungarian women. Following literature review, we collated validated items and scales from two previous English-language surveys and adapted them to the Hungarian context. An expert panel assessed items for clarity and relevance on a 4-point ordinal scale. We calculated item-level Content Validation Index (CVI) scores. We designed 9 new items concerning informal cash payments, as well as 7 new "model of care" categories based on mode of payment. The final questionnaire (N = 111 items) was tested in two samples of Hungarian women, representative (N = 600) and convenience (N = 657). We conducted bivariate analysis and thematic analysis of open-ended responses. Experts rated pre-existing English-language items as clear and relevant to Hungarian women's maternity care experiences with an average CVI for included questions of 0.97. Significant differences emerged across the model of care categories in terms of informal payments, informed consent practices, and women's perceptions of autonomy. Thematic analysis (N = 1015) of women's responses identified 13 priority areas of the maternity care experience, 9 of which were addressed by the questionnaire. We developed and validated a comprehensive questionnaire that can be used to evaluate respectful maternity care, evidence-based practice, and informal cash payments in CEE region and beyond.

Latest Developments of the Isprs Student Consortium

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Detchev, I.; Kanjir, U.; Reyes, S. R.; Miyazaki, H.; Aktas, A. F.

2016-06-01

The International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Student Consortium (SC) is a network for young professionals studying or working within the fields of photogrammetry, remote sensing, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), and other related geo-spatial sciences. The main goal of the network is to provide means for information exchange for its young members and thus help promote and integrate youth into the ISPRS. Over the past four years the Student Consortium has successfully continued to fulfil its mission in both formal and informal ways. The formal means of communication of the SC are its website, newsletter, e-mail announcements and summer schools, while its informal ones are multiple social media outlets and various social activities during student related events. The newsletter is published every three to four months and provides both technical and experiential content relevant for the young people in the ISPRS. The SC has been in charge or at least has helped with organizing one or more summer schools every year. The organization's e-mail list has over 1,100 subscribers, its website hosts over 1,300 members from 100 countries across the entire globe, and its public Facebook group currently has over 4,500 joined visitors, who connect among one another and share information relevant for their professional careers. These numbers show that the Student Consortium has grown into a significant online-united community. The paper will present the organization's on-going and past activities for the last four years, its current priorities and a strategic plan and aspirations for the future four-year period.

Active assistance technology for health-related behavior change: an interdisciplinary review.

PubMed

Kennedy, Catriona M; Powell, John; Payne, Thomas H; Ainsworth, John; Boyd, Alan; Buchan, Iain

2012-06-14

Information technology can help individuals to change their health behaviors. This is due to its potential for dynamic and unbiased information processing enabling users to monitor their own progress and be informed about risks and opportunities specific to evolving contexts and motivations. However, in many behavior change interventions, information technology is underused by treating it as a passive medium focused on efficient transmission of information and a positive user experience. To conduct an interdisciplinary literature review to determine the extent to which the active technological capabilities of dynamic and adaptive information processing are being applied in behavior change interventions and to identify their role in these interventions. We defined key categories of active technology such as semantic information processing, pattern recognition, and adaptation. We conducted the literature search using keywords derived from the categories and included studies that indicated a significant role for an active technology in health-related behavior change. In the data extraction, we looked specifically for the following technology roles: (1) dynamic adaptive tailoring of messages depending on context, (2) interactive education, (3) support for client self-monitoring of behavior change progress, and (4) novel ways in which interventions are grounded in behavior change theories using active technology. The search returned 228 potentially relevant articles, of which 41 satisfied the inclusion criteria. We found that significant research was focused on dialog systems, embodied conversational agents, and activity recognition. The most covered health topic was physical activity. The majority of the studies were early-stage research. Only 6 were randomized controlled trials, of which 4 were positive for behavior change and 5 were positive for acceptability. Empathy and relational behavior were significant research themes in dialog systems for behavior change, with many pilot studies showing a preference for those features. We found few studies that focused on interactive education (3 studies) and self-monitoring (2 studies). Some recent research is emerging in dynamic tailoring (15 studies) and theoretically grounded ontologies for automated semantic processing (4 studies). The potential capabilities and risks of active assistance technologies are not being fully explored in most current behavior change research. Designers of health behavior interventions need to consider the relevant informatics methods and algorithms more fully. There is also a need to analyze the possibilities that can result from interaction between different technology components. This requires deep interdisciplinary collaboration, for example, between health psychology, computer science, health informatics, cognitive science, and educational methodology.

Active Assistance Technology for Health-Related Behavior Change: An Interdisciplinary Review

PubMed Central

Kennedy, Catriona M; Powell, John; Payne, Thomas H; Ainsworth, John; Boyd, Alan

2012-01-01

Background Information technology can help individuals to change their health behaviors. This is due to its potential for dynamic and unbiased information processing enabling users to monitor their own progress and be informed about risks and opportunities specific to evolving contexts and motivations. However, in many behavior change interventions, information technology is underused by treating it as a passive medium focused on efficient transmission of information and a positive user experience. Objective To conduct an interdisciplinary literature review to determine the extent to which the active technological capabilities of dynamic and adaptive information processing are being applied in behavior change interventions and to identify their role in these interventions. Methods We defined key categories of active technology such as semantic information processing, pattern recognition, and adaptation. We conducted the literature search using keywords derived from the categories and included studies that indicated a significant role for an active technology in health-related behavior change. In the data extraction, we looked specifically for the following technology roles: (1) dynamic adaptive tailoring of messages depending on context, (2) interactive education, (3) support for client self-monitoring of behavior change progress, and (4) novel ways in which interventions are grounded in behavior change theories using active technology. Results The search returned 228 potentially relevant articles, of which 41 satisfied the inclusion criteria. We found that significant research was focused on dialog systems, embodied conversational agents, and activity recognition. The most covered health topic was physical activity. The majority of the studies were early-stage research. Only 6 were randomized controlled trials, of which 4 were positive for behavior change and 5 were positive for acceptability. Empathy and relational behavior were significant research themes in dialog systems for behavior change, with many pilot studies showing a preference for those features. We found few studies that focused on interactive education (3 studies) and self-monitoring (2 studies). Some recent research is emerging in dynamic tailoring (15 studies) and theoretically grounded ontologies for automated semantic processing (4 studies). Conclusions The potential capabilities and risks of active assistance technologies are not being fully explored in most current behavior change research. Designers of health behavior interventions need to consider the relevant informatics methods and algorithms more fully. There is also a need to analyze the possibilities that can result from interaction between different technology components. This requires deep interdisciplinary collaboration, for example, between health psychology, computer science, health informatics, cognitive science, and educational methodology. PMID:22698679

Encoding of goal-relevant stimuli is strengthened by emotional arousal in memory.

