Independent distractor frequency and age-of-acquisition dffects in picture-word interference: FMRI evidence for post-lexical and lexical accounts according to distractor type

In two fMRI experiments, participants named pictures with superimposed distractors that were high or low in frequency or varied in terms of age of acquisition. Pictures superimposed with low-frequency words were named more slowly than those superimposed with high-frequency words, and late-acquired words interfered with picture naming to a greater extent than early-acquired words. The distractor frequency effect (Experiment 1) was associated with increased activity in left premotor and posterior superior temporal cortices, consistent with the operation of an articulatory response buffer and verbal selfmonitoring system. Conversely, the distractor age-of-acquisition effect (Experiment 2) was associated with increased activity in the left middle and posterior middle temporal cortex, consistent with the operation of lexical level processes such as lemma and phonological word form retrieval. The spatially dissociated patterns of activity across the two experiments indicate that distractor effects in picture-word interference may occur at lexical or postlexical levels of processing in speech production.

The semantic interference effect in the picture-word paradigm: An event-related fMRI study employing overt responses

We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate neural responses associated with the semantic interference (SI) effect in the picture-word task. Independent stage models of word production assume that the locus of the SI effect is at the conceptual processing level (Levelt et al. [1999]: Behav Brain Sci 22:1-75), whereas interactive models postulate that it occurs at phonological retrieval (Starreveld and La Heij [1996]: J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 22:896-918). In both types of model resolution of the SI effect occurs as a result of competitive, spreading activation without the involvement of inhibitory links. These assumptions were tested by randomly presenting participants with trials from semantically-related and lexical control distractor conditions and acquiring image volumes coincident with the estimated peak hemodynamic response for each trial. Overt vocalization of picture names occurred in the absence of scanner noise, allowing reaction time (RT) data to be collected. Analysis of the RT data confirmed the SI effect. Regions showing differential hemodynamic responses during the SI effect included the left mid section of the middle temporal gyrus, left posterior superior temporal gyrus, left anterior cingulate cortex, and bilateral orbitomedial prefrontal cortex. Additional responses were observed in the frontal eye fields, left inferior parietal lobule, and right anterior temporal and occipital cortex. The results are interpreted as indirectly supporting interactive models that allow spreading activation between both conceptual processing and phonological retrieval levels of word production. In addition, the data confirm that selective attention/response suppression has a role in resolving the SI effect similar to the way in which Stroop interference is resolved. We conclude that neuroimaging studies can provide information about the neuroanatomical organization of the lexical system that may prove useful for constraining theoretical models of word production.

Orthographic effects on picture naming in Chinese: A 4T erfMRI study

The presence of a phonological relationship between a context word (cap) and the name of a target picture (cat) facilitates picture naming in the picture–word interference task in alphabetic languages such as English and Dutch. Neuroimaging studies of picture naming in English suggest distinct regions of brain activity are involved in phonological priming relative to a baseline control.

A time and motion study of peripheral venous catheter flushing practice using manually prepared and prefilled flush syringes

Peripheral venous catheters (PVCs) are the simplest and most frequently used method for drug, fluid, and blood product administration in the hospital setting. It is estimated that up to 90% of patients in acute care hospitals require a PVC; however, PVCs are associated with inherent complications, which can be mechanical or infectious. There have been a range of strategies to prevent or reduce PVC-related complications that include optimizing patency through the use of flushing. Little is known about the current status of flushing practice. This observational study quantified preparation and administration time and identified adherence to principles of Aseptic Non-Touch Technique and organizational protocol on PVC flushing by using both manually prepared and prefilled syringes.

Interplay of MLC, gantry and respiratory motion during DCAT delivery

This study investigated the possible interplay effects arising from the treatment of moving targets using the dynamic conformal arc therapy (DCAT) technique. Dose from a modulated test beam was measured, with and without phantom motion and with and without a 30o arc rotation, using a diode array placed on a sinusoidally moving platform. Measurements were repeated at five different collimator angles (0, 22.5, 45, 67.5 and 90o), at two different dose rates (300 and 600 MU/min). Results showed that the effect of respiratory motion on the measured dose distribution increased slightly when the beams were delivered as arcs, rather than with a static gantry angle, and that this effect increased substantially as the collimator angle was increased from 0o (MLC motion perpendicular to respiratory motion) to 90o (MLC motion parallel to respiratory motion). The dose oscillations arising from interplay between phantom and MLC motion were found to increase in magnitude when the dose rate was increased. These results led to the development of simple recommendations for minimizing the negative effects of motion interplay on DCAT dose distributions

Investigation of the relationship between BMI and prostate motion in radiation therapy treatment for prostate cancer

This thesis studied the influence of patient obesity on prostate motion during radiation therapy treatment delivery, an important consideration in the accurate treatment of prostate cancer. The study highlighted the importance of daily image guidance to correct for prostate motion, increasing radiation dose to the prostate while decreasing radiation dose to surrounding healthy tissues, thereby increasing patient quality of life.

