Language Disabilities of Delinquent Adolescents

Many studies have been conducted on the prevalence of learning disabilities in the population of juvenile delinquents (Holte, 1972; Broder, Dunivant, Smith, and Sutton, 1981; Meltzer, 1983; Bachara and Zada, 1978). One investigation conducted by the United States Government, found that juvenile delinquents have severe learning problems (Reed and Heilman, 1981). Learning disabilities appear in eight to 10 percent of all school age children and adolescents. Of that group, 39 to 63 percent show a language disorder syndrome which may negatively affect school learning over a broad range of the curriculum area (Semel and Wiig, 1980). The prevalence of learning disabilities in the juvenile delinquent population is significantly higher. It ranges from 26 to 71 percent (Reed and Heilman, 1981). Frazee (1979) studied the language performance of juvenile delinquents to determine whether they were significantly different from nondelinquents. Frazee administered the Fullerton Test of Language Performance of Adolescents (FTLPA) (Thorum, 1978) when it was in its field test form. The FTLPA gives results over eight broad language areas. The results showed the delinquents to be significantly lower than the nondelinquents in the area of morphology competency. Frazee indicated that additional research is needed to determine if juvenile delinquents have other deficits in language performance skills which the FTLPA does not assess, or that are so subtle that they require a more in-depth assessment of psycholinguistic language abilities than the FTLPA provides. The Clinical Evaluation of Language Functions (CELF) (Semel and Wiig, 1980) was used to compare the language abilities of 25 delinquents and 25 nondelinquents. Each subject was evaluated individually with a pure-tone hearing screening, a vision screening, the Advanced Progressive Matrices, Set I, (Raven, 1958) as a screening test for intelligence, and the CELF. The purpose of the present investigation was to indentify [sic] underlying language disabilities in juvenile delinquents which could be contributing to their inappropriate academic and social behaviors. The data were statistically analyzed using a one-tailed paired t-test to compare the means and standard deviations of the experimental subjects with the control subjects on each of the 11 subtests of the CELF. The results of this study indicated that juvenile delinquents did demonstrate significantly more errors than nondelinquents in the processing and production of language. The specific language areas in which a significant difference was demonstrated on the CELF were understanding linguistic concepts, critical thinking, long and short term memory, rapid recall of common words, and sentence formulation. The findings of this study suggested that further investigation may be needed to establish a link between language disabilities and juvenile delinquency

Essence of Choice in a Classroom

Curriculum and Instructio

The Year of Care approach: developing a model and delivery programme for care and support planning in long term conditions within general practice

Background: People with long term conditions (LTCs) make most of the daily decisions and carry out the activities which affect their health and quality of life. Only a fraction of each contact with a health care professional (HCP) is spent supporting this. This paper describes how care and support planning (CSP) and an implementation framework to redesign services, were developed to address this in UK general practice. Focussed on what is important to each individual, CSP brings together traditional clinical issues and the person's lived experience in a solution focussed, forward looking conversation with an emphasis on 'people not diseases'. Methods: The components of CSP were developed in three health communities using diabetes as an exemplar. This model was extended and refined for other single conditions and multimorbidity across 40 sites and two nations, over 15 years. Working with local teams and communities the authors used theoretical models of care, implementation and spread, developing and tailoring training, support and resources to embed CSP as usual care, sharing learning across a community of practice. Results: The purpose, content, process, developmental hurdles and impact of this CSP model are described, alongside an implementation strategy. There is now a robust, reproducible five step model; preparation, conversation, recording, actions and review. Uniquely, preparation, involving information sharing with time for reflection, enables an uncluttered conversation with a professional focussed on what is important to each person. The components of the Year of Care House act as a checklist for implementation, a metaphor for their interdependence and a flexible framework. Spreading CSP involved developing exemplar practices and building capacity across local health communities. These reported improved patient experience, practitioner job satisfaction, health behaviours and outcomes, teamwork, practice organisation, resource use, and links with wider community activities. Conclusions: Tested in multiple settings, CSP is a reproducible and practical model of planned care applicable to all LTCs, with the capacity to be transformative for people with LTCs and health care professionals. It recaptures relational dimensions of care with transactional elements in the background. Options for applying this model and implementation framework at scale now need to be explored

Transfer Learning for the Prediction of Entity Modifiers in Clinical Text: Application to Opioid Use Disorder Case Detection

