Spoken Name Research Articles

Clinical Trials in Orthopaedics Research. Part I. Cultural and Practical Barriers to Randomized Trials in Orthopaedics∗

Randomized clinical trials are the most rigorous clinical research design. However, trials are expensive, time-consuming, and challenging to design and complete. In May 2009, the Clinical Trials in Orthopaedics Research Symposium, sponsored by the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), the Orthopaedic Research and Education Foundation (OREF), and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS), brought together multiple disciplines to define a randomized clinical trials research agenda by focusing on important clinical questions in each subspecialty and to debate the major important methodological, cultural, and practical barriers to performing more randomized clinical trials in orthopaedics. We defined barriers as any challenge that makes a randomized clinical trial difficult to design or perform. We plan to report the deliberations of the Clinical Trials in Orthopaedics Research Symposium in three publications. The purpose of this first article is to present the cultural and practical barriers and to highlight the key infrastructure needed to support performing randomized trials in orthopaedics. We largely focused on randomized clinical trials but realized that methodologically sound prospective cohort studies also provide important information1. Our deliberations were clearly not exhaustive, and readers can refer to texts for basic information about randomized clinical trials not addressed during the symposium2. We have included the names of symposium speakers in parentheses after the title for each section. Randomized clinical trials have been infrequently performed in surgery3. We use the term culture in this article to reflect how orthopaedic surgeons resolve clinical questions, respond to clinical controversies, express their participation enthusiasm, and respond to the results of randomized clinical trials. Culture is one potential explanation for the paucity of trials in orthopaedics and may be a barrier to more trials. Each surgical procedure provides challenges that require ingenuity and often require deviations …

Identifying Object Categories from Event-Related EEG: Toward Decoding of Conceptual Representations

Multivariate pattern analysis is a technique that allows the decoding of conceptual information such as the semantic category of a perceived object from neuroimaging data. Impressive single-trial classification results have been reported in studies that used fMRI. Here, we investigate the possibility to identify conceptual representations from event-related EEG based on the presentation of an object in different modalities: its spoken name, its visual representation and its written name. We used Bayesian logistic regression with a multivariate Laplace prior for classification. Marked differences in classification performance were observed for the tested modalities. Highest accuracies (89% correctly classified trials) were attained when classifying object drawings. In auditory and orthographical modalities, results were lower though still significant for some subjects. The employed classification method allowed for a precise temporal localization of the features that contributed to the performance of the classifier for three modalities. These findings could help to further understand the mechanisms underlying conceptual representations. The study also provides a first step towards the use of concept decoding in the context of real-time brain-computer interface applications.

Student Conference, and: Late April House Fire along Interstate 81, and: Lifeguard, and: Namesake

Student Conference, and: Late April House Fire along Interstate 81, and: Lifeguard, and: Namesake Claudia Emerson (bio) Student Conference At first, I mistook the small, black tattoofor a phone number or a date jotted in haste on her wrist's paler underside—then suspected stitches when it didn't fade. I was not far wrong. (Her poems: careful,deliberate, thin as she was, haunted by a mother years dead—not a word about the brief griefof the father who saw in her a worsening resemblance.) I imagined what it tookfor her to enter the parlor, where nothing—garish [End Page 63] bird, snake, broken heart—could tempt her,turn her from the small, determined letters: think. The word she had purchased moved faintlyin what she must have thought would be permanence above her pulse, her body's argumentto think what she wished she could still feel, arm bared for another cominginto being, the needle's indelible sting. Late April House Fire along Interstate 81 We had wondered aloud for some timeabout its source, the smoke a fixed roiling column visible for miles, unchangedby the wind that had all day blown across the road with pollen and bees a fine spring snowsalting fields newly greening, the redbuds livid beneath it. By the time we came upon it,fire was integral, part of the two-story, wood-frame farm house—still itself, completelywhole, composed: white clapboard, porch and roof, front door, window frames—glass panes intact—the chimneys that would survive, calm inside [End Page 64] the flames' straight rush—contained, bright-risingenravishment. We knew this was nothing like the worse resolve of another hourwhen the gravity of fire would have succumbed to the old habit of collapse, the sift of slowash down on all that does not burn—hinges, latches, doorknobs, keys still sunk in the locks.Before night the wind would return and with it a roomy swarm of snow, pollen, sootthat would pass through what remained; windowless and without walls, the air, uneasy, would settleinto something almost familiar, a dull anguish not yet grief. And so we slowedbut did not stop to watch someone else's tragedy burn past this brief, nearlybeautiful suspension that changes nothing. Lifeguard She perches high on the stand, gleaming whistledangling, on her suit a dutiful, faded red cross. Mine her only lifeto guard, she does for a while watch [End Page 65] the middle-aged woman who has nothing betterto do than swim laps in the Y's indoor pool on a late Friday afternoon. I am slow,though, boring, length after predictable length of breaststroke or the duller lapof elementary backstroke perfectly executed within the taut confinesof the brightly buoyed lane. So she abandons me to study split ends, hangnail, wristwatch,until—the body of the whistle cupped loosely in her palm—her head nods towardshallow dreams. I've never felt so safe in my life, making flawless, practiced turns, pushing, invisible,to reenter my own wake, reverse it. Namesake While still a child, she sensed her name—spoken,shouted, whispered, laughed, and called and called and called—was not fully hers, having been firsther grandmother's, someone her mother never knew except through weary stories the childlessaunts told and retold, memories the stuff [End Page 66] of patterned lace, fragile, impractical—but lasting. So—though she had come to herself in the familiar, dark wood of it—she had learnedthat every time she answered or refused its voicing over her shoulder, the name was not all she hadto share but also its early vanishing, and that when she did appear, she was near revenantand at once perishing, impossible disappointment, and she could not know whom to rage against,the one who called, the one who would not come. [End Page 67] Claudia Emerson Claudia Emerson's poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and New England Review. She is the author of several books including Pharaoh, Pharaoh; Pinion, An Elegy; and Late Wife, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She is currently...

