ARC-ED Curriculum: The Application of Video Game Formats to Educational Software

This is the publisher's version, also found at: http://sped.org/This article explores the applicability of video arcade game formats to educational microcomputer software. Four variables are discussed as being potentially important to the motivational appeal of video arcade games and several established educational practices are examined in relation to the motivational features of arcade games. Also, guidelines for educational curriculum based on arcade game formats are proposed and the term Arc-Ed Curriculum is offered to describe such software. The content for this article is based on established learning theory and the authors1 experience in the development and field testing of six math games based on video game formats

The Heliogyro Reloaded

The heliogyro is a high-performance, spinning solar sail architecture that uses long - order of kilometers - reflective membrane strips to produce thrust from solar radiation pressure. The heliogyro s membrane blades spin about a central hub and are stiffened by centrifugal forces only, making the design exceedingly light weight. Blades are also stowed and deployed from rolls; eliminating deployment and packaging problems associated with handling extremely large, and delicate, membrane sheets used with most traditional square-rigged or spinning disk solar sail designs. The heliogyro solar sail concept was first advanced in the 1960s by MacNeal. A 15 km diameter version was later extensively studied in the 1970s by JPL for an ambitious Comet Halley rendezvous mission, but ultimately not selected due to the need for a risk-reduction flight demonstration. Demonstrating system-level feasibility of a large, spinning heliogyro solar sail on the ground is impossible; however, recent advances in microsatellite bus technologies, coupled with the successful flight demonstration of reflectance control technologies on the JAXA IKAROS solar sail, now make an affordable, small-scale heliogyro technology flight demonstration potentially feasible. In this paper, we will present an overview of the history of the heliogyro solar sail concept, with particular attention paid to the MIT 200-meter-diameter heliogyro study of 1989, followed by a description of our updated, low-cost, heliogyro flight demonstration concept. Our preliminary heliogyro concept (HELIOS) should be capable of demonstrating an order-of-magnitude characteristic acceleration performance improvement over existing solar sail demonstrators (HELIOS target: 0.5 to 1.0 mm/s2 at 1.0 AU); placing the heliogyro technology in the range required to enable a variety of science and human exploration relevant support missions

Elite male Flat jockeys display lower bone density and lower resting metabolic rate than their female counterparts: implications for athlete welfare

To test the hypothesis that daily weight-making is more problematic to health in male compared with female jockeys, we compared the bone-density and resting metabolic rate (RMR) in weight-matched male and female Flat-jockeys. RMR (kcal.kg-1 lean mass) was lower in males compared with females as well as lower bone-density Z-scores at the hip and lumbar spine. Data suggest the lifestyle of male jockeys’ compromise health more severely than females, possibly due to making-weight more frequently

Multi-stakeholder analysis to improve agricultural water management policy and practice in Malta

Malta faces a raft of water challenges which are negatively impacting on the sustainability of irrigated agriculture, and creating serious tensions with other sectors competing for water, including urban development, tourism and the environment. In this paper we argue for a transparent process centred on participatory stakeholder engagement to agree on the most challenging water-related risks and to identify solutions that both support the water governance framework and improve on-farm water management practices. Given Malta’s dependence on freshwater, this study focused on outdoor field-scale irrigated production. A three staged stakeholder-driven approach was developed. The first stage included Delphi analyses to identify the key constraints on water management and fuzzy cognitive mapping to enable stakeholders to analyse their mental models and formalise conceptual and causal relationships between different components impacting on Maltese agriculture. Secondly, questionnaires were used to inform understanding of national policy gaps in water management and thirdly, a “backcasting” stakeholder workshop was used to identify policy actions to achieve a more sustainable future for agriculture on the island. The study confirmed that Malta’s core challenge is tied to poor water governance and the need to define policies that are socially and environmentally acceptable and geared to tackling the complex water challenges the agricultural sector faces. Developing support for farmer training, knowledge translation, greater public awareness of the importance and value of water for high-value crop production and multi-sector collaboration to promote shared opportunities for water infrastructure investment were highlighted as potential solutions. The findings have direct relevance to other island communities where water scarcity poses serious agronomic risks to production and where agriculture underpins rural livelihoods and the economy

Depression and its associated factors among people living with HIV in the Volta region of Ghana

Depression among people living with HIV/AIDS in higher-income countries is associated with suboptimal adherence to antiretroviral therapy and though counterintuitive. Yet, less is known regarding how depression, social support, and other sociodemographic factors influence outcomes among people living with HIV, particularly in resource-limited settings like Ghana. In view of this gap, this study investigated factors associated with depressive symptoms among people living with HIV in the Volta region of Ghana. A total of 181 people living with HIV from a local antiretroviral clinic was purposively sampled for the study. The questionnaire included the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, the Internalized Stigma of HIV/AIDS Tool, and the Interpersonal Support Evaluation List-12. An independent student t-test, one-way analysis of variance, and chi-square test were conducted to ascertain the associations among the variables of interest. The magnitude of association was evaluated with multiple linear regression. The average depression score among the participants was 9.1±8.8 and 20.4% reported signs of depression. Majority (78%) of participants who were depressed were male compared to females (p = 0.031). In the multiple linear regression, every one-year increase in age was significantly associated with an estimated 0.012 standard deviation increase in depression scores (95% CI: 0.002–0.021) after adjusting for all other variables in the model. Every unit standard deviation increase in social support was significantly associated with an estimated 0.659 standard deviation increase in depression scores (95% CI:0.187–1.132), after adjusting for all other variables in the model. We found a high prevalence of depressive symptoms among people living with HIV especially among males. An increase in age and social support was associated with an increase in depressive symptoms among people living with HIV in this study. We recommend further study using longitudinal approach to understand this unexpected association between depression and social support among people living with HIV in Ghana

