Who is Right? A Word-Identification-in-Noise Test for Young Children Using Minimal Pair Distracters

Purpose: Many children have difficulties understanding speech. At present, there are few assessments that test for subtle impairments in speech perception with normative data from U.K. children. We present a new test that evaluates children's ability to identify target words in background noise by choosing between minimal pair alternatives that differ by a single articulatory phonetic feature. This task (a) is tailored to testing young children, but also readily applicable to adults; (b) has minimal memory demands; (c) adapts to the child's ability; and (d) does not require reading or verbal output. Method: We tested 155 children and young adults aged from 5 to 25 years on this new test of single word perception. Results: Speech-in-noise abilities in this particular task develop rapidly through childhood until they reach maturity at around 9 years of age. Conclusions: We make this test freely available and provide associated normative data. We hope that it will be useful to researchers and clinicians in the assessment of speech perception abilities in children who are hard of hearing or have developmental language disorder, dyslexia, or auditory processing disorder. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.1715593

Lyceum: internet voice groupware for distance learning

This paper describes the design, implementation and deployment of Lyceum, a groupware system providing students and tutors with real time voice conferencing and visual workspace tools, over the standard internet. Lyceum uses a Java client/server architecture to tackle a formidable set of networking requirements: multi-way voice communication with synchronous shared displays, scalable to hundreds of simultaneous users, running over normal modem connections via unknown internet service providers, on home PCs. Additionally, the design had to support multiple courses with different requirements. We describe the interdisciplinary requirements analysis, and iterative design process, by which an academic course team was able to specify and evaluate prototypes. We present the systemís architecture, describe the technical successes and failures from Lyceumís first large scale deployment, and summarise its affordances for interaction and learning

Governing Bodies: Caster Semenya and the Rhetorical Management of Sex and Gender Ambiguity in Professional Athletics

Sport has long been thought of as an opiate for the masses, where a collective can forget about social, political, racial, or economic differences and unify to compete in the same space or root for a common team (Eitzen and Sage 202). Scholarship in sports communication, sports rhetoric, and sports sociology, however, has shown that this view of sport as an apolitical cultural institution separate from impactful political debate is oversimplified. Rather, sports are key sites in which beliefs about gender, race, class, and politics are made manifest. This dissertation uses the case of Caster Semenya, a female South African middle-distance runner who was wrongly accused of being a man competing in a women\u27s race, to shed light on the ways athletics shape definitions of sex and gender. I suggest that governing bodies in professional athletics have employed rhetorical silence in rules to maintain the power to determine who can access the gendered space of an athletics competition and under what pretenses. I assert that despite the fact that competitive spaces restrict athletes\u27 gender deliveries to a great degree, athletes such as Semenya still retain some autonomy in delivering their gender to viewers, though that delivery does have significant consequences. And finally, I suggest that U.S. media coverage of Semenya reaffirms a binary gender ideology by rhetorically scapegoating Semenya, separating her from the collective and symbolically sacrificing her to reaffirm binary gender ideals. By identifying the methods in which sex and gender ambiguity are presented and treated in sports, this dissertation identifies a need for a clearer, non-alienating way of discussing sex and gender variance in sport and society

Personality Profiles of Iditasport Ultra-marathon Participants

Each February, competitors convene in Big Lake, Alaska, to participate in the “Iditasport Human Powered Ultra-Marathon”. Who would attempt this challenging race? Personality might be one factor predicting participation. Iditasport represents a unique athletic event with a distinctive social and psychological climate that might be reflected in the personalities of the participants in many ways. This study was designed to identify the personality profile of Iditasport athletes when compared to normative populations and to explore differences between athletes competing in different race divisions

What's So Spatial About Time Anyway?

Both Skow (2007) and Callender (2008) independently argue that time can be distinguished from space due to the special role it plays in our laws of nature: our laws determine the behaviour of physical systems across time, but not across space. In this work we asses the claim that the laws of nature might provide the basis for distinguishing time from space by looking specifically at the claims of Skow and Callender. We find that there is an obvious reason to be sceptical of the argument Skow submits for distinguishing time from space: Skow fails to pay sufficient attention to the relationship between the dynamical laws and the antecedent conditions required to establish a complete solution from the laws. Callender's more sophisticated argument in favour of distinguishing time from space by virtue of the laws of nature presents a much stronger basis to draw the distinction. We raise, however, the possibility that Callender's account in a certain sense shifts the bump in the carpet: that laws are more 'informative' in the temporal direction seems to call out for an underlying explanation, and whatever this underlying factor is, surely this is the real distinction between time and space

