Parental Experiences of Professional Involvement for Children And Young People with Selective Mutism and Their Preferred Support

Selective Mutism (SM) is a rare childhood disorder that affects the ability to speak in certain social environments, despite having the physical ability to speak. Without appropriate support and intervention, it can persist into adulthood. Despite its potential long-lasting effects, knowledge of the disorder and how to support those with it is limited. Research into SM is mostly quantitative, or case studies focused on the effectiveness of interventions. This research aimed to explore parental perspectives of professional support for their child with SM, how this support has influenced their experience of SM, and ideal support for the children and families of those with SM. Despite the key role that parents have in their child’s life and recovery from SM, they are currently almost voiceless within the literature. Likewise, the support that professionals provide that is beneficial is unclear. Eight parents with a child in key stage 3 or 4 with traits of SM took part in semistructured interviews. Thematic analysis was used to qualitatively analyse the data. A first master theme of ‘the parent and SM’ was identified, followed by a superordinate theme of ‘experiences of professional input’, which contains two further master themes of ‘input of professionals’ and ‘the system’. A master theme of ‘impact of professional’s input’ was identified, followed by the final master theme of ‘looking forwards’. Parents reported both supportive and unhelpful input from professionals affected by factors such as the professional’s personality, communication, and knowledge of SM. Parents also identified barriers in the systems around professionals which affected the support they received. They noted the high impact a professional could have on the life of the parent and their child, and expressed hope for more awareness of SM, and an SM pathway. Further research could explore the viability of such a pathway

Robust federated learning with noisy communication

Federated learning is a communication-efficient training process that alternate between local training at the edge devices and averaging of the updated local model at the center server. Nevertheless, it is impractical to achieve perfect acquisition of the local models in wireless communication due to the noise, which also brings serious effect on federated learning. To tackle this challenge in this paper, we propose a robust design for federated learning to decline the effect of noise. Considering the noise in two aforementioned steps, we first formulate the training problem as a parallel optimization for each node under the expectation-based model and worst-case model. Due to the non-convexity of the problem, regularizer approximation method is proposed to make it tractable. Regarding the worst-case model, we utilize the sampling-based successive convex approximation algorithm to develop a feasible training scheme to tackle the unavailable maxima or minima noise condition and the non-convex issue of the objective function. Furthermore, the convergence rates of both new designs are analyzed from a theoretical point of view. Finally, the improvement of prediction accuracy and the reduction of loss function value are demonstrated via simulation for the proposed designs

Visual Feature Attribution using Wasserstein GANs

Attributing the pixels of an input image to a certain category is an important and well-studied problem in computer vision, with applications ranging from weakly supervised localisation to understanding hidden effects in the data. In recent years, approaches based on interpreting a previously trained neural network classifier have become the de facto state-of-the-art and are commonly used on medical as well as natural image datasets. In this paper, we discuss a limitation of these approaches which may lead to only a subset of the category specific features being detected. To address this problem we develop a novel feature attribution technique based on Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGAN), which does not suffer from this limitation. We show that our proposed method performs substantially better than the state-of-the-art for visual attribution on a synthetic dataset and on real 3D neuroimaging data from patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's disease (AD). For AD patients the method produces compellingly realistic disease effect maps which are very close to the observed effects.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201

Faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhi penguasaan sains dalam kalangan murid Sekolah Rendah Kebangsaan

Sains merupakan satu mata pelajaran yang mengkaji secara sistematik berkenaan alam semula jadi dan juga bagaimana alam semula jadi ini memberi kesan kepada kita dan persekitaran

Bringing the JMGS into Being– An Origin Story

The essay revisits the events behind the origin and genesis of the journal in celebration of its 10 years of existence

Assessment of the feasibility of an ultra-low power, wireless digital patch for the continuous ambulatory monitoring of vital signs.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Vital signs are usually recorded at 4–8 h intervals in hospital patients, and deterioration between measurements can have serious consequences. The primary study objective was to assess agreement between a new ultra-low power, wireless and wearable surveillance system for continuous ambulatory monitoring of vital signs and a widely used clinical vital signs monitor. The secondary objective was to examine the system's ability to automatically identify and reject invalid physiological data. SETTING: Single hospital centre. PARTICIPANTS: Heart and respiratory rate were recorded over 2 h in 20 patients undergoing elective surgery and a second group of 41 patients with comorbid conditions, in the general ward. OUTCOME MEASURES: Primary outcome measures were limits of agreement and bias. The secondary outcome measure was proportion of data rejected. RESULTS: The digital patch provided reliable heart rate values in the majority of patients (about 80%) with normal sinus rhythm, and in the presence of abnormal ECG recordings (excluding aperiodic arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation). The mean difference between systems was less than ±1 bpm in all patient groups studied. Although respiratory data were more frequently rejected as invalid because of the high sensitivity of impedance pneumography to motion artefacts, valid rates were reported for 50% of recordings with a mean difference of less than ±1 brpm compared with the bedside monitor. Correlation between systems was statistically significant (p<0.0001) for heart and respiratory rate, apart from respiratory rate in patients with atrial fibrillation (p=0.02). CONCLUSIONS: Overall agreement between digital patch and clinical monitor was satisfactory, as was the efficacy of the system for automatic rejection of invalid data. Wireless monitoring technologies, such as the one tested, may offer clinical value when implemented as part of wider hospital systems that integrate and support existing clinical protocols and workflows

Analysis of the influence of module construction upon forward osmosis performance

The potential of a commercial forward osmosis (FO) module to recover water from NEWater brine, an RO retentate, was assessed by taking an innovative approach to obtaining the mass transfer coefficients. The performance comparison of the spiral wound (S-W) FO module with that of the flat sheet laboratory unit suggests that the winding involved in S-W construction can adversely affect performance; the values for the S-W mass transfer coefficients were half of those expected. This first-of-its-kind performance comparison utilised coupons of the membrane and spacers taken from the module. The module was used both in the conventional manner for FO and in the reverse manner with the active layer facing the draw solution. Estimates of membrane parameters and mass transfer coefficients experiments for the two orientations were obtained using pure water, 10 mM and 25 mM NaCl solution on the feed side and 1 M NaCl as draw solution. The fouling potential of NEWater brine per se was found to be low. These are the first results with a S-W module that suggest potential for this niche application; nevertheless the level of the water flux through the S-W module clearly indicates that industrial applications of S-W FO will be constrained to special cases