Perceived Psychological Restorativeness in Relation to Individual and Environmental Variables: A Study Conducted at Poetto Beach in Sardinia, Italy

This study examines how objective, social, and perceived environmental conditions in a blue space are associated with the perception of psychological restorativeness. We collected data between April 2021 and February 2022 at Poetto Beach in Sardinia, Italy. The participants (N = 255) completed a survey about perceived environmental quality, stress, weather, and restorativeness during their stay at the beach. We used linear models to evaluate the association between psychological restorativeness and social, environmental, and weather parameters. We also analyzed the nature of the association between temperature and restorativeness by viewing this relation as both linear and non-linear and by evaluating the differences in restorativeness between winter, springtime, and summer. The results suggested that the participants viewed the beach as psychologically restorative, especially during the winter season. We also found that the number of people that participants came with was negatively associated with perceived restorativeness. Finally, the results from the correlation analysis revealed that people are less stressed if they go to the beach more frequently

The Wolf of SUTD (TWOS): A dataset of malicious insider threat behavior based on a gamified competition

In this paper we present open research questions and options for data analysis of our previously designed dataset called TWOS: The Wolf of SUTD. In specified research questions, we illustrate the potential use of the TWOS dataset in multiple areas of cyber security, which does not limit only to malicious insider threat detection but are also related to authorship verification and identification, continuous authentication, and sentiment analysis. For the purpose of investigating the research questions, we present several state-of-the-art features applicable to collected data sources, and thus we provide researchers with a guidance how to start with data analysis. The TWOS dataset was collected during a gamified competition that was devised in order to obtain realistic instances of malicious insider threat. The competition simulated user interactions in/among competing companies, where two types of behaviors (normal and malicious) were incentivized. For the case of malicious behavior,we designed two types of malicious periods that was intended to capture the behavior of two types of insiders – masqueraders and traitors. The game involved the participation of 6 teams consisting of 4 students who competed with each other for a period of 5 days. Their activities were monitored by several data collection agents and producing data for mouse, keyboard, process and file-system monitor, network traffic, emails, and login/logout data sources. In total, we obtained 320 hours of active participation that included 18 hours of masquerader data and at least two instances of traitor data. In addition to expected malicious behaviors, students explored various defensive and offensive strategies such as denial of service attacks and obfuscation techniques, in an effort to get ahead in the competition. The TWOS dataset was made publicly accessible for further research purposes. In this paper we present the TWOS dataset that contains realistic instances of insider threats based on a gamified competition. The competition simulated user interactions in/among competing companies, where two types of behaviors (normal and malicious) were incentivized. For the case of malicious behavior, we designed sessions for two types of insider threats (masqueraders and traitors). The game involved the participation of 6 teams consisting of 4 students who competed with each other for a period of 5 days, while their activities were monitored considering several heterogeneous sources (mouse, keyboard, process and file-system monitor, network traffic, emails and login/logout). In total, we obtained 320 hours of active participation that included 18 hours of masquerader data and at least two instances of traitor data. In addition to expected malicious behaviors, students explored various defensive and offensive strategies such as denial of service attacks and obfuscation techniques, in an effort to get ahead in the competition. Furthermore, we illustrate the potential use of the TWOS dataset in multiple areas of cyber security, which does not limit to malicious insider threat detection, but also areas such as authorship verification and identification, continuous authentication, and sentiment analysis. We also present several state-of-the-art features that can be extracted from different data sources in order to guide researchers in the analysis of the dataset. The TWOS dataset is publicly accessible for further research purposes. © 2018, Innovative Information Science and Technology Research Group. All rights reserved

ProKinO: An Ontology for Integrative Analysis of Protein Kinases in Cancer

Protein kinases are a large and diverse family of enzymes that are genomically altered in many human cancers. Targeted cancer genome sequencing efforts have unveiled the mutational profiles of protein kinase genes from many different cancer types. While mutational data on protein kinases is currently catalogued in various databases, integration of mutation data with other forms of data on protein kinases such as sequence, structure, function and pathway is necessary to identify and characterize key cancer causing mutations. Integrative analysis of protein kinase data, however, is a challenge because of the disparate nature of protein kinase data sources and data formats., where the mutations are spread over 82 distinct kinases. We also provide examples of how ontology-based data analysis can be used to generate testable hypotheses regarding cancer mutations.

