Symbolic gesturing: creating opportunities for emotional connections between practitioners and infants in day care

This article reports on how symbolic gesturing was applied in a nursery setting. Forms of signing systems have been well documented as contributing to communication, predominately used alongside speech when there is a different mother tongue or a physical impairment [Goodwyn, S. W., &amp; Acredolo, L. P. (1993). Symbolic gesture versus word: Is there a modality advantage for onset of symbol use? Child Development, 6, 688–701]. Symbolic Gesturing (SG) is an emerging area to support pre-verbal infants in communicating more effectively. In this article, SG was evaluated as way of reflecting and developing practitioner’s emotional responses and initiations with the infants in their care. The narratives of three practitioners using SG were gathered over several months and revealed how SG created further opportunities for reflection regarding the emotional relationships with infants they cared for. SG was considered a valuable approach to enhancing the emotional interactional connections with infants, resulting in closer, more attuned relationships.</p

The impact of moisture on the milling behavior of different biomasses

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of moisture content on the milling behaviour of four different biomasses commonly used in the power sector and characterise their milling behaviour in a laboratory scale planetary ball mill. As received (raw) and dried wood pellets, eucalyptus pellets, olive pellets, and Spanish olive cake were milled for the same milling conditions, and then characterised by energy consumption, particle size, and thermal characterisation. The study found that dry samples have higher energy consumption than raw samples in a laboratory scale planetary ball mill. Drying had varying impacts on the particle size distributions of the samples, with olive cake showing a 60% reduction in mean geometric diameter, while wood and eucalyptus pellets only showed a 15% and 18% reduction respectively. Moisture acts an inhibitor to milling performance, and increased moisture makes biomass more impact resistant, thus reducing ball momentum and resulting in lower energy consumption in the mill

Optimisation of biomass milling for conveyance and combustion

Agricultural wastes are increasingly being used as biomass materials for co-firing in coal fired power stations. However issues in milling and conveyance of agricultural residues are limiting the use of these resources and a greater understanding of their milling and conveyance behaviours is required to overcome the issues being seen in industry. The batch milling process of a planetary ball mill can be used to simulate various conditions within a continuous flow ball mill, which allows for the analysis of the different of mill variables, and identify the optimal milling conditions within the mill for different biomasses. For this study, as received olive cake was milled in a laboratory scale planetary ball mill for a range of mill variables in order to ascertain the impact of these variables on milling behavior. The variables investigated were volume (100-200ml), mill rotational speed (200-600 RPM), and energy inputs/time (0.1 kJ-8 kJ). During the milling process caking was observed for all speeds and volumes, especially for long milling periods and was more pronounced for higher speeds. Dusting was observed for high volumes at low speeds for prolonged milling durations. The impact of overloading the mill can be seen by the increased energy requirements and milling times; low speeds result in incomplete milling and dusting, and high speeds result in extreme caking in short time periods

The design with intent method: A design tool for influencing user behaviour

The official published version can be found at the link below.Using product and system design to influence user behaviour offers potential for improving performance and reducing user error, yet little guidance is available at the concept generation stage for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour. This article presents the Design with Intent Method, an innovation tool for designers working in this area, illustrated via application to an everyday human–technology interaction problem: reducing the likelihood of a customer leaving his or her card in an automatic teller machine. The example application results in a range of feasible design concepts which are comparable to existing developments in ATM design, demonstrating that the method has potential for development and application as part of a user-centred design process

The measurement of guanxi: Introducing the GRX scale

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Industrial Marketing Management. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.This study posits and examines a measurement scale for measuring guanxi based on three Chinese relational constructs – ganqing, renqing and xinren. Focusing on Anglo-Chinese buyer–seller relationships, the research reports the findings from six qualitative in-depth interviews and survey data obtained from over 200 Taiwanese trading companies. Based on exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses the findings from the final second-order confirmatory factor analysis of the guanxi model identified 11 items for measuring ganqing, renqing, xinren and guanxi respectively. The results offer a useful starting point in order for business practitioners to assess their guanxi and at the same time provide academics with a scale for operationalizing the measurement of guanxi

