A Multimodal Approach for the Assessment of Alexithymia: An Evaluation of Physiological, Behavioral, and Self-Reported Reactivity to a Traumatic Event-Relevant Video

Evidence suggests alexithymia is often relatively elevated among people suffering from posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Despite a growing body of research supporting this relation between alexithymia and PTSS, it is unclear whether alexithymia is a unique predictor of emotional reactivity relative to posttraumatic stress symptoms. Furthermore, existing literature is largely limited to retrospective, self-reported symptoms. Therefore, the current study employed a multimodal assessment strategy for measuring emotional reactivity in the context of posttraumatic stress. More specifically, self-report, behavioral, and physiological measures were used to measure emotional responding to a traumatic event-related stimulus among motor vehicle accident victims. It was hypothesized that behavioral and self-reported responding would evidence a negative relation to level of alexithymia, while physiological responding was not expected to relate to levels of alexithymia. Results replicated previous research demonstrating a strong correlation between self-reported PTSS and alexithymia. Also as expected, alexithymia did not predict physiological responding to the stimulus. However, alexithymia was not found to uniquely predict self-reported or behavioral responding above and beyond the influence of PTSS. These findings do not conclusively support alexithymia as a unique predictor of emotional responding relative to PTSS

Reading with Social, Digital Annotation: Encouraging Engaged Critical Reading in a Challenging Age

This design-based research study examines the pedagogical role of social, digital annotation in teaching reading as rhetorical invention, particularly the kind of invention necessary for thoughtful democratic participation in the contemporary discursive era, often described as troubled. In this dissertation study, I deployed a classroom-based intervention meant to challenge how educators in rhetoric and composition/writing studies might directly address the acute and exigent discursive struggle in the first-year composition classroom. This study ultimately finds that social, digital annotation invites significant shifts in students’ reading habits, in that Hypothes.is-based annotations yielded a far more complex, multifaceted set of reading skills, behaviors, and dispositions than the pre-intervention private annotations. The social annotation experience proved far more performative and, therefore, highly rhetorical and inventive, encouraging an agentic approach to reading that many FYC teacher-scholars crave. In addition to the performative nature of SDA (Hypothes.is, specifically), the social engagement among readers afforded by this relatively new digital tool of reading were the biggest catalysts for change. As a result, SDA may have that capacity as a technology to arrange meaning-making interactions in ways that are visible to the students themselves, shifting their perspectives on agency within reading

Straight to Shapes: Real-time Detection of Encoded Shapes

Current object detection approaches predict bounding boxes, but these provide little instance-specific information beyond location, scale and aspect ratio. In this work, we propose to directly regress to objects' shapes in addition to their bounding boxes and categories. It is crucial to find an appropriate shape representation that is compact and decodable, and in which objects can be compared for higher-order concepts such as view similarity, pose variation and occlusion. To achieve this, we use a denoising convolutional auto-encoder to establish an embedding space, and place the decoder after a fast end-to-end network trained to regress directly to the encoded shape vectors. This yields what to the best of our knowledge is the first real-time shape prediction network, running at ~35 FPS on a high-end desktop. With higher-order shape reasoning well-integrated into the network pipeline, the network shows the useful practical quality of generalising to unseen categories similar to the ones in the training set, something that most existing approaches fail to handle.Comment: 16 pages including appendix; Published at CVPR 201

Value creation:What matters most in Communities of Learning Practice in higher education

This study examines the phenomenon of value creation enabled by peers’ voluntary participation in Communities of Learning Practice (CoLPs) in higher education, with the aim to extract which experiences of learning community participation are considered valuable by learning community members. The participants were 27 international master students at a German university. Data were collected from participants’ written narratives-so called value creation stories. A systematic qualitative research approach was employed. Initially, we conducted a theory-driven content analysis to classify members’ attributed values. Subsequently, we performed an emergent data-driven thematic analysis to extrapolate the specifics of attributed values by participants. This study underscores the role of learning community members’ agency in value creation, by having community members, instead of external members, define value creation for themselves, as an individual and collective process and “outcome” enabled by participation in CoLPs.<br/

Gross Motor Development, Movement Abnormalities, and Early Identification of Autism

Gross motor development (supine, prone, rolling, sitting, crawling, walking) and movement abnormalities were examined in the home videos of infants later diagnosed with autism (regression and no regression subgroups), developmental delays (DD), or typical development. Group differences in maturity were found for walking, prone, and supine, with the DD and Autism-No Regression groups both showing later developing motor maturity than typical children. The only statistically significant differences in movement abnormalities were in the DD group; the two autism groups did not differ from the typical group in rates of movement abnormalities or lack of protective responses. These findings do not replicate previous investigations suggesting that early motor abnormalities seen on home video can assist in early identification of autism

