Sleep and Cognition: Results From a Longitudinal Cohort of Older Puerto Rican Adults

We examined cross-sectional and prospective associations of sleep duration and insomnia symptoms with measures of cognitive function among older adults aged 45-75 y from the Boston Puerto Rican Health Study, a longitudinal cohort of 1500 participants of Puerto Rican ancestry. We found, statistically significant cross-sectional associations of sleep duration (hours) and an executive function domain before (F=6.20; Prob>F=0.0001) and after (F=2.33; Prob>F=0.05) controlling for covariates (age, sex, education, smoking, drinking, mental and health conditions and medication use); between sleep duration and global cognition before (F=5.38; Prob>F=0.0003) and a trend after controlling for covariates (F=2.20; Prob>F=0.0669). In longitudinal associations, sleep duration (time2) was significantly associated with global condition at time3 (F=2.42; Prob>F=0.0475) after controlling for time2 global cognition. In conclusion, we found hours of sleep and insomnia symptoms significantly associated with various cognitive factors. A public health focus on sleep hygiene may improve cognitive health outcomes in older Puerto Rican adults.

Urban Landscape and Horror Vacui, spectacularity of a distorted perception

In this paper, the very original urban landscape perception caused by the emergency after the 2020’ New CoronaVirus Pandemic event will be discussed and analyzed. Most of the approaches conducted on social media and on the newspaper have pointed to putting in evidence the spectacular empty cities “as never seen before”, which thing is absolutely correct and underlines a unique condition otherwise almost impossible to experience. In fact, the total lock-down caused by the emergency made it impossible to move from a view of the urban landscape to another, where most of the people were able to see such an emptiness only for their own town, maybe just for their own neighbourhood and maybe just from some lucky windows. The global condition will be watched only composing together the pictures exhibited online and in the newspaper. But … … … A specific set of images, created in the days of the emergency will comment and describe the content of the paper.

Local Processing Bias Impacts Implicit and Explicit Memory in Autism

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical perception, including processing that is biased toward local details rather than global configurations. This bias may impact on memory. The present study examined the effect of this perception on both implicit (Experiment 1) and explicit (Experiment 2) memory in conditions that promote either local or global processing. The first experiment consisted of an object identification priming task using two distinct encoding conditions: one favoring local processing (Local condition) and the other favoring global processing (Global condition) of drawings. The second experiment focused on episodic (explicit) memory with two different cartoon recognition tasks that favored either local (i.e., processing specific details) or a global processing (i.e., processing each cartoon as a whole). In addition, all the participants underwent a general clinical cognitive assessment aimed at documenting their cognitive profile and enabling correlational analyses with experimental memory tasks. Seventeen participants with ASD and 17 typically developing (TD) controls aged from 10 to 16 years participated to the first experiment and 13 ASD matched with 13 TD participants were included for the second experiment. Experiment 1 confirmed the preservation of priming effects in ASD but, unlike the Comparison group, the ASD group did not increase his performance as controls after a globally oriented processing. Experiment 2 revealed that local processing led to difficulties in discriminating lures from targets in a recognition task when both lures and targets shared common details. The correlation analysis revealed that these difficulties were associated with processing speed and inhibition. These preliminary results suggest that natural perceptual processes oriented toward local information in ASD may impact upon their implicit memory by preventing globally oriented processing in time-limited conditions and induce confusion between explicit memories that share common details.

Modern Dance in the Digital Space: A Screen Dance in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Modern dance is developing in the face of new threats and opportunities. Like any other social phenomenon, it is affected by external conditions that can affect its content, development and forms. The COVID-19 pandemic has become the most global condition in recent times, the impact of which has become tangible for all spheres of society. Like other branches of art, Contemporary Dance was put into new conditions, which led not only to negative consequences but also caused a surge in the use of information technologies to bring the results of creative research to the viewer. It was the pandemic conditions that contributed to the intensive development of new forms of interaction between the professional choreographic community and the new stage of the development of the screen dance as one of the forms of Contemporary Dance. The article is devoted to the impact of the restrictive conditions of the pandemic on the development of contemporary dance and its form such as a screen dance. We analyzed the few available approaches to determining the essence of a screen dancer, as well as the experience of choreographers in creating dance performances in conditions of self-isolation. The research is based on the analysis of the scientific literature covering problems of development of modern dance and screen dance in the conditions of COVID-19 pandemic. We concluded that representatives of the professional community of choreographers were able to use the conditions of self-isolation to implement new creative ideas, and the screen dance became more popular. Keywords: contemporary dance, screen dance, digital space, pandemic

An innovative approach for high-performance road pavement monitoring using black box

One of the criteria adopted by the Word Bank with the aim of defining the economic level of a country is represented by the condition of the road pavements. To ensure adequate road pavement quality, road authorities should be continuously monitoring and repair the detected anomalies. To fast solve problems associated with poor quality of road surface such as comfort or safety, the presence of distress must be detected quickly. The high-performance pavement distress detection, such as those base on the image processing or on the laser scanning, is very expensive and does not allow to the road administration to conduct the appropriate monitoring campaigns. To solve these problems, the paper describes the pave box methodology, an innovative and immediately operational distress detection approach based on the exploitation of data collected by the black boxes located inside the vehicles that routinely pass on the road network. Data processing and the algorithms used in the post-processing evaluation of the vertical acceleration were compared with existing visual surveys procedures such as PCI. Two different indices have been proposed to detect and classify both the local damages and the global condition of the entire road. Pave box provides a robust evaluation of the pavement condition that allows to detect all the severe distress and not less than 70% of the minor damages on the pavement surface. The proposal is characterized by low time and cost consumption and it represents an effective tool for road authorities.

Criteria Considered in a Manufacturing Reshoring Decision – A Multiple Case Study

The manufacturing reshoring phenomenon has received more attention in the academic and business literature in recent years. Due to the newness of the phenomenon, there is a lack of knowledge about how these decisions were made. This research provides a theoretical framework by reviewing literature on possible criteria that are considered in a manufacturing reshoring decision. The criteria are categorized into six categories including competitive priority, resource, strategy, context, preference and global condition. A multiple case study methodology is used to identify the criteria and compare them with the theoretical framework. The findings indicate that total cost is the most common criteria considered and each case company has followed its own cost analysis techniques. Other criteria considered by all case companies were inventory cost, transportation cost, switching cost, delivery lead times, proximity to customer and availability of manufacturing technology. The research concludes that manufacturing reshoring is a holistic decision with criteria occurring at all categories in the theoretical framework. This contributes to the knowledge of reshoring decision-making and suggests that future research should investigate decision support tools for such decisions.

Well-Posedness and Exponential Estimates for the Solutions to Neutral Stochastic Functional Differential Equations with Infinite Delay

In this work, neutral stochastic functional differential equations with infinite delay (NSFD-EwID) have been addressed. By using the Euler-Maruyama scheme and a localization argument, the existence and uniqueness of solutions to NSFDEwID at the state space Cr under the local weak monotone condition, the weak coercivity condition and the global condition on the neutral term have been investigated. In addition, the L2 and exponential estimates of NSFDEwID have been studied.