PubMed

Lee, Tae-Ho; Greening, Steven G; Mather, Mara

2015-01-01

Emotional information receives preferential processing, which facilitates adaptive strategies for survival. However, the presence of emotional stimuli and the arousal they induce also influence how surrounding non-emotional information is processed in memory (Mather and Sutherland, 2011). For example, seeing a highly emotional scene often leads to forgetting of what was seen right beforehand, but sometimes instead enhances memory for the preceding information. In two studies, we examined how emotional arousal affects short-term memory retention for goal-relevant information that was just seen. In Study 1, participants were asked to remember neutral objects in spatially-cued locations (i.e., goal-relevant objects determined by specific location), while ignoring objects in uncued locations. After each set of objects were shown, arousal was manipulated by playing a previously fear-conditioned tone (i.e., CS+) or a neutral tone that had not been paired with shock (CS-). In Study 1, memory for the goal-relevant neutral objects from arousing trials was enhanced compared to those from the non-arousing trials. This result suggests that emotional arousal helps to increase the impact of top-down priority (i.e., goal-relevancy) on memory encoding. Study 2 supports this conclusion by demonstrating that when the goal was to remember all objects regardless of the spatial cue, emotional arousal induced memory enhancement in a more global manner for all objects. In sum, the two studies show that the ability of arousal to enhance memory for previously encoded items depends on the goal relevance initially assigned to those items.

Farmers, streams, information, and money: does informing farmers about riparian management have any effect?

PubMed

Rhodes, Heather M; Leland, Louis S; Niven, Brian E

2002-11-01

We assessed relationships between the extent to which farmers reported exposure to relevant information and their attitudes towards, knowledge about, and degree of adoption of riparian management strategies. We also examined associations between knowledge of, or receipt of, financial assistance for riparian fencing/planting and intentions for and extent of adoption of this strategy. A mail survey of 718 pastoral farmers in Otago and Southland in New Zealand [294 surveys returned (41%)] yielded 279 usable questionnaires. Indices were developed to reflect range and frequency of information use and range of practices adopted. Attitudes were measured using Likert-type responses to 11 statements, and knowledge as a score on a ten-question true/false test. Positive relationships between information and the three main response variables (attitude, knowledge, and adoption) were weak but significant and systematic. These associations remained significant when important demographic and farm characteristics were taken into account. Informed farmers were more likely to report intentions to carry out riparian fencing or planting within the next year. Farmers who were aware that funding was available were also more likely to state this intention, independent of information level. The reported extent to which waterways had been fenced to exclude stock was related to receipt of funding, but not to information level. Financial factors were the most influential barrier preventing adoption of permanent fencing. Our research shows a positive correlation between the receipt of information and funding and the adoption of specific riparian management measures.

Text mining in livestock animal science: introducing the potential of text mining to animal sciences.

PubMed

Sahadevan, S; Hofmann-Apitius, M; Schellander, K; Tesfaye, D; Fluck, J; Friedrich, C M

2012-10-01

In biological research, establishing the prior art by searching and collecting information already present in the domain has equal importance as the experiments done. To obtain a complete overview about the relevant knowledge, researchers mainly rely on 2 major information sources: i) various biological databases and ii) scientific publications in the field. The major difference between the 2 information sources is that information from databases is available, typically well structured and condensed. The information content in scientific literature is vastly unstructured; that is, dispersed among the many different sections of scientific text. The traditional method of information extraction from scientific literature occurs by generating a list of relevant publications in the field of interest and manually scanning these texts for relevant information, which is very time consuming. It is more than likely that in using this "classical" approach the researcher misses some relevant information mentioned in the literature or has to go through biological databases to extract further information. Text mining and named entity recognition methods have already been used in human genomics and related fields as a solution to this problem. These methods can process and extract information from large volumes of scientific text. Text mining is defined as the automatic extraction of previously unknown and potentially useful information from text. Named entity recognition (NER) is defined as the method of identifying named entities (names of real world objects; for example, gene/protein names, drugs, enzymes) in text. In animal sciences, text mining and related methods have been briefly used in murine genomics and associated fields, leaving behind other fields of animal sciences, such as livestock genomics. The aim of this work was to develop an information retrieval platform in the livestock domain focusing on livestock publications and the recognition of relevant data from cattle and pigs. For this purpose, the rather noncomprehensive resources of pig and cattle gene and protein terminologies were enriched with orthologue synonyms, integrated in the NER platform, ProMiner, which is successfully used in human genomics domain. Based on the performance tests done, the present system achieved a fair performance with precision 0.64, recall 0.74, and F(1) measure of 0.69 in a test scenario based on cattle literature.

International Symposium on Space Technology and Science (27th) (ISTA) Panel Discussion on Space Solar Power Systems, held in Tsukuba, Japan on 10 July 2009

DTIC Science & Technology

2010-01-01

REPORT DOCUMENTATION PAGE Form Approved OMB No. 0704-0188 The public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average...ACRONYM(S) AOARD 11. SPONSOR/MONITOR’S REPORT NUMBER(S) CSP-091013 12. DISTRIBUTION/AVAILABILITY STATEMENT Approved for public release; U.S...Also, significant relevant R&D continued to be conducted by Texas A&M University (TAMU), 
 3
 the Battelle Memorial Institute, through PNNL , and

Spatially Compact Neural Clusters in the Dorsal Striatum Encode Locomotion Relevant Information.