TEACHING EARLY BRAILLE LITERACY SKILLS WITHIN A STIMULUS EQUIVALENCE PARADIGM TO CHILDREN WITH DEGENERATIVE VISUAL IMPAIRMENTS

Despite the need for braille literacy, there has been little attempt to systematically evaluate braille-instruction programs. The current study evaluated an instructive procedure for teaching early braille-reading skills with 4 school-aged children with degenerative visual impairments. Following a series of pretests, braille instruction involved providing a sample braille letter and teaching the selection of the corresponding printed letter from a comparison array. Concomitant with increases in the accuracy of this skill, we assessed and captured the formation of equivalence classes through tests of symmetry and transitivity among the printed letters, the corresponding braille letters, and their spoken names.

Identification of Soundbite and Its Speaker Name Using Transcripts of Broadcast News Speech

This article presents a pipeline framework for identifying soundbite and its speaker name from Mandarin broadcast news transcripts. Both of the two modules, soundbite segment detection and soundbite speaker name recognition, are based on a supervised classification approach using multiple linguistic features. We systematically evaluated performance for each module as well as the entire system, and investigated the effect of using speech recognition (ASR) output and automatic sentence segmentation. We found that both of the two components impact the pipeline system, with more degradation in the entire system performance due to automatic speaker name recognition errors than soundbite segment detection. In addition, our experimental results show that using ASR output degrades the system performance significantly, and that using automatic sentence segmentation greatly impacts soundbite detection, but has much less effect on speaker name recognition.

Silver paper: The future of health promotion and preventive actions, basic research, and clinical aspects of age-related disease

BACKGROUND. In September 2008, under the French Presidency of the European Union and with the support of the Polish Minister of Health, a European Summit on Age-Related Disease was organised inWroclaw (Poland). At this meeting, European politicians, gerontologists and geriatricians gathered to discuss a common approach to future challenges related to age-related disease. Politicians and decision-makers from the European Union and Ministers of Health and their deputies from many European countries raised the problems and difficulties to be tackled in a growing population with a high burden of disease, and asked scientists to write a consensus document with recommendations for future actions and decisions. Scientists and clinicians worked in parallel in three different groups, on health promotion and preventive actions, basic research in age-related disease, and clinical aspects of disease in older people. Beforehand, the format of the paper with recommendations was discussed, and it was finally agreed that, for a better understanding by decision- makers, it would be divided in two different columns: one with facts that were considered settled and agreed by most experts (under the heading We know), and a second with recommendations related to each fact (We recommend). No limit on the number of topics to be discussed was settled. After careful and detailed discussion in each group, which in most cases included the exact wording of each statement, chairpersons presented the results in a plenary session, and new input from all participants was received, until each of the statements and recommendations were accepted by a large majority. Areas with no consensus were excluded from the document. Immediately after the Summit, the chairpersons sent the document both to the main authors and to a list of experts (see footnote) who had made presentations at the summit and agreed to review and critically comment on the final document, which is presented below. As regards the scientific aspects of the planning of the Summit, several organisations, under the leadership of the EUGMS, were asked both to review the program and to suggest names of speakers and participants. After the Summit, the Boards of these organizations (European Union Geriatric Medicine Society (EUGMS), International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics-European Region (IAGGER), European Association of Geriatric Psychiatry (EAGP), International Society of Gerontechnology (ISG) and International Society for the Study of the Aging Male (ISSAM) agreed to consider the document as an official paper, and help with its dissemination. The name Silver Paper was used, recalling the grey or silvery hair of our older citizens, as an easy reference. It has been sent officially to several bodies of the European Union and to Health Ministers of most European countries; and will be published in other languages in local journals. Its declared intention is to foster changes in policies which may, in the future, reduce the burden of disease in old age.