Are children with developmental dyslexia all the same? A cluster analysis with more than 300 cases

Reading is vital to every aspect of modern life, exacerbated by reliance of the internet, email, and social media on the written medium. Developmental dyslexia (DD) characterizes a disorder in which the core deficit involves reading. Traditionally, DD is thought to be associated with a phonological impairment. However, recent evidence has begun to suggest that the reading impairment in some individuals is provoked by a visual processing deficit. In this paper, we present WISC‐IV data from more than 300 Italian children with a diagnosis of DD to investigate the manifestation of phonological and visual subtypes. Our results indicate the existence of two clusters of children with DD. In one cluster, the deficit was more pronounced in the phonological component, while both clusters were impaired in visual processing. These data indicate that DD may be an umbrella term that encompasses different profiles. From a theoretical perspective, our results demonstrate that dyslexia cannot be explained in terms of an isolated phonological deficit alone; visual impairment plays a crucial role. Moreover, general rather than specific accounts of DD are discussed

Autocrine PDGF stimulation in malignancies

Platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) isoforms are important mitogens for different types of mesenchymal cells, which have important functions during the embryonal development and in the adult during wound healing and tissue homeostasis. In tumors, PDGF isoforms are often over-expressed and contribute to the growth of both normal and malignant cells. This review focuses on tumors expressing PDGF isoforms together with their tyrosine kinase receptors, thus resulting in autocrine stimulation of growth and survival. Patients with such tumors could benefit from treatment with inhibitors of either PDGF or PDGF receptors

Specific weaknesses of high-functioning autistic children on the Leiter-3 International Performance Scale

The assessments of non-verbal intelligence in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may be subject to biases. This study compared the scores obtained on the most recent version of the Leiter scale by 18 children with high-functioning ASD and 18 typically-developing controls, who were matched for age, sex, and IQ estimated using the Raven’s Coloured Matrices. ASD children performed worse than controls on all virtually subtests and areas of the Leiter-3, including non-verbal IQ, attention-related, and working memory ability. It is suggested that the high degree of social interaction required by the Leiter-3 makes its use problematic for ASD children

Dyslexia treatment studies: A systematic review and suggestions on testing treatment efficacy with small effects and small samples

Poor response to treatment is a defining characteristic of reading disorder. In the present systematic review and meta-analysis, we found that the overall average effect size for treatment efficacy was modest, with a mean standardized difference of 0.38. Small true effects, combined with the difficulty to recruit large samples, seriously challenge researchers planning to test treatment efficacy in dyslexia and potentially in other learning disorders. Nonetheless, most published studies claim effectiveness, generally based on liberal use of multiple testing. This inflates the risk that most statistically significant results are associated with overestimated effect sizes. To enhance power, we propose the strategic use of repeated measurements with mixed-effects modelling. This novel approach would enable us to estimate both individual parameters and population-level effects more reliably. We suggest assessing a reading outcome not once, but three times, at pre-treatment and three times at post-treatment. Such design would require only modest additional efforts compared to current practices. Based on this, we performed ad hoc a priori design analyses via simulation studies. Results showed that using the novel design may allow one to reach adequate power even with low sample sizes of 30–40 participants (i.e., 15–20 participants per group) for a typical effect size of d = 0.38. Nonetheless, more conservative assumptions are warranted for various reasons, including a high risk of publication bias in the extant literature. Our considerations can be extended to intervention studies of other types of neurodevelopmental disorders

The Morra Game as a Naturalistic Test Bed for Investigating Automatic and Voluntary Processes in Random Sequence Generation

Morra is a 3,000-years-old hand game of prediction and numbers. The two players reveal their hand simultaneously, presenting a number of fingers between 1 and 5, while calling out a number between 2 and 10. Any player who successfully guesses the summation of fingers revealed by both players scores a point. While the game is extremely fast-paced, making it very difficult for players to achieve a conscious control of their game strategies, expert players regularly outperform non-experts, possibly with strategies residing out of conscious control. In this study, we used Morra as a naturalistic setting to investigate the necessity of attentive control in generation of sequence of items and the ability to proceduralize random number generation, which are both a crucial defensive strategy in Morra and a well-known empirical procedure to test the central executive capacity within the working memory model. We recorded the sequence of numbers generated by expert players in a Morra tournament in Sardinia (Italy) and by undergraduate students enrolled in a course-based research experience (CRE) course at Lawrence Technological University in the United States. Number sequences generated by non-expert and expert players both while playing Morra and in a random number generation task (RNGT) were compared in terms of randomness scores. Results indicate that expert players of Morra largely outperformed non-experts in the randomness scores only within Morra games, whereas in RNGT the two groups were very similar. Importantly, survey data acquired after the games indicate that expert players have very poor conscious recall of their number generation strategies used during the Morra game. Our results indicate that the ability of generating random sequences can be proceduralized and do not necessarily require attentive control. Results are discussed in the framework of the dual processing theory and its automatic-parallel-fast vs. controlled-sequential-slow polarities