PubMed

Barbera, Giovanni; Liang, Bo; Zhang, Lifeng; Gerfen, Charles R; Culurciello, Eugenio; Chen, Rong; Li, Yun; Lin, Da-Ting

2016-10-05

An influential striatal model postulates that neural activities in the striatal direct and indirect pathways promote and inhibit movement, respectively. Normal behavior requires coordinated activity in the direct pathway to facilitate intended locomotion and indirect pathway to inhibit unwanted locomotion. In this striatal model, neuronal population activity is assumed to encode locomotion relevant information. Here, we propose a novel encoding mechanism for the dorsal striatum. We identified spatially compact neural clusters in both the direct and indirect pathways. Detailed characterization revealed similar cluster organization between the direct and indirect pathways, and cluster activities from both pathways were correlated with mouse locomotion velocities. Using machine-learning algorithms, cluster activities could be used to decode locomotion relevant behavioral states and locomotion velocity. We propose that neural clusters in the dorsal striatum encode locomotion relevant information and that coordinated activities of direct and indirect pathway neural clusters are required for normal striatal controlled behavior. VIDEO ABSTRACT. Published by Elsevier Inc.

wayGoo recommender system: personalized recommendations for events scheduling, based on static and real-time information

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Thanos, Konstantinos-Georgios; Thomopoulos, Stelios C. A.

2016-05-01

wayGoo is a fully functional application whose main functionalities include content geolocation, event scheduling, and indoor navigation. However, significant information about events do not reach users' attention, either because of the size of this information or because some information comes from real - time data sources. The purpose of this work is to facilitate event management operations by prioritizing the presented events, based on users' interests using both, static and real - time data. Through the wayGoo interface, users select conceptual topics that are interesting for them. These topics constitute a browsing behavior vector which is used for learning users' interests implicitly, without being intrusive. Then, the system estimates user preferences and return an events list sorted from the most preferred one to the least. User preferences are modeled via a Naïve Bayesian Network which consists of: a) the `decision' random variable corresponding to users' decision on attending an event, b) the `distance' random variable, modeled by a linear regression that estimates the probability that the distance between a user and each event destination is not discouraging, ` the seat availability' random variable, modeled by a linear regression, which estimates the probability that the seat availability is encouraging d) and the `relevance' random variable, modeled by a clustering - based collaborative filtering, which determines the relevance of each event users' interests. Finally, experimental results show that the proposed system contribute essentially to assisting users in browsing and selecting events to attend.

The effect of the labelled serving size on consumption: A systematic review.

PubMed

Bucher, Tamara; Murawski, Beatrice; Duncanson, Kerith; Labbe, David; Van der Horst, Klazine

2018-06-01

Guidance for food consumption and portion control plays an important role in the global management of overweight and obesity. Carefully conceptualised serving size labelling can contribute to this guidance. However, little is known about the relationship between the information that is provided regarding serving sizes on food packages and levels of actual food consumption. The aim of this systematic review was to investigate how serving size information on food packages influences food consumption. We conducted a systematic review of the evidence published between 1980 and March 2018. Two reviewers screened titles and abstracts for relevance and assessed relevant articles for eligibility in full-text. Five studies were considered eligible for the systematic review. In three of the included studies, changes in serving size labelling resulted in positive health implications for consumers, whereby less discretionary foods were consumed, if serving sizes were smaller or if serving size information was provided alongside contextual information referring to the entire package. One study did not find significant differences between the conditions they tested and one study suggested a potentially negative impact, if the serving size was reduced. The influence of labelled serving size on consumption of non-discretionary foods remains unclear, which is partially due to the absence of studies specifically focusing on non-discretionary food groups. Studies that investigate the impact of serving size labels within the home environment and across a broad demographic cross-section are required. Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Task-relevant information is prioritized in spatiotemporal contextual cueing.

PubMed

Higuchi, Yoko; Ueda, Yoshiyuki; Ogawa, Hirokazu; Saiki, Jun

2016-11-01

Implicit learning of visual contexts facilitates search performance-a phenomenon known as contextual cueing; however, little is known about contextual cueing under situations in which multidimensional regularities exist simultaneously. In everyday vision, different information, such as object identity and location, appears simultaneously and interacts with each other. We tested the hypothesis that, in contextual cueing, when multiple regularities are present, the regularities that are most relevant to our behavioral goals would be prioritized. Previous studies of contextual cueing have commonly used the visual search paradigm. However, this paradigm is not suitable for directing participants' attention to a particular regularity. Therefore, we developed a new paradigm, the "spatiotemporal contextual cueing paradigm," and manipulated task-relevant and task-irrelevant regularities. In four experiments, we demonstrated that task-relevant regularities were more responsible for search facilitation than task-irrelevant regularities. This finding suggests our visual behavior is focused on regularities that are relevant to our current goal.

Interactive survey of consumer awareness of nanotechnologies and nanoparticles in consumer products in South Korea.

PubMed

Kim, Yu-Ri; Lee, Eun Jeong; Park, Sung Ha; Kwon, Hyo Jin; An, Seong Soo A; Son, Sang Wook; Seo, Young Rok; Pie, Jae-Eun; Yoon, Myoung; Kim, Ja Hei; Kim, Meyoung-Kon

2014-01-01

The purpose of our study was to understand consumers' risk awareness and need for relevant information about nanotechnology and nanoparticles contained in products currently being sold in Korea. One thousand and seven adult consumers (aged 20-50 years) were randomly selected from all over South Korea between November 1 and 9, 2010. We surveyed the origin and degree of their concern and their need for information and education regarding nanomaterials. Analysis of the survey results showed no significant differences in responses by sex, age, and level of education, but significant differences were found in responses based on average monthly household income. Our research showed that consumers have vague expectations for and positive image of nanotechnology and nanoproducts but do not clearly understand what they are. In addition, we found that preparing and disseminating information to consumers is required in order to provide correct information about nanotechnology to the public. A communication system should be established among the multiple stakeholders involved with nanomaterials to address consumer expectations and concerns. Further, a safety evaluation system must be set up, the results of which should be processed by a reliable expert group so they can be disseminated to the public.

Effects of visual working memory on brain information processing of irrelevant auditory stimuli.