Crew factors in flight operations. Part 3: The operational significance of exposure to short-haul air transport operations

Excessive flightcrew fatigue has potentially serious safety consequences. Laboratory studies have implicated fatigue as a causal factor associated with varying levels of performance deterioration depending on the amount of fatigue and the type of measure utilized in assessing performance. These studies have been of limited utility because of the difficulty of relating laboratory task performance to the demands associated with the operation of a complex aircraft. The performance of 20 volunteer twin-jet transport crews is examined in a full-mission simulator scenario that included most aspects of an actual line operation. The scenario included both routine flight operations and an unexpected mechanical abnormality which resulted in a high level of crew workload. Half of the crews flew the simulation within two to three hours after completing a three-day, high-density, short-haul duty cycle (Post-Duty condition). The other half flew the scenario after a minimum of three days off duty (Pre-Duty) condition). The results revealed that, not surprisingly, Post-Duty crews were significantly more fatigued than Pre-Duty crews. However, a somewhat counter-intuitive pattern of results emerged on the crew performancemeasures. In general, the performance of Post-Duty crews was significantly better than that of Pre-Duty crews, as rated by an expert observer on a number of dimensions relevant to flight safety. Analyses of the flightcrew communication patterns revealed that Post-Duty crews communicated significantly more overall, suggesting, as has previous research, that communication is a good predictor of overall crew performance

Parent Civic Behavior and Observed Civic Messages: Associations with Adolescent Civic Behavior and Prioritization

The current study employed observational and multi-informant survey methodology to explore associations among parents\u27 civic behaviors, observed parent and adolescent messages about civic obligation, and adolescents\u27 civic behavior and prioritization (should) judgments. A sample of 160 adolescents (Mage = 14.42, range = 12-18) and their parents (144 mothers and 52 fathers), participated in video-recorded, structured, dyadic interaction tasks in which they discussed citizenship and civic duty. Parents and adolescents also completed questionnaires assessing civic behavior and civic prioritization judgments. Within distinct civic activities, parents\u27 report of civic behavior was positively associated with adolescents\u27 report of civic behavior and prioritization judgments. Over and above parents\u27 civic behavior, adolescents\u27 community service behavior was positively associated with parents\u27 observed messages about help and respect for others and one\u27s country but negatively associated with adolescents\u27 own observed messages about being productive members of society. Additionally, parents\u27 observed messages about the importance of following rules and regulations were negatively associated with their adolescents\u27 prioritization judgments concerning social movement involvement (e.g., protesting). Findings suggest that parents\u27 observed messages about citizenship and civic duty may promote and deter adolescents\u27 from engagement in specific civic activities

A small interactive science centre as a learning environment for students with severe learning difficulties: an exploration of pedagogy

This study explores the use of a small interactive science centre as a learning environment for students with severe learning difficulties and is based on extensive video footage of nine students between the ages of six and nineteen. Participants were filmed across two academic years during visits to the science centre, and in their school or college, both in their usual classes and in follow-up sessions designed by the researcher. All participants were from educational provisions designated as being for students with severe learning difficulties. Analysis based on grounded theory strategy (Glaser and Strauss 1967, Strauss and Corbin 1998) was used to explore the complexities of a learning situation that did not appear to have been studied in this way before. Systematic coding and categorisation of video data was supplemented by semi-structured interviews with the students' teachers, using video material to stimulate recall. These interviews provided a separate viewpoint for triangulation purposes and, with the video analysis, suggested an unusually high degree of independent and focused activity on the part of the students during visits to the science centre. Results have confirmed the very high level of engagement and independent activity remarked on by the teachers, both in the science centre and when a similar environment was created in school or college. The use of grounded theory techniques has permitted the formation of hypotheses, grounded in the data, and small-scale sequential and quantitative analysis has made it possible to further explore a number of these relating to pedagogical factors within the environment; notably input mode (whether this was language-based or multi-sensory) and the importance of choice and control. Implications for debates concerning teaching methods and learning environments and indirectly for those concerning the provision of more inclusive environments are discussed

A Fast Decodable Full-Rate STBC with High Coding Gain for 4x2 MIMO Systems

In this work, a new fast-decodable space-time block code (STBC) is proposed. The code is full-rate and full-diversity for 4x2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission. Due to the unique structure of the codeword, the proposed code requires a much lower computational complexity to provide maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding performance. It is shown that the ML decoding complexity is only O(M^{4.5}) when M-ary square QAM constellation is used. Finally, the proposed code has highest minimum determinant among the fast-decodable STBCs known in the literature. Simulation results prove that the proposed code provides the best bit error rate (BER) performance among the state-of-the-art STBCs.Comment: 2013 IEEE 24th International Symposium on Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC), London : United Kingdom (2013