IFLA Health and Biosciences Libraries Section: Call for Papers for Satellite Session

Role of Evidence-based Research in Medical Libraries
 
 The one-day session will have two sub-themes: 
 1. Library efforts in support of evidence-based research. 
 2. Research conducted by health science libraries and librarians. 
 
 The audience of this session is likely to include health care professionals, educators, researchers and librarians. 
 
 You are invited to submit an abstract for one of the two themes. It is hoped that papers will cover a wide range of areas, for example: 
 
 How libraries train library staff and users in using evidence.
 Partnerships and collaborations that support evidence-based research.
 Research that has made a difference to library services.
 The librarian’s role in critical appraisal of the evidence. 
 Clinical librarians - walking the talk. 
 Tools to support evidence-based medicine.
 Research methods. 
 Promoting the evidence. 
 
 Presentations are suggested to be no more than 30 minutes, including 10 minutes for questions. 
 
 Submission Guidelines:
 The proposals must be submitted in an electronic format and must contain: 
 
 title of paper; 
 summary of paper (250 - 350 words maximum); 
 speaker's name, address, telephone and fax numbers, professional affiliation, email address, and biographical note (40 words maximum). 
 
 Submissions must be received no later than December 24th, 2007, preferably by email to: 
 
 Heather Todd 
 University of Queensland Library 
 St Lucia campus 
 St Lucia, Queensland 4072 
 E-mail: h.todd@library.uq.edu.au
 
 Important dates:
 
 Satellite Session (preceding the IFLA Conference): August 10th-14th, 2008
 Quebec City, Quebec, Canada 
 
 Deadline for submission of abstracts: December 24th, 2007: 
 
 Notification of acceptance/rejection: January 25th, 2008 
 
 Deadline for submission of text: May, 2008
 
 Information for Speakers:
 Regrettably, IFLA's Sections do not have funds available to pay for speakers’ expenses (e.g. registration fees, travel expenses, or accommodation costs). However, there may be limited funding available through other IFLA channels, especially for people from developing countries. 
 
 For further information: 
 Heather Todd 
 Executive Manager, Engineering and Sciences Library Service
 University of Queensland Library, St Lucia Campus 
 St Lucia QLD 4072 AUSTRALIA 
 Phone: +61 7 334 64394 
 E-mail: h.todd@library.uq.edu.au

