The development of word-object associations in typically developing infants and infants and toddlers with Williams syndrome.

The ability to form associations between words and objects rapidly with a short amount of exposure is a marker of more proficient word learners in typically developing (TD) infants. Investigating the underlying mechanisms for how words are associated with objects is necessary for understanding early word learning in the TD population as well as in people with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare neurogenetic developmental disorder characterized by language delay in early development. The findings in the present study showed a developmental difference in the ability to form word–object associations between 12 and 14 months of age in TD infants. It was indicated that whereas TD 12-month-old infants predominantly processed objects, TD 14-month-old infants processed objects, words, and word–object associations. The developmental pattern found with the participants with WS was very similar to that found in the TD infants. The findings indicated that toddlers with WS develop the ability to rapidly learn word-object associations as early as 2 years of age. Whereas 1-year-olds with WS processed objects and words, 2-year-olds with WS processed objects, words, and word–object associations. These patterns suggested that infants and toddlers with WS may go through similar developmental changes in learning word–object associations as TD population, though their language development is delayed. The findings provided evidence of underlying mechanisms of early word learning in both TD infants and infants and toddlers with WS. In the present study on learning word–object associations, a domain-general developmental progression from an independent to an integrated level of processing was found. In both TD infants and infants and toddlers with WS, novice word learners, who were in the independent processing phase, mainly processed the word and/or object information, but processed them independently of one another. In contrast, intermediate word learners processed associative information between words and objects, as well as the word and object information. This developmental progression was consistent with Cohen’s information processing approach to infant cognitive and perceptual development

THREE ESSAYS ON RURAL EDUCATION: DESCRIPTIVE STUDIES FOCUSED ON FEDERAL RURAL DEFINITIONS AND POLICY CHANGES

Rural education issues in K-12 public schools are understudied despite a large rural student population in the U.S. This dissertation studies how different federal definitions of rural change how rural school districts and their diverse communities are portrayed, in comparison to their non-rural counterparts. This study also explores the recent federal rural policy changes on rural district revenue and student academic outcomes. This dissertation consists of three descriptive essays. The first chapter shows how we choose to define ‘rural’ changes what differences are accentuated between rural and non-rural districts. Definitions of ‘rural’ is closely related to who gains access to federal rural financial assistance. I find that both rural and non-rural school districts show differences in their district characteristics and level of district revenue when two different federal rural definitions are applied to define which districts belong to ‘rural’. The second chapter investigates a federal rural financial assistance initiative, the Rural Education Achievement Program (REAP) and its recent policy changes on funding eligibility requirements. I find new rural federal funding policy changes increased the number of poor rural districts receiving the funding. The new policy change also allowed rural districts to make more independent financial decisions by choosing their preferred program to receive the rural funding when they are qualified for both Rural Low-Income School Program (RLIS) and Small, Rural School Achievement Program (SRSA). The third chapter explores the relationship between current rural policy changes and student achievement gaps between rural and non-rural school districts, and within rural districts. I look at the historical student achievement gap trends and find the interesting patterns that existed before and after the REAP policy changes. Rural school districts receiving additional funding from REAP program are observed to have increases in student test scores, especially for rural districts with high fractions of minority and poverty-status students

Text2Action: Generative Adversarial Synthesis from Language to Action

In this paper, we propose a generative model which learns the relationship between language and human action in order to generate a human action sequence given a sentence describing human behavior. The proposed generative model is a generative adversarial network (GAN), which is based on the sequence to sequence (SEQ2SEQ) model. Using the proposed generative network, we can synthesize various actions for a robot or a virtual agent using a text encoder recurrent neural network (RNN) and an action decoder RNN. The proposed generative network is trained from 29,770 pairs of actions and sentence annotations extracted from MSR-Video-to-Text (MSR-VTT), a large-scale video dataset. We demonstrate that the network can generate human-like actions which can be transferred to a Baxter robot, such that the robot performs an action based on a provided sentence. Results show that the proposed generative network correctly models the relationship between language and action and can generate a diverse set of actions from the same sentence.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figure

Landscape of gene transposition-duplication within the Brassicaceae family

© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Kazusa DNA Research Institute. We developed the CLfinder-OrthNet pipeline that detects co-linearity among multiple closely related genomes, finds orthologous gene groups, and encodes the evolutionary history of each orthologue group into a representative network (OrthNet). Using a search based on network topology, we identified 1,394 OrthNets that included gene transposition-duplication (tr-d) events, out of 17,432 identified in six Brassicaceae genomes. Occurrences of tr-d shared by subsets of Brassicaceae genomes mirrored the divergence times between the genomes and their repeat contents. The majority of tr-d events resulted in truncated open reading frames (ORFs) in the duplicated loci. However, the duplicates with complete ORFs were significantly more frequent than expected from random events. These were derived from older tr-d events and had a higher chance of being expressed. We also found an enrichment of tr-d events with complete loss of intergenic sequence conservation between the original and duplicated loci. Finally, we identified tr-d events uniquely found in two extremophytes among the six Brassicaceae genomes, including tr-d of SALT TOLERANCE 32 and ZINC TRANSPORTER 3 that relate to their adaptive evolution. CLfinder-OrthNet provides a flexible toolkit to compare gene order, visualize evolutionary paths among orthologues as networks, and identify gene loci that share an evolutionary history

Selective versus comprehensive emergency management in Korea

In spite of Korean governments’ efforts, many emergency management practitioners wonder whether what is actually being practiced is selective or comprehensive management. Using a qualitative content analysis and experiences in practice, the article analyzes the barriers to selective emergency management and the paths to comprehensive emergency management via the same three management elements: stakeholders, phases of the emergency management lifecycle, and hazards and impacts. Four analytical levels are considered: central government level, industry level, community level, and household level. Korea, despite its self-praise, has to transform its selective emergency management into comprehensive emergency management in time