Natural Context Research Articles

Outcomes assessments should reflect the dynamic and contextual nature of early childhood development.

Outcomes assessments should reflect the dynamic and contextual nature of early childhood development.

Pattern-Based Target Selection for Treatment of Irregular Past Tense: A Single-Case Experimental Design for Children With Developmental Language Disorder.

Many children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate difficulty inflecting irregular past tense verbs. We evaluated using phonological-based patterns (i.e., schemas) to select targets for treatment of irregular verb inflection for children with DLD. We hypothesized this approach would result in acquisition of treated verbs, generalization to untreated verbs within the same phonological schema, and increased use of correct irregular verbs in naturalistic contexts. Treatment was provided to three 7-year-old participants with DLD in the context of multiple baseline designs across behaviors and participants. Phonological schemas included vowel change, final alveolar, and dual change irregular verbs. Treatment was provided using established therapeutic approaches, including narrative generation, sentence imitation, and naturalistic play activities. Acquisition of treated and untreated targets was assessed at the beginning of sessions, and use of verbs in naturalistic contexts was observed throughout treatment sessions. Positive acquisition effects were noted for two of three participants. Generalization to untreated items occurred within and across treatment sets for two participants, whereas increases in accurate irregular verb production in naturalistic contexts were not observed. Outcomes demonstrated support for a pattern-based approach to target selection for treatment of irregular past tense verbs. One participant, who demonstrated general difficulty with the probe and treatment tasks, showed no treatment effect, suggesting that the treatment may be effective for some children with DLD. Further research is warranted to determine what factors might have influenced these variable outcomes across participants. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23671500.

Luminescence-Based Infrared Thermal Sensors: Comprehensive Insights.

Recent chronological breakthroughs in materials innovation, their fabrication, and structural designs for disparate applications have paved transformational ways to subversively digitalize infrared (IR) thermal imaging sensors from traditional to smart. The noninvasive IR thermal imaging sensors are at the cutting edge of developments, exploiting the abilities of nanomaterials to acquire arbitrary, targeted, and tunable responses suitable for integration with host materials and devices, intimately disintegrate variegated signals from the target onto depiction without any discomfort, eliminating motional artifacts and collects precise physiological and physiochemical information in natural contexts. Highlighting several typical examples from recent literature, this review article summarizes an accessible, critical, and authoritative summary of an emerging class of advancement in the modalities of nano and micro-scale materials and devices, their fabrication designs and applications in infrared thermal sensors. Introduction is begun covering the importance of IR sensors, followed by a survey on sensing capabilities of various nano and micro structural materials, their design architects, and then culminating an overview of their diverse application swaths. The review concludes with a stimulating frontier debate on the opportunities, difficulties, and future approaches in the vibrant sector of infrared thermal imaging sensors.

Single-cell mass distributions reveal simple rules for achieving steady-state growth.

Microbiologists have watched clear liquid turn cloudy for over 100 years. While the cloudiness of a culture is proportional to its total biomass, growth rates from optical density measurements are challenging to interpret when cells change size. Many bacteria adjust their size at different steady-state growth rates, but also when shifting between starvation and growth. Optical density cannot disentangle how mass is distributed among cells. Here, we use single-cell mass measurements to demonstrate that a population of cells in batch culture achieves a stable mass distribution for only a short period of time. Achieving steady-state growth in rich medium requires low initial biomass concentrations and enough time for individual cell mass accumulation and cell number increase via cell division to balance out. Steady-state growth is important for reliable cell mass distributions and experimental reproducibility. We discuss how mass variation outside of steady-state can impact physiology, ecology, and evolution experiments.

Impartiality or Individualization? Imprisoned Women’s Discourses of (In)Justice

Using in-depth interviews with forty women in one California prison, the research addresses incarcerated women’s perceptions of justice regarding their experiences with the criminal justice system, particularly concerning the internal prison grievance system. This article focuses on interview subjects’ perceptions of (in)justice regarding problems relevant to the grievance processes. The most prominent discourses of justice revolved around procedural and substantive justice issues in seemingly contradictory ways. These discourses emerged from three main areas of discussion: everyday prison operations and interactions; the design and operation of grievance procedures; and dehumanizing prison processes and policies and sexual assaults and abuse. The article highlights the seemingly contradictory nature of the justice ideals put forth, discusses the contextual nature of these perceptions and, reflecting on justice and legal theory, offers some conclusions and recommendations, addressing the Prison Litigation Reform Act.

