Familiar Structure Research Articles

Eye Movements of Deaf Students in Expository Versus Narrative Texts.

Text comprehension, a daily academic activity in primary and secondary school, is especially challenging for deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) students. The present study analyzed the effect of text genre (narrative vs. expository) on accuracy and eye-movement patterns during text comprehension by DHH students (ages 9-15 years) when compared to a typically hearing (TH) control group matched for chronological age. Comprehension accuracy was found to be similar across text genres for both groups, though TH participants outperformed DHH participants. Regarding eye movements, both groups spent more time and made more regressive fixations in the expository text than in the narrative text, but DHH participants showed longer saccade amplitude in the expository than in the narrative, which could be interpreted as indicating better self-regulation of DHH readers in the easiest and more familiar narrative text structure.

Large-Scale Cortex-Core Structure Formation in Brain Organoids

Brain organoids recapitulate a number of brain properties, including neuronal diversity. However, do they recapitulate brain structure? Using a hydrodynamic description for cell nuclei as particles interacting initially via an effective, attractive force as mediated by the respective, surrounding cytoskeletons, we quantify structure development in brain organoids to determine what physical mechanism regulates the number of cortex-core structures. Regions of cell nuclei overdensity in the linear regime drive the initial seeding for cortex-core structures, which ultimately develop in the non-linear regime, as inferred by the emergent form of an effective interaction between cell nuclei and with the extracellular environment. Individual cortex-core structures then provide a basis upon which we build an extended version of the buckling without bending morphogenesis (BWBM) model, with its proliferating cortex and constraining core, to predict foliations/folds of the cortex in the presence of a nonlinearity due to cortical cells actively regulating strain. In doing so, we obtain asymmetric foliations/folds with respect to the trough (sulci) and the crest (gyri). In addition to laying new groundwork for the design of more familiar and less familiar brain structures, the hydrodynamic description for cell nuclei during the initial stages of brain organoid development provides an intriguing quantitative connection with large-scale structure formation in the universe.

Encoding of Environmental Cues in Central Amygdala Neurons during Foraging.

To successfully forage in an environment filled with rewards and threats, animals need to rely on familiar structures of their environment that signal food availability. The central amygdala (CeA) is known to mediate a panoply of consummatory and defensive behaviors, yet how specific activity patterns within CeA subpopulations guide optimal choices is not completely understood. In a paradigm of appetitive conditioning in which mice freely forage for food across a continuum of cues, we found that two major subpopulations of CeA neurons, Somatostatin-positive (CeASst) and protein kinase Cδ-positive (CeAPKCδ) neurons, can assign motivational properties to environmental cues. Although the proportion of food responsive cells was higher within CeASst than CeAPKCδ neurons, only the activities of CeAPKCδ, but not CeASst, neurons were required for learning of contextual food cues. Our findings point to a model in which CeAPKCδ neurons may incorporate stimulus salience together with sensory features of the environment to encode memory of the goal location.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The CeA has a very important role in the formation of memories that associate sensory information with aversive or rewarding representation. Here, we used a conditioned place preference paradigm, where freely moving mice learn to associate external cues with food availability, to investigate the roles of CeA neuron subpopulations. We found that CeASst and CeAPKCδ neurons encoded environmental cues during foraging but only the activities of CeAPKCδ neurons were required for learning of contextual food cues.

Because We Care: A Philosophical Investigation into the Spirit of Medical Education

