Effects of clown doctors on child and caregiver anxiety at the entrance to the surgery care unit and separation from caregivers

This study investigated the effects of hospital Clown Doctors intervention on child and caregiver preoperative anxiety at the entrance to the surgery care unit and separation from caregivers. A total of 88 children (aged 4-12 years) were assigned to one of the following two groups: Clown Doctors intervention or control group (standard care). Independent observational records using the modified Yale Preoperative Anxiety Scale instrument assessed children’s anxiety, while the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory measured caregiver’s state anxiety. In addition, caregivers assessed the children’s functional health problems by completing the Functional Status Questionnaire. Although no effects of Clown Doctors were found on children’s anxiety, results showed that both low functional health problems and Clown Doctors intervention were significant predictors of lower caregiver anxiety. Caregivers also reported being very satisfied with their intervention. Overall, this study demonstrated the positive role of Clown Doctors for caregivers at a specific pediatric hospital setting.peer-reviewe

Dedicated hippocampal inhibitory networks for locomotion and immobility

Network activity is strongly tied to animal movement; however, hippocampal circuits selectively engaged during locomotion or immobility remain poorly characterized. Here we examined whether distinct locomotor states are encoded differentially in genetically defined classes of hippocampal interneurons. To characterize the relationship between interneuron activity and movement, we usedin vivo, two-photon calcium imaging in CA1 of male and female mice, as animals performed a virtual-reality (VR) track running task. We found that activity in most somatostatin-expressing and parvalbumin-expressing interneurons positively correlated with locomotion. Surprisingly, nearly one in five somatostatin or one in seven parvalbumin interneurons were inhibited during locomotion and activated during periods of immobility. Anatomically, the somata of somatostatin immobility-activated neurons were smaller than those of movement-activated neurons. Furthermore, immobility-activated interneurons were distributed across cell layers, with somatostatin-expressing cells predominantly in stratum oriens and parvalbumin-expressing cells mostly in stratum pyramidale. Importantly, each cell's correlation between activity and movement was stable both over time and across VR environments. Our findings suggest that hippocampal interneuronal microcircuits are preferentially active during either movement or immobility periods. These inhibitory networks may regulate information flow in “labeled lines” within the hippocampus to process information during distinct behavioral states.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTThe hippocampus is required for learning and memory. Movement controls network activity in the hippocampus but it's unclear how hippocampal neurons encode movement state. We investigated neural circuits active during locomotion and immobility and found interneurons were selectively active during movement or stopped periods, but not both. Each cell's response to locomotion was consistent across time and environments, suggesting there are separate dedicated circuits for processing information during locomotion and immobility. Understanding how the hippocampus switches between different network configurations may lead to therapeutic approaches to hippocampal-dependent dysfunctions, such as Alzheimer's disease or cognitive decline.</jats:p

Risk and Efficiency in Credit Concession: A Case Study in Portugal

The relationship between banks and customers has contributed to several theories in banking economics. The quality of the credit is crucial for banks. Banks classify the risk through quantitative and qualitative indicators. Quantitative indicators are much used by banks, but qualitative indicators are also considered in credit risk evaluation. Taken together, they contribute to increase efficiency and decrease doubtful credit. Several issues arise in order to understand if risk evaluation affects the efficiency of the banking sector or if it affects the bank customer relationship. We wish to analyse some quantitative and qualitative indicators used by the Portuguese banking system. Despite the reputation of a client being a very important qualitative indicator, it is not enough to determine a classification of low risk.credit, banks, bankruptcy, risk

Real-time Convolutional Neural Networks for Emotion and Gender Classification

In this paper we propose an implement a general convolutional neural network (CNN) building framework for designing real-time CNNs. We validate our models by creating a real-time vision system which accomplishes the tasks of face detection, gender classification and emotion classification simultaneously in one blended step using our proposed CNN architecture. After presenting the details of the training procedure setup we proceed to evaluate on standard benchmark sets. We report accuracies of 96% in the IMDB gender dataset and 66% in the FER-2013 emotion dataset. Along with this we also introduced the very recent real-time enabled guided back-propagation visualization technique. Guided back-propagation uncovers the dynamics of the weight changes and evaluates the learned features. We argue that the careful implementation of modern CNN architectures, the use of the current regularization methods and the visualization of previously hidden features are necessary in order to reduce the gap between slow performances and real-time architectures. Our system has been validated by its deployment on a Care-O-bot 3 robot used during RoboCup@Home competitions. All our code, demos and pre-trained architectures have been released under an open-source license in our public repository.Comment: Submitted to ICRA 201

Comparison and quantification of land usage through teledection in the city hall of Ixtapaluca, State of Mexico, 1989-2000

This research aims to comparison and quantification the occupation of land usage, through a module developed in Delphi and operated under the platform of Idrisi Kilimanjaro. This module was designed in order to obtain land usage at two times: 1989 and 2000, also it helped to get the comparison of land usage and to identify and quantify the magnitude of these territorial changesLa presente investigación tiene como objetivo comparar y cuantificar la ocupación del uso del suelo mediante el diseño de un módulo desarrollado en Delphi y operado bajo la plataforma de Idrisi Kilimanjaro. Para obtener la ocupación del suelo en dos momentos: 1989 y 2000, se realizó un módulo con el fin de obtener el comparativo de los usos del suelo para identificar y cuantifica