Close Eyes Research Articles

Talking to children in Tsotsil Mayan: Interactional formats in child-directed communication across multigenerational caregivers

Research on the acquisition of Mayan languages has shown child-directed communication (CDC) to be low in frequency. Nevertheless, long-term linguistic-anthropological research with the Tsotsil Mayan in Southern Mexico has documented episodes in family life when children engage in interactional routines or interactional formats (IFs) with their multigenerational caregivers. These interactions are sequentially organized communicative acts (verbal and nonverbal) that call forth specific responses from the child in turn-taking episodes (e.g. muts’o la sate ‘close your eyes’, chibat, uto ‘say, good-bye’). This study analyzes IFs in four communicative events involving four children (11–17 months; M = 15) each from multigenerational families with a household average of 7.75 members. Three research questions are addressed: What types and functions of IFs characterize CDC experienced by Tsotsil children? How do IF types distribute across specific communicative events? How do IF types distribute across multigenerational caregivers? The study used both qualitative and quantitative methods. IFs were classified on the basis of their pragmatic function: directive, prompting, teasing, referential, regulatory, and evaluation. The six IF types and their relative frequencies reveal core language socialization practices among the Tsotsil Mayan of the study. Quantitative analysis makes clear a significant association between IFs and event, and IFs and caregivers’ CDC. A central finding is that non-parental input from multigenerational caregivers (i.e. grandmothers and sisters) is a more significant source of CDC than parental input.

Classroom Assessment and Academic Performance in Ghanaian Junior High Schools Integrated Science

The study took place in the Sunyani municipality, the capital of the Bono region of Ghana. The purpose of the study was to investigate public and private junior high school pupils’ perceptions of classroom assessment and academic performance in integrated science. The study employed the descriptive survey research design involving 200 second-year pupils. A questionnaire was used to collect data on their perceptions of classroom assessment while the national BECE examination results for three consecutive years were used to determine pupils’ performance in the subject based on school type. Mean scores, standard deviations and t-test were used to analyze the data. The study concludes that pupils had a positive perception on transparency of assessment, application and their capabilities. However, the pupils had a neutral perception towards congruence with planned learning. Private JHS pupils performed higher than public JHS pupils. To address the pupils’ neutral perceptions of congruence with planned learning, it is recommended that the teachers from the sampled schools be open to the pupils and inform them of the mode of assessment to be taken. Since the private JHS pupils performed better than the public JHS pupils, it is recommended that the district and municipal education directors and circuit supervisors keep close eyes on the work of the public integrated science teachers in the municipality to bridge the gap between the performance of public and private junior high school pupils in integrated science.

The 2-Minutes Walking Test Is Not Correlated with Aerobic Fitness Indices but with the 5-Times Sit-to-Stand Test Performance in Apparently Healthy Older Adults.

The 2-minutes walking test (2-MWT) is a valid and reliable test that has a high correlation with the distance walked in the 6-minutes walking test (6-MWT). However, to date, no study has determined the relationship between 2-MWT performance and the aerobic fitness indices obtained during a maximal incremental test to confirm if this test is a valid surrogate of aerobic fitness in apparently healthy older adults. The main objective of this work was to identify the factors associated to the performance in the 2-MWT, including aerobic fitness, functional and spatial-temporal gait parameters. Seventeen elderly adults performed a maximal incremental cycling test to determine maximum oxygen consumption (VO2max) and ventilatory thresholds (VT1 and VT2), two static standing balance tests with open and close eyes, a 5-times sit-to-stand test (5-TSTS), a handgrip test, and a 2-MWT on three different days over 2 weeks. No correlations were found between aerobic fitness indices and the distance covered in 2-MWT, but significant moderate correlations were found between the distance covered in 2-MWT and the time to perform the 5-TSTS (rho = -0.49) and with stride length (rho = 0.52) during the test. In conclusion, the 2-MWT does not seem a good test to assess aerobic capacity while it showed to be associated to the 5-TSTS performance of the elderly.

Metoda ANFIS za klasifikaciju EEG signala pri zamišljanju pokreta različitih zglobova istog ekstremiteta

Introduction: The experimental area of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is expanding to include movement actions, which play a crucial part in deciphering cognitive processes. Without the need for any kind of exterior stimulation, motor imagining (MI) can be used as a powerful model for braincomputer interfaces (BCIs). A natural method of operating exterior devices is to imagine moving various joints in the same arm. These envisioned motions have similar spatial images in the motor brain, making it difficult to differentiate MI of various joints of the same leg based on EEG data. Method: A pre-existing data collection of 25 participants was utilized in this study. The participants visualized using their right limbs to carry out three different activities: visualize yourself manipulating your right hand, visualize bending your right arm, and close your eyes while you relax. To assign categories to these impulses, we turned to the adaptive neuro-fuzzy reasoning system. Results: The average level of accuracy was 90%. Conclusion: The findings demonstrate that this technique is crucial for correctly categorizing EEG data. The data collection used in this investigation consists of EEG measurements of the same limb used in muscular imaging. The new categorization method will be applied to these signals to draw conclusions.

