The design and evaluation of collimators for the measurement of radioactive isotope distribution in vivo

Imperial Users onl

There are multiple contributors to the verbal short-term memory deficit in children with developmental reading disabilities.

Prior research has put forth at least four possible contributors to the verbal short-term memory (VSTM) deficit in children with developmental reading disabilities (RD): poor phonological awareness that affects phonological coding into VSTM, a less effective phonological store, slow articulation rate, and fewer/poorer quality long-term memory (LTM) representations. This project is among the first to test the four suppositions in one study. Participants included 18 children with RD and 18 controls. VSTM was assessed using Baddeley\u27s model of the phonological loop. Findings suggest all four suppositions are correct, depending upon the type of material utilized. Children with RD performed comparably to controls in VSTM for common words but worse for less frequent words and nonwords. Furthermore, only articulation rate predicted VSTM for common words, whereas Verbal IQ and articulation rate predicted VSTM for less frequent words, and phonological awareness and articulation rate predicted VSTM for nonwords. Overall, findings suggest that the mechanism(s) used to code and store items by their meaning is intact in RD, and the deficit in VSTM for less frequent words may be a result of fewer/poorer quality LTM representations for these words. In contrast, phonological awareness and the phonological store are impaired, affecting VSTM for items that are coded phonetically. Slow articulation rate likely affects VSTM for most material when present. When assessing reading performance, VSTM predicted decoding skill but not word identification after controlling Verbal IQ and phonological awareness. Thus, VSTM likely contributes to reading ability when words are novel and must be decoded

Analyzing Business-Focused Social Networks in Hiring: The Influence of a Job Candidate\u27s Network on a Recruiter\u27s Hiring Recommendation

Social media has altered the ways in which people interact. Business-focused social media profiles, such as those on LinkedIn, can act as a proxy for a traditional resume. However, these websites differ from a traditional resume in that information presented is sometimes informal, personal, and irrelevant to the member’s career. Furthermore, HR employees are able to view a job candidate’s social network. This research investigates the influence of a recruiter’s knowledge of an applicant’s professional network on the recruiter’s perception of the applicant’s trustworthiness and hence their willingness to take risk in the hiring relationship. A review of the literature covered two areas of research: trust and the use of social networks in hiring. While previous studies connected the trust model to LinkedIn, none of them addressed the influence of a LinkedIn profile’s social network on a hiring manager’s perception of the candidate’s trustworthiness. A survey-based experiment was designed to evaluate how network association bias, a newly created construct, affects a hiring manager’s perception of a job candidate’s ability and benevolence. The experimental model was based on Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman’s trust model. A structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis was conducted in RStudio using the lavaan latent variable modeling package. ix The results of this experiment reveal that that a job candidate’s social network impacts how the candidate’s levels of ability and benevolence are perceived by others. Furthermore, it is suggested that a recruiter’s propensity to trust influences the relationship between network association bias and a job candidate’s ability

Reviews

Successful Instructional Diagrams by Ric Lowe, London, Kogan Page, 1993. ISBN: 0–7494–0711–5

Video Games, Colonialism, and Theater: The Nature of Ideology in Endless and Narrative Games

Despite the rapidly growing popularity of video games, their ideology remains a disputed and controversial topic. This paper examines several influential games through postcolonial and Brechtian lenses, in order to provide a new methodology by which to analyze the ways in which specific sub-genres of games engage with player autonomy and inevitably fail to meaningfully allow player manipulation beyond the scope of coded interactions. The first section discusses “endless” games (such as Animal Crossing, Minecraft, and The Sims), which represent themselves as good-natured fun with no ideological commitments. We find that these games encourage and often require the player to engage in behaviors that colonize the game’s virtual world in pursuit of this fun. These games purport to give the player limitless freedom and tools to express themselves creatively, but in the end the player’s only choice is to what extent they appropriate and utilize the world around them. The second section examines narrative games, like Pathologic and the Mass Effect series, comparing the experiences they engender to theater, but arguing that they are also specific to video games and irreplicable in other media. These games allow the player to behave as the audience, actors, director, and playwright of a digital theatrical production, but the player is always limited in their choices to those paths of action which the game’s designers lay out for them. Narrative games then find themselves aligning with Bertolt Brecht’s theory of alienation making the audience aware of the artifice of the theatric-ludic experiences and thus creating conclusions that otherwise could not exist without awareness of the medium. Ultimately, this thesis examines the nature of games as fundamentally hyper-constructed experiences, whether they are procedurally constructed or highly scripted. Both genres showcase how games have the potential to prompt serious shifts in consciousness, notably as Brecht hoped his theater would