A Diversity of Voices for a Balanced Debate

Actions based solely on belief or ideology risk being actively or--perhaps worse--passively resisted by those who do not share the ideology. Adopting a stay the approach in the face of changing public opinion and even multistate legislation will eventually cause the public to simply tune out its leaders. In like fashion, even nagging mothers eventually get tuned out. Or, to draw on my own experience, when the cafeteria lady made 8-year-old me sit at the table until ate my spinach--because she believed it was good for me--I planned to sit there for days. In fact, did remain in my place well into the afternoon, at which time she huffed and puffed--but pointed me back to class. On the other hand, when a course of action is based solely on data, without taking account of the views of those who will implement it, it risks missing out on the human knowledge that might have improved it. How many times have you heard, I could have told them that would never work? No Child Left Behind is a perfect example. While consensus on the goals of NCLB is high, there is nothing approaching consensus on all the courses of action stemming from it. Informed decision making that is built on knowledge of how others see a problem can support powerful action that has a chance to succeed. Thus each year, for more than four decades, the Education Commission of the States has provided state policy leaders, experts, practitioners, national and state organizations, federal representatives, and business leaders with a unique opportunity for a balanced discussion of the critical issues facing American education. Regardless of political party or philosophy, participants share information, ideas, and lessons learned--all in a neutral setting. To help share more broadly the views of those who attended this gathering, I've gathered some quotes from invited speakers and discussants. I've also included notes from a subsequent opportunity for reasoned discussion, provided by the Gates Foundation, when it convened a similar mix of leaders in an effort to ensure that all kids will be ready for college. When am certain who was speaking, have identified speakers by name. When couldn't be sure of a speaker's name, I've identified the speaker by role or group only. On Rethinking the System * Perhaps a better way to think about the system of education is pre-K to gray.--Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius * We can't just focus on kids not falling behind. ... We also have to focus on kids getting ahead. We need to move from an expectation of competence to an expectation of excellence.--Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine * We're on an exponential pace for change, but we're still at a place in education where there is no focal event. Unlike the late 1950s, there is no Sputnik moment to drive change. It is a question of will. would argue for a new federalism. The current system (where the national government says you decide the standards but we're going to micromanage how you assess and intevene) needs to be flipped on its head, with the leading voice coming from states.--Scott Palmer, partner, Holland & Knight LLP On Parent Involvement * In China, when kids complain about a teacher, parents say, You're wrong. In the U.S., that doesn't happen. It would help if there were more parent support for teachers.--Gerardo Gonzales, dean of the School of Education, Indiana University, Bloomington * As a teacher, can't teach if kids come to school scared or tired. We need to engage communities and parents.--State teacher of the year On Accelerating Student Achievement * There are five critical challenges: 1. Building consensus about which school conditions need to be changed; 2. Encouraging teachers to abandon ineffective routines and dysfunctional mental models; 3. …

Cerebral response to patient's own name in the vegetative and minimally conscious states

A challenge in the management of severely brain-damaged patients with altered states of consciousness is the differential diagnosis between the vegetative state (VS) and the minimally conscious state (MCS), especially for the gray zone separating these clinical entities. To evaluate the differences in brain activation in response to presentation of the patient's own name spoken by a familiar voice (SON-FV) in patients with VS and MCS. By using fMRI, we prospectively studied residual cerebral activation to SON-FV in seven patients with VS and four with MCS. Behavioral evaluation was performed by means of standardized testing up to 3 months post-fMRI. Two patients with VS failed to show any significant cerebral activation. Three patients with VS showed SON-FV induced activation within the primary auditory cortex. Finally, two patients with VS and all four patients with MCS not only showed activation in primary auditory cortex but also in hierarchically higher order associative temporal areas. These two patients with VS showing the most widespread activation subsequently showed clinical improvement to MCS observed 3 months after their fMRI scan. The cerebral responses to patient's own name spoken by a familiar voice as measured by fMRI might be a useful tool to preclinically distinguish minimally conscious state-like cognitive processing in some patients behaviorally classified as vegetative.

Specific Effect of Modeling Ion Young Children’s Word Productions

Effects of object-name contiguity on word production were examined in 11/2- to 2-yr-old children. Two objects and two spoken names were presented in each of three experiments. Each object was the referent of 1 spoken name. An object was presented either together with its spoken name (modeling trial) or alone (test trial). Modeling trials and test trials were mixed with trials that presented familiar stimuli. Referent-specific productions of the experimental names developed on the test trials. This was found immediately after modeling (Experiment 1), and at least 1 day later (Experiments 2 and 3). Further, it was found not only when children interacted with an experimenter (Experiments 1 and 2) but also when they saw a computerized animation (Experiment 3). These findings support theoretical accounts that emphasize a role for modeling rather than consequences of behavior in the learning of object-name productions, and they have implications for the design of word modeling studies.

