Examining the Effects of a Peer-Mediated Social Skills Intervention on the Prosocial Behaviors of Elementary Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders represent part of the population of students who receive special education services, and the social skill deficits that they present makes it so that they are less likely to pass their classes and more likely to drop out of school than their typical peers. The social skill deficits of these students often lead to a variety of negative factors including poor relationships and academic achievement. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a peer-mediated social skills intervention on fourth and fifth grade students in a public-school setting. The current study explicitly taught students the target social skills of sharing, compliment giving, and sportsmanship using modeling, role-play, and discussion with feedback. Results of the study indicated participants increased target skills in intervention phases with the skill of sharing showing strong results for all three participants and sportsmanship skills showing strong results for one participant. Target skills declined somewhat in maintenance phases for all participants but remained above baseline levels. Two participants generalized the skill of sharing to the recess setting with untrained peers, while the third participant generalized sportsmanship skills to the recess setting

Implementation of an efficient Fuzzy Logic based Information Retrieval System

This paper exemplifies the implementation of an efficient Information Retrieval (IR) System to compute the similarity between a dataset and a query using Fuzzy Logic. TREC dataset has been used for the same purpose. The dataset is parsed to generate keywords index which is used for the similarity comparison with the user query. Each query is assigned a score value based on its fuzzy similarity with the index keywords. The relevant documents are retrieved based on the score value. The performance and accuracy of the proposed fuzzy similarity model is compared with Cosine similarity model using Precision-Recall curves. The results prove the dominance of Fuzzy Similarity based IR system.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with http://ntz-develop.blogspot.in/ , http://www.micsymposium.org/mics2012/submissions/mics2012_submission_8.pdf , http://www.slideshare.net/JeffreyStricklandPhD/predictive-modeling-and-analytics-selectchapters-41304405 by other author

The Role Of Adult Stem Cells And Tumor Necrosis Factor In Peripheral Neuropathy

Peripheral neuropathies are a significant cause of morbidity and mortality, with a population prevalence of 2,400 per 100,000 (2.4%) that increases in the elderly to 8,000 per 100,000 (8%)(C. N. Martyn and R. A. Hughes, 1997). The variations in symptom distribution and etiologic attribution have resulted in the classification of over 100 types of peripheral neuropathy with specific patterns of development and prognoses. In the first study, we use a mouse model of hereditary peripheral neuropathy that results in hind-limb paralysis to investigate the therapeutic efficacy of adult, adipose derived stem cells (ADSC). The paralyzed mice that received ADSC transplantation demonstrated significantly improved motor function, likely due to stromal support provided by ADSCs. The ultrastructure of the nerve was not significantly improved, indicating that the threshold of functional motor improvement can be met through alternative means. In the second study, we developed a process to identify highly-connected genes in a model of peripheral nerve development using entropy maximized network analysis of gene microarrays. We found that Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF) mediates axonal-Schwann cell communication, and that disruption of TNF signaling results in sensory and tissue dysfunction. These findings indicate that the threshold of wild-type physiological function in peripheral nerve development can be addressed by disrupting or strengthening specific signaling processes without significant changes to tissue structure

Investigating the Functional and Structural Neural Correlates Associated With Dance Expertise

We investigated the structural and functional plasticity associated with dance expertise in a cross-sectional pilot study, comparing ballet dancers to controls. Using fMRI, the whole-brain functional activation maps of dancers and controls engaged in motor imagery of dance movements were compared. Controls were found to show greater activity in numerous regions relative to dancers, including in the superior frontal gyrus, hippocampus, and cerebellum. Anatomically, dancers exhibited greater cortical thickness in areas such as the inferior occipital gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus. We also found years of dance training to be correlated with cortical thickness in various regions, including positive correlations being reported in the fusiform gyrus and parahippocampal gyrus. These preliminary results suggest that dance expertise is associated with a functional reorganization that corresponds to the reduced activity reported in other motor expertise groups, as well various putative changes in structure

Multi-Direction Layered Deposition: An Overview of Process Planning Methodologies

Layered Manufacturing (LM) techniques build a part by adding thin layers of material. In many LM processes overhangs require the deposition of sacrificial supports resulting in an increase in the build time, wastage of material and costly post-processing. This has led to the development of LM systems which can deposit material along multiple directions and eliminate the need for supports. We survey the configurations of available multi-direction deposition systems. An overview of the process planning challenges is presented. Literature on process planning methodologies is reviewed.Mechanical Engineerin

EVALUATION OF ANTIOXIDANT, ANTIBACTERIAL, ANTIHEMOLYTIC, AND PHYOCHEMICAL PROPERTIES OF FICUS BENJAMINA, FICUS INFECTORIA, AND FICUS KRISHNAE

Objective: The study was conducted for the evaluation of antioxidant, antibacterial, antihemolytic, and phytochemical activity of Ficus benjamina (FB), Ficus infectoria (FI), and Ficus krishnae (FK). Methods: The antioxidant analysis of FB, FI, and FK was done by 1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging and nitric oxide (NO) scavenging assay. Evaluation was performed for antibacterial activity against Clostridium perfringens and Staphylococcus aureus by an agar well diffusion method. Hemolytic assay was performed with red blood cell suspension for evaluating antihemolytic activity. Standard protocols were used for phytochemical activity. Results: In the results of DPPH antioxidant activity assay, it was found that DPPH inhibition was significantly increased with increasing amount of extract. For NO scavenging assay, ANOVA revealed that the inhibition of NO is not significantly affected with an increase in the amount of extract used. Results of antibacterial activity revealed that methanolic extract of FI shows a maximum zone of inhibition (30.5 mm) against S. aureus and aqueous extract of FK shows a maximum zone of inhibition (28 mm) against C. perfringens. The antihemolytic activity of FB, FI, and FK was performed by measuring percentage inhibition of plant extracts at different concentrations. FK has shown maximum percentage inhibition activity, i.e., 28.64 % at 60 μg/ml, whereas FB shows minimum inhibition activity, i.e. 2.7 % at 40 μg/ml. Flavonoid content was found to be 0.593 μg/ml, 0.783 μg/ml, and 1.023 μg/ml, whereas phenolic content was found to be 0.267 μg/ml, 0.298 μg/ml, and 0.355 μg/ml for FB, FI, and FK, respectively. Conclusion: FB, FI, and FK extracts contain various phytochemicals which confirm that these plants can be used for therapeutic use and traditional medicine. The methanolic as well as aqueous extracts of the plants have shown the potential to kill the tested microorganism (C. perfringens and S. aureus) and hence can be used as an antibiotic and potential antibacterial