Age of Acquisition and Spoken Words: Examining Hemispheric Differences in Lexical Processing

The relationship between the age of acquisition (AoA) of words and their cerebral hemispheric representation is controversial because the experimental results have been contradictory. However, most of the lexical processing experiments were performed with stimuli consisting of written words. If we want to compare the processing of words learned very early in infancy—when children cannot read—with words learned later, it seems more logical to employ spoken words as experimental stimuli. This study, based on the auditory lexical decision task, used spoken words that were classified according to an objective criterion of AoA with extremely distant means (2.88 vs. 9.28 years old). As revealed by the reaction times, both early and late words were processed more efficiently in the left hemisphere, with no AoA × Hemisphere interaction. The results are discussed from a theoretical point of view, considering that all the experiments were conducted using adult participants.

An Improved Evaluation Methodology for Mining Association Rules

At present, association rules have been widely used in prediction, personalized recommendation, risk analysis and other fields. However, it has been pointed out that the traditional framework to evaluate association rules, based on Support and Confidence as measures of importance and accuracy, has several drawbacks. Some papers presented several new evaluation methods; the most typical methods are Lift, Improvement, Validity, Conviction, Chi-square analysis, etc. Here, this paper first analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of common measurement indicators of association rules and then puts forward four new measure indicators (i.e., Bi-support, Bi-lift, Bi-improvement, and Bi-confidence) based on the analysis. At last, this paper proposes a novel Bi-directional interestingness measure framework to improve the traditional one. In conclusion, the bi-directional interestingness measure framework (Bi-support and Bi-confidence framework) is superior to the traditional ones in the aspects of the objective criterion, comprehensive definition, and practical application.

Performance Comparison Study of Several Interpolation Methods on Streak Metal Artifacts Reduction of CT Images

In the course of generating the CT images, the streak metal artifacts emerge from the reconstructed images, often degraded the quality of the images and blur the fringe information around the metal implant. Although a number of attempts had been reported, among them, our proposed interpolation-based method is the simplest and most efficient approaches. In this paper, three interpolation approaches are compared with subjective and objective criterion based on both simulation and clinical cases. Our results have shown an improvement from the original images. As for the comparison with NRMSD and MAD. For the execution time, the L-MAR possesses the shortest time with S-MAR time being the slowest among the interpolation-based methods. For NRMSD and MAD, the digits from small to large are P-MAR, S-MAR, L-MAR and original. This shows that among interpolation-based methods the image corrected by P-MAR approach is the closest to the ideal image, followed by S-MAR correction, L-MAR correction, and the gap between the original image and the ideal image is the largest.

Hierarchical Unsupervised Partitioning of Large Size Data and Its Application to Hyperspectral Images

In this paper, we propose a true unsupervised method to partition large-size images, where the number of classes, training samples, and other a priori information is not known. Thus, partitioning an image without any knowledge is a great challenge. This novel adaptive and hierarchical classification method is based on affinity propagation, where all criteria and parameters are adaptively calculated from the image to be partitioned. It is reliable to objectively discover classes of an image without user intervention and therefore satisfies all the objectives of an unsupervised method. Hierarchical partitioning adopted allows the user to analyze and interpret the data very finely. The optimal partition maximizing an objective criterion provides the number of classes and the exemplar of each class. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated through experimental results on hyperspectral images. The obtained results show its superiority over the most widely used unsupervised and semi-supervised methods. The developed method can be used in several application domains to partition large-size images or data. It allows the user to consider all or part of the obtained classes and gives the possibility to select the samples in an objective way during a learning process.

Validity of the Perceived Physical Ability Scale for Children: An Actigraphic Study

This study aimed to provide evidence of the validity of the Perceived Physical Ability Scale for Children against an external-objective criterion of the 24 h motor activity pattern assessed through actigraphy. A total of 107 children (60 females; mean age 10.25 ± 0.48) were originally enrolled. Children wore the actigraph model Actiwatch AW64 (Cambridge Neurotechnology Ltd., Fenstanton, UK) for seven days, 24 h per day, around the non-dominant wrist. At the beginning of the actigraphic recording, participants filled in the Perceived Physical Ability Scale for Children. Functional Linear Modeling was used to examine variation in the 24 h motor activity pattern according to the total score in the Perceived Physical Ability Scale for Children. Higher physical self-efficacy was significantly related to greater levels of motor activity in the afternoon. Overall, this pattern of results supports the validity of the Perceived Physical Ability Scale for Children against the external-objective criterion of the 24 h motor pattern. The Perceived Physical Ability Scale for Children could represent a promising endpoint for studies assessing the effectiveness of physical activity promotion interventions.