Lexical Chunks between Investigation and Application: A Case Study of a BBC Radio 4 Interview

This study represents an approach to easily extract lexical chunks which are considered to be the essence of gaining a communicative skill similar to that of any native language speaker. Lexical approaches are very important in this respect; far from grammar rules, they concentrate on learning language in use. Therefore, it aims to investigate this field and its effect on the process of learning a language. It is hypothesized that lexical approaches have their direct effect on raising the students’ performance regarding L2 language fluency and production by means of lexical chunks. It is also hypothesized that it is difficult for the students to easily identify and extract lexical chunks in their natural contexts. Therefore, this study adopts Boers and Lindstromberg’s (2009) model as a way to facilitate the identification of lexical chunks and to open a way to easily identify them. A transcript of a BBC radio 4 interview (see the appendix) is chosen as the source of the data analysis in this study. The working procedures are thought to be beneficial for L2 learners future identification and extraction of lexical chunks.

Pore-scale study of miscible density instability with viscosity contrast in porous media

The transport of miscible fluids in porous media is a prevalent phenomenon that occurs in various natural and industrial contexts. However, this fundamental phenomenon is usually coupled with interface instabilities (e.g., viscous/density fingering), which has yet to be thoroughly investigated. In this paper, a multiple-relaxation-time lattice Boltzmann method is applied to study the displacement between two miscible fluids in porous media at the pore scale, with the coexistence of density difference (Rayleigh number Ra), viscosity contrast (R), and injection velocity (Utop). A parametric study is conducted to evaluate the impact of Ra, R, and Utop on the flow stability. For a fixed Ra that can trigger density fingering, the increase in R or Utop is found to suppress density fingering. Consequently, under a large Utop and a moderate R, the density fingering is fully stabilized and the flow follows a stabile pattern. Furthermore, as both R and Utop grow to a sufficiently high level, they can jointly trigger viscous fingering. In addition, the increasing Ra shows an enhancing effect on both density fingering and viscous fingering. Finally, by quantitatively analyzing the fingering length (lm) and the fingering propagation time (te), five different flow patterns are classified as viscosity-suppressed (I), viscosity-enhanced (II), viscosity-unstable (III), displacement-suppressed (IV), and stable (V) regimes. In a three-dimensional parameter space spanned by Ra, R, and Utop, the parameter ranges of the five regimes are determined according to lm and te. These findings hold a significant value in providing guidance for controlling the flow stability by selecting appropriate operating conditions.

The local-global relationship of nature

In the light of possible advance in the elucidation of emergence in natural systems we address the likelihood of an overriding relationship between the local and the global in Nature. We consider the possible views of an abstract conglomeration of entities, and whether a global representation can be established. This leads to a consideration of the problem in natural contexts to establish a relationship between local and global properties. We describe the application of a model-hierarchical representation to a biological cell, and its implications in terms of subjective and objective viewpoints. We conclude by stating the concluded relationship between local and global properties in Nature, in that control is exercised not only from local-to-global, but also from global-to-local.

Sustainable cycle-tourism for society: Integrating multi-criteria decision-making and land use approaches for route selection

Cycle tourism is a sustainable active vacation, which is quickly growing in recent years. Although it has several benefits for society and users (e.g., social connections, amusement, and physical and mental health), cycle tourism requires an adequate route network to enjoy destinations with historical and landscape peculiarities. Past literature mainly investigated motivations and preferences for cycle tourists and proposed optimisation methods in planning routes. However, applying assessment methods for prioritising cycle-tourist routes is a seldom-explored topic. This study aims to address this gap by applying an integrated method for evaluating and prioritising cycle routes, searching for a compromise between route characteristics, service provided to users, and natural and building contexts crossed. It jointly includes Multi-Criteria Decision Methods (MCDMs) and a land use approach: AHP determines the weights of criteria and parameters describing cycle routes; GIS elaborates spatial analysis of parameters; ELECTRE I and VIKOR help find a compromise solution amongst different cycle routes. The integrated method involved a panel of experts to collect data, and it is applied to the wide-study area of Franciacorta (Italy). Some comparisons with other MCDMs are made to justify the results. The findings could support multi-institutions prioritising cycle route alternatives in deciding their building.

