Development of a Men\u27s Depression Inventory

This paper details the development of a scale to more accurately assess depression in men. It first summarizes the literature on depression, depression assessment, and current research on men and masculinity. It is argued that current conceptualizations of both depression and masculinity influence prevalence studies, which consistently find that men experience depression half as often as women. It is argued that an assessment measure that accounts for masculine variants of depression (substance use, anger, withdrawal, and emotional restriction) may identify more frequent depression in men than previously expected. Next, the paper details the development of a men\u27s depression scale using classical test theory, followed by psychometric analysis of the scale using Rasch modeling and structural equation modeling. Implications on use of the scale and issues related to identifying men\u27s depression are discussed

The Progress of Power: A Narrative Review of the Practical Progression of Running Power Assessment and Application

Power has revolutionized endurance athletics. Power is a function of the amount of force produced in a certain amount of time. Utilized correctly, it can be an effective metric of effort during endurance activities. Cycling saw the first fruits of this metric in the 1980s and 1990s with Tour de France athletes and has continued to provide immense benefits to cyclists. Power when applied to running, however, has seen a much slower progression toward effective use. Various attempts in the 1970s and 80s to use calculations to express running power as a function of multiple different kinematic variables proved futile. In recent years, significant technological developments have led to a revitalization of running power research, particularly in the Stryd pod, which is the most commercially successful “running power meter” available. This technology has been shown to be quite reliable, however results related to metabolic and cardiovascular metrics of effort such as running economy, RPE, and HR have shown a lot of variability and inconsistency. Though sensors such as the Stryd pod have propelled running power research into the 21st century, there is still so much that needs to be done. Perhaps a holistic model utilizing technology from multiple different disciplines in the field of exercise science would provide a more valid and accurate base from which to implement running power in training and racing for a wider range of people and settings

Continuous Control Artificial Potential Function Methods and Optimal Control

Artificial potential function methods (APFMs) are a class of computationally inexpensive control methods for driving a system to a desired goal while avoiding obstacles. Although APFMs have been applied successfully to a wide range systems since the late 1980s, these control methods do have notable drawbacks. The general suboptimality of APFM results is one of these drawbacks, which is due to the fact that APFMs contain no cost function in their formulation. This thesis first develops a new continuous control APFM for fully actuated systems called the Velocity Artificial Potential Function (VAPF) Method, which causes the system velocity to converge to the negative gradient of an artificial potential function. Then, methods for increasing APFM optimality are studied. First, an investigation is undertaken to determine if placing an APFM into an optimal control framework is a practical way of addressing the suboptimality of APFMs. While effective at increasing optimality of APFM results, this approach proves to be too computationally expensive to be practical. Finally, the Adaptive Artificial Potential Function developed by Munoz is studied and implemented via the VAPF Method. This approach produce results with higher optimality than traditional APFMs but negligibly greater computational expense

Age-related differences in event-related potentials for early visual processing of emotional faces

With advancing age, processing resources are shifted away from negative emotional stimuli and toward positive ones. Here, we explored this \u27positivity effect\u27 using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants identified the presence or absence of a visual probe that appeared over photographs of emotional faces. The ERPs elicited by the onsets of angry, sad, happy and neutral faces were recorded. We examined the frontocentral emotional positivity (FcEP), which is defined as a positive deflection in the waveforms elicited by emotional expressions relative to neutral faces early on in the time course of the ERP. The FcEP is thought to reflect enhanced early processing of emotional expressions. The results show that within the first 130 ms young adults show an FcEP to negative emotional expressions, whereas older adults show an FcEP to positive emotional expressions. These findings provide additional evidence that the age-related positivity effect in emotion processing can be traced to automatic processes that are evident very early in the processing of emotional facial expressions

Towards gene therapy for haemophilia using muscle as a target: A study of vector transduction and the implications of the immune response

