General language abilities following management of childhood supratentorial tumour: Part 1

Background. To date few studies have investigated the impact of management for supratentorial tumour on the language abilities of children. In reporting children with brain tumour as part of a larger cohort of various aetiologies of brain injury, such studies have failed to differentiate between the causes of acquired childhood language disorders, or specifically report associated information relating to site and treatment. Material and methods. The present study examined the general language abilities of six children managed for supratentorial tumour, using a comprehensive standardized general language assessment battery, including receptive and expressive components, receptive vocabulary, and naming. Results. At a group level, children managed for supratentorial tumour performed below an individually matched control group in the area of general expressive language. However, at an individual case level it was revealed that only two cases exhibited specific language deficits. Reduced performance in the area of expressive language and syntax was evident in the language profile of one child treated surgically for a left parietal astrocytoma, while a child treated surgically for an optic nerve glioma demonstrated difficulties in receptive semantic abilities. The remaining four cases with similar treatments and locations demonstrated intact general language abilities. Conclusions. Factors such as site, long-term presence of tumour prior to diagnosis, young age at diagnosis, and variations in time post treatment were considered to have contributed to the findings. The need for long-term monitoring of language abilities post treatment as well as larger group sizes and the investigation of higher-level abilities was highlighted

The rellationship between specific features of aphasia-friendly written material and comprehension of written material for people with aphasia: An exploratory study

Background: Written material is often inaccessible fro people with aphasia. The format of written material needs to be adapted to enable people with aphasia to read with understanding. Aims: This study aimed to further explore some issues raised in Rose, Worrall, and MacKenna (2003) concerning the effects of aphasia-friendly formats on the reading comprehension of people with aphasia. It was hypothesised that people with aphasia would comprehend significantly more paragraphs that were formatted in an aphasia-friendly manner than control paragraphs. This study also aimed to investigate if each single aspect of aphasia-friendly formatting (i.e., simplified vocabulary and syntax, large print, increased white spacem and pictures) used in isolation would result in increased comprehension compared to control paragraphs. Other aims were to compare the effect of aphasia-friendly fromatting with the effects of each single adaptation, and to investigate if the effects of aphasia-friendly formates were related to aphasia severity. Methods & Procedures: Participants with mild to moderately severe aphasia (N = 9) read a battery of 90 paragraphs and selected the best word of phrase from a choice of four to complete each paragraph. A linear mixed model (p < .05) was used to analyse the differences in reading comprehension with each paragraph fromat across three reading grade levels. Outcomes & Results: People with aphasia comprehended significantly more aphasia-friendly paragraphs than control paragraphs. They also comprehended significantly more paragraphs with each of the following single adaptations: simplified vocabulary and syntax, large ptint, and increased white spaces. Although people with aphasia tended to comprehend more paragraphs with pictures added than control paragraphs, this difference was not significant. No significant correlation between aphasia severity and the effect of aphasia-friendly formatting was found. Conclusion: This study supports the idea that aphasia-friendly formats increase the reading comprehension of people with aphasia. It suggests that adding pictures, particularly Clip Art pictures, may not significantly improve the reading the reading comprehension of people with aphasia. These findings have implications for all written communication with people with aphasia, both in the clinical setting and in the wider community. Applying these findings may enable people with aphasia to have equal access to written information and to participate in society.

Attaching unit costs to Australia's National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing

Background: In mental health, policy-makers and planners are increasingly being asked to set priorities. This means that health economists, health services researchers and clinical investigators are being called upon to work together to define and measure costs. Typically, these researchers take available service utilisation data and convert them to costs, using a range of assumptions. There are inefficiencies, as individual groups of researchers frequently repeat essentially similar exercises in achieving this end. There are clearly areas where shared or common investment in the development of statistical software syntax, analytical frameworks and other resources could maximise the use of data. Aims of the Study: This paper reports on an Australian project in which we calculated unit costs for mental health admissions and community encounters. In reporting on these calculations, our purpose is to make the data and the resources associated with them publicly available to researchers interested in conducting economic analyses, and allow them to copy, distribute and modify them, providing that all copies and modifications are available under the same terms and conditions (i.e., in accordance with the 'Copyleft' principle), Within this context, the objectives of the paper are to: (i) introduce the 'Copyleft' principle; (ii) provide an overview of the methodology we employed to derive the unit costs; (iii) present the unit costs themselves; and (iv) examine the total and mean costs for a range of single and comorbid conditions, as an example of the kind of question that the unit cost data can be used to address. Method: We took relevant data from the Australian National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing (NSMHWB), and developed a set of unit costs for inpatient and community encounters. We then examined total and mean costs for a range of single and comorbid conditions. Results: We present the unit costs for mental health admissions and mental health community contacts. Our example, which explored the association between comorbidity and total and mean costs, suggested that comorbidly occurring conditions cost more than conditions which occur on their own. Discussion: Our unit costs, and the materials associated with them, have been published in a freely available form governed by a provision termed 'Copyleft'. They provide a valuable resource for researchers wanting to explore economic questions in mental health. Implications for Health Policies: Our unit costs provide an important resource to inform economic debate in mental health in Australia, particularly in the area of priority-setting. In the past, such debate has largely, been based on opinion. Our unit costs provide the underpinning to strengthen the evidence-base of this debate. Implications for Further Research: We would encourage other Australian researchers to make use of our unit costs in order to foster comparability across studies. We would also encourage Australian and international researchers to adopt the 'Copyleft' principle in equivalent circumstances. Furthermore, we suggest that the provision of 'Copyleft'-contingent funding to support the development of enabling resources for researchers should be considered in the planning of future large-scale collaborative survey work, both in Australia and overseas.