BMQ

BMQ: Boston Medical Quarterly was published from 1950-1966 by the Boston University School of Medicine and the Massachusetts Memorial Hospitals

Attention and automation: New perspectives on mental underload and performance

There is considerable evidence in the ergonomics literature that automation can significantly reduce operator mental workload. Furthermore, reducing mental workload is not necessarily a good thing, particularly in cases where the level is already manageable. This raises the issue of mental underload, which can be at least as detrimental to performance as overload. However, although it is widely recognized that mental underload is detrimental to performance, there are very few attempts to explain why this may be the case. It is argued in this paper that, until the need for a human operator is completely eliminated, automation has psychological implications relevant in both theoretical and applied domains. The present paper reviews theories of attention, as well as the literature on mental workload and automation, to synthesize a new explanation for the effects of mental underload on performance. Malleable attentional resources theory proposes that attentional capacity shrinks to accommodate reductions in mental workload, and that this shrinkage is responsible for the underload effect. The theory is discussed with respect to the applied implications for ergonomics research

Hierarchical Processing in Seven-Month-Old Infants

Hierarchical structures are crucial to many aspects of cognitive processing and especially for language. However, there still is little experimental support for the ability of infants to learn such structures. Here, we show that, with structures simple enough to be processed by various animals, seven-month-old infants seem to learn hierarchical relations. Infants were presented with an artificial language composed of “sentences” made of three-syllable “words.” The syllables within words conformed to repetition patterns based on syllable tokens involving either adjacent repetitions (e.g., dubaba) or nonadjacent repetitions (e.g., dubadu). Importantly, the sequence of word structures in each sentence conformed to repetition patterns based on word types (e.g., aba-abb-abb). Infants learned this repetition pattern of repetition patterns and thus likely a hierarchical pattern based on repetitions, but only when the repeated word structure was based on adjacent repetitions. While our results leave open the question of which exact sentence-level pattern infants learned, they suggest that infants embedded the word-level patterns into a higher-level pattern and thus seemed to acquire a hierarchically embedded pattern

Docetaxel-Loaded PLGA Nanoparticles Improve Efficacy in Taxane-Resistant Triple-Negative Breast Cancer

Novel treatment strategies, including nanomedicine, are needed for improving management of triple-negative breast cancer. Patients with triple-negative breast cancer, when considered as a group, have a worse outcome after chemotherapy than patients with breast cancers of other subtypes, a finding that reflects the intrinsically adverse prognosis associated with the disease. The aim of this study was to improve the efficacy of docetaxel by incorporation into a novel nanoparticle platform for the treatment of taxane-resistant triple-negative breast cancer. Rod-shaped nanoparticles encapsulating docetaxel were fabricated using an imprint lithography based technique referred to as Particle Replication in Nonwetting Templates (PRINT). These rod-shaped PLGA-docetaxel nanoparticles were tested in the C3(1)-T-antigen (C3Tag) genetically engineered mouse model (GEMM) of breast cancer that represents the basal-like subtype of triple-negative breast cancer and is resistant to therapeutics from the taxane family. Thi..

Bullying and cyberbullying studies in the school-aged population on the island of Ireland : a meta-analysis

Background. Bullying research has gained a substantial amount of interest in recent years because of the implications for child and adolescent development. Aim and sample. We conducted a meta-analysis of traditional and cyberbullying studies in the Republic and North of Ireland to gain an understanding of prevalence rates and associated issues (particularly psychological correlates and intervention strategies) among young people (primary and secondary school students). Method. Four electronic databases were searched (PsychArticles, ERIC, PsychInfo and Education Research Complete) for studies of traditional bullying and cyberbullying behaviours (perpetrators, victims or both) published between January 1997 and April 2016. Results. Afinal sample of 39 articles fit our selection criteria.CMAsoftware was used to estimate a pooled prevalence rate for traditional/cyberbullying victimization and perpetration. A systematic review on the psychological impacts for all types of bullying and previously used interventions in an Irish setting is also provided. Conclusions. The results demonstrate the influence moderating factors (e.g., assessment tools, answer scale, time frame) have on reported prevalence rates. These results are discussed in light of current studies, and points for future research are considered