Implementation of liquid culture for tuberculosis diagnosis in a remote setting: lessons learned.

Although sputum smear microscopy is the primary method for tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis in low-resource settings, it has low sensitivity. The World Health Organization recommends the use of liquid culture techniques for TB diagnosis and drug susceptibility testing in low- and middle-income countries. An evaluation of samples from southern Sudan found that culture was able to detect cases of active pulmonary TB and extra-pulmonary TB missed by conventional smear microscopy. However, the long delays involved in obtaining culture results meant that they were usually not clinically useful, and high rates of non-tuberculous mycobacteria isolation made interpretation of results difficult. Improvements in diagnostic capacity and rapid speciation facilities, either on-site or through a local reference laboratory, are crucial

Reading Disorders

There are two major types of reading disorder; developmental dyslexia and reading comprehension impairment. The primary difficulty in dyslexia is with the accurate and fluent reading of single words, whilst in reading comprehension impairment words can be read accurately but there is no or little understanding of what is read. Using the causal modelling framework, the underlying causes of the two disorders are reviewed together with the co-occurrence of reading and language disorders. The rationale for viewing reading as a dimensional disorder, where the difficulties experienced are on a continuum rather than using cut-off points to identify disorders is also reviewed

Exploring word learning in a high-density longitudinal corpus

What is the role of the linguistic environment in children’s early word learning? Here we provide a preliminary analysis of one child’s linguistic development, using a portion of the high-density longitudinal data collected for the Human Speechome Project. We focus particularly on the development of the child’s productive vocabulary from the age of 9 to 24 months and the relationship between the child’s language development and the caregivers’ speech. We find significant correlations between input frequencies and age of acquisition for individual words. In addition, caregivers’ utterance length, type-token ratio, and proportion of single-word utterances all show significant temporal relationships with the child’s development, suggesting that caregivers “tune” their utterances to the linguistic ability of the child

Feature weighting techniques for CBR in software effort estimation studies: A review and empirical evaluation

Context : Software effort estimation is one of the most important activities in the software development process. Unfortunately, estimates are often substantially wrong. Numerous estimation methods have been proposed including Case-based Reasoning (CBR). In order to improve CBR estimation accuracy, many researchers have proposed feature weighting techniques (FWT). Objective: Our purpose is to systematically review the empirical evidence to determine whether FWT leads to improved predictions. In addition we evaluate these techniques from the perspectives of (i) approach (ii) strengths and weaknesses (iii) performance and (iv) experimental evaluation approach including the data sets used. Method: We conducted a systematic literature review of published, refereed primary studies on FWT (2000-2014). Results: We identified 19 relevant primary studies. These reported a range of different techniques. 17 out of 19 make benchmark comparisons with standard CBR and 16 out of 17 studies report improved accuracy. Using a one-sample sign test this positive impact is significant (p = 0:0003). Conclusion: The actionable conclusion from this study is that our review of all relevant empirical evidence supports the use of FWTs and we recommend that researchers and practitioners give serious consideration to their adoption

Contributions of Prosodic and Distributional Features of Caregivers' Speech in Early Word Learning

How do characteristics of caregiver speech contribute to a child's early word learning? We explore the relationship between a single child's vocabulary growth and the distributional and prosodic characteristics of the speech he hears using data collected for the Human Speechome Project, an ecologically valid corpus collected from the home of a family with a young child. We measured F0, intensity, phoneme duration, usage frequency, recurrence, and MLU for caregivers' production of each word that the child learned during the period of recording. When all variables are considered, we obtain a model of word acquisition as a function of caregiver input speech. Coefficient estimates in the model help to illuminate which factors are relevant to learning classes of words. In addition, words that deviate from the model's prediction are of interest as they may suggest important social, contextual and other cues relevant to word learning

Effects of Caregiver Prosody on Child Language Acquisition

http://speechprosody2010.illinois.edu/program.php (conference site)This paper investigates the role of prosody in one child’s lexical acquisition using an ecologically valid, high-density, longitudinal corpus. The corpus consists of high fidelity recordings collected from microphones embedded throughout the home of a family with a young child. We analyze data collected continuously from ages 9 – 24 months, including the child’s first productive use of language at about 11 months and ending at the child’s active use of more than 500 words. We found significant correlations between prosody of caregivers’ speech and age of acquisition for individual words

The differential regulation of Lck kinase phosphorylation sites by CD45 is critical for T cell receptor signaling responses

SummaryThe molecular mechanisms whereby the CD45 tyrosine phosphatase (PTPase) regulates T cell receptor (TCR) signaling responses remain to be elucidated. To investigate this question, we have reconstituted CD45 (encoded by Ptprc)-deficient mice, which display severe defects in thymic development, with five different expression levels of transgenic CD45RO, or with mutant PTPase null or PTPase-low CD45R0. Whereas CD45 PTPase activity was absolutely required for the reconstitution of thymic development, only 3% of wild-type CD45 activity restored T cell numbers and normal cytotoxic T cell responses. Lowering the CD45 expression increased CD4 lineage commitment. Peripheral T cells with very low activity of CD45 phosphatase displayed reduced TCR signaling, whereas intermediate activity caused hyperactivation of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. These results are explained by a rheostat mechanism whereby CD45 differentially regulates the negatively acting pTyr-505 and positively acting pTyr-394 p56lck tyrosine kinase phosphorylation sites. We propose that high wild-type CD45 expression is necessary to dephosphorylate p56lck pTyr-394, suppressing CD4 T+ cell lineage commitment and hyperactivity

Image Deblurring and Near-real-time Atmospheric Seeing Estimation through the Employment of Convergence of Variance

A new image reconstruction algorithm is presented that will remove the effect of atmospheric turbulence on motion compensated frame average images. The primary focus of this research was to develop a blind deconvolution technique that could be employed in a tactical military environment where both time and computational power are limited. Additionally, this technique can be employed to measure atmospheric seeing conditions. In a blind deconvolution fashion, the algorithm simultaneously computes a high resolution image and an average model for the atmospheric blur parameterized by Fried’s seeing parameter. The difference in this approach is that it does not assume a prior distribution for the seeing parameter, rather it assesses the convergence of the image’s variance as the stopping criteria and identification of the proper seeing parameter from a range of candidate values. Experimental results show that the convergence of variance technique allows for estimation of the seeing parameter accurate to within 0.5 cm and often even better depending on the signal to noise ratio