Shaping a mental health curriculum for Canada\u27s teacher education programs: Rationale and brief overview

It is a well-known and accepted statistic that one in five Canadian children will experience a significant mental health challenge prior to their 18th birthday; this is a conservative estimate given the many who suffer ‘under the radar’ with transient sadness, depression, and anxiety (Flett & Hewitt, 2013). And if we have yet to be sensitized to this critical period of childhood and adolescence, longitudinal studies indicate that 70% of adults who experience an emotional disorder report having their first onset episode prior to the age of 18 (Kessler et al., 2009)

Resting-state functional connectivity and reading subskills in children

Individual differences in reading ability have been linked to characteristics of functional connectivity in the brain in both children and adults. However, many previous studies have used single or composite measures of reading, leading to difficulty characterizing the role of functional connectivity in discrete subskills of reading. The present study addresses this issue using resting-state fMRI to examine how resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) related to individual differences in children\u27s reading subskills, including decoding, sight word reading, reading comprehension, and rapid automatized naming (RAN). Findings showed both positive and negative RSFC-behaviour relationships that diverged across different reading subskills. Positive relationships included increasing RSFC among left dorsal and anterior regions with increasing decoding proficiency, and increasing RSFC between the left thalamus and right fusiform gyrus with increasing sight word reading, RAN, and reading comprehension abilities. In contrast, negative relationships suggested greater functional segregation of attentional and reading networks with improved performance on RAN, decoding, and reading comprehension tasks. Importantly, the results suggest that although reading subskills rely to some extent on shared functional networks, there are also distinct functional connections supporting different components of reading ability in children

Aboveground Biomass Accumulation in a Tropical Wet Forest in Nicaragua Following a Catastrophic Hurricane Disturbance 1

Among their effects on forest structure and carbon dynamics, hurricanes frequently create large-scale canopy gaps that promote secondary growth. To measure the accumulation of aboveground biomass (AGBM) in a hurricane damaged forest, we established permanent plots 4 mo after the landfall of Hurricane Joan on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua in October 1988. We quantified AGBM accumulation in these plots by correlating diameter measurements to AGBM values using a published allometric regression equation for tropical wet forests. In the first measurement year following the storm, AGBM in hurricane-affected plots was quite variable, ranging from 26 to 153 Mg/ha, with a mean of 78 (±15) Mg/ha. AGBM was substantially lower than in two control plots several kilometers outside the hurricane's path (331 ±15 Mg/ha). Biomass accumulation was slow (5.36 ± 0.74 Mg/ha/yr), relative to previous studies of forest regeneration following another hurricane (Hugo) and agricultural activity. We suggest that large-scale, homogenous canopy damage caused by Hurricane Joan impeded the dispersal and establishment of pioneer trees and led to a secondary forest dominated by late successional species that resprouted and survived the disturbance. With the relatively slow rate of biomass accumulation, any tightening in disturbance interval could reduce the maximum capacity of the living biomass to store carbon.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73646/1/j.1744-7429.2005.00077.x.pd

Temporal perception deficits in schizophrenia: integration is the problem, not deployment of attentions

Patients with schizophrenia are known to have impairments in sensory processing. In order to understand the specific temporal perception deficits of schizophrenia, we investigated and determined to what extent impairments in temporal integration can be dissociated from attention deployment using Attentional Blink (AB). Our findings showed that there was no evident deficit in the deployment of attention in patients with schizophrenia. However, patients showed an increased temporal integration deficit within a hundred-millisecond timescale. The degree of such integration dysfunction was correlated with the clinical manifestations of schizophrenia. There was no difference between individuals with/without schizotypal personality disorder in temporal integration. Differently from previous studies using the AB, we did not find a significant impairment in deployment of attention in schizophrenia. Instead, we used both theoretical and empirical approaches to show that previous findings (using the suppression ratio to correct for the baseline difference) produced a systematic exaggeration of the attention deficits. Instead, we modulated the perceptual difficulty of the task to bring the baseline levels of target detection between the groups into closer alignment. We found that the integration dysfunction rather than deployment of attention is clinically relevant, and thus should be an additional focus of research in schizophrenia

Transformation Textures in Zirconia

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65433/1/j.1151-2916.1993.tb03696.x.pd

An equation for the replacement value of agroforestry

This article examines some of the existing analytical tools which quantify both the ecological and economic aspects of intercropping decisions. The characteristics of tree crops are evaluated to determine how a specific tool, the replacement value of intercropping (RVI), could be modified to better interpret agroforestry improvements to bush fallow farming systems. The modified equation captures some of the potential production improvements associated with agroforestry by accounting for the fraction of time that a field is actually in production over the long run. The result is an improved estimate of the average annual difference between a tree/crop polyculture and a monoculture system which employs fallows.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/41763/1/10457_2004_Article_BF00705151.pd

The Agricultural Matrix and a Future Paradigm for Conservation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73889/1/j.1523-1739.2006.00582.x.pd