PubMed

Qu, Jiagui; Rizak, Joshua D; Zhao, Lun; Li, Minghong; Ma, Yuanye

2014-01-01

Selective attention has traditionally been viewed as a sensory processing modulator that promotes cognitive processing efficiency by favoring relevant stimuli while inhibiting irrelevant stimuli. However, the cross-modal processing of irrelevant information during working memory (WM) has been rarely investigated. In this study, the modulation of irrelevant auditory information by the brain during a visual WM task was investigated. The N100 auditory evoked potential (N100-AEP) following an auditory click was used to evaluate the selective attention to auditory stimulus during WM processing and at rest. N100-AEP amplitudes were found to be significantly affected in the left-prefrontal, mid-prefrontal, right-prefrontal, left-frontal, and mid-frontal regions while performing a high WM load task. In contrast, no significant differences were found between N100-AEP amplitudes in WM states and rest states under a low WM load task in all recorded brain regions. Furthermore, no differences were found between the time latencies of N100-AEP troughs in WM states and rest states while performing either the high or low WM load task. These findings suggested that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) may integrate information from different sensory channels to protect perceptual integrity during cognitive processing.

Relevance Judging, Evaluation, and Decision Making in Virtual Libraries: A Descriptive Study.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fitzgerald, Mary Ann; Galloway, Chad

2001-01-01

Describes a study that investigated the cognitive processes undergraduates used to select information while using a virtual library, GALILEO (Georgia Library Learning Online). Discusses higher order thinking processes, relevance judging, evaluation (critical thinking), decision making, reasoning involving documents, relevance-related reasoning,…

Identifying Candidate Chemical-Disease Linkages ...

EPA Pesticide Factsheets

Presentation at meeting on Environmental and Epigenetic Determinants of IBD in New York, NY on identifying candidate chemical-disease linkages by using AOPs to identify molecular initiating events and using relevant high throughput assays to screen for candidate chemicals. This hazard information is combined with exposure models to inform risk assessment. Presentation at meeting on Environmental and Epigenetic Determinants of IBD in New York, NY on identifying candidate chemical-disease linkages by using AOPs to identify molecular initiating events and using relevant high throughput assays to screen for candidate chemicals. This hazard information is combined with exposure models to inform risk assessment.

Brain oscillatory substrates of visual short-term memory capacity.

PubMed

Sauseng, Paul; Klimesch, Wolfgang; Heise, Kirstin F; Gruber, Walter R; Holz, Elisa; Karim, Ahmed A; Glennon, Mark; Gerloff, Christian; Birbaumer, Niels; Hummel, Friedhelm C

2009-11-17

The amount of information that can be stored in visual short-term memory is strictly limited to about four items. Therefore, memory capacity relies not only on the successful retention of relevant information but also on efficient suppression of distracting information, visual attention, and executive functions. However, completely separable neural signatures for these memory capacity-limiting factors remain to be identified. Because of its functional diversity, oscillatory brain activity may offer a utile solution. In the present study, we show that capacity-determining mechanisms, namely retention of relevant information and suppression of distracting information, are based on neural substrates independent of each other: the successful maintenance of relevant material in short-term memory is associated with cross-frequency phase synchronization between theta (rhythmical neural activity around 5 Hz) and gamma (> 50 Hz) oscillations at posterior parietal recording sites. On the other hand, electroencephalographic alpha activity (around 10 Hz) predicts memory capacity based on efficient suppression of irrelevant information in short-term memory. Moreover, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation at alpha frequency can modulate short-term memory capacity by influencing the ability to suppress distracting information. Taken together, the current study provides evidence for a double dissociation of brain oscillatory correlates of visual short-term memory capacity.

A systematic review of web-based interventions for patient empowerment and physical activity in chronic diseases: relevance for cancer survivors.

PubMed

Kuijpers, Wilma; Groen, Wim G; Aaronson, Neil K; van Harten, Wim H

2013-02-20

Patient empowerment reflects the ability of patients to positively influence their health and health behavior such as physical activity. While interactive Web-based interventions are increasingly used in various chronic disease settings to enhance empowerment and physical activity, such interventions are still uncommon for cancer survivors. The objective of this study was to systematically review the literature regarding interactive Web-based interventions. We focused on interventions aimed at increasing patient empowerment and physical activity for various chronic conditions, and explored their possible relevance for cancer survivors. Searches were performed in PubMed, Embase, and Scopus to identify peer-reviewed papers reporting on randomized controlled trials that studied the effects of Web-based interventions. These interventions were developed for adults with diabetes, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart failure, or cancer. Intervention characteristics, effects on patient empowerment and physical activity, information on barriers to and facilitators of intervention use, users' experiences, and methodological quality were assessed. Results were summarized in a qualitative way. We used the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) regarding cancer survivorship care to explore the relevance of the interventions for cancer survivors. We included 19 papers reporting on trials with 18 unique studies. Significant, positive effects on patient empowerment were reported by 4 studies and 2 studies reported positive effects on physical activity. The remaining studies yielded mixed results or no significant group differences in these outcomes (ie, no change or improvement for all groups). Although the content, duration, and frequency of interventions varied considerably across studies, commonly used elements included education, self-monitoring, feedback/tailored information, self-management training, personal exercise program, and communication (eg, chat, email) with either health care providers or patients. Limited information was found on barriers, facilitators, and users' experiences. Methodological quality varied, with 13 studies being of moderate quality. The reported Web-based intervention elements appeared to be highly relevant to address the specific needs of cancer survivors as indicated by the IOM. We identified 7 common elements of interactive, Web-based interventions in chronic disease settings that could possibly be translated into eHealth recommendations for cancer survivors. While further work is needed to determine optimal intervention characteristics, the work performed in other chronic disease settings provides a basis for the design of an interactive eHealth approach to improve patient empowerment and physical activity in cancer survivors. This may subsequently improve their health status and quality of life and reduce their need for supportive care.

A locally-blazed ant trail achieves efficient collective navigation despite limited information

PubMed Central

Fonio, Ehud; Heyman, Yael; Boczkowski, Lucas; Gelblum, Aviram; Kosowski, Adrian; Korman, Amos; Feinerman, Ofer

2016-01-01

Any organism faces sensory and cognitive limitations which may result in maladaptive decisions. Such limitations are prominent in the context of groups where the relevant information at the individual level may not coincide with collective requirements. Here, we study the navigational decisions exhibited by Paratrechina longicornis ants as they cooperatively transport a large food item. These decisions hinge on the perception of individuals which often restricts them from providing the group with reliable directional information. We find that, to achieve efficient navigation despite partial and even misleading information, these ants employ a locally-blazed trail. This trail significantly deviates from the classical notion of an ant trail: First, instead of systematically marking the full path, ants mark short segments originating at the load. Second, the carrying team constantly loses the guiding trail. We experimentally and theoretically show that the locally-blazed trail optimally and robustly exploits useful knowledge while avoiding the pitfalls of misleading information. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.20185.001 PMID:27815944

Motor-visual neurons and action recognition in social interactions.