Responder por exclusão em crianças de 2 a 3 anos em uma situação de brincadeira

O responder por "exclusão', que se supõe ser um dos mecanismos pelos quais crianças aprendem a relacionar palavras novas a objetos ou eventos, tem sido amplamente replicado em situação de laboratório. O presente estudo, conduzido com seis crianças, teve por objetivo investigar o responder por exclusão em um contexto de brincadeira, com estímulos manipuláveis, e verificar se este contexto favorece a aprendizagem da relação nome - objeto, após uma única tentativa de exclusão. Em cada tentativa o experimentador falava o nome de um brinquedo conhecido e a tarefa da criança era pegá-lo e jogá-lo dentro de uma caixa grande, disposta à frente da criança. Em meio a essas tentativas, eram introduzidas três sondas de exclusão (o nome falado era novo e havia um brinquedo novo exposto no ambiente); três outras sondas verificavam se a relação entre o nome e o brinquedo havia sido aprendida. Todas as crianças responderam por exclusão, mas somente uma mostrou aprendizagem após uma única tentativa.

Inhibiting Your Native Language

After immersion in a foreign language, speakers often have difficulty retrieving native-language words--a phenomenon known as first-language attrition. We propose that first-language attrition arises in part from the suppression of native-language phonology during second-language use, and thus is a case of phonological retrieval-induced forgetting. In two experiments, we investigated this hypothesis by having native English speakers name visual objects in a language they were learning (Spanish). Repeatedly naming the objects in Spanish reduced the accessibility of the corresponding English words, as measured by an independent-probe test of inhibition. The results establish that the phonology of the words was inhibited, as access to the concepts underlying the presented objects was facilitated, not impaired. More asymmetry between English and Spanish fluency was associated with more inhibition for native-language words. This result supports the idea that inhibition plays a functional role in overcoming interference during the early stages of second-language acquisition.

Age of acquisition for naming and knowing: A new hypothesis

This paper reports an investigation into the age of acquisition of object names and object knowledge in a cross-sectional study of 288 children aged between 3 years 7 months and 11 years 6 months, comprising equal numbers of boys and girls. The objects belonged to four categories: animals, fruit and vegetables, implements, and vehicles. They were presented in three image types: line drawings, black-and-white photographs, and coloured photographs. In the knowledge test, five probe questions were asked for each object given the spoken name. Results showed that line drawings were more difficult to name than either black-and-white photographs or coloured photographs, which did not differ. The boys significantly out-performed the girls at naming and knowing, both overall and specifically for the category of vehicles. Naming and knowledge increased steadily with age but while young children below about 6 years 6 months showed an advantage to naming, older children showed an advantage to knowing. Similarly, age-of-acquisition measures for each item revealed a significant shift in the relationship between naming and knowing at around 80 months. We argue that differences in learning experience lead younger and older children to associate object names with different types of information, and we suggest that this difference probably accounts for the age-of-acquisition effects reported in adult object naming.

Method and system for identifying a user by voice

A method and apparatus identifies a caller as a user in a group of users. An enrollment process extracts a grammar of the user's password and a voiceprint of the user's password and name. A caller may identify himself as a user by speaking his name. The name is recognized and a number of users having a name most closely matching the name spoken is identified using voice recognition techniques. The caller then speaks his password and the grammar is identified that most closely matches the grammars of the passwords corresponding to the users identified from the spoken name. A voiceprint is extracted from the name and grammar spoken by the caller, and if the voiceprint matches the voiceprint extracted for the user identified using the grammar during that user's enrollment process, the caller is identified as that user.

Identification of degenerate neuronal systems based on intersubject variability

Group studies implicitly assume that all subjects activate one common system to sustain a particular cognitive task. Intersubject variability is generally treated as well-behaved and uninteresting noise. However, intersubject variability might result from subjects engaging different degenerate neuronal systems that are each sufficient for task performance. This would produce a multimodal distribution of intersubject variability. We have explored this idea with the help of Gaussian Mixture Modeling and Bayesian model comparison procedures. We illustrate our approach using a crossmodal priming paradigm, in which subjects perform a semantic decision on environmental sounds or their spoken names that were preceded by a semantically congruent or incongruent picture or written name. All subjects consistently activated the superior temporal gyri bilaterally, the left fusiform gyrus and the inferior frontal sulcus. Comparing a One and Two Gaussian Mixture Model of the unexplained residuals provided very strong evidence for two groups with distinct activation patterns: 6 subjects exhibited additional activations in the superior temporal sulci bilaterally, the right superior frontal and central sulcus. 11 subjects showed increased activation in the striate and the right inferior parietal cortex. These results suggest that semantic decisions on auditory–visual compound stimuli might be accomplished by two overlapping degenerate neuronal systems.

