4,057 research outputs found
Systematic Review: Comparative Efficacy of the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) to Other Augmentative Communication Systems in Increasing Social Communication Skills in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Purpose: This systematic review aims to compare the efficacy of the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) to other forms of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) in increasing social communication skills in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
Methods: A systematic review of the literature on PECS and other forms of AAC written between 2007 and 2018 was conducted. Studies were selected based on the established inclusionary and exclusionary criteria. The inclusionary criteria incorporated subjects with a formal diagnosis of ASD under the age of 18. Exclusionary criteria included individuals with severe sensory, motor, and/or other medical conditions that may have affected their use of PECS. 25 articles of varying study designs were critically appraised for validity and reliability to minimize bias.
Results: Results suggest that both PECS and other forms of AAC are conducive to improving social communication in children (\u3c18 \u3eyears) with ASD. Advancements in conversation initiation, requesting behaviors and joint attention were noted, resulting in a global increase in communication interactions. However, studies demonstrated mixed results with specific consideration of rate of acquisition, modality preference, and overall effectiveness of the system.
Conclusion: Synthesis of results from the 25 studies suggest that both PECS and other AAC systems show favorable outcomes for encouraging social-communicative behavior. The clinical implications of these results suggest the implementation of an AAC system may be client dependent. Single design designs were included in this review due to the lack of research in the areas of ASD and AAC. Further research of this comparison should be conducted on larger populations of children with ASD to improve clinical decision making to target social communication and increase generalizability.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/csdms/1000/thumbnail.jp
Comparative Analysis of the Magnitude of Oxidative Stress Following Acute High Fat Feeding and Acute Strenuous Exercise
Two prevalent origins of oxidative stress in Western society are the ingestion of certain nutrients and exercise. The purpose of this investigation was to compare the magnitude of increase in oxidative stress following acute feeding and acute exercise. Twelve exercise-trained men consumed a high-fat meal or performed one of three exercise bouts, in a random order, cross-over design. Blood samples were assayed for malondialdehyde (MDA), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity (TEAC), and triglycerides (TAG). A significant condition effect was noted for MDA (p=0.01) and H2O2 (p\u3c0.0001), with values highest for the meal condition. A trend was also noted for TAG (p=0.07), with values highest for the meal condition. These results illustrate that the magnitude of oxidative stress following a mealis significantly greater than the magnitude of oxidative stress elecitied after an acutebout of strenuous exercise, in a sample of healthy, exercise-trained men
Museum, Field, Colony: collecting, displaying and governing people and things
The papers selected for this special issue of Museum and Society have their beginnings in the workshop, ‘Colonial Governmentalities’, held in late October 2012 and hosted by the Institute of Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, followed by the seminar ‘Reassembling the material,’ hosted by the Museum and Heritage Studies programmes at Victoria University of Wellington in early November. The stimulus for these events was the international research collaboration, ‘Museum, Field, Metropolis, Colony: Practices of Social Governance funded by the Australian Research Council’
Education, globalization and the nation state
Review of the book Education, globalization and the nation state by Prof. Ronald C. Sultanapeer-reviewe
Learning to communicate about shared procedural abstractions
Many real-world tasks require agents to coordinate their behavior to achieve
shared goals. Successful collaboration requires not only adopting the same
communicative conventions, but also grounding these conventions in the same
task-appropriate conceptual abstractions. We investigate how humans use natural
language to collaboratively solve physical assembly problems more effectively
over time. Human participants were paired up in an online environment to
reconstruct scenes containing two block towers. One participant could see the
target towers, and sent assembly instructions for the other participant to
reconstruct. Participants provided increasingly concise instructions across
repeated attempts on each pair of towers, using higher-level referring
expressions that captured each scene's hierarchical structure. To explain these
findings, we extend recent probabilistic models of ad-hoc convention formation
with an explicit perceptual learning mechanism. These results shed light on the
inductive biases that enable intelligent agents to coordinate upon shared
procedural abstractions
Three-Point Correlation Functions of SDSS Galaxies: Luminosity and Color Dependence in Redshift and Projected Space
The three-point correlation function (3PCF) provides an important view into
the clustering of galaxies that is not available to its lower order cousin, the
two-point correlation function (2PCF). Higher order statistics, such as the
3PCF, are necessary to probe the non-Gaussian structure and shape information
expected in these distributions. We measure the clustering of spectroscopic
galaxies in the Main Galaxy Sample of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS),
focusing on the shape or configuration dependence of the reduced 3PCF in both
redshift and projected space. This work constitutes the largest number of
galaxies ever used to investigate the reduced 3PCF, using over 220,000 galaxies
in three volume-limited samples. We find significant configuration dependence
of the reduced 3PCF at 3-27 Mpc/h, in agreement with LCDM predictions and in
disagreement with the hierarchical ansatz. Below 6 Mpc/h, the redshift space
reduced 3PCF shows a smaller amplitude and weak configuration dependence in
comparison with projected measurements suggesting that redshift distortions,
and not galaxy bias, can make the reduced 3PCF appear consistent with the
hierarchical ansatz. The reduced 3PCF shows a weaker dependence on luminosity
than the 2PCF, with no significant dependence on scales above 9 Mpc/h. On
scales less than 9 Mpc/h, the reduced 3PCF appears more affected by galaxy
color than luminosty. We demonstrate the extreme sensitivity of the 3PCF to
systematic effects such as sky completeness and binning scheme, along with the
difficulty of resolving the errors. Some comparable analyses make assumptions
that do not consistently account for these effects.Comment: 27 pages, 21 figures. Updated to match accepted version. Published in
Ap
The fraction of early-type galaxies in low redshift groups and clusters of galaxies
We examine the fraction of early-type (and spiral) galaxies found in groups
and clusters of galaxies as a function of dark matter halo mass. We use
morphological classifications from the Galaxy Zoo project matched to halo
masses from both the C4 cluster catalogue and the Yang et al (2007) group
catalogue. We find that the fraction of early-type (or spiral) galaxies remains
constant (changing by less than 10%) over three orders of magnitude in halo
mass (13<log MH/Msol/h<15.8). This result is insensitive to our choice of halo
mass measure, from velocity dispersions or summed optical luminosity.
Furthermore, we consider the morphology-halo mass relations in bins of galaxy
stellar mass M*, and find that while the trend of constant fraction remains
unchanged, the early-type fraction amongst the most massive galaxies (11<log
M*/Msol/h <12) is a factor of three greater than lower mass galaxies
(10<logM*/Msol/h<10.7). We compare our observational results with those of
simulations presented in De Lucia et al (2011), as well as previous
observational analyses, and semi-analytic bulge (or disc) dominated galaxies
from the Millennium Simulation. We find the simulations recover similar trends
as observed, but may over-predict the abundances of the most massive bulge
dominated (early-type) galaxies. Our results suggest that most morphological
transformation is happening on the group scale before groups merge into massive
clusters. However, we show that within each halo a morphology-density relation
remains: it is summing the total fraction to a self-similar scaled radius which
results in a flat morphology-halo mass relationship.Comment: 9 page, 5 figures, modified to match accepted version (MNRAS
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