Black Culture, Self Concept and Schooling.

With the continuing crisis in education, especially marked in the urban schools with large numbers of West Indian pupils, and against a theoretical and research Background which explains educational failure in terms of cultural deficit, individual/family pathology and socio-psychological maladjustment a critique was undertaken of theories and research which deals with the self-concept and schooling of black children in Britain and America; and a research project investigated the self-concept and attitudes of a sample of West Indian children living and going to schools and Supplementary (Saturday) schools in the London area. The research was based on a sample of 264 West Indian children aged 10-15; 76 involved in curriculum innovatory, school-based 'enrichment' projects; 99 in community-based 'increased attainment' projects, and 89 who acted as a comparison group. The self-concept, attitudes to school, teachers, parents and home was investigated by means of (1) the Piers-Harris Children's self-concept scale; (2) the Ziller self-social symbols tasks (a diagrammatic presentation of self and others) and (3) a projective sentence-completion item of 7 stems. The research results suggest that community-based attempts at achievement-motivation are more successful in developing positive attitudes to school than are school-based self-concept 'enrichment projects; but that children taking part in school-based projects are more positive to school than those not doing so. The implications of the study for theory, research and practice in relation to the schooling of West Indian children are discussed

When Questions are the Answers

This is an accessible article published in a magazine that is circulated to all members of the British Association of Social Work. The article draws the attention of practitioners and their managers to developments in what constitutes good practice in supervision.Professional supervision enables social work practitioners to reflect on their performance in relation to organizational goals, but also their own developmental needs. Over recent times, front line managers have been encouraged to incorporate reflective techniques in their supervision, such as those associated with coaching. Among coaching theorists there is a consensus that 'questions are the answers'. Good quality questioning conversations, which are part of a trusting supervisory relationship, may be of benefit to social work practitioners as well as the people they aim to help

San Diego Natural History Museum Strategic Planning Project

In January 2009, a team of students from the University of San Diego’s (USD) Nonprofit Leadership and Management conducted a pre-planning exercise to help prepare the San Diego Natural History Museum (SDNHM) for its 2012-2022 strategic plan. With an annual attendance last year of more than 600,000 visitors, the Museum is one of the largest cultural institutions in Balboa Park. The consulting team engaged in an extensive discovery process, including a review of the Museum’s current strategic plan1 and preliminary key informant interviews. The results of this discovery process pointed towards a number of themes from which, three key strategic questions were identified and pursued. The consulting team conducted a three-phase process including: review, discovery/analysis, and conclusions /recommendations.https://digital.sandiego.edu/npi-bpl-strategicplanning/1001/thumbnail.jp

Synthesizing audio from tongue motion during speech using tagged MRI via transformer

Investigating the relationship between internal tissue point motion of the tongue and oropharyngeal muscle deformation measured from tagged MRI and intelligible speech can aid in advancing speech motor control theories and developing novel treatment methods for speech related-disorders. However, elucidating the relationship between these two sources of information is challenging, due in part to the disparity in data structure between spatiotemporal motion fields (i.e., 4D motion fields) and one-dimensional audio waveforms. In this work, we present an efficient encoder-decoder translation network for exploring the predictive information inherent in 4D motion fields via 2D spectrograms as a surrogate of the audio data. Specifically, our encoder is based on 3D convolutional spatial modeling and transformer-based temporal modeling. The extracted features are processed by an asymmetric 2D convolution decoder to generate spectrograms that correspond to 4D motion fields. Furthermore, we incorporate a generative adversarial training approach into our framework to further improve synthesis quality on our generated spectrograms. We experiment on 63 paired motion field sequences and speech waveforms, demonstrating that our framework enables the generation of clear audio waveforms from a sequence of motion fields. Thus, our framework has the potential to improve our understanding of the relationship between these two modalities and inform the development of treatments for speech disorders.Comment: SPIE Medical Imaging: Deep Dive Ora

Analysis of speech and tongue motion in normal and post-glossectomy speaker using cine MRI