Penultimate Activities

Penultimate Activities Alejandro Zambra (bio) Translated by Megan McDowell (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Illustrations and design by Claire Hungerford. [End Page 50] 1 in a word document, using a maximum of five thousand characters (including spaces), describe, in the greatest possible detail, the house in which you live. Observe the walls especially. Note the cracks, the stains, the nail marks and holes. Think, for example, of how many times whose walls have been painted. Imagine the brushes, the paint cans, the rollers. Think of the people who painted whose walls. Call up their faces, invent them. Next consider the leaks, the imperfections in the floors, the carpets (if there are carpets), the drawers that don't close all the [End Page 51] way, the kitchen utensils, the condition of handles and outlets, the shape and quality of the mirrors (if there are mirrors): pay special attention to what the mirrors reflect when no one is looking at them, when a suspicion of uselessness settles over them. 2 Organize any books in the house according to size, not from largest to smallest but in the shape of waves or pyramids. Do not think, please, about the possibility of reading them–that is not the purpose of this activity. Nor should you pay any mind to the titles or authors: confront the books as if they were mere imperfect bricks. Then set them on fire and gaze at the flames from a prudent distance. Let the blaze grow, but try not to let it get out of control. Breathe in a little smoke, close your eyes every once in a while, though ideally for no longer than ten seconds. Think of this: every fire, no matter how slight or brief, is a spectacle. Think of the clouds when the trees burn. Then try to extinguish the fire. Do it calmly and with care, elegantly if possible. Finally, look up at the sky, where God or one of his epigones should be, and give thanks. If you were able to control the fire, if by this point you are not dead or aboard an ambulance, if you managed–with or without faith–to give thanks to God or one of his epigones, you will see some books that are blackened and unrecognizable and others that are half-burned, almost completely destroyed but still recognizable, even legible, and also a group of almost-intact books that are maybe a little wet or smudged but still salvageable. Gather up the ruined books, place them in suitcases you don't often use or in heavy-duty garbage bags, large or extra-large, walk to the nearest river, toss the baggage into the current, look at the sky and give thanks, but this time with no real ceremony, without emphasis, with real familiarity toward God or his epigones or toward the entity that fulfills (or should fulfill) a certain transcendent function. If there is not a reasonably close river, drop the bags in the place where, if you lived in a different city, in a city designed–well or badly–by you, there would be a river. Stand looking at [End Page 52] the current and concentrate on it until you feel as if you are moving forward. Back at home, read the books that survived the fire, and (a) draw your conclusions. Don't over-elaborate your theories: simply postulate some ideas, no matter how abstruse, about the meaning of the fact–fair or unfair but always capricious–that it was these and not other books that were spared from the fire. And (b) think, but without a shred of dramatics or self-pity, about whether these books could somehow save you. 3 Write down your impressions about activity number 2 in a Word file, 12-point Perpetua font, double-spaced, using a minimum of twenty thousand characters (including spaces). 4 Repeat activity number 2 until there are no more legible or recognizable books in your house. Always give thanks, though you needn't look at the sky—just raise your eyebrows. Every time, concentrate on the current of the river until you feel that you are moving forward. Then, with no...

Analisis Nilai Religius Sastra Novel 99 Cahaya di Langit Eropa Karya Rangga Almahendra dan Hanum Salsabiela Rais Kajian: Nilai Religius Hubungan Manusia dengan Tuhan

Literary work as a medium for the soul of an author who feels he has a duty to contribute as a messenger of moral or religious messages and human life on earth. An author is considered successful if he is able to convey moral and religious messages and life through the literary works he writes, so that the reader does not feel that he is being lectured or lectured, but without realizing the moral message in literary works. Religion refers more to the system of worship of God in terms of official, laws, ordinances, statutes, etc., as well as the organization of the overall interpretation of the Bible, which includes social levels. Express devotion to God, close your eyes, focus, surrender and prepare to listen to the Holy Word silently. Humans were created to worship Allah SWT by carrying out His commands and staying away from all His prohibitions. Human closeness to Allah SWT takes various forms, depending on each individual. However, humans created by Allah SWT are guided by the holy book of the Qur'an and adhere to the teachings of Islam. This research is a qualitative study of literature and activities carried out by collecting and analyzing research data from the novel 99 Lights in the Sky of Europe by Rangga Almahendra and Hanum Salsabiela Rais. In this study, the researcher first read in detail the novel 99 Lights in the Sky Europe by Rangga Almahendra and Hanum Salsabiela Rais. divine value approach. Found research results seen from. (1) looking for divine values related to humans and faith, (2) looking for divine values related to humans and worship, (3) seeking grateful values related to God with humans and (4) looking for patient values related to God with humans.

