Envisioning work : an autism friendly and anxiety free office

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) refers to a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication. It is estimated that worldwide 1 in 160 children has ASD, and in China, about 1 in 69 children has ASD. There are many successful educational environments specially designed for people on the spectrum to support learning, understanding, and behaving. However, after graduating, it is usually very hard for people on the spectrum to move toward independence because there is a huge difference between school environments and office environments. Most office environments are designed to meet the majority workers’ needs, but they are not supportive for people on the spectrum. There are very few innovative companies that recognize the unique skills that people on the spectrum and design their office carefully to support them. Most companies don’t consider the special needs of people on the spectrum while designing their office, which makes people with ASD struggle to find jobs because of the anxiety that might be caused by unsupportive workspaces. An office’s interior configurations has a great impact on employees’ performance. It is important to create a supportive office environment for both people on the spectrum and those who have other forms of anxiety at work. The key to an autism friendly and anxiety free office is balance. The space will be divided in a way to create a balance between working and relaxing, private and open, as well as light and shade. Focusing on productivity, privacy, and flexibility, I will create a system that can be applied to any type of building to make an office ASD friendly. The system provides employees the personal space they need, ABSTRACT and at the same time it encourages employees to communicate. The proposed site is located in Laodaowai District, Harbin, China, and the existing site conditions are not ideal for people on the spectrum for their work performance. The site will be an example of how the autism friendly system can be applied to any type of building, even one in a problematic setting. Most people on the spectrum have sensory problems. According to Autism Speaks, In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association added sensory sensitivities to the symptoms that help diagnose autism. Autism’s sensory issues can involve both hyper-sensitivities (over-responsiveness) and hypo-sensitivities (under-responsiveness) to a wide range of stimuli. It is important to balance the environment through the five senses to make sure that they are not experiencing sensory overload or sensory deprivation. The ideal autism friendly environment should take care of the special needs of people on the spectrum. People on the spectrum need a lot of personal space, and it is important to make sure that they have enough room to be alone. In addition, people on the spectrum do not like unpredictable moments, sharp corners, long corridors, and irregular shapes that make them feel insecure and puzzled. Complicated circulation should also be avoided because they are easy to get lost. Way-finding is a very important element in an autism friendly office. It is important to use colors, patterns, textures, signs..., to navigate people through the office. Not only people on the spectrum are invited to the office. General population, people who have anxiety problems and people who desire a relaxing working environment are all welcomed to work in the office. The employees will get the comfort of working from home, as well as the productivity of working at a formal office

Processing of Individual Items during Ensemble Coding of Facial Expressions

There is growing evidence that human observers are able to extract the mean emotion or other type of information from a set of faces. The most intriguing aspect of this phenomenon is that observers often fail to identify or form a representation for individual faces in a face set. However, most of these results were based on judgments under limited processing resource. We examined a wider range of exposure time and observed how the relationship between the extraction of a mean and representation of individual facial expressions would change. The results showed that with an exposure time of 50 ms for the faces, observers were more sensitive to mean representation over individual representation, replicating the typical findings in the literature. With longer exposure time, however, observers were able to extract both individual and mean representation more accurately. Furthermore, diffusion model analysis revealed that the mean representation is also more prone to suffer from the noise accumulated in redundant processing time and leads to a more conservative decision bias, whereas individual representations seem more resistant to this noise. Results suggest that the encoding of emotional information from multiple faces may take two forms: single face processing and crowd face processi

GRIK3 rs490647 is a Common Genetic Variant between Personality and Subjective Well-being in Chinese Han Population

Personality and subjective well-being (SWB) have been suggested to be strongly related in previous studies. This study was intended to confirm the relationship between personality and SWB and tried to seek out the genetic variants which underlie both personality and SWB. The subjects were 890 participants from Chinese Han population. We evaluated their personality using the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and used the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) to reflect their SWB. Five single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) were selected from the literature (rs1426371, rs2164273, rs322931, rs3756290, rs490647) and genotyped for genetic association study. We found negative correlations between neuroticism and SWB. On the contrary, extraversion and agreeableness were positively associated with SWB. Three SNPs (rs2164273, rs3756290, rs490647) out of the five were found to connect with personality (extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness and openness to experience) and rs490647 variants of GRIK3 was also associated with SWB. Individuals carrying G allele at this site were predisposed to have lower risk to be neuroticism and greater chance to be extraverted, open and satisfied with their life. In summary, our study revealed that rs490647 might be a good candidate genetic variant for personality and SWB in Chinese Han population