Disciplining the screen through education: The Royal Commission into the moving picture industry in Australia

In this article, we investigate the complex relationship between concerns about children and young people’s exposure to cinema in 1920s Australia and the use of film in education. In part, the Royal Commission into the Moving Picture Industry in Australia aimed to ‘ascertain the effect and the extent of the power of film upon juveniles’ and Commissioners spoke to educationalists, psychologists, medical professions, police officers and parents to gain insight into the impacts of movies on children. Numerous issues were canvassed in the Commission hearings such as exposure to sexual content, ‘excesses’ in film content, children’s inability to concentrate at school following cinema attendance and the influence of cinema on youth crime. While the Commission ultimately suggested it was parents’ role to police children’s engagements with cinema, it did make recommendations for restricting children’s access to films with inappropriate themes. Meanwhile, the Commission was very positive about film’s educational role stating that ‘the advantage to be gained by the use of the cinematograph as an adjunct to educational methods should be assisted in every possible way by the Commonwealth’. We draw on the Commission’s minutes of evidence, the Commission report and newspaper articles form the 1920s to the 1940s to argue that the Commission provides valuable insight into the beginnings of the use of screen content in formal schooling, both as a resource across the curriculum and as a specific focus of education through film appreciation and, later, broader forms of media education. The article argues debates about screen entertainment and education rehearsed in the Commission are reflected today as parents, concerned citizens and educators ponder the dangers and potential of new media technologies and media content used by children and young people such as video games, social media and interactive content.

Moffatt vortices induced by the motion of a contact line

A recent hydrodynamic theory of liquid slippage on a solid substrate (Kirkinis & Davis, Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 110, 2013, 234503) gives rise to a sequence of eddies (Moffatt vortices) that co-move with a moving contact line (CL) in a liquid wedge. The presence of these vortices is established through secular equations that depend on the dynamic contact angle α and capillary number Ca. The limiting case α→O is associated with the appearance of such vortices in a channel. The vortices are generated by the relative motion of the interfaces, which in turn is due to the motion of the CL. This effect has yet to be observed in experiment.

In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History, and the Child

"In Perpetual Motion is an "historical choreography" of power, pedagogy, and the child from the 1600s to the early 1900s. It breaks new ground by historicizing the analytics of power and motion that have interpenetrated renditions of the young. Through a detailed examination of the works of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Herbart, and G. Stanley Hall, this book maps the discursive shifts through which the child was given a unique nature, inscribed in relation to reason, imbued with an effectible interiority, and subjected to theories of power and motion. The book illustrates how developmentalist visions took hold in U.S. public school debates. It documents how particular theories of power became submerged and taken for granted as essences inside the human subject. In Perpetual Motion studiously challenges views of power as in or of the gaze, tracing how different analytics of power have been used to theorize what gazing could notice."--BOOK JACKET.

Destinations: 3 Large Cast Plays for Young People

This book is a collection of three large-cast plays written in response to a very specific problem. My work as a teacher of drama often required me to locate a script that would somehow miraculously work for a cast of unknown number and gender, and most likely uneven skills and enthusiasm, who I hadn’t even met yet. It’s a familiar dilemma for teachers and students of drama in education contexts, at whatever level you’re teaching. I’d first addressed this creative problem with scripts such as Gate 38 (2010). I had tried using scripts that already existed, but found they required such extensive editing to suit the parameters of cast and performance duration that I may as well have been writing them myself. Even in the setting of a closed studio, in altering these plays I felt I was bending the vision of the playwright, and certainly their narrative structure, out of shape. Everyone who’s attempted to stage a performance with a large cast of students in an educational setting knows it takes time to truly connect with a play, its social contexts, themes and characters. It also takes a lot of time to get on top of the practicalities of learning, rehearsing, directing and running a performance with young people. Often the curtain goes up on something unfinished and unstable. I was looking for ways to reduce the complexity of staging a script, while maintaining the potential of this process as a site of rich, enjoyable learning. Two of the plays (Duty Free and Please Be Seated) are comprised of multiple monologues, combined with music-driven ensemble sequences. The monologues enable individuals to develop and polish their own performances, work in small groups, and cut down on the laborious detail of directing naturalistic scenes based in character interaction. The third (Australian Drama) involves a lot of duologues, meaning that its rehearsal process can happily employ that mainstay of the drama classroom: small group work. There’s plenty of room to move in terms of gender-blind casting as well. Please be Seated is mainly young women. The scripts also contain ensemble-based interludes which are non-verbal, music driven, with a choreographic element. They have also springboarded further explorations in form. The ethical and aesthetic complexities of verbatim works; the interaction between music and theatre; and meta-concerns related to the performing of performance: ‘how can the act of acting ‘acted’. The narratives of all three of these plays are deliberately open, enabling the flexible casting and on-the hop editing that large-group, time-poor processes sometimes necessitate. Duty Free is about the overseas ‘adventures’ of young people. Please Be Seated is based in verbatim text about young people falling in and out of love. Australian Drama is about young people in a drama classroom trying to connect with each other and put their own shine on dull fragments of the theatrical canon. The plays were published as a collection in hardcopy and digital editions by Playlab Press in 2015. Please be Seated is a co-write with a large group. These co-author’s names are listed in the publication, and below in ‘additional information’.