Municipal Procedural Relations and Their Types

The paper examines the content of municipal procedural relations, highlights their derivation from municipal substantive legal relations. Substantive and procedural norms in municipal law and their distinctive objectives and features of practice of their application constitute the basis for the separation of municipal procedural relations from the system of municipal legal relations. Municipal procedural legal relations arise when their participants carry out actions aimed at ensuring their powers to resolve issues of local importance. The author shows the difference between substantive and procedural legal relations according to their object and grounds of occurrence and distinguishes them according to such criteria as participants and their objective. Based on the first criterion, six types of municipal procedural relations are distinguished, according to the objective criterion, four blocks of municipal procedural relations are distinguished. Taking into account that in recent years a federal legislator has entrusted more than one and a half thousand substantive powers to local self-government bodies, the author concludes that it is necessary to intensify their law-making activities in order to develop and adopt municipal procedural acts.

Responsive and Minimalist App Based on Explainable AI to Assess Palliative Care Needs during Bedside Consultations on Older Patients

Palliative care is an alternative to standard care for gravely ill patients that has demonstrated many clinical benefits in cost-effective interventions. It is expected to grow in demand soon, so it is necessary to detect those patients who may benefit from these programs using a personalised objective criterion at the correct time. Our goal was to develop a responsive and minimalist web application embedding a 1-year mortality explainable predictive model to assess palliative care at bedside consultation. A 1-year mortality predictive model has been trained. We ranked the input variables and evaluated models with an increasing number of variables. We selected the model with the seven most relevant variables. Finally, we created a responsive, minimalist and explainable app to support bedside decision making for older palliative care. The selected variables are age, medication, Charlson, Barthel, urea, RDW-SD and metastatic tumour. The predictive model achieved an AUC ROC of 0.83 [CI: 0.82, 0.84]. A Shapley value graph was used for explainability. The app allows identifying patients in need of palliative care using the bad prognosis criterion, which can be a useful, easy and quick tool to support healthcare professionals in obtaining a fast recommendation in order to allocate health resources efficiently.

Non-Destructive Method in Determining the Barley Grain Vitreousity

Possibilities of non-destructive express-evaluation of the barley grain vitreousity using machine vision and digital image processing methods were studied. The study was carried out with the proprietary design hardware and software complex on barley samples of three different varieties provided by the LLC "Nosters". Transmittance in the near IR wavelength range was used as the objective criterion in classifying grains as vitreous, partially vitreous and better use powdery. Classification group boundaries were determined empirically by the cross-section inspection method. The optimal filming mode was experimentally selected, and the algorithm for digital processing of grain images was developed in order to determine the number of better use powdery grains in a sample. In addition to classifying grains by vitreousity, the proposed approach also makes it possible to evaluate uniformity of a sample by this indicator and, thus, to identify a grain of higher quality. It was found out that grain orientation introduces an error of not more than 5 %, and high repeatability of the results and, as a consequence, accuracy of the algorithm are characterized by the variation coefficient of 1.1 %

The Gender-Equality Paradox and Optimal Distinctiveness: More Gender-Equal Societies Have More Gendered Names

Findings in several domains have documented a gender-equality paradox, where greater social and economic gender equality predicts increased gender differentiation. Many of these findings have used subjective rating scales and thus have been dismissed as artifactual due to different reference groups in more versus less gender-equal societies. Although recent research has documented the gender-equality paradox using an objective criterion—pursuit of degrees in STEM—the robustness of this finding has also been challenged. The current investigation offers evidence for the gender-equality paradox using an objective marker of gender differentiation: baby names. We find given names are more phonetically gendered in more gender-equal societies, with female names being more likely unvoiced (a softer sound) and male names being more likely voiced (a harder sound). We offer a theoretical explanation based on optimal distinctiveness theory to explain why increasing gender equality might motivate a preference for greater gender differentiation.