“I Notice My Feelings:” Exploring Mindfulness with 1st Graders and their Families

This paper explores a study completed with 1st grade students while a five-week mindfulness unit was implemented in their classroom. The paper discusses tactics for teaching mindfulness strategies to students and results observed in the students over the course of the five-week study. It also contains journal entries completed by students and their families both in the classroom and at home

How effective is low vision service provision? A systematic review

Visual impairment is a large and growing socioeconomic problem. Good evidence on rehabilitation outcomes is required to guide service development and improve the lives of people with sight loss. Of the 478 potentially relevant articles identified, only 58 studies met our liberal inclusion criteria, and of these only 7 were randomized controlled trials. Although the literature is sufficient to confirm that rehabilitation services result in improved clinical and functional ability outcomes, the effects on mood, vision-related quality of life (QoL) and health-related QoL are less clear. There are some good data on the performance of particular types of intervention, but almost no useful data about outcomes in children, those of working age, and other groups. There were no reports on cost effectiveness. Overall, the number of well-designed and adequately reported studies is pitifully small; visual rehabilitation research needs higher quality research. We highlight study design and reporting considerations and suggest a future research agenda

Instructional influences on analogue functional analysis outcomes.

Analogue assessments were conducted with a common contingency (escape from tasks) that varied only by three different instructions describing the contingency. In one condition, the contingency was described as "taking a break," in another condition it was described as "time-out," and no description of the contingency was provided in a third condition. The participant was a typically developing 5-year-old child with a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Rates of inappropriate behavior varied substantially across the three conditions as an apparent effect of the prior instructions. Some implications for conducting functional analyses with verbal children are discussed

A compiler for 3D machine knitting

© 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. Industrial knitting machines can produce finely detailed, seamless, 3D surfaces quickly and without human intervention. However, the tools used to program them require detailed manipulation and understanding of low-level knitting operations. We present a compiler that can automatically turn assemblies of high-level shape primitives (tubes, sheets) into low-level machine instructions. These high-level shape primitives allow knit objects to be scheduled, scaled, and otherwise shaped in ways that require thousands of edits to low-level instructions. At the core of our compiler is a heuristic transfer planning algorithm for knit cycles, which we prove is both sound and complete. This algorithm enables the translation of high-level shaping and scheduling operations into needle-level operations. We show a wide range of examples produced with our compiler and demonstrate a basic visual design interface that uses our compiler as a backend

A step towards the future of roleplaying games: The spyfeet mobile rpg project

Meaningful choice has often been identified as a key component in a player’s engagement with an interactive narrative, but branching stories require tremendous amounts of hand-authored content, in amounts that increase exponentially rather than linearly as more choice points are added. Previous approaches to reducing authorial burden for computer RPGs have relied on creating better tools to manage existing unwieldy structures of quests and dialogue trees. We hypothesize that reducing authorial burden and increasing agency are two sides of the same coin, requiring specific advancements in two related areas of design and technology research: (1) dynamic story management architecture that represents story events abstractly and allows story elements to be selected and re-ordered in response to player choices, and (2) dynamic dialogue generation to allow a single story event to be revealed differently by different characters and in the context of dynamic relationships between those characters and the player. This paper describes SpyFeet, a playable prototype of a storytelling system designed to test this hypothesis

Oxythermal habitat as a primary driver of ecological niche and genetic diversity in cisco (Coregonus artedi)

Cisco (Coregonus artedi) are threatened by climate change and lake eutrophication, and their oxythermal habitat can be assessed with TDO3, the water temperature at which dissolved oxygen equals 3 mg L-1. We assessed the influence of TDO3 on cisco habitat use, genetic diversity, diets, and isotopic niche in 32 lakes ranging from oligotrophic to eutrophic. Results showed that as TDO3 increased cisco were captured higher in the water column, in a narrower band, with higher minimum temperatures and lower minimum dissolved oxygen. TDO3 was also negatively related to cisco allelic richness and expected heterozygosity, likely driven by summer kill events. Moreover, TDO3 influenced the isotopic niche of cisco, as fish captured deeper were more depleted in δ13C and more enriched in δ15N compared to epilimnetic baselines. Lastly, cisco in high TDO3 lakes consumed more Daphnia, had fewer empty stomachs, and achieved larger body size. Our work identifies specific characteristics of cisco populations that respond to climate change and eutrophication effects, and provides a framework for understanding responses of other cold-water species at the global scale.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author