Do instrumental music students hear differently ? : implications for students who have a disability

It should be no surprise to suggest that the better a child listens, the better is their likelihood of classroom success. Within the existing body of research, it is relatively easy to locate evidence that not only is auditory discrimination a key predictor of children's classroom success, but that instrumental music training can enhance children's auditory discrimination skills. Optimizing auditory discrimination is as equally important for children who have a disability as it is for those who do not have a disability. However, the essential problem of (virtually all) the available literature examining music training and its associated non-musical benefits, is that it rarely identifies whether any children who had a disability were included in the study’s experimental samples. This limitation is problematic. While the findings of many studies that investigate auditory discrimination and instrumental music training may well be relevant for children who have a disability, it simply cannot be known with certainty whether they are or not. Therefore, specifically identifying children who had a disability within the participant sample of this study was the critical aspect differentiating this project from the way other, similar studies have been typically run and reported. In all, this study involved 185 eight-year-old children drawn from four schools in south-east Queensland, Australia. Of these, 131 children received instrumental music training (the intervention), while 54 others were not involved in any form of instrumental training over the same 18-week period. A parent survey was used to determine whether individual children who were involved in this study had a disability. Auditory discrimination testing of all the study's participants was performed both before and after the intervention, and scores from each of these tests compared. This study found that children receiving instrumental music training demonstrated significantly greater improvements to their auditory discrimination than did their peers who were not involved in instrumental music training. Critically, this association between instrumental music training and better auditory discrimination performance remained constant regardless of whether the children in this study had a disability. Moreover, this study also found that the effect size for the association between instrumental music training and improvements to auditory discrimination skill was greatest for the children who had a disability and were involved in regular inschool instrumental music classes learning alongside their peers who did not have a disability

Inference of epidemiological parameters from household stratified data

We consider a continuous-time Markov chain model of SIR disease dynamics with two levels of mixing. For this so-called stochastic households model, we provide two methods for inferring the model parameters---governing within-household transmission, recovery, and between-household transmission---from data of the day upon which each individual became infectious and the household in which each infection occurred, as would be available from first few hundred studies. Each method is a form of Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo that allows us to calculate a joint posterior distribution for all parameters and hence the household reproduction number and the early growth rate of the epidemic. The first method performs exact Bayesian inference using a standard data-augmentation approach; the second performs approximate Bayesian inference based on a likelihood approximation derived from branching processes. These methods are compared for computational efficiency and posteriors from each are compared. The branching process is shown to be an excellent approximation and remains computationally efficient as the amount of data is increased

High Speed Civil Transportation

This paper explores the research and development of high-speed transportation for commercial travel that is currently talang place at several research centers. The paper delves into wind\u27tunnel testing of the a~rframea nd development of new enpes that will power high-speed aircraft faster, quieter, and more economically than previous supersonic transports. Noise pollution and possible damage to the environment are significant hurdles to be overcome in the development of this aircraft. The paper will Qscuss the vision of high-speed travel and the challenges to achieve the dream of economic high-speed travel. Achieving these objectives make the possibility of high-speed air travel a reality

Dietary Uncoupling of Gut Microbiota and Energy Harvesting from Obesity and Glucose Tolerance in Mice

The authors gratefully acknowledge Doctoral Training Partnership funding from the BBSRC (M.J.D.) and funding from the Scottish Government (P.J.M., A.W.R., and A.W.W.). We also thank the Centre for Genome-Enabled Biology and Medicine for help with next-generation sequencing and Karen Garden and the Rowett’s Analytical Services for SCFA analysis. SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION Supplemental Information includes four figures and two tables and can be found with this article online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2017.10.056.Peer reviewedPublisher PD