Issue Although in health care education we encounter the word care at every turn, the concept is hardly ever defined or subjected to scrutiny. Care is a foundational concept of health care education, and if we do not take control of our basic concepts, their meaning can be subject to other influences. We take a philosophical approach to care and ask what care is, to connect different conceptions of care in health care education to their common root. We do this by first examining how the concept is used in health care education, how it features in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, and finally, how these philosophical implications may be applied to medical education. Evidence The use of care in medical education suggests that it is foundational to understanding health care education. However, presently the concept is ambiguous and risks being a ‘container concept’ that becomes meaningless because it is used generally. In publications that feature the concept, it is usually in service of another aspect that is under investigation, and not care itself. For instance, publications on teaching patient-centred care focus on the meaning of ‘patient-centeredness’ rather than care. In ‘health care’, there are debates about what ‘health’ means, but not care. The concept is also used in different and sometimes contradictory meanings: care as the organizational structure of health care that safeguards (health care system), care as empathy or careful attention of medical trainees for patients (caring about one’s patients, treating them carefully), and, finally, care as motivation and focus toward a goal (caring about graduating, making a contribution). We turn to the philosophy of Heidegger to integrate these different appearances of care into a unified structure. Heidegger’s Being and Time describes care as the basic ontological structure of human existence. This turns out to be a structure of time: in the familiar structure of past present and future. Anticipating a future end, which determines our attitude toward the people, objects, and physical structures we are with now, and in the light of which we orient ourselves to what is already there. Implications By describing the ontological (foundational) structure of care, we argue that care is the spirit of health care education. This unifying structure can be used to integrate phenomena that are recognized as important in health care education but are usually seen as separate. We use an example to illustrate how empathy, health protocols, and educational goals can be connected in one situation. Just as health provides a framework for patient management, care can provide this framework for education. This fundamental concept of care can be used in practice for reflection on anticipated ends in situations in which different modes of care seemingly conflict. Beyond our focus on care, we also illustrate how one can take an important concept in health care education and use philosophy to root it in a foundational understanding of that concept.

Teaching the Cultural Commitments of Musical Structures and their Theories

While most undergraduate music theory classes are not overtly political, they often convey highly socialized convictions about musicality—that is, what counts as a "coherent," "well-formed," or "expressive" musical utterance—which can shape assessments of worth ascribed to individual composers, musical traditions, and ethnic and national identities. This essay advocates for an approach to music theory pedagogy that deliberately holds the inscribed socialized frameworks of musical structures up for critical examination. Through a lesson plan on the pentatonic scale in huangmei opera, I model several strategies for rendering the cultural commitments of familiar and unfamiliar musical structures palpable to students.

Review Essay: “Beyond Metaphor”: The Uncanny Precariousness of Being

Review Essay: “Beyond Metaphor”: The Uncanny Precariousness of Being

Signatures of causality and determinism in a quantum theory of events

By representing an event as the joint state of a detector-timer couple that interact with a system, we recover the familiar tensor product structure, used to describe spatially separated systems, in the context of timelike events. Furthermore, with this approach, we extend the superposition principle to the moment of occurrence of events. We then outline quantum signatures of causality that manifest through coherence in the detector state and correlation functions of time operators. Finally, we expand the scope of quantum information theoretic measures of state discrimination and information content, commonly used to characterize spatially separated systems, to events in spacetime. For causally connected events, we illustrate a deterministic relationship between events (akin to spatially entangled physical systems) where observing a previous event (one subsystem), enables us to delineate a later event (the other subsystem).

DQDF

Data quality assessment is an essential process of any data analysis process including machine learning. The process is time-consuming as it involves multiple independent data quality checks that are performed iteratively at scale on evolving data resulting from exploratory data analysis (EDA). Existing solutions that provide computational optimizations for data quality assessment often separate the data structure from its data quality which then requires efforts from users to explicitly maintain state-like information. They demand a certain level of distributed system knowledge to ensure high-level pipeline optimizations from data analysts who should instead be focusing on analyzing the data. We, therefore, propose data-quality-aware dataframes, a data quality management system embedded as part of a data analyst's familiar data structure, such as a Python dataframe. The framework automatically detects changes in datasets' metadata and exploits the context of each of the quality checks to provide efficient data quality assessment on ever-changing data. We demonstrate in our experiment that our approach can reduce the overall data quality evaluation runtime by 40-80% in both local and distributed setups with less than 10% increase in memory usage.