An examination of multiple predictors of orthographic functioning.

The purpose of this study was to compare three variables in terms of how well they predict orthographic functioning. To this end, the authors examined the relative contributions of rapid automatic naming, exposure to print, and visual processing to a composite measure of orthographic functioning in a heterogeneous group of 8- to 12-year-old children. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that rapid naming, exposure to print, and visual processing were each predictive of orthographic functioning when controlling for the other variables as well as vocabulary knowledge and phonological awareness. Thus, it appears that both linguistic and visual abilities are related to orthographic functioning

A Comparison of Mutation and Amplification-Driven Resistance Mechanisms and Their Impacts on Tumor Recurrence

Tumor recurrence, driven by the evolution of drug resistance is a major barrier to therapeutic success in cancer. Resistance is often caused by genetic alterations such as point mutation, which refers to the modification of a single genomic base pair, or gene amplification, which refers to the duplication of a region of DNA that contains a gene. Here we investigate the dependence of tumor recurrence dynamics on these mechanisms of resistance, using stochastic multi-type branching process models. We derive tumor extinction probabilities and deterministic estimates for the tumor recurrence time, defined as the time when an initially drug sensitive tumor surpasses its original size after developing resistance. For models of amplification-driven and mutation-driven resistance, we prove law of large numbers results regarding the convergence of the stochastic recurrence times to their mean. Additionally, we prove sufficient and necessary conditions for a tumor to escape extinction under the gene amplification model, discuss behavior under biologically relevant parameters, and compare the recurrence time and tumor composition in the mutation and amplification models both analytically and using simulations. In comparing these mechanisms, we find that the ratio between recurrence times driven by amplification vs. mutation depends linearly on the number of amplification events required to acquire the same degree of resistance as a mutation event, and we find that the relative frequency of amplification and mutation events plays a key role in determining the mechanism under which recurrence is more rapid. In the amplification-driven resistance model, we also observe that increasing drug concentration leads to a stronger initial reduction in tumor burden, but that the eventual recurrent tumor population is less heterogeneous, more aggressive, and harbors higher levels of drug-resistance.Comment: 52 Pages, 5 figure

Memory functioning in children with reading disabilities and/or attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a clinical investigation of their working memory and long-term memory functioning.

We examined memory functioning in children with reading disabilities (RD), Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and RD/ADHD using a clinic sample with a clinical instrument: the Children\u27s Memory Scale, enhancing its generalizability. Participants included 23 children with RD, 30 with ADHD, 30 with RD/ADHD, and 30 controls. Children with RD presented with reduced verbal short-term memory (STM) but intact visual STM, central executive (CE), and long-term memory (LTM) functioning. Their deficit in STM appeared specific to tasks requiring phonetic coding of material. Children with ADHD displayed intact CE and LTM functioning but reduced visual-spatial STM, especially when off stimulant medication. Children with RD/ADHD had deficits consistent with both disorders

Coaching Skills for Responding to Affect

Affective-cognitive integration is a crucial skill for human development and therefore must also be a key enabler in coaching. This paper proposes coaching techniques that facilitate affective-cognitive integration in the light of theory related to emotions triggering. It also explores how emotional sharing, through language, enables an interaction between affect and cognition that assists the integration of both and therefore can be utilized for coaches for enabling self-awareness and development