Guillain-Barre Syndrome in a Patient Posted for Elective Caesarean Delivery: An Anaesthetic Dilemma

Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS) is an acute polyneuropathy most commonly associated with acute flaccid paralysis which may be associated with sensory and autonomic neuropathy. Antecedent infection may trigger an immune response which may cause a cross reaction leading to demyelination and degeneration of axons in nerves. Here we present a case of a 28 year old female, G2P1 at 37 weeks of gestation with a history of previous lower segment caesarean section (LSCS) and oligohydramnios with suspected Guillain-Barre syndrome posted for elective LSCS. She presented with dribbling of saliva from angle of mouth and inability to close both eyes with slurring of speech since 2 days. MRI brain was advised which showed no specific changes. Neurology evaluation was done and Guillain-Barre syndrome with isolated facial diplegia was suspected. Due to risks associated with general anaesthesia and succinylcholine in this patient, a decision was made to proceed with a low dose spinal anaesthesia. Once administered, the level of subarachnoid block was noted to be at T6. The caesarean section proceeded uneventfully with no major hemodynamic changes. A healthy baby girl was delivered and patient was noted to have full motor and sensory recovery in the post-operative period. Providing anaesthesia to patients with Guillain-Barre syndrome can be very challenging. Meticulous pre-anaesthetic planning is needed. A thorough pre-anaesthetic evaluation considering risks and benefits of each modality of anaesthesia is crucial before anaesthetizing these patients.

The development of battery storage co-located with renewable energy in China: A policy-driven system dynamics approach

Battery storage is widely regarded as an indispensable solution to the large-scale integration of intermittent renewable energy into the power grid. Being still too expensive by itself, battery storage is currently promoted in China for utility-scale grid-parity wind/solar projects with compulsive technical standards or voluntary allocation requirements for those additional renewable projects beyond grid integration capacity. Under mandatory policies, part of the revenue from renewable energy is used to pay for battery storage. Without a mature electricity market, the development of battery storage co-located with renewable energy would be largely dependent on policy design. This paper conducts a policy-driven system dynamics simulation on the development mechanism of battery storage co-located with renewable energy in China. The results show that the installed capacity growth of battery storage will mainly be driven by mandatory policies before 2024 and mandatory policies will become almost ineffective after 2028. However, mandatory policies may still dominate the development of battery storage after 2030 if the cost reduction is restrained. The conclusions provide theoretical support for the development of battery storage co-located with renewable energy in China. To minimize the adverse effect of mandatory policy, policymakers should keep close eyes on the advance in technology and power market and adjust the policy accordingly.

All Things Both Temporal and Spiritual

All Things Both Temporal and Spiritual

Pressed Palms

Pressed Palms

Large motion anime head animation using a cascade pose transform network

We study the problem of talking head animation from a single image where a target anime talking head is generated to mimic the change of facial expression and head movement of source anime characters. Most existing methods focus on generating talking heads from real humans. However, few efforts have been made to create anime talking head. Compared with human head generation, the key challenges of anime head generation are: how to align the pose and facial expression of the target head with that of the source head without explicit facial landmarks. To address this, we propose CPTNetV2, a cascaded pose transform network that unifies face pose transformation and head pose transformation. At the core of CPTNetV2 is the implicit encoding of facial changes and head movement by a pose vector. Given the pose vector, we introduce a mask generator to animate facial expression (e.g., close eyes and open mouth) and a grid generator to simulate head movement, followed by a fusion module to generate talking heads. To tackle large displacement and improve the quality of generation, we further design a details inpainting module with pose vector decomposition to reduce the receptive field of network required for pose transformation. In particular, we collect an anime talking head dataset AniHead-2K that includes around 2000 anime characters with different face/head poses. Extensive experiments on AniHead-2K demonstrate that CPTNetV2 can achieve arbitrary pose transformation conditioned on the target pose vector and outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. We also verify the effectiveness of each module through ablative studies. Additional results show that CPTNetV2 has good generalization and is applicable to generate anime talking head even based on human videos. The dataset will be made available at: https://github.com/zhangjiale487/AniHead-2K.

