Children’s Use of a ‘Time Line’ to Indicate When Events Occurred

Children who allege abuse are often asked to provide temporal information such as when the events occurred. Yet, young children often have difficulty recalling temporal information due to their limited knowledge of temporal patterns and linguistic capabilities. As time is an abstract concept (we cannot see it), some investigators have begun to use ‘time-lines’ or pictorial representations of time to aid children. Yet, there is no published research testing whether children are able to use time-lines and whether they can provide adequate temporal information using them. We tested whether children could indicate the time-of-day of events using a pictorial time-line and then compared their responses to their parents’. Seven- to 8-year-olds were most consistent with parental estimates while 4-year-olds were least consistent. Responses from the 5- to 6-year-olds depended on the temporal task. Guessing and using general knowledge to estimate the time-of-day were ruled out, and so children were genuinely drawing on episodic memory when making time-line judgments. Thus, there was a developmental progression in children’s use of physical representations to communicate abstract information. These results are promising for the use of the time-line in forensic settings but much more research is needed

Reflections on Bonhoeffer\u27s Theology

The difficulty of presenting a theology of Bonhoeffer which tries to relate organically the later fragmentary writings of Bonhoeffer to the more comprehensive studies of his earlier period has been recognized in a number of major studies since 1960. The famous essay on cheap grace written in 1937 protested against grace without discipleship and faith without obedience, drawing a sharp line of demarcation between the world and the community of saints

A new protocol for texture mapping process and 2d representation of rupestrian architecture

The development of the survey techniques for architecture and archaeology requires a general review in the methods used for the representation of numerical data. The possibilities offered by data processing allow to find new paths for studying issues connected to the drawing discipline. The research project aimed at experimenting different approaches for the representation of the rupestrian architecture and the texture mapping process. The nature of the rupestrian architecture does not allow a traditional representation of sections and projections of edges and outlines. The paper presents a method, the Equidistant Multiple Sections (EMS), inspired by cartography and based on the use of isohipses generated from different geometric plane. A specific paragraph is dedicated to the texture mapping process for unstructured surface models. One of the main difficulty in the image projection consists in the recognition of homologous points between image and point cloud, above all in the areas with most deformations. With the aid of the “virtual scan” tool a different procedure was developed for improving the correspondences of the image. The result show a sensible improvement of the entire process above all for the architectural vaults. A detailed study concerned the unfolding of the straight line surfaces; the barrel vault of the analyzed chapel has been unfolded for observing the paintings in the real shapes out of the morphological context

Detecting Cognitive Load during Working Memory Tasks utilizing a Digitizer Tablet

The purpose of this line of research is to determine whether the ‘Digitizer’ is a reliable and valid way to measure cognitive load during dual working memory-drawing tasks. A quasi-experimental study was conducted at the University of Arkansas in a research laboratory, and participants included seven right-handed healthy adults with normal or corrected vision and no reading difficulty. The participants were selected on a volunteer basis. The study required participants to draw circles while continuously performing in three conditions – one baseline and two working memory experimental tasks, administered in counterbalanced order. The baseline task was to read an 8th grade level passage at comfortable speed and loudness level. The working memory tasks were symmetry span and operation span tasks. The operation span task required the participants to remember letters in sequence while simultaneously verifying arithmetic operations presented after each letter. The symmetry span task required participants to remember the position of the highlighted square in a grid in sequence while simultaneously determining the symmetricity of a figure presented afterwards. Both tasks were completed while drawing continuous circles on the ‘Digitizer’. A separate repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted for each measure. A significant omnibus effect was found for the stroke duration measure only. Post-hoc paired tests showed that baseline was higher (p=.01) in stroke duration than in operation span task and symmetry span task. In this literature review, the results and elements of the study are described in full to inform future research. It was initially assumed that the working memory load would be significantly less in the baseline task as compared to the two working memory tasks; however, the data alternatively indicated that it taxed working memory more. With reading comprehension as a reference condition, it is logical to conclude that there is evidence of cognitive load in working memory tasks as measured by manual disfluencies. This literature review outlines potential adaptations and highlights primary weaknesses for future study in this area

Taxonomic Work as Information Work: Design for Semantic Refactoring

Taxonomy is the branch of science concerned with classi- fying organisms: drawing the line between cats and dogs, fish and fowl, animals and vegetables. Modern taxonomic work is built on a hundreds-year-old tradition of qualitative research and description. There are aspects of this work that illustrate the pervasiveness and difficulty of a particular kind of qualitative data wrangling, which we call semantic refactoring: the review, normalization, and re-engineering of semantic structures. Because taxonomic work is con- ducted over long time spans, the processes underlying se- mantic refactoring become more visible. An examination of taxonomic data practices may inform our understanding of how (and if) collections of qualitative data scale, particularly when collaboratively created.NSF ABI Grant 1356515.Ope