Teaching Children with Autism when Reward is Delayed. The Effects of Two Kinds of Marking Stimuli

Three children with autism were taught to identify pictures of emotions in response to their spoken names. Their speed of acquisition was compared using a within-child alternating treatments design across three teaching conditions, each involving a 5 second delay to reinforcement. In the marked-before condition, an instruction encouraged the children to visually orient to the cards before they made their choice response; in the marked-after condition, an attention-eliciting verbal cue (e.g., "Look!") was delivered after both correct and incorrect responses; in the delay condition, these marking cues were omitted. Performance in the no-cue control was inferior to both the marked-before and marked-after conditions, but the difference between the latter two conditions was not significant.

Rainbow to Dark Clouds

THIS YEAR IT WAS MY HONOR TO HAVE BEEN THE COMmencement speaker at 3 medical schools: Drexel University, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Texas at Houston. On each occasion, I felt the same euphoria that I had at my own graduation and at the other commencements in which I spoke or, as Vice Dean of Academic Affairs and Faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, helped with the proceedings. It is exhilarating to experience, up close and personally, the enthusiasm and excitement of so many new physicians who clearly sense their potential to help those who will seek their care, and who want to fulfill their dreams of doing so. One of the most touching of all moments in this year’s ceremonies occurred at UCLA. The “benediction” involved 24 graduating physicians joining the chaplain on stage to speak in the native language of their ethnic groups, no matter whether they were 1stor 10th-generation Americans. The 24 languages spoken ranged from Afrikaans through Gujarati, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Tigrinya, and Urdu to Vietnamese. The phrase each graduate spoke was, “May we leave here to cure when possible, and to care always.” What could be better wishes for healers to declare publicly? I wept along with most in the audience. Early the next morning, I flew to San Diego to speak at an international meeting of subspecialists; which subspecialty is unfortunately irrelevant because it could have been almost any one. The geographic distance is 111 miles; the psychological distance was an eternity. As I walked off the plane, I was greeted with several ads prominently placed in the airport inviting physicians to visit one exhibit booth or another. It’s a free country, so why not? It was too early to check into the hotel, so I went to the convention center to register. On the way I passed hundreds of people (many certainly were physicians) walking from the center with identification cards in plastic cases hung around their necks on a ribbon emblazoned with the name of a pharmaceutical company. They were also carrying cloth bags adorned with large logos of several pharmaceutical companies—oh, and also the name of the subspecialty society. I politely declined both when they were offered to me, much to the chagrin of the sweet woman who worked the registration desk. When I arrived at the room where I was to speak, a giant placard outside listed the names of the speakers and times of presentations—and the announcement by the names of several speakers that their presentations were sponsored by a particular pharmaceutical company. Of course, there were statements all over the podiums and in the rooms stating that all “sponsored” discussions involved funds from “unencumbered educational grants” that had nothing to do with the choice of speakers or topics. The spirit displayed at the conference was in such contrast to that displayed at the previous day’s commencement. What happened to the altruistic, “above all, help the patient” spirit? After completing my presentation on conflicts of interest (the conference committee apparently had a sense of irony), I returned to the hotel to register. I was handed my room key: a plastic card with the name and logo of a pharmaceutical company on one side and an invitation to “visit us at booth #1501.” Once again, I wept—this time, alone.

Bilingualism and Identity in Deaf Communities (review)