Getting a foot in the door: local labour markets and the school-to-work transition

ABSTRACT Despite persistent sub-national variation in youth unemployment rates, the relationship between local labour market conditions and youth labour market outcomes is not well understood. This article explores the consequences of variation in the level and type of demand for labour for the amount of time it takes young people in the United Kingdom to find employment, following departure from full-time education. Survival analysis of British Household Panel Study (BHPS) data covering the period 1998–2008 shows that variation in the level (but not the type) of demand for labour is associated with considerable heterogeneity in job search time among less qualified young people, but not their better qualified peers. On average, it takes young people with lower secondary qualifications 1 month longer to find employment of any sort and 7 months longer to find secure, full-time employment if they are located in a place of low rather than high labour demand. These findings, which highlight the contextual nature of the risk associated with low educational attainment, point to the need for greater policy focus on bridging spatial mismatch between the location of low qualified young people and the location of secure employment opportunities.

The role of nursery school teachers in early intervention with children with signs of ASD

In Brazil, daycare as a social and economic reality for many families is consolidated as a natural context for the child and complementary to the family, and places teachers as important partners within an integrated system that involves the care of children from zero to 3 years old in the promotion of their full development. The experiences lived in daycare are decisive and fundamental in the child development process, and teachers as agents of intervention must be alert to possible early signs of change in the child’s development. However, the practices of Brazilian daycare teachers have been little investigated with regard to school inclusion. In this sense, this research aimed to investigate the experiences of daycare teachers with children who present risk signs for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This is a qualitative exploratory research, with the participation of 10 teachers from public daycare centers in a city in the state of São Paulo. The information was obtained through semi-structured interviews that followed a script previously defined by the researchers. Data analysis was carried out using thematic content analysis. The results pointed out that the teachers’ conceptions about development, permeated by their own ideas about education, care, family, and society, imply directly in their practices with the child and in the conduction of the case to other spheres. It was possible to verify the protagonism of the teachers who have in their effective practices care and play as intervention strategies in their actions. Gaps emerged regarding the communication between education professionals and the articulation between education and health. We identified the need for consistent intersectoral actions that favor the development of children who show early signs of ASD and value the role of the teacher in this process, also promoting inclusive educational practices.

Sentences Are Key: Helping School-Age Children and Adolescents Build Sentence Skills Needed for Real Language.

In this article, we present key concepts pointing to the importance of targeting complex sentences for school-age children and adolescents with developmental language disorders (DLD). Drawing on current treatment research, we argue that the sentence is a crucial but often neglected piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding relationships between DLD and academic outcomes. We provide detailed suggestions for how clinicians can focus on complex sentence structures in natural academic contexts to bridge this gap. Background information on sentence complexity is presented, along with a rationale for targeting complex sentences with school-age children and adolescents with DLD. Intervention methods from a variety of studies targeting multiclausal sentences are discussed in relation to current accounts of language learning and language processing models. We provide a robust catalog of suggested strategies for targeting sentence complexity in a manner that is aligned with research findings to date and integrated into real academic contexts. Complex sentence structures are a key challenge for students with DLD as they tackle discipline-specific language and academic tasks. Sentence complexity treatment programs employ one or more treatment methods including priming, modeling, recasting, contextualization, metalinguistic instruction, and sentence combining. While studies have consistently shown a measurable improvement in complex sentence production on proximal outcomes regardless of treatment approach, evidence of durable, functional changes for students with DLD remains sparse. We encourage new treatments that target comprehension and production of complex sentences in real-life academic contexts in clinical practice and research. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23969103.

The global anaerobic metabolism regulator fnr is necessary for the degradation of food dyes and drugs by Escherichia coli.