Roadmap on printable electronic materials for next-generation sensors

The dissemination of sensors is key to realizing a sustainable, ‘intelligent’ world, where everyday objects and environments are equipped with sensing capabilities to advance the sustainability and quality of our lives—e.g., via smart homes, smart cities, smart healthcare, smart logistics, Industry 4.0, and precision agriculture. The realization of the full potential of these applications critically depends on the availability of easy-to-make, low-cost sensor technologies. Sensors based on printable electronic materials offer the ideal platform: they can be fabricated through simple methods (e.g., printing and coating) and are compatible with high-throughput roll-to-roll processing. Moreover, printable electronic materials often allow the fabrication of sensors on flexible/stretchable/biodegradable substrates, thereby enabling the deployment of sensors in unconventional settings. Fulfilling the promise of printable electronic materials for sensing will require materials and device innovations to enhance their ability to transduce external stimuli—light, ionizing radiation, pressure, strain, force, temperature, gas, vapours, humidity, and other chemical and biological analytes. This Roadmap brings together the viewpoints of experts in various printable sensing materials—and devices thereof—to provide insights into the status and outlook of the field. Alongside recent materials and device innovations, the roadmap discusses the key outstanding challenges pertaining to each printable sensing technology. Finally, the Roadmap points to promising directions to overcome these challenges and thus enable ubiquitous sensing for a sustainable, ‘intelligent’ world

Predictable Fluctuations in Excitatory Synaptic Strength Due to Natural Variation in Presynaptic Firing Rate.

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A Placebo-Controlled Study on the Treatment of Metabolic Syndrome of Qi Stagnation and Dampness Obstruction Related to Atypical Antipsychotics with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)

Backgroud. To observe the effects of Liuyu decoction on qi stagnation and dampness obstruction syndrome of metabolic syndrome related to atypical antipsychotics . Methods. 154 schizophrenics who met both the diagnostic criteria of metabolic syndrome and qi stagnation and dampness obstruction syndrome were randomly divided into 2 : 1 groups. The PANSS and Tess were assessed before treatment and at the end of first month, second month, and third month after treatment; blood pressure, weight, waist circumference, hip circumference, blood glucose, glycosylated hemoglobin, high-density lipoprotein, low-density lipoprotein, triglyceride, and cholesterol were also measured at the same four time points. On the basis of continuous antipsychotic treatment, the study group took Liuyu decoction, and the control group took placebo. Results. Of the 154 cases, 102 were in the study group and 52 in the control group. Before and after treatment, there was a slight increase but no significant difference in blood pressure, blood sugar, glycosylated hemoglobin, cholesterol, TG, DHL, and LHL in two groups (P>0.05) and also between the two groups (P>0.05). The body weight, waist circumference, hip circumference, and BMI in the study group decreased, while that in the control group increased from the dividing group to the end of study. At the end of the third month, there was a significant difference in the body weight, waist circumference, hip circumference, and BMI between the two groups (P<0.05). Before and after treatment, there was a significant difference in positive symptoms, negative symptoms, general symptoms, and PANSS in two groups, respectively (P<0.05). The negative symptoms, general symptoms, PANSS, and TESS in the study group were lighter than that in the control group after treatment. Conclusion. Liuyu decoction is not only beneficial to the treatment in body constitution of metabolic syndrome in qi stagnation and dampness obstruction but also beneficial to the improvement of such patients’ mental symptoms and side effects

Perceptual integration and the composite face effect

The composite face paradigm is widely used to investigate holistic perception of faces. In the paradigm, parts from different faces (usually the top and bottom halves) are recombined. The principal criterion for holistic perception is that responses involving the component parts of composites in which the parts are aligned into a face-like configuration are disrupted compared with the same parts in a misaligned (not face-like) format. This is often taken as evidence that seeing a whole face in the aligned condition interferes with perceiving its separate parts, but the extent to which the effect is perceptually driven remains unclear. We used salient perceptual categories of gender (male or female) and race (Asian or Caucasian appearance) to create composite stimuli from parts of faces that varied orthogonally on these characteristics. In Experiment 1, participants categorised the gender of the parts of aligned composite and misaligned images created from parts with the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) gender and the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) race. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli were used but the task changed to categorising race. In both experiments, there was a strong influence of the task-relevant manipulation on the composite effect, with slower responses to aligned stimuli with incongruent gender in Experiment 1 and incongruent race in Experiment 2. In contrast, the task-irrelevant variable (race in Experiment 1, gender in Experiment 2) did not exert much influence on the composite effect in either experiment. These findings show that although holistic integration of salient visual properties makes a strong contribution to the composite face effect, it clearly also involves targeted processing of an attended visual characteristic.</p

Modeling the Short-Term Dynamics of in Vivo Excitatory Spike Transmission

Contains fulltext : 219651.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access

Processing of Individual Items during Ensemble Coding of Facial Expressions

There is growing evidence that human observers are able to extract the mean emotion or other type of information from a set of faces. The most intriguing aspect of this phenomenon is that observers often fail to identify or form a representation for individual faces in a face set. However, most of these results were based on judgments under limited processing resource. We examined a wider range of exposure time and observed how the relationship between the extraction of a mean and representation of individual facial expressions would change. The results showed that with an exposure time of 50 ms for the faces, observers were more sensitive to mean representation over individual representation, replicating the typical findings in the literature. With longer exposure time, however, observers were able to extract both individual and mean representation more accurately. Furthermore, diffusion model analysis revealed that the mean representation is also more prone to suffer from the noise accumulated in redundant processing time and leads to a more conservative decision bias, whereas individual representations seem more resistant to this noise. Results suggest that the encoding of emotional information from multiple faces may take two forms: single face processing and crowd face processing