Exploring the Influence of Parents\u27 Beliefs and Behaviors on Children\u27s Developing Executive Function

Executive function (EF) is a multi-component construct responsible for higher-order thinking abilities such as problem solving, goal-setting, and attentional flexibility (Jurado & Rosselli, 2007). Executive functions are associated with the prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain that undergoes substantial growth and modification from birth to age five. For young children, EF supports behavioral and social adjustment and is predictive of future academic achievement (Brock, Rimm-Kaufman, Nathanson & Grimm, 2007). The neurobiological components of EF have been extensively researched, but only recently have socio-environmental influences come to light. This ecological perspective may be of particular importance for children growing up in low-income households, who tend to demonstrate weaker performance on EF-related tasks (Hackman, Gallop, Evans & Farah, 2015). Parents and/or primary caregivers serve as one vital component of children’s early environments. Preliminary research investigating parent behaviors – such as scaffolding, stimulation, sensitivity/responsivity vs. hostility/rejection, and control – (as observed during specific tasks) affect the development of children’s EF. The contributions of parents’ knowledge about effective parenting and their self-reported behaviors, however, have not been explored. The current study investigated the independent influences of parents’ behaviors, parenting knowledge, and involvement on young children’s developing EF. A secondary aim of the study was to better understand and characterize parents’ knowledge and beliefs. 52 parent-child dyads from three early childcare centers in the metro-Atlanta area participated in the study. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to determine the unique variance in children’s EF accounted for by parent variables. Parents’ use of non-reasoning, punitive strategies negatively contributed to children’s inhibitory control and their good-natured/easygoingness positively contributed to their set-shifting abilities. Parents’ knowledge about parenting practices did not significantly contribute to children’s EF. Findings from this study inform existing research demonstrating an association between children’s EF and parenting practices and provides new knowledge regarding normative and non-normative parenting knowledge and practices for the specific population

Performance comparison of an emulator and physical Android mobile device based on chess algorithm

Article discusses performance differences of emulators Android Emulator version 26.1.4 and BlueStacks App Player 3 and physical devices with Android platform. Performance is measured by the chess algorithm execution time. Article also describes previous research related to this subject. The article also presents the used research methods, results of research based on chess algorithms and conclusions

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IP MIB for IP Fast-Reroute draft-ietf-rtgwg-ipfrr-ip-mib-03 This draft defines a portion of the Management Information Base (MIB) for use with network management protocols in the Internet community. In particular, it describes managed objects relevant for IP routes using IP Fast-Reroute [RFC5714

A role for the ubiquitin-proteasome system in activity-dependent presynaptic silencing

Chronic changes in electrical excitability profoundly affect synaptic transmission throughout the lifetime of a neuron. We have previously explored persistent presynaptic silencing, a form of synaptic depression at glutamate synapses produced by ongoing neuronal activity and by strong depolarization. Here we investigate the involvement of the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) in the modulation of presynaptic function. We found that proteasome inhibition prevented the induction of persistent presynaptic silencing. Specifically, application of the proteasome inhibitor, MG-132, prevented decreases in the size of the readily releasable pool of vesicles and in the percentage of active synapses. Presynaptic silencing was accompanied by decreases in levels of the priming proteins, Munc13-1 and Rim1. Importantly, overexpression of Rim1α prevented the induction of persistent presynaptic silencing. Furthermore, strong depolarization itself increased proteasome enzymatic activity measured in cell lysates. These results suggest that modulation of the UPS by electrical activity contributes to persistent presynaptic silencing by promoting the degradation of key presynaptic proteins

Linguistically-based Reranking of Google’s Snippets with GReG

We present an experiment evaluating the contribution of a system called GReG for reranking the snippets returned by Google’s search engine in the 10 best links presented to the user and captured by the use of Google’s API. The evaluation aims at establishing whether or not the introduction of deep linguistic information may improve the accuracy of Google or rather it is the opposite case as maintained by the majority of people working in Information Retrieval and using a Bag Of Words approach. We used 900 questions and answers taken from TREC 8 and 9 competitions and execute three different types of evaluation: one without any linguistic aid; a second one with tagging and syntactic constituency contribution; another run with what we call Partial Logical Form. Even though GReG is still work in progress, it is possible to draw clearcut conclusions: adding linguistic information to the evaluation process of the best snippet that can answer a question improves enormously the performance. In another experiment we used the actual texts associated to the Q/A pairs distributed by one of TREC’s participant and got even higher accuracy

