1,868 research outputs found
The influence of facemasks on communication in healthcare settings: a systematic review
PurposeAlthough a well-established aspect of healthcare practice, the impact of facemasks on verbal communication is surprisingly ambiguous.Materials and MethodsA systematic search was conducted in APA PSYCHinfo, CINAHL, NHS Knowledge Network, Medline and SPORTDiscus databases from inception to November 2022 according to the PRISMA guidelines. Studies reporting an objective measure of speech understanding in adults, where information was transmitted or received whilst wearing a facemask were included. Risk of bias of included studies was assessed with the Newcastle-Ottawa score.ResultsFour hundred and thirty-three studies were identified, of which fifteen were suitable for inclusion, incorporating 350 participants with a median age of 49 (range 19 to 74) years. Wide heterogeneity of test parameters and outcome measurement prohibited pooling of data. 93% (14 of 15) studies reported a deleterious effect of facemasks on speech understanding, and 100% (5 of 5) of the included studies reported attenuation of sound with facemask usage. Background noise added further deleterious effects on speech understanding which was particularly problematic within hearing-impaired populations. Risk of bias in included studies varied but overall was modest.ConclusionsDespite considerable complexity and heterogeneity in outcome measure, 93% (14 of 15) articles suggest respiratory protective equipment negatively affects speech understanding in normal hearing and hearing-impaired adults.Implications for Rehabilitation As a result of the covid-19 pandemic, facemask use is now commonplace across all healthcare and rehabilitation settings and has material implications for interpersonal communication. This systematic review of human communicative studies highlights that the use of facemasks does indeed inhibit communication through effects on speech intelligibility and through sound attenuation. These effects are evident in both normal hearing and hearing-impaired adults due to the visual cues required with lipreading and facial expressions during communication. The presence of background noise also produces deleterious effects on speech understanding and is more problematic for hearing-impaired populations. Simple recommendations to reduce background noise (where possible), to step closer (where social-distancing rules permit), to speak louder or to use speech to text applications (if practical) could all mitigate these communicative barriers. Further an awareness of persons with hearing impairments, the function (or otherwise) of hearing aids in those patients that require these, and an ability to use transparent facemasks can be specifically helpful
Estimation of slow- and fast-cycling soil organic carbon pools from 6N HCI hydrolysis
Includes bibliographical references (pages 238-239).Acid hydrolysis is used to fractionate the soil organic carbon pool into relatively slow- and fast-cycling compartments on soils from Arizona, the Great Plains states and Michigan collected for carbon isotope tracer studies related to soil carbon sequestration, for studies of shifts in C3/C4 vegetation, and for "pre-bomb" soil-carbon inventories. Prior to hydrolysis, soil samples are first treated with cold 0.5-1N HCl to remove soil carbonates if necessary. Samples are then dispersed in a concentrated NaCI solution (p~1.2 g cm-3) and floated plant fragments are skimmed off the surface. After rinsing and drying, all remaining recognizable plant fragments are picked from the soil under 20x magnification. Plant-free soils, and hot, 6NHCl acid-hydrolysis residue and hydrolyzate fractions are analyzed for carbon content, δ 13C and 14C age, and the carbon distribution is verified within 1-2% by stable-carbon isotope mass balance. On average, the recalcitrant residue fraction is 1800 year older and 2.6‰ more 13C-depleted than total soil organic carbon. A test of hydrolysis with fresh plant fragments produced as much as 71-76% in the acid-hydrolysis residue pool. Thus, if plant fragments are not largely removed prior to hydrolysis, the residue fraction may date much younger than it actually is.Publisher version: https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/view/1903/1904
Using Galactic Cepheids to verify Gaia parallaxes
Context. The Gaia satellite will measure highly accurate absolute parallaxes
of hundreds of millions of stars by comparing the parallactic displacements in
the two fields of view of the optical instrument. The requirements on the
stability of the 'basic angle' between the two fields are correspondingly
strict, and possible variations (on the microarcsec level) are therefore
monitored by an on-board metrology system. Nevertheless, since even very small
periodic variations of the basic angle might cause a global offset of the
measured parallaxes, it is important to find independent verification methods.