This work has broad relevance due to the ubiquity of dyes containing azo bonds in food and drugs. We report that azo dyes can be degraded by human gut bacteria through both enzymatic and nonenzymatic mechanisms, even from a single gut bacterial species. Furthermore, we revealed that environmental factors, oxygen, and L-Cysteine control the ability of E. coli to degrade azo dyes due to their impacts on bacterial transcription and metabolism. These results open up new opportunities to manipulate the azoreductase activity of the gut microbiome through the manipulation of host diet, suggest that azoreductase potential may be altered in patients suffering from gastrointestinal disease, and highlight the importance of studying bacterial enzymes for drug metabolism in their natural cellular and ecological context.

Research on landscape regeneration design of old industrial sites under the concept of sustainable development

By the end of the 20th century, the transformation of industrial economic structure led to the decline of a large number of old industries. The large area of abandoned industrial land left by the city not only hindered the development of the city, but also brought damage to the ecological environment. According to the background of sustainable development theory, around the problems of industrial site wasteland reuse analysis, from many aspects to the industrial site of water, vegetation, soil and further combing ecological restoration, environmental protection, improve the utilization rate of land and the humanistic spirit refining fusion, the industrial wasteland design with natural ecology and context heritage of human natural landscape.

Advancing Naturalistic Affective Science with Deep Learning.

People express their own emotions and perceive others' emotions via a variety of channels, including facial movements, body gestures, vocal prosody, and language. Studying these channels of affective behavior offers insight into both the experience and perception of emotion. Prior research has predominantly focused on studying individual channels of affective behavior in isolation using tightly controlled, non-naturalistic experiments. This approach limits our understanding of emotion in more naturalistic contexts where different channels of information tend to interact. Traditional methods struggle to address this limitation: manually annotating behavior is time-consuming, making it infeasible to do at large scale; manually selecting and manipulating stimuli based on hypotheses may neglect unanticipated features, potentially generating biased conclusions; and common linear modeling approaches cannot fully capture the complex, nonlinear, and interactive nature of real-life affective processes. In this methodology review, we describe how deep learning can be applied to address these challenges to advance a more naturalistic affective science. First, we describe current practices in affective research and explain why existing methods face challenges in revealing a more naturalistic understanding of emotion. Second, we introduce deep learning approaches and explain how they can be applied to tackle three main challenges: quantifying naturalistic behaviors, selecting and manipulating naturalistic stimuli, and modeling naturalistic affective processes. Finally, we describe the limitations of these deep learning methods, and how these limitations might be avoided or mitigated. By detailing the promise and the peril of deep learning, this review aims to pave the way for a more naturalistic affective science.

Animal-friendly behavioral testing in field studies: examples from ground squirrels.

Field studies of behavior provide insight into the expression of behavior in its natural ecological context and can serve as an important complement to behavioral studies conducted in the lab under controlled conditions. In addition to naturalistic observations, behavioral testing can be an important component of field studies of behavior. This mini review evaluates a sample of behavioral testing methods in field studies to identify ways in which behavioral testing can be animal-friendly and generate ethologically relevant data. Specific examples, primarily from studies of ground squirrels, are presented to illustrate ways in which principles of animal-friendly behavioral testing can be applied to and guide testing methods. Tests conducted with animals in their natural habitat and that elicit naturally occurring behavioral responses can minimize stress and disturbance for animals, as well as disruption of the larger ecosystem, and can have high ethological validity. When animals are trapped or handled as part of a study, behavioral testing can be incorporated into handling procedures to reduce overall disturbance. When behavior is evaluated in a testing arena, the arena can be designed to resemble natural conditions to increase the ethological relevance of the test. Efforts to minimize time spent in testing arenas can also reduce disturbance to animals. Adapting a behavioral test to a species or habitat conditions can facilitate reduced disruption to subjects and increased ethological relevance of the test.

Beyond Logography


 
 
 Zhuānzì 專字 are often defined as graphs representing a “special meaning” of a word, manifest in the choice (i.e., addition or alteration) of a semantic component. This article approaches the zhuānzì phenomenon in the broader context of the logographic nature of the Chinese writing system. It first identifies and discusses several thematic categories of zhuānzì, including both historical examples from unearthed and transmitted corpora and instances from the Chinese script as used in the linguistic environment of modern Mandarin. The article then seeks to compare and describe different kinds of information conveyed by different zhuānzì and suggests a terminological shift toward defining zhuānzì as “representing a subset of the word’s denotation,” a phrasing more suited to the complex reality of the phenomenon in question.
 
