10,705 research outputs found
A Parent's Autoethnography: Examining My Experiences and Identity as Parent, Educator, and Researcher While Teaching Literacy to My Adolescent Sons Who Have Autism and Use Augmentative and Alternative Communication
This autoethnography was completed from my unique perspective as a mother to two adolescent
sons with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have complex communication needs and use
augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) to communicate. Although literacy is a
human right (Ontario Human Rights Commission, 2022a), it often has been overlooked in my
sonsâ self-contained classrooms in high school. As my sonsâ parent and educator, I gathered my
reflections, observations, descriptions, journals, lesson plans, and artifacts to examine the
experiences I encountered in developing their literacy. Initially, I conducted a pilot project based
on Erickson and Koppenhaverâs (2007) Children With Disabilities: Reading and Writing the
Four BlocksÂź Way, the results of which guided my planning in teaching literacy with an
adaptation of the more recent Comprehensive Literacy for All: Teaching Students With
Significant Disabilities to Read and Write (Erickson & Koppenhaver, 2020). I coded by hand
each line of the collected data to extract categories and then streamline these into the meaningful
themes to respond to my two research questions: (a) What are the experiences of a parent
educator who has been teaching literacy awareness and skills to her adolescent sons who both
have autism and use AAC devices? (b) Does the experience shape her identity as a parent,
educator, and researcher? Thematic findings pertaining to the first question revealed experiences
related to planning and questioning and my own transformational learning and mindshift.
Thematic findings related to the second question include: Parental concerns; Educator:
advocating and imposter syndrome; Researcher: Lesson planning and questioning; and
Transformational learning and mindshift. Findings are discussed in light of the literature on
experiences of parents as educators of children with exceptionalities. The study also presents
implications for theory, practice, and research, as well as limitations and future directions
Efficacy and risks in the use of human stem cells in the treatment of children with cerebral palsy
Cerebral palsy (CP), depending on disease severity, can result in diminished quality of life not only from decreased function but from societal stigmatization. Coordinating various care provider appointments, expense of short-term treatments, difficulty navigating transportation, and relying on caregivers can complicate patient and family lives. The costs of CP are substantial on the healthcare system, with one managed Medicaid database averaged across 15 U.S states finding the average annual Medicaid costs for children with CP to be 15 times higher than children without CP and averaged to 1,358 USD respectively (Pulgar et al., 2019). Cost effective treatment and effective prevention strategies are increasingly warranted for the CP population.
Due to the varying manifestations associated with CP, a standardized treatment for this condition is challenging. Current treatments may enhance quality of life and temporarily reduce pain or discomfort, but they do not cure CP. While perinatal prevention strategies potentially provide the greatest chance to prevent CP from occurring and should be the focus of health care policy, financial barriers remain especially with strained health care budgets. While cure remains elusive, focus on treatments and prevention strategies to limit disease impact is paramount.
In the last decade some attention has turned to the use of stem cell treatments in children and adolescents with CP to provide more impactful outcomes with earlier intervention potentially limiting the devastating musculoskeletal effects seen with severe disease. While primarily results from clinical trials both nationally and internationally suggest stem cell treatment increases gross motor function in children and adolescents, questions remain whether these treatments provide clinically meaningful improvement compared to traditional therapies.
The goal of this thesis is to discuss the current pharmaceuticals and non- pharmaceutical treatments with rehabilitative therapies that are historically used to reduce severity of secondary manifestations associated with CP in children. Human stem cell clinical trials for CP will be reviewed to assess efficacy and risks as this treatment is translated into clinical practice for children. In addition to stem cell treatment, public health practices of prevention during prenatal visits will be reviewed as it is an encouraging method to reduce preterm births which are a risk factor for CP development
Endogenous measures for contextualising large-scale social phenomena: a corpus-based method for mediated public discourse
This work presents an interdisciplinary methodology for developing endogenous measures of group membership through analysis of pervasive linguistic patterns in public discourse. Focusing on political discourse, this work critiques the conventional approach to the study of political participation, which is premised on decontextualised, exogenous measures to characterise groups. Considering the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of decontextualised approaches to large-scale social phenomena, this work suggests that contextualisation using endogenous measures might provide a complementary perspective to mitigate such weaknesses.
This work develops a sociomaterial perspective on political participation in mediated discourse as affiliatory action performed through language. While the affiliatory function of language is often performed consciously (such as statements of identity), this work is concerned with unconscious features (such as patterns in lexis and grammar). This work argues that pervasive patterns in such features that emerge through socialisation are resistant to change and manipulation, and thus might serve as endogenous measures of sociopolitical contexts, and thus of groups.