Aims. We investigate the potential use of Galactic Cepheids as standard candles
for verifying the Gaia parallax zero point. Methods. We simulate the complete
population of Galactic Cepheids and their observations by Gaia. Using the
simulated data, simultaneous fits are made of the parameters of the
period-luminosity relation and a global parallax zero point. Results. The total
number of Galactic Cepheids is estimated at about 20 000, of which nearly half
could be observed by Gaia. In the most favourable circumstances, including
negligible intrinsic scatter and extinction errors, the determined parallax
zero point has an uncertainty of 0.2 microarcsec. With more realistic
assumptions the uncertainty is several times larger, and the result is very
sensitive to errors in the applied extinction corrections. Conclusions. The use
of Galactic Cepheids alone will not be sufficient to determine a possible
parallax zero-point error to the full potential systematic accuracy of Gaia.
The global verification of Gaia parallaxes will most likely depend on a
combination of many different methods, including this one.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and
Astrophysic
Protective personality traits: High openness and low neuroticism linked to better memory in multiple sclerosis
Memory impairment in multiple sclerosis (MS) is common, although few risk/protective factors are known
Chemical impacts in fish and shellfish from Cape Cod and Massachusetts Bays
This paper is not subject to U.S. copyright. The definitive version was published in Environment Cape Cod 1, no. 3 (1998): 68-85.Mununichogs, soft shell clams, and blue mussels from some or all of 10 sites in Boston
Harbor and Massachusetts and Cape Cod Bays were examined histologically: a suite of
pathological changes previously known to be associated with chemical contamination were found
in animals from the more contaminated sites. In particular, liver tumors were evident in 14% of
the adult mununichogs from the Island End River, a tributary of the Mystic River in Boston
Harbor. Additionally, a number of pathologies previously shown to be associated with chemical
exposure were seen in the two bivalve species at a number of contaminated sites. Induction of
cytochrome P45() IA (CYPIA) was also seen in muntntichogs from the more contaminated sites:
CYPIA induction is a biochemical change associated with exposure to dioxin and other planar
halogenated and aromatic hydrocarbons. These findings suggest that there are measurable
biochemical and pathological changes in intertidal fish and shellfish from the more contaminated
parts of the Massachusetts Bays system. These types of changes were less evident in the two
reference sites in Cape Cod Bay
Tracking system analytic calibration activities for the Mariner Mars 1971 mission
Data covering various planning aspects of Mariner Mars 1971 mission are summarized. Data cover calibrating procedures for tracking stations, radio signal propagation in the troposphere, effects of charged particles on radio transmission, orbit calculation, and data smoothing
Distraction from pain and executive functioning: an experimental investigation of the role of inhibition, task switching and working memory
Although many studies have investigated the effectiveness of distraction as a method of pain control, the cognitive processes by which attentional re-direction is achieved, remain unclear. In this study the role of executive functioning abilities (inhibition, task switching and working memory) in the effectiveness of distraction is investigated. We hypothesized that the effectiveness of distraction in terms of pain reduction would be larger in participants with better executive functioning abilities. Ninety-one undergraduate students first performed executive functioning tasks, and subsequently participated in a cold pressor task (CPT). Participants were randomly assigned to (1) a distraction group, in which an attention-demanding tone-detection task was performed during the CPT, or (2) a control group, in which no distraction task was performed. Participants in the distraction group reported significantly less pain during the CPT, but the pain experience was not influenced by executive functioning abilities. However, the performance on the distraction task improved with better inhibition abilities, indicating that inhibition abilities might be important in focussing on a task despite the pain
A Very Low Resource Language Speech Corpus for Computational Language Documentation Experiments
Most speech and language technologies are trained with massive amounts of
speech and text information. However, most of the world languages do not have
such resources or stable orthography. Systems constructed under these almost
zero resource conditions are not only promising for speech technology but also
for computational language documentation. The goal of computational language
documentation is to help field linguists to (semi-)automatically analyze and
annotate audio recordings of endangered and unwritten languages. Example tasks
are automatic phoneme discovery or lexicon discovery from the speech signal.
This paper presents a speech corpus collected during a realistic language
documentation process. It is made up of 5k speech utterances in Mboshi (Bantu
C25) aligned to French text translations. Speech transcriptions are also made
available: they correspond to a non-standard graphemic form close to the
language phonology. We present how the data was collected, cleaned and
processed and we illustrate its use through a zero-resource task: spoken term
discovery. The dataset is made available to the community for reproducible
computational language documentation experiments and their evaluation.Comment: accepted to LREC 201
Influence of retardation effects on 2D magnetoplasmon spectrum
Within dissipationless limit the magnetic field dependence of magnetoplasmon
spectrum for unbounded 2DEG system found to intersect the cyclotron resonance
line, and, then approaches the frequency given by light dispersion relation.
Recent experiments done for macroscopic disc-shape 2DEG systems confirm theory
expectations.Comment: 2 pages,2 figure
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