46 research outputs found
Why Arts Education, At All?: An A/r/tographic Inquiry
In the wake of curricular epistemicide, the authors draw your attention towards the theoretical and practical constraints created around arts education. As a/r/tographers (artists, researchers, and teachers), we argue that our ways of knowing and creating in the space of curriculum and instruction are dynamic ways to think about and through curricular epistemicide. In foregrounding our own experiences of ā(un)becoming through the cracksā, when we are faced with restrictive ways of knowing in a Department of Teacher Education, we put forth a question through our arts-based practices of knowing: why arts education, at all
Conflict, Earthquakes, and School Outcomes: Two Studies on Nepal
The increased frequency of natural disasters globally has prioritized the need for a
broader understanding of disaster resilience. More recently, on April 25 and May 12 of
2015, two major earthquakes devastated many Nepalese communities, inflicting damage
on multiple sectors of the society. Given the enormous amount of damage caused by the
earthquakes, this natural disaster is the greatest natural disaster tragedy to hit Nepal in
over 80 years. Almost ten years before the earthquakes shook Nepal, ten years of
destructive armed conflict came to a end. This study will examine the link between these
two events, both conceptually and empirically, by addressing the question: Did conflict
experience during the armed conflict in Nepal impact the degree of damage resulting
from the 2015 earthquakes
Opportunities for Increasing HPV Vaccine Provision in School Health Centers
Uptake of HPV vaccine remains low among adolescents in the United States. We sought to assess barriers to HPV vaccine provision in school health centers to inform subsequent interventions
Phantasia - the psychological significance of lifelong visual imagery vividness extremes
This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordVisual imagery typically enables us to see absent items in the mindās eye. It plays a role in memory,
day-dreaming and creativity. Since coining the terms aphantasia and hyperphantasia to describe
the absence and abundance of visual imagery, we have been contacted by many thousands of
people with extreme imagery abilities. Questionnaire data from 2000 participants with aphantasia
and 200 with hyperphantasia indicate that aphantasia is associated with scientific and
mathematical occupations, whereas hyperphantasia is associated with ācreativeā professions.
Participants with aphantasia report an elevated rate of difficulty with face recognition and
autobiographical memory, whereas participants with hyperphantasia report an elevated rate of
synaesthesia. Around half those with aphantasia describe an absence of wakeful imagery in all
sense modalities, while a majority dream visually. Aphantasia appears to run within families more
often than would be expected by chance. Aphantasia and hyperphantasia appear to be widespread
but neglected features of human experience with informative psychological associations.Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC
Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density
Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data
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Brain multiplexes reveal morphological connectional biomarkers fingerprinting late brain dementia states
Accurate diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) before conversion to Alzheimerās disease (AD) is invaluable for patient treatment. Many works showed that MCI and AD affect functional and structural connections between brain regions as well as the shape of cortical regions. However, āshape connectionsā between brain regions are rarely investigated -e.g., how morphological attributes such as cortical thickness and sulcal depth of a specific brain region change in relation to morphological attributes in other regions. To fill this gap, we unprecedentedly design morphological brain multiplexes for late MCI/AD classification. Specifically, we use structural T1-w MRI to define morphological brain networks, each quantifying similarity in morphology between different cortical regions for a specific cortical attribute. Then, we define a brain multiplex where each intra-layer represents the morphological connectivity network of a specific cortical attribute, and each inter-layer encodes the similarity between two consecutive intra-layers. A significant performance gain is achieved when using the multiplex architecture in comparison to other conventional network analysis architectures. We also leverage this architecture to discover morphological connectional biomarkers fingerprinting the difference between late MCI and AD stages, which included the right entorhinal cortex and right caudal middle frontal gyrus
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Multimodal and Multiscale Deep Neural Networks for the Early Diagnosis of Alzheimerās Disease using structural MR and FDG-PET images
Alzheimerās Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease where biomarkers for disease based on pathophysiology may be able to provide objective measures for disease diagnosis and staging. Neuroimaging scans acquired from MRI and metabolism images obtained by FDG-PET provide in-vivo measurements of structure and function (glucose metabolism) in a living brain. It is hypothesized that combining multiple different image modalities providing complementary information could help improve early diagnosis of AD. In this paper, we propose a novel deep-learning-based framework to discriminate individuals with AD utilizing a multimodal and multiscale deep neural network. Our method delivers 82.4% accuracy in identifying the individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who will convert to AD at 3 years prior to conversion (86.4% combined accuracy for conversion within 1ā3 years), a 94.23% sensitivity in classifying individuals with clinical diagnosis of probable AD, and a 86.3% specificity in classifying non-demented controls improving upon results in published literature
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The impact of PICALM genetic variations on reserve capacity of posterior cingulate in AD continuum
Phosphatidylinositolbinding clathrin assembly protein (PICALM) gene is one novel genetic player associated with late-onset Alzheimerās disease (LOAD), based on recent genome wide association studies (GWAS). However, how it affects AD occurrence is still unknown. Brain reserve hypothesis highlights the tolerant capacities of brain as a passive means to fight against neurodegenerations. Here, we took the baseline volume and/or thickness of LOAD-associated brain regions as proxies of brain reserve capacities and investigated whether PICALM genetic variations can influence the baseline reserve capacities and the longitudinal atrophy rate of these specific regions using data from Alzheimerās Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset. In mixed population, we found that brain region significantly affected by PICALM genetic variations was majorly restricted to posterior cingulate. In sub-population analysis, we found that one PICALM variation (C allele of rs642949) was associated with larger baseline thickness of posterior cingulate in health. We found seven variations in health and two variations (rs543293 and rs592297) in individuals with mild cognitive impairment were associated with slower atrophy rate of posterior cingulate. Our study provided preliminary evidences supporting that PICALM variations render protections by facilitating reserve capacities of posterior cingulate in non-demented elderly
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Early role of vascular dysregulation on late-onset Alzheimer's disease based on multifactorial data-driven analysis
Multifactorial mechanisms underlying late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) are poorly characterized from an integrative perspective. Here spatiotemporal alterations in brain amyloid-Ī² deposition, metabolism, vascular, functional activity at rest, structural properties, cognitive integrity and peripheral proteins levels are characterized in relation to LOAD progression. We analyse over 7,700 brain images and tens of plasma and cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). Through a multifactorial data-driven analysis, we obtain dynamic LOADāabnormality indices for all biomarkers, and a tentative temporal ordering of disease progression. Imaging results suggest that intra-brain vascular dysregulation is an early pathological event during disease development. Cognitive decline is noticeable from initial LOAD stages, suggesting early memory deficit associated with the primary disease factors. High abnormality levels are also observed for specific proteins associated with the vascular system's integrity. Although still subjected to the sensitivity of the algorithms and biomarkers employed, our results might contribute to the development of preventive therapeutic interventions