Audiology Students’ Perception of Hybrid Simulation Experiences: Qualitative Evaluation of Debriefing Sessions

Simulation-based research is still new in the audiology field and requires more research to better understand students’ perspectives on standardized patients/parents (SPs) and manikins use. There is also limited research about debriefing practices in audiology. This qualitative study used a baby simulator and SPs to evaluate audiology students’ reflection during three debriefing sessions conducted at the University of Arkansas for Medical Science (UAMS) Simulation Center. Seventeen Doctor of Audiology (AuD) students participated in the simulation event, and the data were collected using the transcripts of videotaped debriefing sessions. The qualitative content analysis of the transcripts revealed eight sub-themes: support, compassion, respect, teamwork, limited academic knowledge and practice, insufficient communication skills, low self-confidence, and undesirable emotional reactions. These items, in turn, fell under two main themes of Qualification and Lack of Preparation. Both main themes were included in one core category named Professional Dispositions and Competencies. Study findings indicated that audiology students demonstrated both promising professional dispositions and competencies as well as characteristics that may hinder students from developing their professional abilities. Thus, audiology programs will benefit from simulation use, including debriefing sessions, to emphasize professional efficiency

Category training affects colour discrimination but only in the right visual field

There is indirect evidence that categorical colour perception (better discrimination of colours from different categories than those from the same category) can be learned. For instance, CP can be induced across a newly learned category boundary (Özgen & Davies 2002). Here we replicate and extend Özgen and Davies's category learning study to try and pinpoint the nature of the changes underlying category learning. Participants learned to divide green into two new categories 'yellow-green'/'blue-green' across four days. The trained group showed CP across the new boundary on a target detection task and this was restricted to the left hemisphere (LH; cf. Drivonikou et al. 2007), whereas the controls did not. The results could suggest that category training produces changes at early stages in visual processing mainly in the LH. © 2011 - John Benjamins B.V

Evidence and Ideology in Macroeconomics: The Case of Investment Cycles

The paper reports the principal findings of a long term research project on the description and explanation of business cycles. The research strongly confirmed the older view that business cycles have large systematic components that take the form of investment cycles. These quasi-periodic movements can be represented as low order, stochastic, dynamic processes with complex eigenvalues. Specifically, there is a fixed investment cycle of about 8 years and an inventory cycle of about 4 years. Maximum entropy spectral analysis was employed for the description of the cycles and continuous time econometrics for the explanatory models. The central explanatory mechanism is the second order accelerator, which incorporates adjustment costs both in relation to the capital stock and the rate of investment. By means of parametric resonance it was possible to show, both theoretically and empirically how cycles aggregate from the micro to the macro level. The same mathematical tool was also used to explain the international convergence of cycles. I argue that the theory of investment cycles was abandoned for ideological, not for evidential reasons. Methodological issues are also discussed

Science and Ideology in Economic, Political, and Social Thought

This paper has two sources: One is my own research in three broad areas: business cycles, economic measurement and social choice. In all of these fields I attempted to apply the basic precepts of the scientific method as it is understood in the natural sciences. I found that my effort at using natural science methods in economics was met with little understanding and often considerable hostility. I found economics to be driven less by common sense and empirical evidence, then by various ideologies that exhibited either a political or a methodological bias, or both. This brings me to the second source: Several books have appeared recently that describe in historical terms the ideological forces that have shaped either the direct areas in which I worked, or a broader background. These books taught me that the ideological forces in the social sciences are even stronger than I imagined on the basis of my own experiences. The scientific method is the antipode to ideology. I feel that the scientific work that I have done on specific, long standing and fundamental problems in economics and political science have given me additional insights into the destructive role of ideology beyond the history of thought orientation of the works I will be discussing

Categorical encoding of color in the brain

The areas of the brain that encode color categorically have not yet been reliably identified. Here, we used functional MRI adaptation to identify neuronal populations that represent color categories irrespective of metric differences in color. Two colors were successively presented within a block of trials. The two colors were either from the same or different categories (e.g., “blue 1 and blue 2” or “blue 1 and green 1”), and the size of the hue difference was varied. Participants performed a target detection task unrelated to the difference in color. In the middle frontal gyrus of both hemispheres and to a lesser extent, the cerebellum, blood-oxygen level-dependent response was greater for colors from different categories relative to colors from the same category. Importantly, activation in these regions was not modulated by the size of the hue difference, suggesting that neurons in these regions represent color categorically, regardless of metric color difference. Representational similarity analyses, which investigated the similarity of the pattern of activity across local groups of voxels, identified other regions of the brain (including the visual cortex), which responded to metric but not categorical color differences. Therefore, categorical and metric hue differences appear to be coded in qualitatively different ways and in different brain regions. These findings have implications for the long-standing debate on the origin and nature of color categories, and also further our understanding of how color is processed by the brain