Bilingualism and Identity in Deaf Communities, ed. Melanie Metzger (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 2000, 3 17 pp., casebound, $55.00) MELANIE METZGER made the right choice when she began her Bilingualism and Identity in Deaf Communities with chapter on New Zealand name signs. The chapter is interesting and easy to identify with. Everybody has name. The subject easily leads the reader into the other ten chapters in this volume of Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities, the sixth of series of books published by Gallaudet University Press. Many who purchased the first collection years ago, Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities, remember the initial impact that these chapters had on bringing about increased recognition to the American Deaf community and its sociolinguistic activities. If you have not kept up with the series, you may be surprised to find the diversity of topics in the first six volumes: Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities (Ceil Lucas, editor); Multicultural Aspects of Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities (Lucas); Deaf Children in Public Schoools (Claire Ramsey); Pinky iExtension and Eye Gaze; Use in Deaf Communities (Lucas); Storytelling and Conversation: Discourse in Deaf Communities (Elizabeth Winston); and this volume, edited by Metzger. The first five volumes provide excellent material for understanding the mores, values, and rationale behind many actions in deaf communities throughout the United States. The volume under review provides worldview of Deaf communities and offers contrasts and similarities of the cultural and linguistic behaviors of Deaf communities in various parts of the world. One opens the cover and realizes that the book indeed offers global look at Deaf communities. And what an offer it is-Argentine semiotic aspects; education of Deaf children in Barcelona; New Zealand name signs; Mexican miracle cures; European Union minority language policy; Swedish tactile turn-taking; Nicaraguan search for roots; codeswitching between American Sign and cued speech, and more. The first chapter, Name Signs and Identity in New Zealand Sign Language by Rachel Locker McKee and David McKee, begins this way: Personal names in any culture are potential gold mine of information about social relationships, identity, history, and linguistic processes. One might assume that all names are given in similar ways-the process is so natural. But the reader finds that name bestowing in New Zealand is sometimes quite different from the practice found in, say, the United States. The authors videotaped 118 deaf people from two years to seventy years of age in three major regions of New Zealand. Since many informants had more than one name sign, the authors recorded total of 223 name signs. Informants were asked to provide their legal name, age, the schools they attended, all the name signs they had had during their life, the date each one was acquired, and the etymology behind each name sign. Seven distinct name sign categories in New Zealand Sign (NZSL) were discovered. Several of them are similar to American naming practices, such as acquiring new names signs when Deaf person moves to different community or takes on new role in relation to group of signers. A couple of interesting differences were noted also. In ASL descriptive name signs (those that make use of classifiers to identify person's physical characteristics) are typically not ascribed to adults. Adult ASL users are more likely to have an arbitrary, initialized name sign than descriptive one. In NZSL the opposite occurs. Fingerspelled initials are regarded as a temporary and uninteresting measure, usually adopted only until descriptive name sign evolves (27). In fact, for deaf people over the age of fifty-one, no NZSL fmgerspelling in any of their names was found. McKee and McKee found another interesting, age-related pattern. The oldest cohort (51 + years) has the highest number of name signs that are based on their spoken names. …

Reminiscence of a teacher and a researcher

The names of previous after-dinner speakers at this conference read like a Who is Who of Quantum Optics and Photonics research. When the organizers of this conference asked me to present an after-dinner talk I felt honored by the invitation, but also humbled by joining such a distinguished company. This fact gives me a “Leitmotiv” for my present talk, because being humbled by, and feeling inferior to, all the brilliant minds one encounters in one's career is a necessary occurrence, which most of the younger listeners in this audience have either experienced or will experience. I have witnessed these feelings as advisor to students at MIT. Many of them fear that everything worth doing has already been done. There is a simple answer to this. Do not get discouraged, work harder and you will also make a respectable contribution to science or engineering.

Associative recognition in a patient with selective hippocampal lesions and relatively normal item recognition.

Previous work (Mayes et al., Hippocampus 12:325-340, 2002) found that patient YR, who suffered a selective bilateral lesion to the hippocampus in 1986, showed relatively preserved verbal and visual item recognition memory in the face of clearly impaired verbal and visual recall. In this study, we found that YR's Yes/No as well as forced-choice recognition of both intra-item associations and associations between items of the same kind was as well preserved as her item recognition memory. In contrast, YR was clearly impaired, and more so than she was on the above kinds of recognition, at recognition of associations between different kinds of information. Thus, her recognition memory for associations between objects and their locations, words and their temporal positions, abstract visual items or words and their temporal order, animal pictures and names of professions, faces and voices, faces and spoken names, words and definitions, and pictures and sounds, was clearly impaired. Several of the different information associative recognition tests at which YR was impaired could be compared with related item or inter-item association recognition tests of similar difficulty that she performed relatively normally around the same time. It is suggested that YR's familiarity memory for items, intra-item associations, and associations between items of the same kind was mediated by her intact medial temporal lobe cortices and was preserved, whereas her hippocampally mediated recall/recollection of these kinds of information was impaired. It is also suggested that the components of associations between different kinds of information are represented in distinct neocortical regions and that initially they only converge for memory processing within the hippocampus. No familiarity memory may exist in normal subjects for such associations, and, if so, YR's often chance recognition occurred because of her severe recall/recollection deficit. Conflicting data and views are discussed, and the way in which recall as well as item and associative recognition need to be systematically explored in patients with apparently selective hippocampal lesions, in order to resolve existing conflicts, is outlined.