Defying Dementia: An Exploration of Recovery

Exploring the human side of dementia helps put a face on this fast-growing affliction. This study reflects one elderly woman’s story of recovery from dementia that arose following a stroke. Painting a portrait of life with dementia can help us conceptualize the experience, how people live and how they would like to live. The woman is Marcia, my mom, and this is a qualitative inquiry with a collaborative narrative design to explore her experiences and to document my own. This study may help dementia patients and their support teams better understand the process of living with dementia and can perhaps lead to a more informed and supportive environment to optimize recovery for all concerned

Denoising Autoencoders for fast Combinatorial Black Box Optimization

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) require flexible probability models that can be efficiently learned and sampled. Autoencoders (AE) are generative stochastic networks with these desired properties. We integrate a special type of AE, the Denoising Autoencoder (DAE), into an EDA and evaluate the performance of DAE-EDA on several combinatorial optimization problems with a single objective. We asses the number of fitness evaluations as well as the required CPU times. We compare the results to the performance to the Bayesian Optimization Algorithm (BOA) and RBM-EDA, another EDA which is based on a generative neural network which has proven competitive with BOA. For the considered problem instances, DAE-EDA is considerably faster than BOA and RBM-EDA, sometimes by orders of magnitude. The number of fitness evaluations is higher than for BOA, but competitive with RBM-EDA. These results show that DAEs can be useful tools for problems with low but non-negligible fitness evaluation costs.Comment: corrected typos and small inconsistencie

Episode 23 : COVID-19 in Rural Communities: The Emerging Story

COVID-19 media headlines are often centered around large, urban areas, but rural communities are facing unique challenges in combating the pandemic. To discuss these challenges, we spoke with three Maine healthcare and public health experts with a long-standing interest in re-visioning Maine’s public health and rural health systems. They discussed the rural health challenges before the pandemic hit, what is happening now in rural healthcare and rural economies, and where we can go from here to create a brighter rural future

Indiana Nonprofits: Scope and Community Dimensions

This report presents new data on the size, composition, and distribution of paid employment over the 1995-2011 time period in Indiana's private nonprofit organizations in a broad range of industries traditionally dominated by for-profit industries. Nonprofit organizations make significant contributions to the quality of life for the residents of Indiana and are a major force in the state's economy. This is particularly the case for the industries where nonprofits play a major role, such as health care, social assistance, education, arts, culture and recreation, and membership associations. However, very little is known about the large number of nonprofits that are scattered across virtually all other industries in Indiana where for-profit establishments dominate. This report provides an overview of nonprofit employment in all the other "minor" nonprofit industries

A new parenting-based group intervention for young anxious children: results of a randomized controlled trial

Objective Despite recent advances, there are still no interventions that have been developed for the specific treatment of young children who have anxiety disorders. This study examined the impact of a new, cognitive–behaviorally based parenting intervention on anxiety symptoms. Method Families of 74 anxious children (aged 9 years or less) took part in a randomized controlled trial, which compared the new 10-session, group-format intervention with a wait-list control condition. Outcome measures included blinded diagnostic interview and self-reports from parents and children. Results Intention-to-treat analyses indicated that children whose parent(s) received the intervention were significantly less anxious at the end of the study than those in the control condition. Specifically, 57% of those receiving the new intervention were free of their primary disorder, compared with 15% in the control condition. Moreover, 32% of treated children were free of any anxiety diagnosis at the end of the treatment period, compared with 6% of those in the control group. Treatment gains were maintained at 12-month follow-up. Conclusions This new parenting-based intervention may represent an advance in the treatment of this previously neglected group. Clinical trial registration information: Anxiety in Young Children: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a New Cognitive-Behaviourally Based Parenting Intervention; http://www.isrctn.org/; ISRCTN12166762

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Predicting the birth of a spoken word

Children learn words through an accumulation of interactions grounded in context. Although many factors in the learning environment have been shown to contribute to word learning in individual studies, no empirical synthesis connects across factors. We introduce a new ultradense corpus of audio and video recordings of a single child’s life that allows us to measure the child’s experience of each word in his vocabulary. This corpus provides the first direct comparison, to our knowledge, between different predictors of the child’s production of individual words. We develop a series of new measures of the distinctiveness of the spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts in which a word appears, and show that these measures are stronger predictors of learning than frequency of use and that, unlike frequency, they play a consistent role across different syntactic categories. Our findings provide a concrete instantiation of classic ideas about the role of coherent activities in word learning and demonstrate the value of multimodal data in understanding children’s language acquisition

Lessons learned from the Dying2Learn MOOC : pedagogy, platforms and partnerships

(1) Background: Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are becoming more commonplace in the delivery of free online education and a Dying2Learn MOOC was offered by a team at Palliative and Supportive Services, Flinders University, South Australia; (2) Methods: Working with the OpenLearning platform developer, a research study and MOOC evaluation were embedded in the course, and content was delivered in innovative ways without compromising pedagogical approaches; (3) Results: This MOOC provided the facilitators with the opportunity to view education as an intervention, with testing undertaken, including measuring attitudinal change. Research, clinical and community partnerships were developed or reaffirmed and the value of ongoing partnerships with developers in creating platforms and tools that can expand the options for online learning is highlighted. Opportunities for future health professional and consumer education were also explored; (4) Conclusion: MOOCs can provide innovative opportunities to redesign educational approaches, which can be achieved by working with new technologies and with platform developers, while still adhering to pedagogical principles

Evaluation of the Operation and Accuracy of Five Available Smart Growth Trip Generation Methodologies

No standard methodology exists in the U.S. for estimating trip generation that takes into account the smart growth characteristics of a land use development project. As a first step toward developing such a methodology, this report assesses the available alternatives to the traditional ITE Trip Generation methodology. Eight methods were identified. For five of these methods, a two part assessment was completed. The first part was to evaluate the methods against a variety of operational criteria developed through discussions with a panel of transportation practitioners. The second part was to test the accuracy of the methods by comparing the predictions of the various methods against available traffic counts and other data at 22 California sites that have at least some characteristics of smart growth. All of the candidate methodologies performed better than the ITE rates, but they do not point to a clear “winner” – one methodology that is clearly superior to the others. Nevertheless, this assessment generated many insights that could guide the selection or development of a recommended methodology