A Multilevel Meta‑Analysis

Insecure attachment to primary caregivers is associated with the development of depression symptoms in children and youth. This association has been shown by individual studies testing the relation between attachment and depression and by meta-analyses focusing on broad internalizing problems instead of depression or adult samples only. We therefore meta-analytically examined the associations between attachment security and depression in children and adolescents, using a multilevel approach. In total, 643 effect sizes were extracted from 123 independent samples. A significant moderate overall effect size was found (r = .31), indicating that insecure attachment to primary caregivers is associated with depression. Multivariate analysis of the significant moderators that impacted on the strength of the association between attachment security and depression showed that country of the study, study design, gender, the type of attachment, and the type of instrument to assess attachment uniquely contributed to the explanation of variance. This study suggests that insecure attachment may be a predictor of the development of depression in children and adolescents. When treating depression in children, attachment should therefore be addressed

MA-VAE: Multi-head Attention-based Variational Autoencoder Approach for Anomaly Detection in Multivariate Time-series Applied to Automotive Endurance Powertrain Testing

A clear need for automatic anomaly detection applied to automotive testing has emerged as more and more attention is paid to the data recorded and manual evaluation by humans reaches its capacity. Such real-world data is massive, diverse, multivariate and temporal in nature, therefore requiring modelling of the testee behaviour. We propose a variational autoencoder with multi-head attention (MA-VAE), which, when trained on unlabelled data, not only provides very few false positives but also manages to detect the majority of the anomalies presented. In addition to that, the approach offers a novel way to avoid the bypass phenomenon, an undesirable behaviour investigated in literature. Lastly, the approach also introduces a new method to remap individual windows to a continuous time series. The results are presented in the context of a real-world industrial data set and several experiments are undertaken to further investigate certain aspects of the proposed model. When configured properly, it is 9% of the time wrong when an anomaly is flagged and discovers 67% of the anomalies present. Also, MA-VAE has the potential to perform well with only a fraction of the training and validation subset, however, to extract it, a more sophisticated threshold estimation method is required.Comment: Accepted in NCTA202

Mixité en Education Physique et Sportive: Evolution de la motivation des élèves dans le cadre d’un enseignement mixte au cours d’un cycle de danse

Dans le cadre de notre formation en EPS, nous nous sommes intéressés à l’engagement des élèves dans les classes mixtes. Cette question de l’engagement dans un contexte mixte semblait important à nos yeux, dans un contexte d’enseignement de plus en plus en classes mixtes dans le Canton de Vaud. Il nous semblait judicieux de porter notre regard sur les variations de la motivation des élèves dans ce cas de figure, notamment dans les activités fortement connotées par genre (football, danse, …). La motivation en EPS a été investiguée par de nombreux auteurs. Nous avons choisi de porter la focale sur les effets éventuels du guidage de l’enseignant, du travail par petits groupes, de la création de sens par l’engagement des élèves dans un projet et de l’utilisation de la tablette numérique dans le processus d’apprentissage des élèves. Nous avons réalisé une étude avec deux classes de 9H sur 17 leçons, dans une activité connotée féminine (danse). Nous avons procédé à des observations, soutenues par trois focus groups et deux questionnaires (MIXEPS et ISEP). Des indicateurs ont été définis pour mesurer les variations de motivation des élèves, permettant de repérer les effets potentiels des différentes variables : guidage de l’enseignant, travail par petits groupes, projet et utilisation de la tablette numérique. Les résultats montrent que le guidage de l’enseignant et la mise en projet ont un impact positif sur l’évolution de la motivation au cours du cycle. Il est plus difficile de conclure avec certitude que l’enseignement par petits groupes et l’utilisation de la tablette génèrent une motivation plus importante. D’un point de vue professionnel, cette étude souligne l’importance du sens des apprentissages par le biais de la mise en projet ainsi que l’attention à porter sur l’évolution des élèves afin d’adapter les formes de guidage au plus près de cette évolution

Defining flexibility of assembly workstations through the underlying dimensions and impacting drivers

The concept of mass customization is becoming increasingly important for manufacturers of assembled products. As a result, manufacturers face a high variety of products, small batch sizes and frequent changeovers. To cope with these challenges, an appropriate level of flexibility of the assembly system is required. A methodology for quantifying the flexibility level of assembly workstations could help to evaluate (and improve) this flexibility level at all times. That flexibility model could even be integrated into the standard workstation design process. Despite the general consensus among researchers that manufacturing flexibility is a multi-dimensional concept, there is still no consensus on its different dimensions. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) shows that many similarities can be found in the multitude of flexibility dimensions. Through a series of interactive company workshops, we achieved to reduce them to a shortlist of 9 flexibility dimensions applicable to an assembly workstation. In addition, a first step was taken to construct a causal model of these flexibility dimensions and their determining factors, the so called drivers, through the Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) approach. In the next phase, a driver scoring mechanism will be initiated to achieve an overall assembly workstation flexibility assessment based on the scoring of drivers depending on the workstation design