The Passenger and Stella Maris

The Passenger <i>and</i> Stella Maris

Giving, or Refugee Love Language

Giving, or Refugee Love Language Lilly U. Nguyen (bio) “In other words, silence is not opposed to language, but as a choice not to verbalize, a will not to say, a necessary interval in an interaction—in brief, as a means of communication of its own . . . In silences, I returned home.” —Trinh Minh-Ha, Elsewhere, Within Here “Con gái biết nhờ.” —Vietnamese saying I am a first-born daughter. Of their daughters, Vietnamese people have an aphorism. In English, it goes something like this. Girls know how to be dependable. Or even, you can trust daughters to love you. But to really give you a sense of the full nuance of the phrase, it is most accurate to say, daughters know how to give with full thanks. I was conceived on top of a shipping container at the moment of first quiet after a long journey. I cannot say how I have come to know this because I belong to the first generation to not know. When I was four years old, I slept in a bed with my mother and comforted myself to sleep by running my hand along the stubble on her head. Whether she enjoyed this I never knew, but she neither pushed my [End Page 35] hand away nor turned her head to avoid my touch. Where her black hair had fallen out, one million shorn remainders prickled the pads of my fingertips. I played them like a tiny keyboard, fast and slow. I drew circles with a full palm and heard ocean waves. This made me laugh out loud. When my hand became tired, I fell asleep with my fingers grazing the top of her head. Her right breast had disappeared and was replaced by a line of staples and dried blood. The metal appeared too sharp against her muted skin. I traced my pointer finger along the raised edges. Each staple anchored itself to her chest with two punctures into her flesh. They formed a rhythm of dots and lines like a glyph, and I followed the message they made towards her heart. But these were metal teeth that did not speak. There was something in there, formless and moving. I wanted to reach inside and grasp at the things that made her hum. I wanted to crawl in and draw the covers of her skin over me, as close as a child could ever be to a mother. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep inside that narrow space and wake when the staples had been replaced by a song. My mother and I shared a large bed. Daisies decorated the sheets in shades of flamboyant neon. On especially cold nights, we burrowed ourselves under a sleeping bag she hand-stuffed and patched over with squares of red gingham and yellow thread. Under such a heavy cover, warmth felt like a punishment. One day, my father clapped his hand against her face. She left him in the car and together we walked home to nap. Inside our bedroom, she stripped the mattress and tidied up the sum of that afternoon into a pile of laundry. My mother lay down and the cool pillow next to her cheek relieved the heat of my father’s rage. I watched the tears slip down her face and disappear into the folds of our bed. I gathered my knees into my chest and nestled into my mother’s heaving frame. My mother never sang Vietnamese lullabies because they were not worth remembering. Instead, she whispered stories in the dark. She did not tell them straight. They trailed in a thick of half-finished sentences and forked at the junctures of chronology. She spoke at the joints of memory and mood, scattering fragments of herself in the dark. She spoke to shed the skin of a world left behind. I listened like dog paddling after her and heard a life across two languages and two continents. A world between prison islands and cul-de-sacs, wet markets and strip malls, desert casinos, [End Page 36] and alleyways filled with the sound of noodle pushcarts and clacking wood blocks. Boat journeys transformed into bus rides to...

Multiscale entropy of ADHD children during resting state condition.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11571-022-09869-0.

Unfinished Painting

Unfinished Painting

The View From the Tree.

The View From the Tree.

Women in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Imagine a world where community, harmony, and equality exist. A place fueled by innovation where trees grow from balanced soil to provide both shade and oxygen to people who breathe it all in. Where women are valued as community leaders, mothers, and professionals, who are essential for building the future. If you close your eyes and listen in earnest, you can feel that this mystical paradise exists. It is real. And so our journey begins to find this promised land.

