Analyzing the Quality of Attention of a Client with Williams Syndrome During Improvisational Music Therapy

This study sought to investigate the effectiveness of improvisational music therapy for a client with Williams Syndrome (WS). The study employed both quantitative and qualitative analysis to assess the quality of attention of a client with WS during improvisational music therapy. The participant of this study was a teenage boy with Williams Syndrome who received music therapy at the Rebecca Center for Music Therapy and Molloy College in New York. The study analyzed the participant’s attention behaviors in musical-play by reviewing video recordings that had been made of the client’s therapy sessions at the Rebecca Center. To analyze the quantitative data, this study measured the client’s attention behaviors by using select dimensions (focusing on musical attention) of the Individual Music-Centered Assessment Profile for Neurodevelopmental Disorders (IMCAP-ND; Carpente, 2013). These ratings were examined for directionality of change over the course of five therapy sessions by using a linear regression analysis. For the qualitative analysis, video recordings were reviewed to determine separately the effects of improvisational therapy treatment on the client over the five sessions. The study described the quality of attention based on the linear regression graphs and notes about the sessions, including how the music therapist and client played music interactively, how the client improved, and what the client’s behavior meant

Auxiliary Verbs as Head-adjoined Expressives in Korean: Against the Aspectual Approach

We examine the nature of the second verb (V2) in auxiliary verb constructions in Korean, in which one clause with two verbs denotes a single event. Arguing against the previous analyses that treat the V2 as an Aspect head, we propose that the V2 is head-adjoined to the v of the first verb (V1) and marks the speaker’s commitment toward the event described in the sentence

Online Video Deblurring via Dynamic Temporal Blending Network

State-of-the-art video deblurring methods are capable of removing non-uniform blur caused by unwanted camera shake and/or object motion in dynamic scenes. However, most existing methods are based on batch processing and thus need access to all recorded frames, rendering them computationally demanding and time consuming and thus limiting their practical use. In contrast, we propose an online (sequential) video deblurring method based on a spatio-temporal recurrent network that allows for real-time performance. In particular, we introduce a novel architecture which extends the receptive field while keeping the overall size of the network small to enable fast execution. In doing so, our network is able to remove even large blur caused by strong camera shake and/or fast moving objects. Furthermore, we propose a novel network layer that enforces temporal consistency between consecutive frames by dynamic temporal blending which compares and adaptively (at test time) shares features obtained at different time steps. We show the superiority of the proposed method in an extensive experimental evaluation.Comment: 10 page

The Politics of Employment Insecurity

At the heart of debates about the effects of globalization and the service economy on the welfare state is the notion of employment insecurity. It is considered a key causal mechanism through which cross-border movements of capital, goods and services (globalization) and employment shifts from manufacturing to services (deindustrialization) affect social policy. However, empirical research on such a causal linkage has been markedly lacking. In many cases, employment insecurity has been simply assumed to be the causal mechanism at work behind the observed relationship between economic globalization or deindustrialization and governments' commitment to social protection. This dissertation brings the hidden causal mechanism to the fore by using employment protection both as an explanatory and a dependent variable. Employment protection, which refers to regulatory frameworks that govern hiring and firing, has a direct bearing on workers' job security and can capture the politics of labor market risks. This dissertation consists of two projects. First, it examines how globalization and the service economy affect employment protection. Second, it analyzes how employment protection influences institutions of social protection. Focusing on the preferences and political strength of skilled workers, I argue that the effects of international trade and the service economy on employment protection depend on the relative scarcity of skilled labor and on the patterns of employment shifts between industries. I also contend that whether employment insecurity leads to expanded social protection depends on the social policy preference of skilled workers, which in turn, is shaped by the skill distribution in the economy and by pre-existing social protection institutions. This study finds that employment protection is both a political response to external and internal economic changes and a driving force for social policy change. Moreover, it highlights different causal processes for developed and developing economies. It offers statistical evidence based on two extensive cross-national time-series datasets of employment protection in the OECD and Latin America, and uses a case study of South Korea as qualitative evidence to elucidate the underlying dynamics of its quantitative findings