Age-related biomarkers can be modulated by diet in the rat

This study seeks to establish the normal serum concentrations of biochemical markers related to nutrition, inflammation and disease, and to investigate how the levels change with age and diet in the rat. To this end, we fed rats from weaning on three diets differing in their protein, carbohydrate and fatty acid content. The diets consisted of a control, nutritionally balanced diet, this same diet supplemented with 10% (wt/wt) beef tallow, and a diet that was high in fat and carbohydrate and low in protein. Blood samples from rats at two different ages, 3 months and 12 months, were then analysed. In control rats, with advancing age there was a general decrease in potassium, iron and serum albumin concentrations and in the activities of aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase, and an increase in total and HDL cholesterol. These changes were modulated by diet: many of the age-related changes (serum concentrations of potassium, iron and cholesterol, and liver enzyme activities) were not observed in animals eating the high fat diet. In contrast, the high carbohydrate, high fat, low protein diet-fed animals showed several additional changes (serum concentrations of sodium, urea, creatinine and TG, and activity of alkaline phosphatase) that can be related to kidney, liver and cardiovascular health

Biomechanical testing of hip protectors following the Canadian Standards Association express document

Summary A variety of hip protectors are available, but it is not clear which is the most effective and there is no standard test to evaluate their performance. This is the first study that uses a standard mechanical test on hip protectors. Some protectors perform well but others are almost ineffective, providing little to no protection to the wearer during a fall. Introduction Each year, over 70,000 patients are admitted to hospital in the UK with hip fractures. There are a variety of commercial hip protectors currently available. However, it is not explicitly clear which is the most effective with regard to maximum force attenuation, whilst still being both comfortable for the user and providing reasonable force reduction if misplaced from the intended position. The numerous test methods reported in the literature have given conflicting results, making objective comparison difficult for users, researchers, and manufacturers alike. The Canadian Standards Association (CSA) has therefore published an express document (EXP-08-17) with a draft standard test method. This paper presents initial results for a range of hip protectors. Methods Eighteen commercially available hip protectors were tested according to EXP-08-17. Each hip protector was impacted five times in correct anatomical alignment over the greater trochanter and once at 50 mm displacements in the anterior, posterior, and lateral directions. Results Considerable differences were identified between individual hip protectors in their ability to reduce impact forces on the femur (between 3% and 36% reduction in peak force). The performance was reduced when misplaced in many cases (maximum reduction only 20%). Conclusions This is the first study that uses a standard mechanical test on hip protectors. Previous studies have used a variety of methods, making it difficult to interpret results. We hope that these results using a standard test method will facilitate the effective comparison of results, as well as providing useful data for clinicians, users, and purchasers

What's So Spatial About Time Anyway?

Skow ([2007]), and much more recently Callender ([2017]), argue that time can be distinguished from space due to the special role it plays in our laws of nature: our laws determine the behaviour of physical systems across time, but not across space. In this work we assess the claim that the laws of nature might provide the basis for distinguishing time from space. We find that there is an obvious reason to be sceptical of the argument Skow submits for distinguishing time from space: Skow fails to pay sufficient attention to the relationship between the dynamical laws and the antecedent conditions required to establish a complete solution from the laws. Callender’s more sophisticated arguments in favour of distinguishing time from space by virtue of the laws of nature presents a much stronger basis to draw the distinction. By developing a radical reading of Callender’s view we propose a novel approach to differentiating time and space that we call temporal perspectivalism. This is the view according to which the difference between time and space is a function of the agentive perspective

What's So Spatial About Time Anyway?

Both Skow (2007) and Callender (2008) independently argue that time can be distinguished from space due to the special role it plays in our laws of nature: our laws determine the behaviour of physical systems across time, but not across space. In this work we asses the claim that the laws of nature might provide the basis for distinguishing time from space by looking specifically at the claims of Skow and Callender. We find that there is an obvious reason to be sceptical of the argument Skow submits for distinguishing time from space: Skow fails to pay sufficient attention to the relationship between the dynamical laws and the antecedent conditions required to establish a complete solution from the laws. Callender's more sophisticated argument in favour of distinguishing time from space by virtue of the laws of nature presents a much stronger basis to draw the distinction. We raise, however, the possibility that Callender's account in a certain sense shifts the bump in the carpet: that laws are more 'informative' in the temporal direction seems to call out for an underlying explanation, and whatever this underlying factor is, surely this is the real distinction between time and space