Objective Since the tongue is the oral structure responsible for mastication, pronunciation, and swallowing functions, patients who undergo glossectomy can be affected in various aspects of these functions. The vowel /i/ uses the tongue shape, whereas /u/ uses tongue and lip shapes. The purpose of this study is to investigate the morphological changes of the tongue and the adaptation of pronunciation using cine MRI for speech of patients who undergo glossectomy. Material and Methods Twenty-three controls (11 males and 12 females) and 13 patients (eight males and five females) volunteered to participate in the experiment. The patients underwent glossectomy surgery for T1 or T2 lateral lingual tumors. The speech tasks “a souk” and “a geese” were spoken by all subjects providing data for the vowels /u/ and /i/. Cine MRI and speech acoustics were recorded and measured to compare the changes in the tongue with vowel acoustics after surgery. 2D measurements were made of the interlip distance, tongue-palate distance, tongue position (anterior-posterior and superior-inferior), tongue height on the left and right sides, and pharynx size. Vowel formants Fl, F2, and F3 were measured. Results The patients had significantly lower F2/Fl ratios (F=5.911, p=0.018), and lower F3/F1 ratios that approached significance. This was seen primarily in the /u/ data. Patients had flatter tongue shapes than controls with a greater effect seen in /u/ than /i/. Conclusion The patients showed complex adaptation motion in order to preserve the acoustic integrity of the vowels, and the tongue modified cavity size relationships to maintain the value of the formant frequencies

Speech Audio Synthesis from Tagged MRI and Non-Negative Matrix Factorization via Plastic Transformer

The tongue's intricate 3D structure, comprising localized functional units, plays a crucial role in the production of speech. When measured using tagged MRI, these functional units exhibit cohesive displacements and derived quantities that facilitate the complex process of speech production. Non-negative matrix factorization-based approaches have been shown to estimate the functional units through motion features, yielding a set of building blocks and a corresponding weighting map. Investigating the link between weighting maps and speech acoustics can offer significant insights into the intricate process of speech production. To this end, in this work, we utilize two-dimensional spectrograms as a proxy representation, and develop an end-to-end deep learning framework for translating weighting maps to their corresponding audio waveforms. Our proposed plastic light transformer (PLT) framework is based on directional product relative position bias and single-level spatial pyramid pooling, thus enabling flexible processing of weighting maps with variable size to fixed-size spectrograms, without input information loss or dimension expansion. Additionally, our PLT framework efficiently models the global correlation of wide matrix input. To improve the realism of our generated spectrograms with relatively limited training samples, we apply pair-wise utterance consistency with Maximum Mean Discrepancy constraint and adversarial training. Experimental results on a dataset of 29 subjects speaking two utterances demonstrated that our framework is able to synthesize speech audio waveforms from weighting maps, outperforming conventional convolution and transformer models.Comment: MICCAI 2023 (Oral presentation

Assessing Retinal Structure In Complete Congenital Stationary Night Blindness and Oguchi Disease

Purpose To examine retinal structure and changes in photoreceptor intensity after dark adaptation in patients with complete congenital stationary night blindness and Oguchi disease. Design Prospective, observational case series. Methods We recruited 3 patients with complete congenital stationary night blindness caused by mutations in GRM6, 2 brothers with Oguchi disease caused by mutations in GRK1, and 1 normal control. Retinal thickness was measured from optical coherence tomography images. Integrity of the rod and cone mosaic was assessed using adaptive optics scanning light ophthalmoscopy. We imaged 5 of the patients after a period of dark adaptation and examined layer reflectivity on optical coherence tomography in a patient with Oguchi disease under light- and dark-adapted conditions. Results Retinal thickness was reduced in the parafoveal region in patients with GRM6 mutations as a result of decreased thickness of the inner retinal layers. All patients had normal photoreceptor density at all locations analyzed. On removal from dark adaptation, the intensity of the rods (but not cones) in the patients with Oguchi disease gradually and significantly increased. In 1 Oguchi disease patient, the outer segment layer contrast on optical coherence tomography was 4-fold higher under dark-adapted versus light-adapted conditions. Conclusions The selective thinning of the inner retinal layers in patients with GRM6 mutations suggests either reduced bipolar or ganglion cell numbers or altered synaptic structure in the inner retina. Our finding that rods, but not cones, change intensity after dark adaptation suggests that fundus changes in Oguchi disease are the result of changes within the rods as opposed to changes at a different retinal locus