Inferencing skills of deaf adolescent readers

The great difficulty which deaf children have in learning to read is well documented. Previous studies have examined such aspects as problems with vocabulary and syntax but little work has been directed towards inferential and discourse skills. The present series of studies examines the inferencing skills of severely and profoundly deaf adolescents. Different types of inference were examined using a variety of experimental techniques, ranging from on-line reading times, through memory probes after reading, to tracking the movements of subjects' eyes as they read. The deaf were found to be poorer at drawing inferences than hearing children matched on reading age, although they can recall as much detail from those extra texts in which they do infer correctly as the controls. The deaf were as successful as the reading age matched controls for material which required spatial inferences but not for more abstract temporal and causal inferences. On-line studies suggested that the deaf, when drawing inferences, use a schemata, concept driven mechanism similar to hearing peers approximately matched for chronological age. A similar mechanism would seem to be operating when material is presented in the form of sign language. Thus many of the difficulties previously ascribed to deaf children's reading skills may in fact derive from more general language problems. It is suggested that these difficulties with inferencing are independent of modality of presentation and perhaps reflect a more impoverished experimental background for most deaf children. The comparative richness of scenarios for deaf and hearing children are then investigated

Perspectives on the Tax Avoidance Culture: Legislative, Administrative, and Judicial Ambiguity

Henry Ordower discusses the effect that legislating economic incentives through the tax system has on taxpayer behaviour and explores the resulting difficulty in drawing the line between legitimate and objectionable tax avoidance. He argues that while the attempts to separate the two types of tax avoidance – attempts such as enacting general anti-avoidance rules (GAARs) and following general principles of economic substance – may be partially successful, subsidies delivered through the tax system will inherently limit their effect. The lack of clear delineation between legitimate tax planning and objectionable tax avoidance enables an even firmer embedding of “the culture of tax avoidance” into the society. Perspectives on the tax avoidance culture: legislative, administrative, and judicial ambiguity in Yulia Epifantseva (Boston, USA) and Nigar Hashimzade (Durham, UK) editors, The Routledge Companion To Tax Avoidance Research 26 (2017) (copy of book in fac. pubs case in library in case you get back there

Shapecollage: Occlusion-Aware, Example-Based Shape Interpretation

This paper presents an example-based method to interpret a 3D shape from a single image depicting that shape. A major difficulty in applying an example-based approach to shape interpretation is the combinatorial explosion of shape possibilities that occur at occluding contours. Our key technical contribution is a new shape patch representation and corresponding pairwise compatibility terms that allow for flexible matching of overlapping patches, avoiding the combinatorial explosion by allowing patches to explain only the parts of the image they best fit. We infer the best set of localized shape patches over a graph of keypoints at multiple scales to produce a discontinuous shape representation we term a shape collage. To reconstruct a smooth result, we fit a surface to the collage using the predicted confidence of each shape patch. We demonstrate the method on shapes depicted in line drawing, diffuse and glossy shading, and textured styles.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1111415)United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-09-1-1051)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant R01-EY019262

Life Insurance, The Forbidden Fruit

Until recently life insurance has represented the most impenetrable stronghold of the professional tax avoider and his advisors. As a vehicle for the transmission of wealth to future generations with minimum tax levies, it stood unrivaled. During a policyholder\u27s life the value of his policy for gift tax purposes was and is measured by replacement cost.\u27 Under applicable regulations during the thirties, when insurance was transferred by way of inter vivos gift the tremendous increase in value of the policy that came with death escaped gift tax, income tax, and estate tax. But since 1941 the situation has been reversed so that it may be fairly said from the standpoint of tax avoidance that life insurance is now in the doghouse. It is the object of this paper to trace the history of the impact of federal taxation on life insurance and the efforts of the Treasury to keep apace with the fertility of invention of taxpayers. It might as appropriately have been entitled A Study in the Consequence of Tax Avoidance. This is not to say that tax avoidance is in any sense improper. The legal right of a taxpayer to decrease the amount of what would otherwise be his taxes or altogether to avoid them by means which the law permits, is hornbook law. He need not adopt the most expensive tax method of procedure. Rather than sell securities held for exactly six months and incur a tax on the whole profit, he may delay the sale for one additional day and suffer income tax on only half of his profits. Rather than pay a debt with a $20.00 check where a tax is imposed on all checks of$20.00 or more, he may pay the same debt by drawing two checks each in the amount of $10.00. The difficulty with drawing a line, as Mr. Justice Holmes has pointed out, is that the taxpayer may come as close to the line as he will so long as he does not cross it