Writing the Conceptual Article: A Practical Guide

The conceptual article can make a valuable contribution to the scholarly conversation but presents its own special challenges compared to the traditional article that reports empirical findings or interpretive analysis with a familiar organizational structure. This article provides a guide to this task, organized around the process of concept explication—the development of theoretical concepts with careful attention to the interplay between their definition and measurement. From ideation to the final writing stage, one must carefully specify how these concepts are connected together in a broader theoretical argument. Examples of this kind of conceptual work are drawn from the field of journalism studies and communication to guide writers in moving beyond an essay that summarizes literature to an article that makes an original contribution, writing in such a way that the key argument is communicated effectively.

Privatization of Law Enforcement


 
 The year 2020 ushered in growing calls to defund the police. In Canada, as in other countries where the movement to defund the police has gained momentum, activists demand transferring money from police departments to social workers, reducing the number of police officers, and increasing police departments’ democratic accountability. This last group of reform initiatives is, perhaps, the least controversial one because it calls for improving the familiar structures of democratic oversight over police departments, such as municipal councils, independent police oversight boards and complaints bodies, and others. 
 The demands for greater accountability of police departments to the public are a symptom of a deeper problem - there is a growing discrepancy between the goals of policing and the consequences of the police’s actions. This discrepancy materializes when the police’s attempts to ensure public safety result in the marginalization of racialized communities, particularly in larger cities across Canada. In order to understand why laudable policy goals lead to deeply problematic consequences, it is necessary to analyze the policing process in our cities. While it has traditionally been assumed that this process is left to the discretion of separate police departments, this paper demonstrates that externalities, such as data generated by private technologies, play an important role in undermining the goals of policing. Reliance on private data and technology does not absolve the police of accountability for resulting human rights violations. However, it has important implications for the reform of public oversight over the police. In an era when non-governmental actors are taking part in law enforcement through procurement contracts, democratic control over the exercise of the police’s contracting powers is an important, albeit often overlooked, instrument of police reform. Relying on contracts for predictive policing technologies as a case study, this paper argues that communities should condition the funding of police procurement on ex ante assessment procedures, technical specifications, and contract enforcement rights. Also, local elected representatives should have an opportunity to approve any data and technology sharing arrangements as well as federal standing offer arrangements that extend predictive policing to their communities.
 

A One-Shot Shift from Explore to Exploit in Monkey Prefrontal Cortex.

Much animal learning is slow, with cumulative changes in behavior driven by reward prediction errors. When the abstract structure of a problem is known, however, both animals and formal learning models can rapidly attach new items to their roles within this structure, sometimes in a single trial. Frontal cortex is likely to play a key role in this process. To examine information seeking and use in a known problem structure, we trained monkeys in an explore/exploit task, requiring the animal first to test objects for their association with reward, then, once rewarded objects were found, to reselect them on further trials for further rewards. Many cells in the frontal cortex showed an explore/exploit preference aligned with one-shot learning in the monkeys' behavior: the population switched from an explore state to an exploit state after a single trial of learning but partially maintained the explore state if an error indicated that learning had failed. Binary switch from explore to exploit was not explained by continuous changes linked to expectancy or prediction error. Explore/exploit preferences were independent for two stages of the trial: object selection and receipt of feedback. Within an established task structure, frontal activity may control the separate processes of explore and exploit, switching in one trial between the two.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Much animal learning is slow, with cumulative changes in behavior driven by reward prediction errors. When the abstract structure a problem is known, however, both animals and formal learning models can rapidly attach new items to their roles within this structure. To address transitions in neural activity during one-shot learning, we trained monkeys in an explore/exploit task using familiar objects and a highly familiar task structure. When learning was rapid, many frontal neurons showed a binary, one-shot switch between explore and exploit. Within an established task structure, frontal activity may control the separate operations of exploring alternative objects to establish their current role, then exploiting this knowledge for further reward.