Evaluation of the efficacy of dentin hypersensitivity treatments - a systematic review and follow-up analysis

OBJECTIVES: To compare the treatments used to treat dentin hypersensitivity (DH), based on its efficacy and effect duration. METHODS: Medline/PubMed, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, and ClinicalTrials were searched for articles published between January 1st , 2008 and November 14th , 2018, in English, Portuguese or Spanish, reporting clinical trials, completed and with results. This systematic review protocol was registered in PROSPERO, number CRD42019121986. RESULTS: 74 randomized clinical trials were included in the systematic review, reporting patients from 16 to 65 years old, with a clinical diagnosis of DH, that evaluate the efficacy of a desensitizing product, compared to pre-treatment, used the evaporative method stimulation and the visual analogue scale. These studies evaluated 5366 patients and at least 9167 teeth. Seven follow-up periods were considered corresponding to an immediate, medium or long-time effect. 66 studies were included in the quantitative synthesis. Glutaraldehyde with HEMA, glass ionomer cements and Laser present significant immediate (until 7 days) DH reduction. Medium term (until 1 month) reduction was observed in stannous fluoride, glutaraldehyde with HEMA, hydroxyapatite, glass ionomer cements and Laser groups. Finally, long term significant reduction was seen at potassium nitrate, arginine, glutaraldehyde with HEMA, hydroxyapatite, adhesive systems, glass ionomer cements, and LASER. CONCLUSIONS: All active ingredients show efficacy in DH reduction in different follow-up times. Only in-office treatments are effective in immediate DH reduction, maintaining its efficacy over time. For long time effects, at home treatments can also be used. More standardized evaluation protocols should be implemented to increase the robustly of the results.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A multi-population phenome-wide association study of genetically-predicted height in the Million Veteran Program

Background Height has been associated with many clinical traits but whether such associations are causal versus secondary to confounding remains unclear in many cases. To systematically examine this question, we performed a Mendelian Randomization-Phenome-wide association study (MR-PheWAS) using clinical and genetic data from a national healthcare system biobank. Methods and findings Analyses were performed using data from the US Veterans Affairs (VA) Million Veteran Program in non-Hispanic White (EA, n = 222,300) and non-Hispanic Black (AA, n = 58,151) adults in the US. We estimated height genetic risk based on 3290 height-associated variants from a recent European-ancestry genome-wide meta-analysis. We compared associations of measured and genetically-predicted height with phenome-wide traits derived from the VA electronic health record, adjusting for age, sex, and genetic principal components. We found 345 clinical traits associated with measured height in EA and an additional 17 in AA. Of these, 127 were associated with genetically-predicted height at phenome-wide significance in EA and 2 in AA. These associations were largely independent from body mass index. We confirmed several previously described MR associations between height and cardiovascular disease traits such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, coronary heart disease (CHD), and atrial fibrillation, and further uncovered MR associations with venous circulatory disorders and peripheral neuropathy in the presence and absence of diabetes. As a number of traits associated with genetically-predicted height frequently co-occur with CHD, we evaluated effect modification by CHD status of genetically-predicted height associations with risk factors for and complications of CHD. We found modification of effects of MR associations by CHD status for atrial fibrillation/flutter but not for hypertension, hyperlipidemia, or venous circulatory disorders. Conclusions We conclude that height may be an unrecognized but biologically plausible risk factor for several common conditions in adults. However, more studies are needed to reliably exclude horizontal pleiotropy as a driving force behind at least some of the MR associations observed in this study

A Probabilistic Model of Semantic Plausibility in Sentence Processing

Experimental research shows that human sentence processing uses information from different levels of linguistic analysis, for example lexical and syntactic preferences as well as semantic plausibility. Existing computational models of human sentence processing, however, have focused primarily on lexico-syntactic factors. Those models that do account for semantic plausibility effects lack a general model of human plausibility intuitions at the sentence level. Within a probabilistic framework, we propose a widecoverage model that both assigns thematic roles to verb-argument pairs and determines a preferred interpretation by evaluating the plausibility of the resulting (verb,role,argument) triples. The model is trained on a corpus of role-annotated language data. We also present a transparent integration of the semantic model with an incremental probabilistic parser. We demonstrate that both the semantic plausibility model and the combined syntax/semantics model predict judgment and reading time data from the experimental literature. 1