PubMed

de la Rosa, Stephan; Bülthoff, Heinrich H

2014-04-01

Cook et al. suggest that motor-visual neurons originate from associative learning. This suggestion has interesting implications for the processing of socially relevant visual information in social interactions. Here, we discuss two aspects of the associative learning account that seem to have particular relevance for visual recognition of social information in social interactions - namely, context-specific and contingency based learning.

Assessment of the Main Indicators' Relationship of Projects of Information and Communication Services' Development

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Chernyavskaya, Yana S.; Kiselev, Sergey V.; Rassolov, Ilya M.; Kurushin, Viktor V.; Chernikova, Lyudmila I.; Faizova, Guzel R.

2016-01-01

The relevance of research: The relevance of the problem studied is caused by the acceleration of transition of the Russian economy on an innovative way of development, which depends on the vector of innovative sphere of services and, to a large extent, information and communication services, as well as it is caused by the poor drafting of…

Relevant Responding in Pragmatic Language Impairment: The Role of Language Variation in the Information-Soliciting Utterance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Vigil, Vannesa T.; Eyer, Julia A.; Hardee, W Paul

2005-01-01

Responding relevantly to an information-soliciting utterance (ISU) is required of a school-age child many times daily. For the child with pragmatic language difficulties, this may be especially problematic, yet clinicians have had few data to design intervention for improving these skills. This small-scale study looks at the ability of a child…

Attention Switching and Multimedia Learning: The Impact of Executive Resources on the Integrative Comprehension of Texts and Pictures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Baadte, Christiane; Rasch, Thorsten; Honstein, Helena

2015-01-01

The ability to flexibly allocate attention to goal-relevant information is pivotal for the completion of high-level cognitive processes. For instance, in comprehending illustrated texts, the reader permanently has to switch the attentional focus between the text and the corresponding picture in order to extract relevant information from both…

Distinguishing the time- and magnitude-difference accounts of the Simon effect: Evidence from the reach-to-touch paradigm.

PubMed

Finkbeiner, Matthew; Heathcote, Andrew

2016-04-01

A Simon effect occurs when the irrelevant spatial attributes of a stimulus conflict with choice responses based on non-spatial stimulus attributes. Many theories of the Simon effect assume that activation from task-irrelevant spatial attributes becomes available before the activation from task-relevant attributes. We refer to this as the time-difference account. Other theories follow a magnitude-difference account, assuming activation from relevant and irrelevant attributes becomes available at the same time, but with the activation from irrelevant attributes initially being stronger. To distinguish these two accounts, we incorporated the response-signal procedure into the reach-to-touch paradigm to map out the emergence of the Simon effect. We also used a carefully calibrated neutral condition to reveal differences in the initial onset of the influence of relevant and irrelevant information. Our results establish that irrelevant spatial information becomes available earlier than relevant non-spatial information. This finding is consistent with the time-difference account and inconsistent with the magnitude-difference account. However, we did find a magnitude effect, in the form of reduced interference from irrelevant information, for the second of a sequence of two incongruent trials.

Availability Issues in Wireless Visual Sensor Networks

PubMed Central

Costa, Daniel G.; Silva, Ivanovitch; Guedes, Luiz Affonso; Vasques, Francisco; Portugal, Paulo

2014-01-01

Wireless visual sensor networks have been considered for a large set of monitoring applications related with surveillance, tracking and multipurpose visual monitoring. When sensors are deployed over a monitored field, permanent faults may happen during the network lifetime, reducing the monitoring quality or rendering parts or the entire network unavailable. In a different way from scalar sensor networks, camera-enabled sensors collect information following a directional sensing model, which changes the notions of vicinity and redundancy. Moreover, visual source nodes may have different relevancies for the applications, according to the monitoring requirements and cameras' poses. In this paper we discuss the most relevant availability issues related to wireless visual sensor networks, addressing availability evaluation and enhancement. Such discussions are valuable when designing, deploying and managing wireless visual sensor networks, bringing significant contributions to these networks. PMID:24526301

Expertise finding in bibliographic network: topic dominance learning approach.

PubMed

Neshati, Mahmood; Hashemi, Seyyed Hadi; Beigy, Hamid

2014-12-01

Expert finding problem in bibliographic networks has received increased interest in recent years. This problem concerns finding relevant researchers for a given topic. Motivated by the observation that rarely do all coauthors contribute to a paper equally, in this paper, we propose two discriminative methods for realizing leading authors contributing in a scientific publication. Specifically, we cast the problem of expert finding in a bibliographic network to find leading experts in a research group, which is easier to solve. We recognize three feature groups that can discriminate relevant experts from other authors of a document. Experimental results on a real dataset, and a synthetic one that is gathered from a Microsoft academic search engine, show that the proposed model significantly improves the performance of expert finding in terms of all common information retrieval evaluation metrics.

Tackling Information Asymmetry in Networks: A New Entropy-Based Ranking Index

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barucca, Paolo; Caldarelli, Guido; Squartini, Tiziano

2018-06-01

Information is a valuable asset in socio-economic systems, a significant part of which is entailed into the network of connections between agents. The different interlinkages patterns that agents establish may, in fact, lead to asymmetries in the knowledge of the network structure; since this entails a different ability of quantifying relevant, systemic properties (e.g. the risk of contagion in a network of liabilities), agents capable of providing a better estimation of (otherwise) inaccessible network properties, ultimately have a competitive advantage. In this paper, we address the issue of quantifying the information asymmetry of nodes: to this aim, we define a novel index—InfoRank—intended to rank nodes according to their information content. In order to do so, each node ego-network is enforced as a constraint of an entropy-maximization problem and the subsequent uncertainty reduction is used to quantify the node-specific accessible information. We, then, test the performance of our ranking procedure in terms of reconstruction accuracy and show that it outperforms other centrality measures in identifying the "most informative" nodes. Finally, we discuss the socio-economic implications of network information asymmetry.