 

Acceptable Risks in Europe’s Proposed AI Act: Reasonableness and Other Principles for Deciding How Much Risk Management Is Enough

Abstract This paper critically evaluates the European Commission’s proposed AI Act’s approach to risk management and risk acceptability for high-risk artificial intelligence systems that pose risks to fundamental rights and safety. The Act aims to promote “trustworthy” AI with a proportionate regulatory burden. Its provisions on risk acceptability require residual risks from high-risk systems to be reduced or eliminated “as far as possible”, having regard for the “state of the art”. This criterion, especially if interpreted narrowly, is unworkable and promotes neither proportionate regulatory burden nor trustworthiness. By contrast, the Parliament’s most recent draft amendments to the risk management provisions introduce “reasonableness” and cost–benefit analyses and are more transparent regarding the value-laden and contextual nature of risk acceptability judgments. This paper argues that the Parliament’s approach is more workable and better balances the goals of proportionality and trustworthiness. It explains what reasonableness in risk acceptability judgments would entail, drawing on principles from negligence law and European medical devices regulation. It also contends that the approach to risk acceptability judgments needs a firm foundation of civic legitimacy, including detailed guidance or involvement from regulators and meaningful input from affected stakeholders.

Egocentric projection is a rational strategy for accurate emotion prediction

People need to accurately understand and predict others' emotions in order to build and maintain meaningful social connections. However, when they encounter new social partners, people often do not have enough information about them to make accurate inferences. Rather, they often resort to an egocentric heuristic, and make predictions about a target by using their own self-knowledge as a proxy. Is this egocentric heuristic a form of cognitive bias, or is it a rational strategy for real-world social prediction? If egocentrism provides a rational and effective solution to the challenging task of social prediction in naturalistic contexts, we should expect that a) egocentric predictions tend to be more accurate, and b) people rely on self-knowledge to a greater extent when it's more likely to be a good proxy. Using an emotion prediction task and personality measures, we assessed similarity and predictive accuracy between first-year college students and their new acquaintance roommate. Results demonstrated that, when people need to predict an unfamiliar target's emotions, self-knowledge can often effectively approximate knowledge about others, and thus support accurate predictions. Moreover, participants that were typical of the sample, whose self-knowledge can better approximate information about the target, relied more on self-knowledge in their predictions, and thus achieved higher accuracy. These findings suggest that people rationally tune their use of egocentrism based on whether it is likely to pay off. Overall, these findings demonstrate a rational side to a cognitive phenomenon usually framed as a cognitive pitfall, namely egocentric projection, when its natural decision context is taken into consideration.

Tuning Methylation-Dependent Silencing Dynamics by Synthetic Modulation of CpG Density.

Methylation of cytosines in CG dinucleotides (CpGs) within promoters has been shown to lead to gene silencing in mammals in natural contexts. Recently, engineered recruitment of methyltransferases (DNMTs) at specific loci was shown to be sufficient to silence synthetic and endogenous gene expression through this mechanism. A critical parameter for DNA methylation-based silencing is the distribution of CpGs within the target promoter. However, how the number or density of CpGs in the target promoter affects the dynamics of silencing by DNMT recruitment has remained unclear. Here, we constructed a library of promoters with systematically varying CpG content, and analyzed the rate of silencing in response to recruitment of DNMT. We observed a tight correlation between silencing rate and CpG content. Further, methylation-specific analysis revealed a constant accumulation rate of methylation at the promoter after DNMT recruitment. We identified a single CpG site between TATA box and transcription start site (TSS) that accounted for a substantial part of the difference in silencing rates between promoters with differing CpG content, indicating that certain residues play disproportionate roles in controlling silencing. Together, these results provide a library of promoters for synthetic epigenetic and gene regulation applications, as well as insights into the regulatory link between CpG content and silencing rate.