Investigation of Parameters That Affect the Acquired Near Infrared Diffuse Reflected Signals in Non-Destructive Soluble Solids Content Prediction

Near infrared spectroscopy is a susceptible technique which can be affected by various factors including the surface of samples. According to the Lambertian reflection, the uneven and matte surface of fruits will provide Lambertian light or diffuse reflectance where the light enters the sample tissues and that uniformly reflects out in all orientations. Bunch of researches were carried out using near infrared diffuse reflection mode in non-destructive soluble solids content (SSC) prediction whereas fewer of them studying about the geometrical effects of uneven surface of samples. Thus, this study aims to investigate the parameters that affect the near infrared diffuse reflection signals in non-destructive SSC prediction using intact pineapples. The relationship among the reflectance intensity, measurement positions, and the SSC value was studied. Next, three independent artificial neural networks were separately trained to investigate the geometrical effects on three different measurement positions. Results show that the concave surface of top and bottom parts of pineapples would affect the reflectance of light and consequently deteriorate the predictive model performance. The predictive model of middle part of pineapples achieved the best performance, i.e. root mean square error of prediction (RMSEP) and correlation coefficient of prediction (Rp) of 1.2104 °Brix and 0.7301 respectively

Intraprofessional Collaboration in Learning Evidence-Based Practice

Little is known about how collaborative curricular activities can help students learn about scientific evidence in occupational therapy (OT) and occupational therapy assistant (OTA) programs. We created and measured collaborative learning in evidence-based practice activities to enhance partnership building and intraprofessional collaboration among students in OT and OTA programs. Thirty-three OT students and 26 OTA students enrolled in a didactic course (Phase I) and an intraprofessional collaborative learning activity (Phase II) participated in this quasi-experimental repeated measure study. The students’ ability of how to read scholarly articles and their perceived importance and perceived ability to engage in intraprofessional collaboration were examined at three time points. Improvements were found in the OT students’ perceived importance of intraprofessional roles/responsibilities and the OTA students’ perceived ability to engage in intraprofessional communication after completing the Phase I didactic course. Both the OT and OTA students’ perceived ability to work as a team, identify their roles/responsibilities, communicate with peers, and their ability to read scholarly articles improved after the Phase II intraprofessional collaboration. Students valued the opportunity to gain collaboration experience and share different perspectives. They indicated they would have preferred to spend more time on the activities. The findings suggest that targeted learning activities can improve OT and OTA students’ ability to engage in evidence-based practice and their perceived importance and ability to engage in intraprofessional collaboration. Effective partnerships and intraprofessional collaboration are best introduced within academic programs

Reward prediction errors arising from switches between major and minor modes in music: An fMRI study

Evidence has accumulated that prediction error processing plays a role in the enjoyment of music listening. The present study examined listeners' neural responses to the signed reward prediction errors (RPEs) arising from switches between major and minor modes in music. We manipulated the final chord of J. S. Bach's keyboard pieces so that each major-mode passage ended with either the major (Major-Major) or minor (Major-Minor) tonic chord, and each minor-mode passage ended with either the minor (Minor-Minor) or major (Minor-Major) tonic chord. In Western music, the major and minor modes have positive and negative connotations, respectively. Therefore, the outcome of the final chord in Major-Minor stimuli was associated with negative RPE, whereas that in Minor-Major was associated with positive RPE. Twenty-three musically experienced adults underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while listening to Major-Major, Major-Minor, Minor-Minor, and Minor-Major stimuli. We found that activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (extending into the ventromedial prefrontal cortex) during the final chord for Major-Major was significantly higher than that for Major-Minor. Conversely, a frontoparietal network for Major-Minor exhibited significantly increased activity compared to Major-Major. The contrasts between Minor-Minor and Minor-Major yielded regions implicated in interoception. We discuss our results in relation to executive functions and the emotional connotations of major versus minor mode.Comment: submitted to Psychophysiolog

A Comparison between the Post- and Pre-dispersive Near Infrared Spectroscopy in Non-Destructive Brix Prediction Using Artificial Neural Network