Understanding self-monitoring of blood glucose among individuals with type 1 and type 2 diabetes: an information-motivation-behavioral skills analysis.

PubMed

Fisher, William A; Kohut, Taylor; Schachner, Holly; Stenger, Patricia

2011-01-01

To evaluate self-monitoring of blood glucose (SMBG) information deficits, motivational obstacles, and behavioral skills limitations in individuals with type 1 and type 2 diabetes, and to assess the relationship of these deficits with SMBG frequency. Individuals with type 1 (n = 208; 103 male, 105 female) and type 2 (n = 218; 107 male, 111 female) diabetes participated in an online survey assessing SMBG information, motivation, behavioral skills, and behavior. A substantial proportion of participants scored as SMBG uninformed, unmotivated, and unskilled on specific assessment items. SMBG information, motivation, and behavioral skills deficits were significantly correlated with SMBG frequency, such that individuals with type 1 or type 2 diabetes, who were less informed, less motivated, and less behaviorally skilled, reported lower frequency of SMBG. Common and consequential SMBG information, motivation, and behavioral skills deficits were present, and patients with these gaps were less likely to test frequently. Clinical education focusing on relevant SMBG information, motivation to act, and behavioral skills for acting effectively may be a priority.

False memories from survival processing make better primes for problem-solving.

PubMed

Garner, Sarah R; Howe, Mark L

2014-01-01

Previous research has demonstrated that participants remember significantly more survival-related information and more information that is processed for its survival relevance. Recent research has also shown that survival materials and processing result in more false memories, ones that are adaptive inasmuch as they prime solutions to insight-based problems. Importantly, false memories for survival-related information facilitate problem solving more than false memories for other types of information. The present study explores this survival advantage using an incidental rather than intentional memory task. Here participants rated information either in the context of its importance to a survival-processing scenario or to moving to a new house. Following this, participants solved a number of compound remote associate tasks (CRATs), half of which had the solution primed by false memories that were generated during the processing task. Results showed that (a) CRATs were primed by false memories in this incidental task, with participants solving significantly more CRATs when primed than when unprimed, (b) this effect was greatest when participants rated items for survival than moving, and (c) processing items for a survival scenario improved overall problem-solving performance even when specific problems themselves were not primed. Results are discussed with regard to adaptive theories of memory.

Leader humility and team creativity: The role of team information sharing, psychological safety, and power distance.

PubMed

Hu, Jia; Erdogan, Berrin; Jiang, Kaifeng; Bauer, Talya N; Liu, Songbo

2018-03-01

In this study, we identify leader humility, characterized by being open to admitting one's limitations, shortcomings, and mistakes, and showing appreciation and giving credit to followers, as a critical leader characteristic relevant for team creativity. Integrating the literatures on creativity and leadership, we explore the relationship between leader humility and team creativity, treating team psychological safety and team information sharing as mediators. Further, we hypothesize and examine team power distance as a moderator of the relationship. We tested our hypotheses using data gathered from 72 work teams and 354 individual members from 11 information and technology firms in China using a multiple-source, time-lagged research design. We found that the positive relationship between leader humility and team information sharing was significant and positive only within teams with a low power distance value. In addition, leader humility was negatively related to team psychological safety in teams with a high power distance value, whereas the relationship was positive yet nonsignificant in teams with low power distance. Furthermore, team information sharing and psychological safety were both significantly related to team creativity. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for leadership and work teams. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Information filtering via preferential diffusion.

PubMed

Lü, Linyuan; Liu, Weiping

2011-06-01

Recommender systems have shown great potential in addressing the information overload problem, namely helping users in finding interesting and relevant objects within a huge information space. Some physical dynamics, including the heat conduction process and mass or energy diffusion on networks, have recently found applications in personalized recommendation. Most of the previous studies focus overwhelmingly on recommendation accuracy as the only important factor, while overlooking the significance of diversity and novelty that indeed provide the vitality of the system. In this paper, we propose a recommendation algorithm based on the preferential diffusion process on a user-object bipartite network. Numerical analyses on two benchmark data sets, MovieLens and Netflix, indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, it can not only provide more accurate recommendations, but also generate more diverse and novel recommendations by accurately recommending unpopular objects.

Information filtering via preferential diffusion

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lü, Linyuan; Liu, Weiping

2011-06-01

Recommender systems have shown great potential in addressing the information overload problem, namely helping users in finding interesting and relevant objects within a huge information space. Some physical dynamics, including the heat conduction process and mass or energy diffusion on networks, have recently found applications in personalized recommendation. Most of the previous studies focus overwhelmingly on recommendation accuracy as the only important factor, while overlooking the significance of diversity and novelty that indeed provide the vitality of the system. In this paper, we propose a recommendation algorithm based on the preferential diffusion process on a user-object bipartite network. Numerical analyses on two benchmark data sets, MovieLens and Netflix, indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, it can not only provide more accurate recommendations, but also generate more diverse and novel recommendations by accurately recommending unpopular objects.

Burden of road traffic injuries and related risk factors in low and middle-income Pacific Island countries and territories: a systematic review of the scientific literature (TRIP 5)

PubMed Central

2012-01-01

Background In Pacific Island countries and territories, the burden of road traffic injuries and their attendant risks are considered significant but are poorly quantified. As with other low and middle-income countries, understanding the epidemiology of road traffic injuries in Pacific countries is critical to informing sustainable research and policy initiatives aimed at reducing this burden. Methods We undertook a systematic review and critical appraisal of the relevant epidemiological literature between January 1980 and December 2010, using key search strings for incidence and aetiological studies focusing on RTIs in less resourced Pacific countries. Results Nineteen studies were identified. The majority were descriptive and were unable to provide population-based estimates of the burden of road crash injury, or reliable information on risk factors using well-designed aetiological research methods. All studies were published more than 10 years ago, and all but three reported on data from Papua New Guinea, thereby limiting the generalisability of findings to the current status in the region. Studies undertaken in Papua New Guinea suggested that RTIs were more frequent among young males, with head injuries the most common cause of death or hospital admission. Two thirds of fatalities occurred at the crash site or soon after admission. Most road crash victims were passengers or pedestrians. Factors postulated to influence the risk of RTIs were travel in open-back utility vehicles, utility vehicle overcrowding, and alcohol. Conclusions This review suggests that, despite increasing awareness of the importance of addressing road safety among stakeholders in less resourced Pacific Island countries, road traffic injuries have not been a research priority with little relevant current evidence from the region to inform policy. Robust epidemiological research that can assess the magnitude and key determinants of road traffic injuries in these settings is essential to determine context-specific road safety initiatives that are relevant and affordable. Greater attention to harnessing routinely collected data (e.g., hospital information systems and police crash statistics) to inform policy is also required. PMID:22731963