Background: The semantics of entities extracted from a clinical text can be dramatically altered by modifiers, including entity negation, uncertainty, conditionality, severity, and subject. Existing models for determining modifiers of clinical entities involve regular expression or features weights that are trained independently for each modifier. Methods: We develop and evaluate a multi-task transformer architecture design where modifiers are learned and predicted jointly using the publicly available SemEval 2015 Task 14 corpus and a new Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) data set that contains modifiers shared with SemEval as well as novel modifiers specific for OUD. We evaluate the effectiveness of our multi-task learning approach versus previously published systems and assess the feasibility of transfer learning for clinical entity modifiers when only a portion of clinical modifiers are shared. Results: Our approach achieved state-of-the-art results on the ShARe corpus from SemEval 2015 Task 14, showing an increase of 1.1% on weighted accuracy, 1.7% on unweighted accuracy, and 10% on micro F1 scores. Conclusions: We show that learned weights from our shared model can be effectively transferred to a new partially matched data set, validating the use of transfer learning for clinical text modifiersComment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables. To be submitted to the Journal of Biomedical Semantic

Kate 2006 Fall

Each year, kate seeks to: explore ideas about normative gender, sex, and sexuality work against oppression and hierarchies of power in any and all forms serve as a voice for race and gender equity as well as queer positivity encourage the silent to speak and feel less afraid build a zine and community that we care about and trusthttps://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/kate/1004/thumbnail.jp

Developing and enhancing biodiversity monitoring programmes: a collaborative assessment of priorities

1.Biodiversity is changing at unprecedented rates, and it is increasingly important that these changes are quantified through monitoring programmes. Previous recommendations for developing or enhancing these programmes focus either on the end goals, that is the intended use of the data, or on how these goals are achieved, for example through volunteer involvement in citizen science, but not both. These recommendations are rarely prioritized. 2.We used a collaborative approach, involving 52 experts in biodiversity monitoring in the UK, to develop a list of attributes of relevance to any biodiversity monitoring programme and to order these attributes by their priority. We also ranked the attributes according to their importance in monitoring biodiversity in the UK. Experts involved included data users, funders, programme organizers and participants in data collection. They covered expertise in a wide range of taxa. 3.We developed a final list of 25 attributes of biodiversity monitoring schemes, ordered from the most elemental (those essential for monitoring schemes; e.g. articulate the objectives and gain sufficient participants) to the most aspirational (e.g. electronic data capture in the field, reporting change annually). This ordered list is a practical framework which can be used to support the development of monitoring programmes. 4.People's ranking of attributes revealed a difference between those who considered attributes with benefits to end users to be most important (e.g. people from governmental organizations) and those who considered attributes with greatest benefit to participants to be most important (e.g. people involved with volunteer biological recording schemes). This reveals a distinction between focussing on aims and the pragmatism in achieving those aims. 5.Synthesis and applications. The ordered list of attributes developed in this study will assist in prioritizing resources to develop biodiversity monitoring programmes (including citizen science). The potential conflict between end users of data and participants in data collection that we discovered should be addressed by involving the diversity of stakeholders at all stages of programme development. This will maximize the chance of successfully achieving the goals of biodiversity monitoring programmes

Blueprint for Creating a Community of Care and Support for People with Serious Illness

There is growing awareness nationwide about the importance of care during serious illness and at endof-life.2 The Institute of Medicine (IOM) Report, Dying in America, released in 2014, recommends a person-centered, family-oriented approach that honors individual preferences and promotes quality of life. The IOM Report emphasizes that implementing this vision is a matter of national priority and urgency. In Whatcom County, there is a rising tide of initiatives, interest, and excitement about the idea of creating a community of excellence for people with serious illness. Whatcom County has supported a successful Hospice and inpatient palliative care service for a number of years, and we enjoy a community-wide culture of collaboration that has spawned a university-based institute for palliative care. The NWLP Coalition Task Force was established in 2014 and developed a blueprint that articulates a coherent vision and a plan for collaborative community action toward achieving community excellence for end-of-life care. The original Task Force produced five White Papers that helped inform the original Blueprint. Posted on the WAHA website, the papers cover the following topics: Advance Care Planning; Palliative Care; Community Culture; Provider Training; and Financing the Future. The 2014 Blueprint provided brief background statements for each of these topics, along with keys to excellence, community assets, and recommended steps toward realizing the Blueprint vision. Two years into implementation, the NWLP Coalition is issuing this revised blueprint. Under an expanded title that invites community excellence in “serious illness care” as well as end-of-life care, the Coalition is re-affirming the original vision, and revising the Blueprint with new recommendations that reflect projects completed and lessons learned as well as a set of aspirational community measures

