When kids act out: a comparison of embodied methods to improve children's memory for a story

Over the last decade, embodied cognition, the idea that sensorimotor processes facilitate higher cognitive processes, has proven useful for improving children's memory for a story. In order to compare the benefits of two embodiment techniques, active experiencing (AE) and indexing, for children's memory for a story, we compared the immediate recall of different types of idea units across three conditions. Participants were between the ages of 7 and 11 and were randomly allocated to experimental conditions. The experimental groups were matched on comprehension ability and age. In the indexing condition, children acted out a short story using a playset (i.e., a Playmobil® playset with figurines), in the AE condition, children read the story using enactment, and during the control condition, children simply read the story. We predicted that children in the indexing condition would recall more action-based idea units, whilst children in the AE condition would recall more descriptive and dialogic idea units. Children in the AE condition recalled more descriptive idea units than in the control condition, whilst in the indexing condition, only poorer comprehenders recalled more descriptive information. Our findings suggest that these two embodiment techniques effect different components of reading comprehension and that future research should investigate these differences more specifically

Investigation of the Prospect of Using Indexing Conventional Units in the National Economy

The influence of inflationary and deflationary processes on the determination of the fair value of goods and services is studied in the article. It is established that as a result of changes in the value of money over time, national currencies are not able to effectively perform the function of a measure of value for a long time. In conditions when gold ceased to be the standard of value measurement and became a commodity, in developing countries, the function of the measure of value is taken over by the currencies of countries with more powerful economies. A consequence of this is the strengthening of dollarization and activation of devaluation processes of weaker and open national economies. With the aim of eliminating these problems, determining the fair and real value of goods and services for a long time, it is proposed to introduce a single indexing of a conventional monetary unit. The domestic and foreign experience in implementing the relevant mechanisms has been studied, and recommendations have been made for their testing and implementation within the national economy

Logical segmentation for article extraction in digitized old newspapers

Newspapers are documents made of news item and informative articles. They are not meant to be red iteratively: the reader can pick his items in any order he fancies. Ignoring this structural property, most digitized newspaper archives only offer access by issue or at best by page to their content. We have built a digitization workflow that automatically extracts newspaper articles from images, which allows indexing and retrieval of information at the article level. Our back-end system extracts the logical structure of the page to produce the informative units: the articles. Each image is labelled at the pixel level, through a machine learning based method, then the page logical structure is constructed up from there by the detection of structuring entities such as horizontal and vertical separators, titles and text lines. This logical structure is stored in a METS wrapper associated to the ALTO file produced by the system including the OCRed text. Our front-end system provides a web high definition visualisation of images, textual indexing and retrieval facilities, searching and reading at the article level. Articles transcriptions can be collaboratively corrected, which as a consequence allows for better indexing. We are currently testing our system on the archives of the Journal de Rouen, one of France eldest local newspaper. These 250 years of publication amount to 300 000 pages of very variable image quality and layout complexity. Test year 1808 can be consulted at plair.univ-rouen.fr.Comment: ACM Document Engineering, France (2012

Sub-word indexing and blind relevance feedback for English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR

The Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE) provides document collections, topics, and relevance assessments for information retrieval (IR) experiments on Indian languages. Several research questions are explored in this paper: 1. how to create create a simple, languageindependent corpus-based stemmer, 2. how to identify sub-words and which types of sub-words are suitable as indexing units, and 3. how to apply blind relevance feedback on sub-words and how feedback term selection is affected by the type of the indexing unit. More than 140 IR experiments are conducted using the BM25 retrieval model on the topic titles and descriptions (TD) for the FIRE 2008 English, Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi document collections. The major findings are: The corpus-based stemming approach is effective as a knowledge-light term conation step and useful in case of few language-specific resources. For English, the corpusbased stemmer performs nearly as well as the Porter stemmer and significantly better than the baseline of indexing words when combined with query expansion. In combination with blind relevance feedback, it also performs significantly better than the baseline for Bengali and Marathi IR. Sub-words such as consonant-vowel sequences and word prefixes can yield similar or better performance in comparison to word indexing. There is no best performing method for all languages. For English, indexing using the Porter stemmer performs best, for Bengali and Marathi, overlapping 3-grams obtain the best result, and for Hindi, 4-prefixes yield the highest MAP. However, in combination with blind relevance feedback using 10 documents and 20 terms, 6-prefixes for English and 4-prefixes for Bengali, Hindi, and Marathi IR yield the highest MAP. Sub-word identification is a general case of decompounding. It results in one or more index terms for a single word form and increases the number of index terms but decreases their average length. The corresponding retrieval experiments show that relevance feedback on sub-words benefits from selecting a larger number of index terms in comparison with retrieval on word forms. Similarly, selecting the number of relevance feedback terms depending on the ratio of word vocabulary size to sub-word vocabulary size almost always slightly increases information retrieval effectiveness compared to using a fixed number of terms for different languages

La indización de artículos científicos con el sistema de indización automática SISA comparada con la indizaicón en las Bases de datos Agricola, WoS y SCOPUS

Since some years the generation of digital documents is enormous as well as its massive incorporation to the information systems and both realities seem unstoppable. Likewise, there is no doubt that indexing is one of the fundamental processes executed in documentary units. Although the first investigations in automatic indexing began decades ago this subject continues to raise interest. Since then different proposals and methodologies have been presented. SISA is a multilingual automatic indexing system for scientific articles based on heuristic and statistical principles governed by rules based on these principles. Objective. In this described context of constant digital increase, it is sought to know the SISA capabilities in the automatic indexing of articles in relation to how they do it in the Agricola, WOS and SCOPUS databases. Material and method. One hundred articles published in different years by the journal Agronomy for sustainable development were randomly selected, the indexing assigned to the articles in the mentioned databases was located, the documents were indexed with SISA, the different indexing were compared and they were calculated the consistency between Agricola and SISA

Biochemical processes in sagebrush ecosystems: Interactions with terrain

The objectives of a biogeochemical study of sagebrush ecosystems in Wyoming and their interactions with terrain are as follows: to describe the vegetational pattern on the landscape and elucidate controlling variables, to measure the soil properties and chemical cycling properties associated with the vegetation units, to associate soil properties with vegetation properties as measured on the ground, to develop remote sensing capabilities for vegetation and surface characteristics of the sagebrush landscape, to develop a system of sensing snow cover and indexing seasonal soil to moisture; and to develop relationships between temporal Thematic Mapper (TM) data and vegetation phenological state

Spoken content retrieval: A survey of techniques and technologies

Speech media, that is, digital audio and video containing spoken content, has blossomed in recent years. Large collections are accruing on the Internet as well as in private and enterprise settings. This growth has motivated extensive research on techniques and technologies that facilitate reliable indexing and retrieval. Spoken content retrieval (SCR) requires the combination of audio and speech processing technologies with methods from information retrieval (IR). SCR research initially investigated planned speech structured in document-like units, but has subsequently shifted focus to more informal spoken content produced spontaneously, outside of the studio and in conversational settings. This survey provides an overview of the field of SCR encompassing component technologies, the relationship of SCR to text IR and automatic speech recognition and user interaction issues. It is aimed at researchers with backgrounds in speech technology or IR who are seeking deeper insight on how these fields are integrated to support research and development, thus addressing the core challenges of SCR

Changes to the Tax Exclusion of Employer-Sponsored Health Insurance Premiums: A Potential Source of Financing for Health Reform

Examines eight options for limiting the tax exclusion of employer-sponsored health insurance premiums. Compares, by income level, estimated effects of various caps and indices on tax revenues and after-tax incomes in the first year and over ten years