Even though near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy have been implemented in determining the Brix of pineapples, no traceable study compares the effects of different acquisition designs. Thus, this study aims to evaluate the prediction performance of both pre- and post-dispersive NIR sensing devices in non-destructive Brix prediction using artificial neural network (ANN). The pre-dispersive device has five narrowband light emitting diodes (LEDs) with different wavelengths and a photodiode detector, whereas the post-dispersive device has a bifurcated fiber optic, a broadband LED, and a spectral sensor. First, the NIR diffuse reflectance was non-destructively collected using both NIR devices. Then, the collected diffuse reflectance was calibrated with the white and dark references, and then pre-processed using normalization and standard normal variate methods. After that, ANNs were built for both devices using the pre-processed data. Results show both devices are suitable for sample screening application with range error ratio (RER) of more than seven. Nevertheless, the ANN that trained using the post-dispersive device outperformed that trained using the pre-dispersive device with an 8.1% improvement of correlation coefficient of prediction (i.e. from 0.6853 to 0.7408), and a 5.7% improvement of root mean square error of prediction (i.e. from 1.3918 to 1.313°Brix)

Low-rank matrix recovery with structural incoherence for robust face recognition

We address the problem of robust face recognition, in which both training and test image data might be corrupted due to occlusion and disguise. From standard face recog-nition algorithms such as Eigenfaces to recently proposed sparse representation-based classification (SRC) methods, most prior works did not consider possible contamination of data during training, and thus the associated performance might be degraded. Based on the recent success of low-rank matrix recovery, we propose a novel low-rank matrix ap-proximation algorithm with structural incoherence for ro-bust face recognition. Our method not only decomposes raw training data into a set of representative basis with corre-sponding sparse errors for better modeling the face images, we further advocate the structural incoherence between the basis learned from different classes. These basis are en-couraged to be as independent as possible due to the regu-larization on structural incoherence. We show that this pro-vides additional discriminating ability to the original low-rank models for improved performance. Experimental re-sults on public face databases verify the effectiveness and robustness of our method, which is also shown to outper-form state-of-the-art SRC based approaches. 1

A Shallow Ritz Method for Elliptic Problems with Singular Sources

In this paper, a shallow Ritz-type neural network for solving elliptic equations with delta function singular sources on an interface is developed. There are three novel features in the present work; namely, (i) the delta function singularity is naturally removed, (ii) level set function is introduced as a feature input, (iii) it is completely shallow, comprising only one hidden layer. We first introduce the energy functional of the problem and then transform the contribution of singular sources to a regular surface integral along the interface. In such a way, the delta function singularity can be naturally removed without introducing a discrete one that is commonly used in traditional regularization methods, such as the well-known immersed boundary method. The original problem is then reformulated as a minimization problem. We propose a shallow Ritz-type neural network with one hidden layer to approximate the global minimizer of the energy functional. As a result, the network is trained by minimizing the loss function that is a discrete version of the energy. In addition, we include the level set function of the interface as a feature input of the network and find that it significantly improves the training efficiency and accuracy. We perform a series of numerical tests to show the accuracy of the present method and its capability for problems in irregular domains and higher dimensions

Occupational Therapy Students’ Self-Efficacy for Therapeutic Use of Self: Development and Associated Factors

Occupational therapy students need to develop self-efficacy for therapeutic use of self in practice. This longitudinal study examined Norwegian occupational therapy students’ self-efficacy for therapeutic use of self over a 16-month period and investigated predictors of their end-point self-efficacy. One hundred and eleven students from two universities completed a self-efficacy questionnaire related to the use of self after a workshop, and at 3-month, 10-month, and 16-month follow-up. The students’ self-efficacy development was analyzed with linear mixed effect models, while factors associated with self-efficacy were investigated with linear regressions. The students from both universities showed a linear increase in self-efficacy for therapeutic mode use (p \u3c 0.001), recognizing clients’ interpersonal characteristics (p \u3c 0.001), and managing interpersonal events (p \u3c 0.001). However, for the students from University 1 the largest increase occurred in an early phase, whereas for the students from University 2 the largest increase occurred in a late phase. Only baseline scores were associated with the end-point measure at 16-month follow-up. The study indicates that students’ self-efficacy for therapeutic use of self increased during the follow-up period and adds to the knowledge about occupational therapy students’ self-efficacy development related to understanding and managing client-therapist interactions