A major hope for treatment of haemophilia is via a gene based approach. But with this hope as for any new novel treatment for haemophilia, is the occurrence of an immune response. This thesis attempts to examine the role of the immune response to Gene transfer by a muscle directed approach. It characterises the humoral and cellular immune response to the secretable human transgene product human factor IX in both small and large animal models of haemophilia. The humoral responses were studied by means of Elisa, Western Blot and Clotting based assays in both normal and haemophilic animal models. The aim of these experiments was to look for the presence of an antibody to human factor IX, determine whether it was inhibitory or not, and look for factors which may influence it's occurrence. Cellular immune responses were analysed histologically, and also by devising an invitro, and later an in vivo based cytotoxic T cell assay (CTL) assay to look for the presence of specific cellular based responses to the secretable transgene product human factor IX. The results demonstrated that humoral responses were observed to the transgene product human factor IX, and that the antibody subtype IgG1 was induced, in keeping with a TH2 cellular driven immune response to adeno-associated viral gene transfer. In the case of plasmid and Adenoviral vectors, a more dominant TH1 cellular driven response was observed. In the large animal studies a humoral response was observed, but in this scenario the response was less inhibitory than observed in the mice. The development of a humoral response could be overcome by setting immunomodulatory strategies designed to suppress inhibitor formation. The cellular based responses showed that for Adenoviral based gene transfer, strong Cytotoxic T cell responses were observed, but not for AAV based muscle transduction. The conclusions from these studies showed that likely immune responses induced were influenced by vector and transgene selection. Other factors such as route of gene transfer administration and underlying mutation status in recipient animals also affected outcome. Finally it was shown that some of these immune responses could be overcome by the design of immunomodulatory strategies. These findings have significant implications for the design of human clinical studies of gene transfer treatments for haemophilia

An Assessment Instrument of Technological Literacies in Makerspaces and FabLabs

Background As the maker movement is increasingly adopted into K‐12 schools, students are developing new competences in exploration and fabrication technologies. This study assesses learning with these technologies in K‐12 makerspaces and FabLabs. Purpose Our study describes the iterative process of developing an assessment instrument for this new technological literacy, the Exploration and Fabrication Technologies Instrument, and presents findings from implementations at five schools in three countries. Our index is generalizable and psychometrically sound, and permits comparison between student confidence and performance. Design/Method Our evaluation of distinct technology skills separates general computing, information and communication technology (ICT), and exploration and fabrication technologies (EFTs) into nonoverlapping areas of technological expertise required to perform their respective sets of tasks. The instrument also tracks student confidence in EFT skills and assesses how that confidence relates to actual task performance. Results Exploration and fabrication technologies constitute a new and distinct set of technology literacies arising from fabrication settings. The EFT instrument compares students\u27 self‐reported confidence with their performance on complex design tasks and demonstrates that, for students, exposure to general computing and ICT tools differs from exposure to EFT tools. Conclusion The EFT instrument captures a new and distinct set of technology literacies that arise within fabrication settings and are independent of both general computing and digital content production skills

Perspectives on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Agricultural and Applied Economics Profession

In this paper, we present perspectives on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from leaders in the Agricultural and Applied Economics profession. The leaders address how to enhance DEI by identifying goals, barriers, and strategies. DEI programs are already underway, and with the changing student demographics to an increasing proportion of minority students, leaders in Agricultural and Applied Economics departments and employing organizations may want to further position themselves to continue to have an impact. Moreover, creating a successful DEI environment for students may also require improvements in the hiring and retention of diverse talent in academic departments and government institutions. Professional associations like the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA) may assist in helping students transition from their academic programs to successful careers, particularly if in collaboration with hiring institutions

Tiny Language Models Enriched with Multimodal Knowledge from Multiplex Networks

Large transformer language models trained exclusively on massive quantities of text are now the standard in NLP. In addition to the impractical amounts of data used to train them, they require enormous computational resources for training. Furthermore, they lack the rich array of sensory information available to humans, who can learn language with much less exposure to language. In this study, performed for submission in the BabyLM challenge, we show that we can improve a small transformer model’s data efficiency by enriching its embeddings by swapping the learned word embeddings from a tiny transformer model with vectors extracted from a custom multiplex network that encodes visual and sensorimotor information. Further, we use a custom variation of the ELECTRA model that contains less than 7 million parameters and can be trained end-to-end using a single GPU. Our experiments show that models using these embeddings outperform equivalent models when pretrained with only the small BabyLM dataset, containing only 10 million words of text, on a variety of natural language understanding tasks from the GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks and a variation of the BLiMP task