A comparison of two-coloured filter systems for treating visual reading difficulties

Copyright @ 2013 Informa UK Ltd.Purpose: Visual disturbances that make it difficult to read text are often termed “visual stress”. Coloured filters in spectacles may help some children overcome reading problems that are often caused by visual stress. It has been suggested that for optimal effect each child requires an individually prescribed colour for each eye, as determined in systems such as the “Harris Foundation” coloured filters. Alternatively, it has been argued that only blue or yellow filters, as used in the “Dyslexia Research Trust” (DRT) filter system, are necessary to affect the underlying physiology. Method: A randomised, double blind trial with 73 delayed readers, was undertaken to compare changes in reading and spelling as well as irregular and non-word reading skills after 3 months of wearing either the Harris or the DRT filters. Results: Reading improved significantly after wearing either type of filter (t = −8.4, p < 0.01), with 40% of the children improving their reading age by 6 months or more during the 3 month trial. However, spelling ability (t = 2.1, p = 0.05) and non-word reading (f = 4.7, p < 0.05) improved significantly more with the DRT than with the Harris filters. Conclusion: Education and rehabilitation professionals should therefore, consider coloured filters as an effective intervention for delayed readers experiencing visual stress

Using coloured filters to reduce the symptoms of visual stress in children with reading delay

Background: Meares Irlen Syndrome (MIS), otherwise known as “visual stress”, is one condition that can cause difficulties with reading. Aim: This study aimed to compare the effect of two coloured-filter systems on the symptoms of visual stress in children with reading delay. Methods: The study design was a pre-test, post-test, randomized head-to-head comparison of two filter systems on the symptoms of visual stress in school children. A total of 68 UK mainstream schoolchildren with significant impairment in reading ability completed the study. Results: The filter systems appeared to have a large effect on the reported symptoms between pre and post three-month time points (d = 2.5, r = 0.78). Both filter types appeared to have large effects (Harris d = 1.79, r = 0.69 and DRT d = 3.22, r = 0.85). Importantly, 35% of participants’ reported that their symptoms had resolved completely; 72% of the 68 children appeared to gain improvements in three or more visual stress symptoms. Conclusion and significance: The reduction in symptoms, which appeared to be brought about by the use of coloured filters, eased the visual discomfort experienced by these children when reading. This type of intervention therefore has the potential to facilitate occupational engagement

VNTR analysis reveals unexpected genetic diversity within Mycoplasma agalactiae, the main causative agent of contagious agalactia

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Mycoplasma agalactiae </it>is the main cause of contagious agalactia, a serious disease of sheep and goats, which has major clinical and economic impacts. Previous studies of <it>M. agalactiae </it>have shown it to be unusually homogeneous and there are currently no available epidemiological techniques which enable a high degree of strain differentiation.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have developed variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) analysis using the sequenced genome of the <it>M. agalactiae </it>type strain PG2. The PG2 genome was found to be replete with tandem repeat sequences and 4 were chosen for further analysis. VNTR 5 was located within the hypothetical protein MAG6170 a predicted lipoprotein. VNTR 14 was intergenic between the hypothetical protein MAG3350 and the hypothetical protein MAG3340. VNTR 17 was intergenic between the hypothetical protein MAG4060 and the hypothetical protein MAG4070 and VNTR 19 spanned the 5' end of the pseudogene for a lipoprotein MAG4310 and the 3' end of the hypothetical lipoprotein MAG4320.</p> <p>We have investigated the genetic diversity of 88 <it>M. agalactiae </it>isolates of wide geographic origin using VNTR analysis and compared it with pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis. Simpson's index of diversity was calculated to be 0.324 for PFGE and 0.574 for VNTR analysis. VNTR analysis revealed unexpected diversity within <it>M. agalactiae </it>with 9 different VNTR types discovered. Some correlation was found between geographical origin and the VNTR type of the isolates.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>VNTR analysis represents a useful, rapid first-line test for use in molecular epidemiological analysis of <it>M. agalactiae </it>for outbreak tracing and control.</p

Organelles in Blastocystis that blur the distinction between mitochondria and hydrogenosomes.