In terms of method, the work takes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of data from the Twitter messaging service whereby patterns in usersâ speech are examined statistically in order to trace potential community membership. The method is applied in the US state of Michigan during the second half of 2018â6 November having been the date of midterm (i.e. non-Presidential) elections in the United States. The corpus is assembled from the original posts of 5,889 users, who are nominally geolocalised to 417 municipalities. These users are clustered according to pervasive language features. Comparing the linguistic clusters according to the municipalities they represent finds that there are regular sociodemographic differentials across clusters. This is understood as an indication of social structure, suggesting that endogenous measures derived from pervasive patterns in language may indeed offer a complementary, contextualised perspective on large-scale social phenomena
The Metaverse: Survey, Trends, Novel Pipeline Ecosystem & Future Directions
The Metaverse offers a second world beyond reality, where boundaries are
non-existent, and possibilities are endless through engagement and immersive
experiences using the virtual reality (VR) technology. Many disciplines can
benefit from the advancement of the Metaverse when accurately developed,
including the fields of technology, gaming, education, art, and culture.
Nevertheless, developing the Metaverse environment to its full potential is an
ambiguous task that needs proper guidance and directions. Existing surveys on
the Metaverse focus only on a specific aspect and discipline of the Metaverse
and lack a holistic view of the entire process. To this end, a more holistic,
multi-disciplinary, in-depth, and academic and industry-oriented review is
required to provide a thorough study of the Metaverse development pipeline. To
address these issues, we present in this survey a novel multi-layered pipeline
ecosystem composed of (1) the Metaverse computing, networking, communications
and hardware infrastructure, (2) environment digitization, and (3) user
interactions. For every layer, we discuss the components that detail the steps
of its development. Also, for each of these components, we examine the impact
of a set of enabling technologies and empowering domains (e.g., Artificial
Intelligence, Security & Privacy, Blockchain, Business, Ethics, and Social) on
its advancement. In addition, we explain the importance of these technologies
to support decentralization, interoperability, user experiences, interactions,
and monetization. Our presented study highlights the existing challenges for
each component, followed by research directions and potential solutions. To the
best of our knowledge, this survey is the most comprehensive and allows users,
scholars, and entrepreneurs to get an in-depth understanding of the Metaverse
ecosystem to find their opportunities and potentials for contribution
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Ensuring Access to Safe and Nutritious Food for All Through the Transformation of Food Systems
Neuroanatomical and gene expression features of the rabbit accessory olfactory system. Implications of pheromone communication in reproductive behaviour and animal physiology
Mainly driven by the vomeronasal system (VNS), pheromone
communication is involved in many species-specific fundamental innate socio-sexual behaviors such as mating and
fighting, which are essential for animal reproduction and survival. Rabbits are a unique model for studying
chemocommunication due to the discovery of the rabbit mammary pheromone, but paradoxically there has been a
lack of knowledge regarding its VNS pathway. In this work, we aim at filling this gap by approaching the system
from an integrative point of view, providing extensive anatomical and genomic data of the rabbit VNS, as well as
pheromone-mediated reproductive and behavioural studies. Our results build strong foundation for further
translational studies which aim at implementing the use of pheromones to improve animal production and welfare
A Hierarchical Game-Theoretic Decision-Making for Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems Under the Presence of Adversarial Agents
Underlying relationships among Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) in hazardous
scenarios can be represented as Game-theoretic models. This paper proposes a
new hierarchical network-based model called Game-theoretic Utility Tree (GUT),
which decomposes high-level strategies into executable low-level actions for
cooperative MAS decisions. It combines with a new payoff measure based on agent
needs for real-time strategy games. We present an Explore game domain, where we
measure the performance of MAS achieving tasks from the perspective of
balancing the success probability and system costs. We evaluate the GUT
approach against state-of-the-art methods that greedily rely on rewards of the
composite actions. Conclusive results on extensive numerical simulations
indicate that GUT can organize more complex relationships among MAS
cooperation, helping the group achieve challenging tasks with lower costs and
higher winning rates. Furthermore, we demonstrated the applicability of the GUT
using the simulator-hardware testbed - Robotarium. The performances verified
the effectiveness of the GUT in the real robot application and validated that
the GUT could effectively organize MAS cooperation strategies, helping the
group with fewer advantages achieve higher performance.Comment: This paper is accepted by the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
(SAC) 2023 Technical Track on Intelligent Robotics and Multi-Agent Systems
(IRMAS
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