Area selection for diamonds using magnetotellurics : examples from southern Africa

Author Posting. © Elsevier B.V., 2009. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Elsevier B.V. for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Lithos 112 (2009): 83-92, doi:10.1016/j.lithos.2009.06.011.Southern Africa, particularly the Kaapvaal Craton, is one of the world’s best natural laboratories for studying the lithospheric mantle given the wealth of xenolith and seismic data that exist for it. The Southern African Magnetotelluric Experiment (SAMTEX) was launched to complement these databases and provide further constraints on physical parameters and conditions by obtaining information about electrical conductivity variations laterally and with depth. Initially it was planned to acquire magnetotelluric data on profiles spatially coincident with the Kaapvaal Seismic Experiment, however with the addition of seven more partners to the original four through the course of the experiment, SAMTEX was enlarged from two to four phases of acquisition, and extended to cover much of Botswana and Namibia. The complete SAMTEX dataset now comprises MT data from over 675 distinct locations in an area of over one million square kilometres, making SAMTEX the largest regional-scale MT experiment conducted to date. Preliminary images of electrical resistivity and electrical resistivity anisotropy at 100 km and 200 km, constructed through approximate one-dimensional methods, map resistive regions spatially correlated with the Kaapvaal, Zimbabwe and Angola Cratons, and more conductive regions spatially associated with the neighbouring mobile belts and the Rehoboth Terrain. Known diamondiferous kimberlites occur primarily on the boundaries between the resistive or isotropic regions and conductive or anisotropic regions. Comparisons between the resistivity image maps and seismic velocities from models constructed through surface wave and body wave tomography show spatial correlations between high velocity regions that are resistive, and low velocity regions that are conductive. In particular, the electrical resistivity of the sub-continental lithospheric mantle of the Kaapvaal Craton is determined by its bulk parameters, so is controlled by a bulk matrix property, namely temperature, and to a lesser degree by iron content and composition, and is not controlled by contributions from interconnected conducting minor phases, such as graphite, sulphides, iron oxides, hydrous minerals, etc. This makes quantitative correlations between velocity and resistivity valid, and a robust regression between the two gives an approximate relationship of Vs [m/s] = 0.045*log(resistivity [ohm.m]).We especially thank our academic funding sponsors; the Continental Dynamics programme of the U.S. National Science Foundation, the South African Department of Science and Technology, and Science Foundation Ireland

Exploring scale-up, spread, and sustainability: an instrumental case study tracing an innovation to enhance dysphagia care

Background Adoption, adaptation, scale-up, spread, and sustainability are ill-defined, undertheorised, and little-researched implementation science concepts. An instrumental case study will track the adoption and adaptation, or not, of a locally developed innovation about dysphagia as a patient safety issue. The case study will examine a conceptual framework with a continuum of spread comprising hierarchical control or ‘making it happen’, participatory adaptation or ‘help it happen’, and facilitated evolution or ‘let it happen’. Methods This case study is a prospective, longitudinal design using mixed methods. The fifteen-month (October 2012 to December 2013) instrumental case study is set in large, healthcare organisation in England. The innovation refers to introducing a nationally recognised, inter-disciplinary dysphagia competency framework to guide workforce development about fundamental aspects of care. Adoption and adaptation will be examined at an organisational level and along two, contrasting care pathways: stroke and fractured neck of femur. A number of educational interventions will be deployed, including training a cadre of trainers to cascade the essentials of dysphagia management and developing a Dysphagia Toolkit as a learning resource. Mixed methods will be used to investigate scale-up, spread, and sustainability in acute and community settings. A purposive sample of senior managers and clinical leaders will be interviewed to identify path dependency or the context specific particularities of implementation. A pre- and post-evaluation, using mealtime observations and a survey, will investigate the learning effect on staff adherence to patient specific dysphagia recommendations and attitudes towards dysphagia, respectively. Official documents and an ethnographic field journal allow critical junctures, temporal aspects and confounding factors to be explored. Discussion Researching spread and sustainability presents methodological and practical challenges. These include fidelity, adaptation latitude, time, and organisational changes. An instrumental case study will allow these confounding factors to be tracked over time and in place. The case study is underpinned by, and will test a conceptual framework about spread, to explore theoretical generalizability