The aphasia rapid test:Adaptation and standardisation for Russian

Background: The Aphasia Rapid Test (ART) is a screening test developed for fast speech/language assessment of people in the acute stroke period. This test has been developed for French and English and was recently adapted for Portuguese and Italian. Nowadays, such a standardised screening test is in a great need at clinics with Russian-speaking patients. To fill this gap, the ART was adapted for Russian. Aims: The current study investigated whether the Russian ART meets all the psychometric standards, and whether it is suitable for detecting speech/language disorders and estimating their severity, as well as for the evaluation of improvement in the acute post-stroke period. Methods & Procedure: First, we evaluated the validity, sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, test-retest reliability, inter-item consistency and inter-rater reliability of the test in a group of people with chronic speech/language disorders (N = 55) and in an age-matched control group of non-brain-damaged individuals (N = 50). Participants performed the Russian ART, and their linguistic status was confirmed by the Russian e-version of the Token Test. Second, to test the appropriateness of the Russian ART in the acute post-stroke period, a clinical group of such individuals (N = 43) performed the ART and the Token Test, as well as the Vasserman's scale which is widely used in Russian clinics. Finally, 16 people in the acute stroke period performed the Russian ART twice to prove that the test can detect early changes in an acute patient's linguistic status. Outcomes & Results: The results showed that the Russian ART can be considered as a valid, sensitive, specific, and accurate screening tool with the high test-retest reliability, inter-item consistency, and inter-rater reliability. In the acute post-stroke group, the correlation between the ART and the Token Test was high and significant; a moderate correlation and no significant correlation were found between the Vasserman's scale and the Russian ART and the Token Test correspondingly. The Russian ART also allowed us to detect the improvement in speech/language status in the acute post-stroke period. Conclusion: The study confirmed that the Russian ART meets all required standards to be suggested for usage in a Russian-speaking clinical population. This test was relevant for detecting the presence and severity of speech/language disorders and to measure the improvement in the acute post-stroke period

The Nordugrid production grid infrastructure, status and plans

Nordugrid offers reliable grid services for academic users over an increasing set of computing & storage resources spanning through the Nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. A small group of scientists has already been using the Nordugrid as their daily computing utility. In the near future we expect a rapid growth both in the number of active users and available resources thanks to the recently launched Nordic grid projects.We report on the present status and short term plans of the Nordic grid infrastructure and describe the available and foreseen resources, grid services and our forming user bas