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

The Call: Leo Strauss on Heidegger, Secularization, and Revelation

'Waiting with Bated Breath'

'Waiting with Bated Breath'

Migrant subjectivities and temporal flexibility of East‐Central European labour migration to the United Kingdom

AbstractThis paper seeks to broaden existing understandings of migrant worker flexibility drawing on the data from the two ethnographic studies of low‐wage employers and Eastern European migrants in Scotland. It focuses on the temporal aspects of flexibility production in employment discourse and temporal expectations about flexible migrant workers. Our findings reveal double movement of interruption and remaking of temporal flexibility, which challenges directional expectations about time and unsettles the assumed connectivity between flexibility's temporal elements. Uncertainty and instability of migration and employment frameworks undermine the attempts of employers and migrants to manage time, to develop continuous portfolio careers and coherent temporal horizons. Furthermore, contested temporal expectations about flexible migrant workers create fragmented and fractured “flexiworkers” that do not fit within the existing temporal frameworks of signs, routines, and rhythms. The paper suggests re‐orientation of flexibility debates beyond temporal measurement, outside familiar temporal structures, and towards redefinition of flexible worker identities.

Genetics and meta-analysis of recessive non-syndromic hearing impairment and Usher syndrome in Maghreb population: lessons from the past, contemporary actualities and future challenges.

Hereditary hearing impairment (HI) is a heterogeneous condition with over 130 genes associated with genetic non-syndromic HI (NSHI) and Usher syndrome (USH). Approximately 80% of hereditary NSHI cases have autosomal recessive (AR) mode of inheritance. The high rate of consanguinity and endogamy in the Maghreb countries, including Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, represents a major contributing factor to the development of ARHI. Since the 90s, those populations, with their particular large familiar structure, represented an effective key towards the discovery of the first HI loci and genes. In this study, we performed a deep literature database search to analyze the mutational spectrum and the distribution of pathogenic variants responsible of USH and the NSHI among those populations. To date, 124 pathogenic variants were identified in 32 genes of which over 70% represent population-specific variants. The particular variants' distribution is related to the high rate of consanguinity as well as the multiple shared features such as demographic history of migrations and social behavior that promoted the spreading of several founder mutations within those countries. This is the first study to report lessons from the past and current actualities of HI within the three Maghreb countries. However, despite the great impact placed by such population for the HI genetic studies, only a few next-generation sequencing platforms have so far been implemented with those countries. We, therefore, believe that those countries should be supported to implement this technology that would definitely be of great value in the discovery of additional novel HI genes/variants.

Disrupting their frame of reference: teacher candidates in alternative education settings

ABSTRACT Despite a growing population of students being served in Alternative Education Settings (AES) and a severe teacher shortage in AES, most traditional teacher preparation programs do not specifically address teaching in alternative settings. Unsurprisingly, teachers in these settings report being inadequately prepared to meet the complex needs of students with significant behavioral challenges. Moreover, when behaviorally challenged students exit AES, they are often at a greater social and academic disadvantage than when they enrolled. This grounded theory study followed three groups (N = 40) of teacher candidates as they completed fieldwork in one of five AES as part of a special education course at a large public university in South-eastern Pennsylvania. Analysis of teacher candidates' field journals suggested an emerging theory of ‘alternative education settings as non-schools.’ For these teacher candidates, familiar structures for teaching, learning, and behaviour did not apply in AES, thus delegitimizing AES as schools.

Hello Possums!

Hello Possums!

Some remarks on applications of analogy within intercultural dialogue

In this article I present some applications of analogy with reference to intercultural dialogue, firstly as a process in which the familiar structure of a direct experience in one situation improves awareness of an expected experience within another structure. Secondly, I follow the Enrique Dussel’s approach according to which where analogy is the key element of a true dialogue. In the paper conceptions of Ryszard Kapuściński, Martin Buber, Józef Tischner are presented in the context of intercultural dialogue and are applied to Yuko Abe’s analysis of students exchange experiences.

IPT: From Humble Origins as ‘High Contact Therapy’ to International Adoption

IPT: From Humble Origins as ‘High Contact Therapy’ to International Adoption

Høj Stene – en monumental skibssætning ved Gudenåen

Høj Stene – en monumental skibssætning ved Gudenåen