Regional sustainability transition through forest-based bioeconomy? Development actors' perspectives on related policies, power, and justice

Forests and forest-based bioeconomy have central roles in the contemporary sustainability transition. However, the transition towards a bioeconomy is loaded with tensions regarding economic growth, ecological integrity, and social justice. These tensions reproduce varying transition discourses. Political actors at the level of the European Union (EU) and nation states take part in the processes creating the discourses and aim to govern the forest bioeconomy-based transition in certain directions viewed as favourable.The transition tensions are strongly felt in regions that are rich with forest resources but poor in terms of economic and political power, called ‘forest peripheries’. In this study, we explored how the forest bioeconomy discourses are downscaled in the development of the forest peripheries in East and North Finland. We examined the ways in which the regional development actors interpret prevailing forest-related policies and reproduce or challenge associated forest discourse(s). The focus was on the linkages between the macro-policies and the regional development, uncertainties that relate to the practical implementation and realisation of the policies, and the conflicts and power relations between the policies, practices, and the actors behind them. As a research strategy, we used embedded triangulation, where the interviews of development actors as initial data were contrasted with policy documents as the supportive data.For the analysis, we used the critical discourse analysis.From the policy documents, we identified the ‘You can have it all (if you close your eyes)’ discourse as the most hegemonic discourse, which aims to merge all the sides under the sustainable forest bioeconomy that favours the biomass regime. From the interviews, we identified three interlinked regional forest bioeconomy discourses: 1) ‘You can have it all is possible’, 2) ‘You can have it all is dependent on many ifs’, and 3) ‘You can have it all runs into conflicts’. The first discourse reproduced the hegemonic discourse, power relations appeared to be vertically unproblematic, and relatively manifested just transition for the forest peripheries. The second discourse produced an alternative discourse, which displayed more dependencies on the qualities of economic actors under the biotech regime. Power relations appeared to be more horizontal and complex, with a random just transition. The third discourse manifested tensions between the ideological aspirations of the policies and the practical reality in the forest peripheries. Conflicts arise from disharmonies between policy implementation and regional needs, cultural clashes, and misrecognition of the regional perspectives. The discourse reflected skewed power relations in vertical and horizontal manners. The transition appeared to be unjust in many ways because the external benefits seemed to be regarded over the regional ones.

Ophthalmic sequelae and psychosocial impact in pediatric ebola survivors.

SummaryBackgroundEbola virus disease (EVD) outbreaks in West Africa (2013-2016) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (2018-2020) have resulted in thousands of EVD survivors who remain at-risk for survivor sequelae. While EVD survivorship has been broadly reported in adult populations, pediatric EVD survivors are under-represented. In this cross-sectional study, we investigated the prevalence of eye disease, health-related quality-of-life, vision-related quality-of-life, and the burden of mental illness among pediatric EVD survivors in Sierra Leone.MethodsTwenty-three pediatric EVD survivors and 58 EVD close contacts were enrolled. Participants underwent a comprehensive ophthalmic examination and completed the following surveys: Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory Version 4.0, Effect of Youngsters Eyesight on Quality-of-Life, and the Revised Child Anxiety and Depression Scale.FindingsA higher prevalence of uveitis was observed in EVD survivor eyes (10·8%) cohort compared to close contacts eyes (1·7%, p=0·03). Overall, 47·8% of EVD survivor eyes and 31·9% of close contact eyes presented with an eye disease at the time of our study (p=0·25). Individuals diagnosed with an ocular complication had poorer vision-related quality-of-life (p=0·02).InterpretationBoth health related quality-of-life and vision-related quality-of-life were poor among EVD survivors and close contacts. The high prevalence of eye disease associated with reduced vision health, suggests that cross-disciplinary approaches are needed to address the unmet needs of EVD survivors.FundingNational Institutes of Health R01 EY029594, K23 EY030158; National Eye Institute; Research to Prevent Blindness (Emory Eye Center); Marcus Foundation Combating Childhood Illness; Emory Global Health Institute; Stanley M. Truhlsen Family Foundation.

Queer Archival Autoethnography in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Bone-Grass Boy

In 2017, queer Chicanx artist Ken Gonzales-Day put on an elaborate installation, titled Bone-Grass Boy, of glossy photographs, sculpture, mural, and mixed-media all seemingly taking place within the nineteenth-century US-Mexico borderlands. Accompanying the photographs is an old manuscript, also titled Bone-Grass Boy: The Secret Banks of the Conejos River, written by Ramoncita Gonzales in 1892. Gonzales-Day’s piece was inspired by a photograph he saw of his ancestor, a gender ambiguous person possibly named Ramoncita. Bone-Grass Boy, I suggest, is a type of speculative and performative archival practice through which Gonzales-Day brings together the erased histories of people of mixed racial, gendered, and sexual identities. I argue that the manipulation of media such as photography and the creation of a speculative archive is a type of queer archival practice that offers Ramoncita a place in history through Gonzales-Day’s queer present. I call this methodology “queer archival autoethnography,” which keeps close eyes on one’s own performative position in the archive, refusing any subject-object divide as well as past-present divide of either privileged or minoritarian archival encounters.