Control of Ship Roll Motion

The undesirable effects of roll motion of ships (rocking about the longitudinal axis) became noticeable in the mid-nineteenth century when significant changes were introduced to the design of ships as a result of sails being replaced by steam engines and the arrangement being changed from broad to narrow hulls. The combination of these changes led to lower transverse stability (lower restoring moment for a given angle of roll) with the consequence of larger roll motion. The increase in roll motion and its effect on cargo and human performance lead to the development several control devices that aimed at reducing and controlling roll motion. The control devices most commonly used today are fin stabilizers, rudder, anti-roll tanks, and gyrostabilizers. The use of different types of actuators for control of ship roll motion has been amply demonstrated for over 100 years. Performance, however, can still fall short of expectations because of difficulties associated with control system design, which have proven to be far from trivial due to fundamental performance limitations and large variations of the spectral characteristics of wave-induced roll motion. This short article provides an overview of the fundamentals of control design for ship roll motion reduction. The overview is limited to the most common control devices.

Energy-based motion control of a slender hull unmanned underwater vehicle

This paper presents a motion control system for tracking of attitude and speed of an underactuated slender-hull unmanned underwater vehicle. The feedback control strategy is developed using the Port-Hamiltonian theory. By shaping of the target dynamics (desired dynamic response in closed loop) with particular attention to the target mass matrix, the influence of the unactuated dynamics on the controlled system is suppressed. This results in achievable dynamics independent of stable uncontrolled states. Throughout the design, the insight of the physical phenomena involved is used to propose the desired target dynamics. Integral action is added to the system for robustness and to reject steady disturbances. This is achieved via a change of coordinates that result in input-to-state stable (ISS) target dynamics. As a final step in the design, an anti-windup scheme is implemented to account for limited actuator capacity, namely saturation. The performance of the design is demonstrated through simulation with a high-fidelity model.

Ship Seakeeping Operability, Motion Control, and Autonomy - A Bayesian Perspective

Ship seakeeping operability refers to the quantification of motion performance in waves relative to mission requirements. This is used to make decisions about preferred vessel designs, but it can also be used as comprehensive assessment of the benefits of ship-motion-control systems. Traditionally, operability computation aggregates statistics of motion computed over over the envelope of likely environmental conditions in order to determine a coefficient in the range from 0 to 1 called operability. When used for assessment of motion-control systems, the increase of operability is taken as the key performance indicator. The operability coefficient is often given the interpretation of the percentage of time operable. This paper considers an alternative probabilistic approach to this traditional computation of operability. It characterises operability not as a number to which a frequency interpretation is attached, but as a hypothesis that a vessel will attain the desired performance in one mission considering the envelope of likely operational conditions. This enables the use of Bayesian theory to compute the probability of that this hypothesis is true conditional on data from simulations. Thus, the metric considered is the probability of operability. This formulation not only adheres to recent developments in reliability and risk analysis, but also allows incorporating into the analysis more accurate descriptions of ship-motion-control systems since the analysis is not limited to linear ship responses in the frequency domain. The paper also discusses an extension of the approach to the case of assessment of increased levels of autonomy for unmanned marine craft.

Using children's picture books and process drama to develop students' critical literacy responses

This workshop introduces a range of process drama activities to develop students' critical literacy responses. Whilst children's picture books and process drama strategies have not traditionally been seen as sophisticated resources and strategies for developing students' critical literacy responses, this workshop shows teaching strategies that can be used in language instruction in primary classrooms with diverse student groups. The teaching activities include ‘attribute lists’, ‘sculptures’ and ‘freeze frames’.

Using children's picture books to develop students' critical literacy responses

This lecture introduces a range of children's picture books from around the world and teaching strategies that develop students' critical literacy responses. Whilst children's picture books have not traditionally been seen as sophisticated resources for developing students' critical literacy responses, this lecture presents research that shows young children as code breakers, text participants, text users and text analysts (Luke & Freebody, 1999) of written, visual, oral and gestural texts. This lecture also outlines the teaching strategies as they have been used in language instruction in primary classrooms with diverse student groups.