15,458 research outputs found
Integrating Item Accuracy and Reaction Time to Improve the Measurement of Inhibitory Control Abilities in Early Childhood
Efforts to improve childrenâs executive function are often hampered by the lack of measures that are optimized for use during the transition from preschool to elementary school. Whereas preschool-based measures often emphasize response accuracy, elementary school-based measures emphasize reaction time (RT)âespecially for measures inhibitory control (IC) tasks that typically have a speeded component. The primary objective of this study was to test in a preschool-aged sample whether the joint use of item-level accuracy and RT data resulted in improved scoring for three IC tasks relative to scores derived from accuracy data alone. Generally, the joint use of item-level accuracy and RT data resulted in modest improvements in the measurement precision of IC abilities. Moreover, the joint use of item-level accuracy and RT helped eliminate floor and ceiling effects that occurred when accuracy data were considered alone. Results are discussed with respect to the importance of scoring IC tasks in ways that are maximally informative for program evaluation and longitudinal modeling
Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer Observations of a Supernova Remnant in the Line of Sight to HD 5980 in the Small Magellanic Cloud
We report a detection of far ultraviolet absorption from the supernova
remnant SNR 0057 - 7226 in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The absorption is
seen in the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) spectrum of the
LBV/WR star HD 5980. Absorption from O VI 1032 and C III 977 is seen at a
velocity of +300 km/s with respect to the Galactic absorption lines, +170 km/s
with respect to the SMC absorption. The O VI 1038 line is contaminated by H_2
absorption, but is present. These lines are not seen in the FUSE spectrum of
Sk80, only ~1' (~17 pc) away from HD 5980. No blue-shifted O VI 1032 absorption
from the SNR is seen in the FUSE spectrum. The O VI 1032 line in the SNR is
well described by a Gaussian with FWHM=75 km/s. We find log N(O
VI)=14.33-14.43, which is roughly 50% of the rest of the O VI column in the SMC
(excluding the SNR) and greater than the O VI column in the Milky Way halo
along this sight line. The N(C IV)/N(O VI) ratio for the SNR absorption is in
the range of 0.12-0.17, similar to the value seen in the Milky Way disk, and
lower than the halo value, supporting models in which SNRs produce the highly
ionized gas close to the plane of the Galaxy, while other mechanisms occur in
the halo. The N(C IV)/N(O VI) ratio is also lower than the SMC ratio along this
sight line, suggesting that other mechanisms contribute to the creation of the
global hot ionized medium in the SMC. The O VI, C IV, and Si IV apparent column
density profiles suggest the presence of a multi-phase shell followed by a
region of higher temperature gas.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, uses emulateapj5.sty. Accepted for
publication in ApJ Letter
FPGA-Based In-Vivo Calcium Image Decoding for Closed-Loop Feedback Applications
The miniaturized calcium imaging is an emerging neural recording technique
that can monitor neural activity at large scale at a specific brain region of a
rat or mice. It has been widely used in the study of brain functions in
experimental neuroscientific research. Most calcium-image analysis pipelines
operate offline, which incurs long processing latency thus are hard to be used
for closed-loop feedback stimulation targeting certain neural circuits. In this
paper, we propose our FPGA-based design that enables real-time calcium image
processing and position decoding for closed-loop feedback applications. Our
design can perform real-time calcium image motion correction, enhancement, and
fast trace extraction based on predefined cell contours and tiles. With that,
we evaluated a variety of machine learning methods to decode positions from the
extracted traces. Our proposed design and implementation can achieve position
decoding with less than 1 ms latency under 300 MHz on FPGA for a variety of
mainstream 1-photon miniscope sensors. We benchmarked the position decoding
accuracy on open-sourced datasets collected from six different rats, and we
show that by taking advantage of the ordinal encoding in the decoding task, we
can consistently improve decoding accuracy without any overhead on hardware
implementation and runtime across the subjects.Comment: 11 pages, 15 figure
Creating citizen-consumers? Public service reform and (un)willing selves
About the book: Postmodern theories heralded the "death of the subject", and thereby deeply contested our intuition that we are free and willing selves. In recent times, the (free) will has come under attack yet again. Findings from the neuro- and cognitive sciences claim the concept of will to be scientifically untenable, specifying that it is our brain rather than our 'self' which decides what we want to do. In spite of these challenges however, the willing self has come to take centre stage in our society: juridical and moral practices ascribing guilt, or the organization of everyday life attributing responsibilities, for instance, can hardly be understood without taking recourse to the willing subject.
In this vein, the authors address topics such as the genealogy of the concept of willing selves, the discourse on agency in neuroscience and sociology, the political debate on volition within neoliberal and neoconservative regimes, approaches toward novel forms of relational responsibility as well as moral evaluations in conceptualizing autonomy
New Labour's communitarianisms
This article argues that communitarianism can be analysed on different levels â sociological, ethical and metaâethical â and along different dimensions â conformist/pluralist, more conditional/less conditional, progressive/conservative, prescriptive/voluntary, moral/socioeconomic and individual/corporate. We argue that New Labour's communitarianism is a response to both neo-liberalism and old social democracy. It is sociological, ethical and universalist rather than particularist on the meta-ethical level. Labour increasingly favours conditional, morally prescriptive, conservative and individual communitarianisms. This is at the expense of less conditional and redistributional socioeconomic, progressive and corporate communitarianisms. It is torn between conformist and pluralist versions of communitarianism. This bias is part of a wider shift in Labour thinking from social democracy to a liberal conservatism which celebrates the dynamic market economy and is socially conservative
Stress transmission in granular matter
The transmission of forces through a disordered granular system is studied by
means of a geometrical-topological approach that reduces the granular packing
into a set of layers. This layered structure constitutes the skeleton through
which the force chains set up. Given the granular packing, and the region where
the force is applied, such a skeleton is uniquely defined. Within this
framework, we write an equation for the transmission of the vertical forces
that can be solved recursively layer by layer. We find that a special class of
analytical solutions for this equation are L\'evi-stable distributions. We
discuss the link between criticality and fragility and we show how the
disordered packing naturally induces the formation of force-chains and arches.
We point out that critical regimes, with power law distributions, are
associated with the roughness of the topological layers. Whereas, fragility is
associated with local changes in the force network induced by local granular
rearrangements or by changes in the applied force. The results are compared
with recent experimental observations in particulate matter and with computer
simulations.Comment: 14 pages, Latex, 5 EPS figure
Narrating One Nation:The Ideology and Rhetoric of the Miliband Labour Party
Speaking at the 2012 Labour Party Conference, Ed Miliband set out his vision of âOne Nationâ. This article maps the core concepts of Labour's ideology and identifies the narratives used to argue for One Nation social security reform. It locates these narratives within Labour's traditions and demonstrates that they coalesce in the leadership persona of Miliband himself. Though an attempt to respond to a populist ârhetorical cultureâ, the article contends that this strategy has created a selfâenclosed ideology that cannot conceive of an audience beyond itself. Labour therefore needs to overcome this solipsism if it is to secure victory in 2015
- âŠ