A case study of the use of GPR for rehabilitation of a classified Art Deco building: The InovaDomus house

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Barraca, Nuno; Almeida, Miguel; Varum, Humberto; Almeida, Fernando; Matias, Manuel Senos

2016-04-01

Ancient buildings in historical town centers can be protected by Cultural Heritage legislation, thus implying that any rehabilitation must respect their main architectural features. These concerns also apply to Modern and Contemporary buildings, in particular if they are important examples of architectural styles from those periods. These extra problems, or motivations, add to the inherent structural delicacy of ancient building restoration that requires detailed knowledge of the building foundations, characteristics and materials, modification history, infrastructure mapping, current pathologies, etc., all relevant information for an informed rehabilitation project. Such knowledge is seldom available before the actual rehabilitation works begin, and the usual invasive preliminary surveys are frequently expensive, time-consuming and likely significantly alter/damage the building's main features or structural integrity. Hence, the current demand for indirect, non-invasive, reliable and high resolution imagery techniques able to produce relevant information at the early stages of a rehabilitation project. The present work demonstrates that Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR or Georadar) surveys can provide a priori knowledge on the structure, construction techniques, materials, history and pathologies in a classified Modern Age building. It is also shown that the use of GPR on these projects requires carefully designed surveys, taking into account the known information, spatial constraints, environmental noise, nature and dimensions of the expected targets and suitable data processing sequences. Thus, if properly applied, GPR produces high-resolution results crucial for sound engineering/architectural interventions aiming to restore and renovate Modern and Contemporary buildings, with (1) focus on the overall quality of the end-result, (2) no damage inflicted to the existing structure, (3) respect of the building's historical coherence and architectural elements and characteristics, that is, its Cultural Heritage value. Most of the findings and applications discussed in this work can be seen as an approximation to model studies, so that, relevant information can be drawn from the different investigated situations. Therefore, owing to the nature and the range of the problems encountered in this case study, it is also expected that the presented GPR data and interpretation will provide important clues and guidance in the planning and investigation of similar projects and problems.

Real time and label free profiling of clinically relevant exosomes

PubMed Central

Sina, Abu Ali Ibn; Vaidyanathan, Ramanathan; Dey, Shuvashis; Carrascosa, Laura G.; Shiddiky, Muhammad J. A.; Trau, Matt

2016-01-01

Tumor-derived exosomes possess significant clinical relevance due to their unique composition of genetic and protein material that is representative of the parent tumor. Specific isolation as well as identification of proportions of these clinically relevant exosomes (CREs) from biological samples could help to better understand their clinical significance as cancer biomarkers. Herein, we present a simple approach for quantification of the proportion of CREs within the bulk exosome population isolated from patient serum. This proportion of CREs can potentially inform on the disease stage and enable non-invasive monitoring of inter-individual variations in tumor-receptor expression levels. Our approach utilises a Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) platform to quantify the proportion of CREs in a two-step strategy that involves (i) initial isolation of bulk exosome population using tetraspanin biomarkers (i.e., CD9, CD63), and (ii) subsequent detection of CREs within the captured bulk exosomes using tumor-specific markers (e.g., human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)). We demonstrate the isolation of bulk exosome population and detection of as low as 10% HER2(+) exosomes from samples containing designated proportions of HER2(+) BT474 and HER2(−) MDA-MB-231 cell derived exosomes. We also demonstrate the successful isolation of exosomes from a small cohort of breast cancer patient samples and identified that approximately 14–35% of their bulk population express HER2. PMID:27464736

Real time and label free profiling of clinically relevant exosomes.

PubMed

Sina, Abu Ali Ibn; Vaidyanathan, Ramanathan; Dey, Shuvashis; Carrascosa, Laura G; Shiddiky, Muhammad J A; Trau, Matt

2016-07-28

Tumor-derived exosomes possess significant clinical relevance due to their unique composition of genetic and protein material that is representative of the parent tumor. Specific isolation as well as identification of proportions of these clinically relevant exosomes (CREs) from biological samples could help to better understand their clinical significance as cancer biomarkers. Herein, we present a simple approach for quantification of the proportion of CREs within the bulk exosome population isolated from patient serum. This proportion of CREs can potentially inform on the disease stage and enable non-invasive monitoring of inter-individual variations in tumor-receptor expression levels. Our approach utilises a Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) platform to quantify the proportion of CREs in a two-step strategy that involves (i) initial isolation of bulk exosome population using tetraspanin biomarkers (i.e., CD9, CD63), and (ii) subsequent detection of CREs within the captured bulk exosomes using tumor-specific markers (e.g., human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)). We demonstrate the isolation of bulk exosome population and detection of as low as 10% HER2(+) exosomes from samples containing designated proportions of HER2(+) BT474 and HER2(-) MDA-MB-231 cell derived exosomes. We also demonstrate the successful isolation of exosomes from a small cohort of breast cancer patient samples and identified that approximately 14-35% of their bulk population express HER2.

Fear of cancer recurrence: a theoretical review and its relevance for clinical presentation and management.