addresses: Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, B3H 1X5, Canada. [email protected]: PMCID: PMC2428068types: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tOpen Access Article. This is a copy of an article published in Current Biology © Elsevier. Current Biology is available online at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09609822Blastocystis is a unicellular stramenopile of controversial pathogenicity in humans. Although it is a strict anaerobe, Blastocystis has mitochondrion-like organelles with cristae, a transmembrane potential and DNA. An apparent lack of several typical mitochondrial pathways has led some to suggest that these organelles might be hydrogenosomes, anaerobic organelles related to mitochondria. We generated 12,767 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) from Blastocystis and identified 115 clusters that encode putative mitochondrial and hydrogenosomal proteins. Among these is the canonical hydrogenosomal protein iron-only [FeFe] hydrogenase that we show localizes to the organelles. The organelles also have mitochondrial characteristics, including pathways for amino acid metabolism, iron-sulfur cluster biogenesis, and an incomplete tricarboxylic acid cycle as well as a mitochondrial genome. Although complexes I and II of the electron transport chain (ETC) are present, we found no evidence for complexes III and IV or F1Fo ATPases. The Blastocystis organelles have metabolic properties of aerobic and anaerobic mitochondria and of hydrogenosomes. They are convergently similar to organelles recently described in the unrelated ciliate Nyctotherus ovalis. These findings blur the boundaries between mitochondria, hydrogenosomes, and mitosomes, as currently defined, underscoring the disparate selective forces that shape these organelles in eukaryotes

Fifty years of spellchecking

A short history of spellchecking from the late 1950s to the present day, describing its development through dictionary lookup, affix stripping, correction, confusion sets, and edit distance to the use of gigantic databases

Multicore implementation of a fixed-complexity tree-search detector for MIMO communications

[EN] Multicore systems allow the efficient implementation of signal processing algorithms for communication systems due to their high parallel processing capabilities. In this paper, we present a high-throughput multicore implementation of a fixed-complexity tree-search-based detector interesting for MIMO wireless communication systems. Experimental results confirm that this implementation allows to accelerate the data detection stage for different constellation sizes and number of subcarriers.This work was supported by the TEC2009-13741 project of the Spanish Ministry of Science, by the PROMETEO/2009/013 project and ACOMP/2012/076 of the Generalitat Valenciana, and the Vicerrectorado de Investigacion de la UPV through Programa de Apoyo a la Investigacion y desarrollo (PAID-05-11-2898).Ramiro Sánchez, C.; Roger Varea, S.; Gonzalez, A.; Almenar Terré, V.; Vidal Maciá, AM. (2013). Multicore implementation of a fixed-complexity tree-search detector for MIMO communications. The Journal of Supercomputing (Online). 65(3):1010-1019. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-012-0839-xS10101019653Paulraj AJ, Gore DA, Nabar RU, Bölcskei H (2004) An overview of MIMO communications—a key to gigabit wireless. Proc IEEE 92(2):198–218Jiang M, Hanzo L (2007) Multiuser MIMO-OFDM for next-generation wireless systems. Proc IEEE 95(7):1430–14693GPP TS 36.201, V10.0.0, Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (E-UTRA); Physical layer—general description, December 2010Lin Y, Lee H, Woh M, Harel Y, Mahlke S, Mudge T, Chakrabarti C, Flautner K (2007) SODA: a high-performance DSP architecture for software-defined radio. IEEE MICRO 27(1):114–123Yang C-H, Markovic D (2008) A multi-core sphere decoder VLSI architecture for MIMO communications. In: Global telecommunications conference, November, pp 1–6Wu D, Eilert J, Liu D (2011) Implementation of a high-speed MIMO soft-output symbol detector for software defined radio. J Signal Process Syst 63(1):27–37Tan K, Liu H, Zhang J, Zhang Y, Fang J, Voelker GM (2011) Sora: high-performance software radio using general-purpose multi-core processors. Communun ACM 54(1):99–107Roger S, Ramiro C, Gonzalez A, Almenar V, Vidal AM (2012) An efficient GPU implementation of fixed-complexity sphere decoders for MIMO wireless systems. Integr Comput-Aided Eng 19(4):341–350Chen Y-K et al (2009) Signal processing on platforms with multiple cores: Part 1-Overview and methodologies. IEEE Signal Proc Mag 6:24–25Karam LJ, AlKamal I, Gatherer A, Frantz GA, Anderson DV, Evans BL (2009) Trends in multicore DSP platforms. IEEE Signal Process Mag 26(6):38–49Barbero LG, Thompson JS (2008) Fixing the complexity of the sphere decoder for MIMO detection. IEEE Trans Wirel Commun 7(6):2131–2142Hassibi B, Vikalo H (2005) On sphere decoding algorithm. Part I, The expected complexity. IEEE Trans Signal Process 54(5):2806–2818Agrell E, Eriksson T, Vardy A, Zeger K (2002) Closest point search in lattices. IEEE Trans Inf Theory 48(8):2201–2214OpenMP v3.0, http://www.openmp.org/mp-documents/spec30.pdf , May 200