Age and skill bias of trade liberalisation? : heterogeneous employment effects of EU Eastern Enlargement

This study analyses the 2004 Eastern Enlargement to the European Union to obtain evidence on the employment effects of an increase in trade liberalisation. The Enlargement is thought to generate a trade-induced demand shock with no (or only limited) supply effects. Besides the variation over time induced by the Enlargement, identification of the effects is based on a Melitz (2003) type productivity term to differentiate firms by the extent of exposure to the demand shock. The idea is that the effects of the demand shock should be driven by differences in firm-level productivity from the period before the new member countries actually entered the EU. German linked employer-employee data allow to observe the relation of initial establishment productivity with employment changes over a long panel from 1995 to 2009. The estimates show that the Enlargement had a negative effect on establishment-level employment growth, which is driven by increased worker separations and increased job destruction. Besides the overall employment effect, the study focuses on effect heterogeneity across age and skill groups of the workforce. These estimates point to a skill bias in the effect of the Enlargement that disadvantages low- and medium-skilled workers in terms of higher worker separation and job destruction. In addition, lowskilled workers suffer fewer accessions by firms, where against medium-skilled workers enjoy increased accessions and creation of new jobs. Besides this indication for a skill bias, there are no clear indications that point to an age bias in the employment effect of the Eastern Enlargement

Effects of maternal and paternal smoking on attentional control in children with and without ADHD

Maternal smoking during pregnancy is a risk factor for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but data on its adverse effects on cognitive functioning are sparse and inconsistent. Since the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy may be due to correlated genetic risk factors rather than being a pure environmental effect, we examined the effect of prenatal exposure to smoking on attentional control, taking into account the effects of both maternal and paternal smoking, and examined whether these effects were genetically mediated by parental genotypes. We further examined whether the effect of prenatal exposure to smoking on attentional control interacted with genotypes of the child. Participants were 79 children with ADHD, ascertained for the International Multi-centre ADHD Gene project (IMAGE), and 105 normal controls. Attentional control was assessed by a visual continuous performance task. Three genetic risk factors for ADHD (DRD4 7-repeat allele of the exon 3 variable number of tandem repeats (VNTR), DAT1 10/10 genotype of the VNTR located in the 3′ untranslated region, and the DAT1 6/6 genotype of the intron 8 VNTR) were included in the analyses. Paternal smoking had a negative effect on attentional control in children with ADHD and this effect appeared to be mediated by genetic risk factors. The prenatal smoking effect did not interact with genotypes of the child. Maternal smoking had no main effect on attentional control, which may be due to lower smoking rates. This study suggests that the effects of paternal smoking on attentional control in children with ADHD should be considered a proxy for ADHD and/or smoking risk genes. Future studies should examine if the results can be generalized to other cognitive domains

A Maternal Influence on Reading the Mind in the Eyes Mediated by Executive Function: Differential Parental Influences on Full and Half-Siblings

BACKGROUND: Parent-of-origin effects have been found to influence the mammalian brain and cognition and have been specifically implicated in the development of human social cognition and theory of mind. The experimental design in this study was developed to detect parent-of-origin effects on theory of mind, as measured by the 'Reading the mind in the eyes' (Eyes) task. Eyes scores were also entered into a principal components analysis with measures of empathy, social skills and executive function, in order to determine what aspect of theory of mind Eyes is measuring. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Maternal and paternal influences on Eyes scores were compared using correlations between pairs of full (70 pairs), maternal (25 pairs) and paternal siblings (15 pairs). Structural equation modelling supported a maternal influence on Eyes scores over the normal range but not low-scoring outliers, and also a sex-specific influence on males acting to decrease male Eyes scores. It was not possible to differentiate between genetic and environmental influences in this particular sample because maternal siblings tended to be raised together while paternal siblings were raised apart. The principal components analysis found Eyes was associated with measures of executive function, principally behavioural inhibition and attention, rather than empathy or social skills. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: In conclusion, the results suggest a maternal influence on Eye scores in the normal range and a sex-specific influence acting to reduce scores in males. This influence may act via aspects of executive function such as behavioural inhibition and attention. There may be different influences acting to produce the lowest Eyes scores which implies that the heratibility and/or maternal influence on poor theory of mind skills may be qualitatively different to the influence on the normal range