SQLator: An online SQL learning workbench

SQL (Structured Query Language) is one of the essential topics in foundation databases courses in higher education. Due to its apparent simple syntax, learning to use the full power of SQL can be a very difficult activity. In this paper, we introduce SQLator, which is a web-based interactive tool for learning SQL. SQLator's key function is the evaluate function, which allows a user to evaluate the correctness of his/her query formulation. The evaluate engine is based on complex heuristic algorithms. The tool also provides instructors the facility to create and populate database schemas with an associated pool of SQL queries. Currently it hosts two databases with a query pool of 300+ across the two databases. The pool is divided into 3 categories according to query complexity. The SQLator user can perform unlimited executions and evaluations on query formulations and/or view the solutions. The SQLator evaluate function has a high rate of success in evaluating the user's statement as correct (or incorrect) corresponding to the question. We will present in this paper, the basic architecture and functions of SQLator. We will further discuss the value of SQLator as an educational technology and report on educational outcomes based on studies conducted at the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland.

An approach to specifying software frameworks

A framework is a reusable design that requires software components to function. To instantiate a framework, a software engineer must provide the software components required by the framework. To do this effectively, the framework-component interfaces must be specified so the software engineer knows what assumptions the framework makes about the components, and so the components can be verified against these assumptions. This paper presents an approach to specifying software frameworks. The approach involves the specification of the framework’s syntax, semantics, and the interfaces between the framework and its components. The approach is demonstrated with a simple case study.

Towards pattern-based design recovery

A method and a corresponding tool is described which assist design recovery and program understanding by recognising instances of design patterns semi-automatically. The approach taken is specifically designed to overcome the existing scalability problems caused by many design and implementation variants of design pattern instances. Our approach is based on a new recognition algorithm which works incrementally rather than trying to analyse a possibly large software system in one pass without any human intervention. The new algorithm exploits domain and context knowledge given by a reverse engineer and by a special underlying data structure, namely a special form of an annotated abstract syntax graph. A comparative and quantitative evaluation of applying the approach to the Java AWT and JGL libraries is also given.

OntoRama: Browsing RDF ontologies using a hyperbolic-style browser

This paper presents a Java-based hyperbolic-style browser designed to render RDF files as structured ontological maps. The program was motivated by the need to browse the content of a web-accessible ontology server: WEB KB-2. The ontology server contains descriptions of over 74,500 object types derived from the WordNet 1.7 lexical database and can be accessed using RDF syntax. Such a structure creates complications for hyperbolic-style displays. In WEB KB-2 there are 140 stable ontology link types and a hyperbolic display needs to filter and iconify the view so different link relations can be distinguished in multi-link views. Our browsing tool, OntoRama, is therefore motivated by two possibly interfering aims: the first to display up to 10 times the number of nodes in a hyperbolic-style view than using a conventional graphics display; secondly, to render the ontology with multiple links comprehensible in that view.

MQL: A powerful extension to OCL for MOF queries

The Meta-Object Facility (MOF) provides a standardized framework for object-oriented models. An instance of a MOF model contains objects and links whose interfaces are entirely derived from that model. Information contained in these objects can be accessed directly, however, in order to realize the Model-Driven Architecture@trade; (MDA), we must have a mechanism for representing and evaluating structured queries on these instances. The MOF Query Language (MQL) is a language that extends the UML's Object Constraint Language (OCL) to provide more expressive power, such as higher-order queries, parametric polymorphism and argument polymorphism. Not only do these features allow more powerful queries, but they also encourage a greater degree of modularization and re-use, resulting in faster prototyping and facilitating automated integrity analysis. This paper presents an overview of the motivations for developing MQL and also discusses its abstract syntax, presented as a MOF model, and its semantics

Interfacing ASM with the MDG tool

In this paper we describe an approach to interface Abstract State Machines (ASM) with Multiway Decision Graphs (MDG) to enable tool support for the formal verification of ASM descriptions. ASM is a specification method for software and hardware providing a powerful means of modeling various kinds of systems. MDGs are decision diagrams based on abstract representation of data and axe used primarily for modeling hardware systems. The notions of ASM and MDG axe hence closely related to each other, making it appealing to link these two concepts. The proposed interface between ASM and MDG uses two steps: first, the ASM model is transformed into a flat, simple transition system as an intermediate model. Second, this intermediate model is transformed into the syntax of the input language of the MDG tool, MDG-HDL. We have successfully applied this transformation scheme on a case study, the Island Tunnel Controller, where we automatically generated the corresponding MDG-HDL models from ASM specifications.

Linguistic determinism and theory of mind in deaf children

DeVilliers and DeVilliers (2000, 2005) propose that deaf and hearing children acquire a theory of mind (or the understanding that human behaviour is the product of psychological states like true and false beliefs) as a consequence of their linguistic mastery of a rule of syntax. Specifically, they argue that the syntactic rule for sentential complementation with verbs of speech (e.g., “say”) precedes syntactic mastery of complementation for cognition (e.g., “think”) and both of these developmentally precede and promote conceptual mastery of a theory of mind (ToM), as indexed via success on standard false belief tests. The present study examined this proposition in groups of primary-school-aged deaf children and hearing preschoolers who took false belief tests and a modified memory for complements test that included control questions. Guttman scaling techniques indicated no support either for the prediction that syntactic skill precedes ToM understanding or for the earlier emergence of complementation for “say” than for “think”. Methodological issues and implications for deaf children's ToM development are discussed.