PubMed

Simonelli, Laura E; Siegel, Scott D; Duffy, Nicole M

2017-10-01

There is increasing recognition of the unique physical and psychosocial concerns of the growing population of cancer survivors. An emerging literature demonstrates that fear of cancer recurrence (FCR) is a problematic long-term and late effect for cancer survivors. In fact, FCR is a top concern, and this article provides a necessary synthesis of the extant research evidence and theory. Literature searches were conducted using databases including MEDLINE and PsychINFO using specified search terms including 'fear of recurrence' and 'worry about recurrence'. A comprehensive narrative review summarizes early empirical findings on FCR including current definitions, assessment tools, clinical presentations, quality of life impact, prevalence, trajectory and risk factors. This paper also critically reviews the relevant theoretical frameworks to best understand these findings and considers multiple psychosocial treatment models that may have relevance for addressing FCR in the clinical setting. There is evidence of substantial prevalence and quality of life impact of FCR. Several theories (e.g. self-regulation model of illness, a family-based model, uncertainty in illness theory, social-cognitive processing theory, terror management theory) directly or indirectly help conceptualize FCR and inform potential treatment options for those with clinically significant distress or impairment resulting from FCR. Further investigation into FCR is warranted to promote evidence-based care for this significant cancer survivorship concern. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Adaptive sampling strategies with high-throughput molecular dynamics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Clementi, Cecilia

Despite recent significant hardware and software developments, the complete thermodynamic and kinetic characterization of large macromolecular complexes by molecular simulations still presents significant challenges. The high dimensionality of these systems and the complexity of the associated potential energy surfaces (creating multiple metastable regions connected by high free energy barriers) does not usually allow to adequately sample the relevant regions of their configurational space by means of a single, long Molecular Dynamics (MD) trajectory. Several different approaches have been proposed to tackle this sampling problem. We focus on the development of ensemble simulation strategies, where data from a large number of weakly coupled simulations are integrated to explore the configurational landscape of a complex system more efficiently. Ensemble methods are of increasing interest as the hardware roadmap is now mostly based on increasing core counts, rather than clock speeds. The main challenge in the development of an ensemble approach for efficient sampling is in the design of strategies to adaptively distribute the trajectories over the relevant regions of the systems' configurational space, without using any a priori information on the system global properties. We will discuss the definition of smart adaptive sampling approaches that can redirect computational resources towards unexplored yet relevant regions. Our approaches are based on new developments in dimensionality reduction for high dimensional dynamical systems, and optimal redistribution of resources. NSF CHE-1152344, NSF CHE-1265929, Welch Foundation C-1570.

Differential discounting and present impact of past information.

PubMed

Brandimarte, Laura; Vosgerau, Joachim; Acquisti, Alessandro

2018-01-01

How does information about a person's past, accessed now, affect individuals' impressions of that person? In 2 survey experiments and 2 experiments with actual incentives, we compare whether, when evaluating a person, information about that person's past greedy or immoral behaviors is discounted similarly to information about her past generous or moral behaviors. We find that, no matter how far in the past a person behaved greedily or immorally, information about her negative behaviors is hardly discounted at all. In contrast, information about her past positive behaviors is discounted heavily: recent behaviors are much more influential than behaviors that occurred a long time ago. The lesser discounting of information about immoral and greedy behaviors is not caused by these behaviors being more influential, memorable, extreme, or attention-grabbing; rather, they are perceived as more diagnostic of a person's character than past moral or generous behaviors. The phenomenon of differential discounting of past information has particular relevance in the digital age, where information about people's past is easily retrieved. Our findings have significant implications for theories of impression formation and social information processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Audio visual speech source separation via improved context dependent association model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kazemi, Alireza; Boostani, Reza; Sobhanmanesh, Fariborz

2014-12-01

In this paper, we exploit the non-linear relation between a speech source and its associated lip video as a source of extra information to propose an improved audio-visual speech source separation (AVSS) algorithm. The audio-visual association is modeled using a neural associator which estimates the visual lip parameters from a temporal context of acoustic observation frames. We define an objective function based on mean square error (MSE) measure between estimated and target visual parameters. This function is minimized for estimation of the de-mixing vector/filters to separate the relevant source from linear instantaneous or time-domain convolutive mixtures. We have also proposed a hybrid criterion which uses AV coherency together with kurtosis as a non-Gaussianity measure. Experimental results are presented and compared in terms of visually relevant speech detection accuracy and output signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) of source separation. The suggested audio-visual model significantly improves relevant speech classification accuracy compared to existing GMM-based model and the proposed AVSS algorithm improves the speech separation quality compared to reference ICA- and AVSS-based methods.

Use of the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory at Brookhaven National Laboratory to Conduct Charged Particle Radiobiology Studies Relevant to Ion Therapy

PubMed Central

Held, Kathryn D.; Blakely, Eleanor A.; Story, Michael D.; Lowenstein, Derek I.

2016-01-01

Although clinical studies with carbon ions have been conducted successfully in Japan and Europe, the limited radiobiological information about charged particles that are heavier than protons remains a significant impediment to exploiting the full potential of particle therapy. There is growing interest in the U.S. to build a cancer treatment facility that utilizes charged particles heavier than protons. Therefore, it is essential that additional radiobiological knowledge be obtained using state-of-the-art technologies and biological models and end points relevant to clinical outcome. Currently, most such ion radiotherapy-related research is being conducted outside the U.S. This article addresses the substantial contributions to that research that are possible at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), which is the only facility in the U.S. at this time where heavy-ion radiobiology research with the ion species and energies of interest for therapy can be done. Here, we briefly discuss the relevant facilities at NSRL and how selected charged particle biology research gaps could be addressed using those facilities. PMID:27195609

Body Weight Relationships in Early Marriage: Weight Relevance, Weight Comparisons, and Weight Talk

PubMed Central

Bove, Caron F.; Sobal, Jeffery

2011-01-01

This investigation uncovered processes underlying the dynamics of body weight and body image among individuals involved in nascent heterosexual marital relationships in Upstate New York. In-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with 34 informants, 20 women and 14 men, just prior to marriage and again one year later were used to explore continuity and change in cognitive, affective, and behavioral factors relating to body weight and body image at the time of marriage, an important transition in the life course. Three major conceptual themes operated in the process of developing and enacting informants’ body weight relationships with their partner: weight relevance, weight comparisons, and weight talk. Weight relevance encompassed the changing significance of weight during early marriage and included attracting and capturing a mate, relaxing about weight, living healthily, and concentrating on weight. Weight comparisons between partners involved weight relativism, weight competition, weight envy, and weight role models. Weight talk employed pragmatic talk, active and passive reassurance, and complaining and critiquing criticism. Concepts emerging from this investigation may be useful in designing future studies of and approaches to managing body weight in adulthood. PMID:21864601