The importance of age effects on performance in the assessment of clinical trials

Forty young adult normal subjects, 10 Parkinson's disease patients and their 10 matched normal subjects, and 10 multiple sclerosis patients and their 10 matched normal subjects were evaluated in the Quantitative Examination of Neurological Function to determine age effects and the importance of selecting closely matched normal control groups for assessing the performance of patients. Where there are significant differences among the three normal subject groups, it is the oldest normal subject group that differs from the two younger subject groups. Significant decreases in performance with increasing age were found for the steadiness tests performed in the supported position, the sensation tests, two or five tests in the Neuro-Psychological Examination and tests requiring fine skilled movements primarily with the dominant hand. It was found that older subjects made fewer errors in coordinated tasks.A normalization technique, expressing performance as a percentage of normal function, was introduced. A method was developed to provide quantitative and meaningful indices of neurological function. The measure is obtained by averaging the percentage of normal function scores over several tests that belong to a primary category of neurological function.Young adult normal subjects do not perform significantly better than normal subjects in the age range of multiple sclerosis patients; however, young adult normal subjects do perform significantly better than normal subjects in the age range of Parkinson's disease patients, especially on tasks requiring fine skilled movements of the dominant hand and coordinated activities of the lower extremities. These results indicate that the performance of multiple sclerosis patients can be expressed as a percentage of the function of either age-matched normal controls or young adult normal controls. However, the performance of Parkinson's disease patients should be expressed only as a percentage of the function of age-matched normal controls.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/33791/1/0000046.pd

Diving deep into digital literacy:emerging methods for research

Literacy studies approaches have tended to adopt a position which enables ethnographic explorations of a wide range of ‘literacies’. An important issue arising is the new challenge required for researchers to capture, manage, and analyse data that highlight the unique character of practices around texts in digital environments. Such inquiries, we argue, require multiple elements of data to be captured and analysed as part of effective literacy ethnographies. These include such things as the unfolding of digital texts, the activities around them, and features of the surrounding social and material environment. This paper addresses these methodological issues drawing from three educationally focused studies, and reporting their experiences and insights within uniquely different contexts. We deal with the issue of adopting new digital methods for literacy research through the notion of a ‘deep dive’ to explore educational tasks in classrooms. Through a discussion of how we approached the capture and analysis of our data, we present methods to better understand digital literacies in education. We then outline challenges posed by our methods, how they can be used more broadly for researching interaction in digital environments, and how they augment transdisciplinary debates and trends in research methods

Factors Associated with Revision Surgery after Internal Fixation of Hip Fractures

Background: Femoral neck fractures are associated with high rates of revision surgery after management with internal fixation. Using data from the Fixation using Alternative Implants for the Treatment of Hip fractures (FAITH) trial evaluating methods of internal fixation in patients with femoral neck fractures, we investigated associations between baseline and surgical factors and the need for revision surgery to promote healing, relieve pain, treat infection or improve function over 24 months postsurgery. Additionally, we investigated factors associated with (1) hardware removal and (2) implant exchange from cancellous screws (CS) or sliding hip screw (SHS) to total hip arthroplasty, hemiarthroplasty, or another internal fixation device. Methods: We identified 15 potential factors a priori that may be associated with revision surgery, 7 with hardware removal, and 14 with implant exchange. We used multivariable Cox proportional hazards analyses in our investigation. Results: Factors associated with increased risk of revision surgery included: female sex, [hazard ratio (HR) 1.79, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.25-2.50; P = 0.001], higher body mass index (fo

Taking a Breath of the Wild: Are gamers or geoscientists better in judging whether game-world landscapes are realistic?

Water Resource

Equal division kernel and reference coalitions in three-person games: results of an experiment

SIGLETIB Hannover: RN 5363 (111) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman

Flooded by jargon: How the interpretation of water-related terms differs between hydrology experts and the general audience

Communication about water-induced hazards (such as floods, droughts or levee breaches) is important, in order to keep their impact as low as possible. However, sometimes the boundary between specialized and non-specialized language can be vague. Therefore, a close scrutiny of the use of hydrological vocabulary by both experts and laypeople is necessary. In this study, we compare the expert and layperson definitions of 22 common terms and pictures related to water and water hazards, to see where misunderstandings might arise both in text and pictures. Our primary objective is to analyze the degree of agreement between experts and laypeople in their definition of the used terms. In this way, we hope to contribute to improving the communication between these groups in the future. Our study was based on a survey completed by 34 experts and 119 laypeople. Especially concerning the definition of words related to water there are some profound differences between experts and laypeople: words like "river" and "river basin" turn out to have a thoroughly different interpretation between the two groups. Concerning the pictures, there is much more agreement between the groups.Water Resource

The effect of thermal pre-slaughter stress on the susceptibility of broiler chickens differing with respect to growth rate, age at slaughter, blood parameters, and ascites mortality, to hemorrhages in muscle

Contains fulltext : 123034.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access