Depression and its associated factors among people living with HIV in the Volta region of Ghana

Depression among people living with HIV/AIDS in higher-income countries is associated with suboptimal adherence to antiretroviral therapy and though counterintuitive. Yet, less is known regarding how depression, social support, and other sociodemographic factors influence outcomes among people living with HIV, particularly in resource-limited settings like Ghana. In view of this gap, this study investigated factors associated with depressive symptoms among people living with HIV in the Volta region of Ghana. A total of 181 people living with HIV from a local antiretroviral clinic was purposively sampled for the study. The questionnaire included the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, the Internalized Stigma of HIV/AIDS Tool, and the Interpersonal Support Evaluation List-12. An independent student t-test, one-way analysis of variance, and chi-square test were conducted to ascertain the associations among the variables of interest. The magnitude of association was evaluated with multiple linear regression. The average depression score among the participants was 9.1±8.8 and 20.4% reported signs of depression. Majority (78%) of participants who were depressed were male compared to females (p = 0.031). In the multiple linear regression, every one-year increase in age was significantly associated with an estimated 0.012 standard deviation increase in depression scores (95% CI: 0.002–0.021) after adjusting for all other variables in the model. Every unit standard deviation increase in social support was significantly associated with an estimated 0.659 standard deviation increase in depression scores (95% CI:0.187–1.132), after adjusting for all other variables in the model. We found a high prevalence of depressive symptoms among people living with HIV especially among males. An increase in age and social support was associated with an increase in depressive symptoms among people living with HIV in this study. We recommend further study using longitudinal approach to understand this unexpected association between depression and social support among people living with HIV in Ghana

Diagnostic criteria for multiple sclerosis: 2010 Revisions to the McDonald criteria

New evidence and consensus has led to further revision of the McDonald Criteria for diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. The use of imaging for demonstration of dissemination of central nervous system lesions in space and time has been simplified, and in some circumstances dissemination in space and time can be established by a single scan. These revisions simplify the Criteria, preserve their diagnostic sensitivity and specificity, address their applicability across populations, and may allow earlier diagnosis and more uniform and widespread use. Ann Neurol 201

Comparing fully automated state-of-the-art cerebellum parcellation from magnetic resonance images

[EN] The human cerebellum plays an essential role in motor control, is involved in cognitive function (i.e., attention, working memory, and language), and helps to regulate emotional responses. Quantitative in-vivo assessment of the cerebellum is important in the study of several neurological diseases including cerebellar ataxia, autism, and schizophrenia. Different structural subdivisions of the cerebellum have been shown to correlate with differing pathologies. To further understand these pathologies, it is helpful to automatically parcellate the cerebellum at the highest fidelity possible. In this paper, we coordinated with colleagues around the world to evaluate automated cerebellum parcellation algorithms on two clinical cohorts showing that the cerebellum can be parcellated to a high accuracy by newer methods. We characterize these various methods at four hierarchical levels: coarse (i.e., whole cerebellum and gross structures), lobe, subdivisions of the vermis, and the lobules. Due to the number of labels, the hierarchy of labels, the number of algorithms, and the two cohorts, we have restricted our analyses to the Dice measure of overlap. Under these conditions, machine learning based methods provide a collection of strategies that are efficient and deliver parcellations of a high standard across both cohorts, surpassing previous work in the area. In conjunction with the rank-sum computation, we identified an overall winning method.The data collection and labeling of the cerebellum was supported in part by the NIH/NINDS grant R01 NS056307 (PI: J.L. Prince) and NIH/NIMH grants R01 MH078160 & R01 MH085328 (PI: S.H. Mostofsky). PMT is supported in part by the NIH/NIBIB grant U54 EB020403. CERES2 development was supported by grant UPV2016-0099 from the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (PI: J.V. Manjon); the French National Research Agency through the Investments for the future Program IdEx Bordeaux (ANR-10-IDEX-03-02, HL-MRI Project; PI: P. Coupe) and Cluster of excellence CPU and TRAIL (HR-DTI ANR-10-LABX-57; PI: P. Coupe). Support for the development of LiviaNET was provided by the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), discovery grant program, and by the ETS Research Chair on Artificial Intelligence in Medical Imaging. The authors wish to acknowledge the invaluable contributions offered by Dr. George Fein (Dept. of Medicine and Psychology, University of Hawaii) in preparing this manuscript.Carass, A.; Cuzzocreo, JL.; Han, S.; Hernandez-Castillo, CR.; Rasser, PE.; Ganz, M.; Beliveau, V.... (2018). Comparing fully automated state-of-the-art cerebellum parcellation from magnetic resonance images. NeuroImage. 183:150-172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.08.003S15017218

The Small Politics of Everyday Life: Local History Society Archives and the Production of Public Histories

Thousands of small, private archives sit in attics, cupboard, church halls and computer hard drives around the country; they are the archives of local history societies. Simultaneously freed from the control of archives sector and government initiatives, and yet saturated with local peculiarities and biases, local history society archives can seem to be the very antithesis of the wider archives movement, apparently private and parochial, undemocratic and uncatalogued. Consequently, local history society archives are rarely included in ‘the politics of the archive’ discussions. But if the activity of archiving is to be understood as a political act, what are the politics and meanings of local history and their archives? In this article, I suggest that certain types of local history society archive collections can help us paint a picture of the everyday lives of working-class people in Britain in the twentieth century. They detail the small politics of people’s lives – family, work, leisure, and beliefs. They give ordinary people a name, a face, and a life lived. Moreover, the workings of local history society archives raise important questions about historical production, for these groups play a significant role in rescuing and preserving archival collections, and in creating and curating their own histories