2,136 research outputs found
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Semantic and inferencing abilities in children with communication disorders
Background: Semantic and inferencing abilities have not been fully examined in children with communication difficulties.
Aims: To investigate the inferential and semantic abilities of children with communication difficulties using newly designed tasks.
Methods & Procedures: Children with different types of communication disorder were compared with each other and with three groups of typically developing children: those of the same chronological age and two groups of younger children. In total, 25 children aged 11 years with specific language impairment and 22 children, also 11 years of age, with primary pragmatic difficulties were recruited. Typically developing groups aged 11 (nâ=â35; ageâmatch), and those aged 9 (nâ=â40) and 7 (nâ=â37; language similar) also participated as comparisons.
Outcomes & Results: For Semantic Choices, children with specific language impairment performed significantly more poorly than 9â and 11âyearâolds, whilst the pragmatic difficulties group scored significantly lower than all the typically developing groups. Borderline differences between specific language impairment and pragmatic difficulties groups were found. For inferencing, children with communication impairments performed significantly below the 11âyearâold peers, but not poorer than 9â and 7âyearâolds, suggesting that this skill is in line with language ability. Six children in the pragmatic difficulties group who met diagnosis for autism performed more poorly than the other two clinical groups on both tasks, but not statistically significantly so.
Conclusions: Both tasks were more difficult for those with communication impairments compared with peers. Semantic but not inferencing abilities showed a nonâsignificant trend for differences between the two clinical groups and children with pragmatic difficulties performed more poorly than all typically developing groups. The tasks may relate to each other in varying ways according to type of communication difficulty
From single point of measurement to distributed sensing in long-term glacier monitoring
Glacial environment monitoring is a key task in understanding natural phenomena related to global warming. For the last 30 years, Automatic Weather Stations (AWSs) have been spreading among the meteorological and geophysical community, and are on the way to become a de facto standard to perform long-lasting unattended data acquisitions in single localized points of interest. Sensor Networks (SNs), on the other hand, promise the possibility to perform measurements with a higher spatial density and lower cost. Designing and developing a SN for glacial environment face particular challenges for embedded electronics and sensor systems, which is why SNs are still under research and development in this eld. This paper surveys the AWSs and SNs for glacial monitoring applications and compares their characteristics
Deploying a Communicating Automatic Weather Station on an Alpine Glacier
The cost and effort of installing and maintaining an automatic weather station (AWS) on a glacier may be mitigated by the possibility of gathering sensor data in near real-time, and of controlling and programming the station remotely. In this paper we report our experience with upgrading an existing AWS, operating over an Italian glacier, from a mere datalogger into a networked sensing station. Design choices, energy constraints and power-aware programming of the station determined by harsh environment are discussed. Deployment operations and results are described. The upgraded AWS provides low-power connectivity from a remote location and is able to serve as a base station for a wireless sensor network working in the glacier
Physical activity as a key issue for promoting human health on a local and global scale: Evidences and perspectives
Clean synthesis of biolubricant range esters using novel liquid lipase enzyme in solvent free medium
Longitudinal phase-space manipulation with beam-driven plasma wakefields
The development of compact accelerator facilities providing high-brightness
beams is one of the most challenging tasks in field of next-generation compact
and cost affordable particle accelerators, to be used in many fields for
industrial, medical and research applications. The ability to shape the beam
longitudinal phase-space, in particular, plays a key role to achieve high-peak
brightness. Here we present a new approach that allows to tune the longitudinal
phase-space of a high-brightness beam by means of a plasma wakefields. The
electron beam passing through the plasma drives large wakefields that are used
to manipulate the time-energy correlation of particles along the beam itself.
We experimentally demonstrate that such solution is highly tunable by simply
adjusting the density of the plasma and can be used to imprint or remove any
correlation onto the beam. This is a fundamental requirement when dealing with
largely time-energy correlated beams coming from future plasma accelerators
Evidence for long-term Gamma-ray and X-ray variability from the unidentified TeV source HESS J0632+057
HESS J0632+057 is one of only two unidentified very-high-energy gamma-ray
sources which appear to be point-like within experimental resolution. It is
possibly associated with the massive Be star MWC 148 and has been suggested to
resemble known TeV binary systems like LS I +61 303 or LS 5039. HESS J0632+057
was observed by VERITAS for 31 hours in 2006, 2008 and 2009. During these
observations, no significant signal in gamma rays with energies above 1 TeV was
detected from the direction of HESS J0632+057. A flux upper limit corresponding
to 1.1% of the flux of the Crab Nebula has been derived from the VERITAS data.
The non-detection by VERITAS excludes with a probability of 99.993% that HESS
J0632+057 is a steady gamma-ray emitter. Contemporaneous X-ray observations
with Swift XRT reveal a factor of 1.8+-0.4 higher flux in the 1-10 keV range
than earlier X-ray observations of HESS J0632+057. The variability in the
gamma-ray and X-ray fluxes supports interpretation of the ob ject as a
gamma-ray emitting binary.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical
Journa
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The Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics
Behavior genetics is the study of the relationship between genetic variation and psychological traits. Turkheimer (2000) proposed âThree Laws of Behavior Geneticsâ based on empirical regularities observed in studies of twins and other kinships. On the basis of molecular studies that have measured DNA variation directly, we propose a Fourth Law of Behavior Genetics: âA typical human behavioral trait is associated with very many genetic variants, each of which accounts for a very small percentage of the behavioral variability.â This law explains several consistent patterns in the results of gene-discovery studies, including the failure of candidate-gene studies to robustly replicate, the need for genome-wide association studies (and why such studies have a much stronger replication record), and the crucial importance of extremely large samples in these endeavors. We review the evidence in favor of the Fourth Law and discuss its implications for the design and interpretation of gene-behavior research.Economic
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