Contextual Effects of Class Mobility on Voting Behaviour in 16 Western Countries: 1956-1990

FdR – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

Colour categories are reflected in sensory stages of colour perception when stimulus issues are resolved

Debate exists about the time course of the effect of colour categories on visual processing. We investigated the effect of colour categories for two groups who differed in whether they categorised a blue-green boundary colour as the same- or different-category to a reliably-named blue colour and a reliably-named green colour. Colour differences were equated in just-noticeable differences to be equally discriminable. We analysed event-related potentials for these colours elicited on a passive visual oddball task and investigated the time course of categorical effects on colour processing. Support for category effects was found 100 ms after stimulus onset, and over frontal sites around 250 ms, suggesting that colour naming affects both early sensory and later stages of chromatic processing

Serum neurofilament dynamics predicts neurodegeneration and clinical progression in presymptomatic Alzheimer's disease

Neurofilament light chain (NfL) is a promising fluid biomarker of disease progression for various cerebral proteopathies. Here we leverage the unique characteristics of the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network and ultrasensitive immunoassay technology to demonstrate that NfL levels in the cerebrospinal fluid (n = 187) and serum (n = 405) are correlated with one another and are elevated at the presymptomatic stages of familial Alzheimer's disease. Longitudinal, within-person analysis of serum NfL dynamics (n = 196) confirmed this elevation and further revealed that the rate of change of serum NfL could discriminate mutation carriers from non-mutation carriers almost a decade earlier than cross-sectional absolute NfL levels (that is, 16.2 versus 6.8 years before the estimated symptom onset). Serum NfL rate of change peaked in participants converting from the presymptomatic to the symptomatic stage and was associated with cortical thinning assessed by magnetic resonance imaging, but less so with amyloid-β deposition or glucose metabolism (assessed by positron emission tomography). Serum NfL was predictive for both the rate of cortical thinning and cognitive changes assessed by the Mini-Mental State Examination and Logical Memory test. Thus, NfL dynamics in serum predict disease progression and brain neurodegeneration at the early presymptomatic stages of familial Alzheimer's disease, which supports its potential utility as a clinically useful biomarker

Color afterimages in autistic adults

It has been suggested that attenuated adaptation to visual stimuli in autism is the result of atypical perceptual priors (e.g., Pellicano and Burr in Trends Cogn Sci 16(10):504–510, 2012. doi:10.​1016/​j.​tics.​2012.​08.​009). This study investigated adaptation to color in autistic adults, measuring both strength of afterimage and the influence of top-down knowledge. We found no difference in color afterimage strength between autistic and typical adults. Effects of top-down knowledge on afterimage intensity shown by Lupyan (Acta Psychol 161:117–130, 2015. doi:10.​1016/​j.​actpsy.​2015.​08.​006) were not replicated for either group. This study finds intact color adaptation in autistic adults. This is in contrast to findings of attenuated adaptation to faces and numerosity in autistic children. Future research should investigate the possibility of developmental differences in adaptation and further examine top-down effects on adaptation

Biological/Biomedical Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Targets. 2. Physical, Morphological, and Structural Characteristics

The number of biological/biomedical applications that require AMS to achieve their goals is increasing, and so is the need for a better understanding of the physical, morphological, and structural traits of high quality of AMS targets. The metrics of quality included color, hardness/texture, and appearance (photo and SEM), along with FT-IR, Raman, and powder X-ray diffraction spectra that correlate positively with reliable and intense ion currents and accuracy, precision, and sensitivity of fraction modern (Fm). Our previous method produced AMS targets of gray-colored iron−carbon materials (ICM) 20% of the time and of graphite-coated iron (GCI) 80% of the time. The ICM was hard, its FT-IR spectra lacked the sp2 bond, its Raman spectra had no detectable G′ band at 2700 cm−1, and it had more iron carbide (Fe3C) crystal than nanocrystalline graphite or graphitizable carbon (g-C). ICM produced low and variable ion current whereas the opposite was true for the graphitic GCI. Our optimized method produced AMS targets of graphite-coated iron powder (GCIP) 100% of the time. The GCIP shared some of the same properties as GCI in that both were black in color, both produced robust ion current consistently, their FT-IR spectra had the sp2 bond, their Raman spectra had matching D, G, G′, D+G, and D′′ bands, and their XRD spectra showed matching crystal size. GCIP was a powder that was easy to tamp into AMS target holders that also facilitated high throughput. We concluded that AMS targets of GCIP were a mix of graphitizable carbon and Fe3C crystal, because none of their spectra, FT-IR, Raman, or XRD, matched exactly those of the graphite standard. Nevertheless, AMS targets of GCIP consistently produced the strong, reliable, and reproducible ion currents for high-throughput AMS analysis (270 targets per skilled analyst/day) along with accurate and precise Fm values