Effects of orthographic consistency and homophone density on Chinese spoken word recognition

Studies of alphabetic language have shown that orthographic knowledge influences phonological processing during spoken word recognition. This study utilized the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to differentiate two types of phonology-to-orthography (P-to-O) mapping consistencies in Chinese, namely homophone density and orthographic consistency. The ERP data revealed an orthographic consistency effect in the frontal-centrally distributed N400, and a homophone density effect in central-posteriorly distributed late positive component (LPC). Further source analyses using the standardized low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (sLORETA) demonstrated that the orthographic effect was not only localized in the frontal and temporal-parietal regions for phonological processing, but also in the posterior visual cortex for orthographic processing, while the homophone density effect was found in middle temporal gyrus for lexical-semantic selection, and in the temporal-occipital junction for orthographic processing. These results suggest that orthographic information not only shapes the nature of phonological representations, but may also be activated during on-line spoken word recognition

The feedback consistency effect in Chinese character recognition:evidence from a psycholinguistic norm

Researchers have demonstrated the importance of phonology in literacy acquisition and in visual word recognition. For example, the spelling-to-sound consistency effect has been observed in visual word recognition tasks, in which the naming responses are faster and more accurate for words with the same letters that also have the same pronunciation (e.g. -ean is always pronounced /in/, as in lean, dean, and bean). In addition, some studies have reported a much less intuitive feedback consistency effect when a rime can be spelled in different ways (e.g. /ip/ in heap and deep) in lexical decision tasks. Such findings suggest that, with activation flowing back and forth between orthographic and phonological units during word processing, any inconsistency in the mappings between orthography and phonology should weaken the stability of the feedback loop, and, thus, should delay recognition. However, several studies have failed to show reliable feedback consistency in printed word recognition. One possible reason for this is that the feedback consistency is naturally confounded with many other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or bigram frequency, as these variables are difficult to tease apart. Furthermore, there are challenges in designing factorial experiments that perfectly balance lexical stimuli on all factors besides feedback consistency. This study aims to examine the feedback consistency effect in reading Chinese characters by using a normative data of 3,423 Chinese phonograms. We collected the lexical decision time from 180 college students. A linear mixed model analysis was used to examine the feedback consistency effect by taking into account additional properties that may be confounded with feedback consistency, including character frequency, number of strokes, phonetic combinability, semantic combinability, semantic ambiguity, phonetic consistency, noun-to-verb ratios, and morphological boundedness. Some typical effects were observed, such as the more frequent and familiar a character, the faster one can decide it is a real character. More importantly, the linear mixed model analysis revealed a significant feedback consistency effect while controlling for other factors, which indicated that the pronunciation of phonograms might accommodate the organization of Chinese orthographic representation. Our study disentangled the feedback consistency from the many other factors, and supports the view that phonological activation would reverberate to orthographic representation in visual word recognition

Prevalence of Pediculus Capitis Infestation Among School Children of Chinese Refugees Residing in Mountainous Areas of Northern Thailand

An epidemiologic survey of Pediculus capitis infestation among Akka aboriginal and Han children of Chinese refugees living in mountainous areas at elevations of 1,100 to 1,400 m in Chiang-Rai Province of northern Thailand was conducted during January 2003. Of the 303 children examined, 43 (14.2%) had P. capitis infestation. The overall infestation rate for P. capitis in Akka children (29.3%, 12/41) was significantly higher than that in Han children (11.8%, 31/262; c2 = 8.161, p = 0.002). The prevalence in Akka (52.2%, 12/23) and Han girls (19.7%, 31/157) was higher than that in Akka (0%) and Han boys (0%), respectively (p < 0.001), and the prevalence was higher in Akka girls than in Han girls (c2 = 10.978, p = 0.001). The high prevalence of P. capitis infestation among these girls was possibly due to poor environmental hygiene and unavailability of sufficient water