Functional MRI activation in children with and without dyslexia during pseudoword aural repeat and visual decode: Before and after treatment.

Children without dyslexia (n=10) received nonphonological treatment, and those with dyslexia received phonological (n=11) or nonphonological (n=9) treatment. Before and after treatment they performed aural repeat, visual decode, and aural match pseudoword tasks during functional MRI scanning that separated stimulus input from response production. Group map analysis indicated that children with dyslexia overactivated compared with good readers during the aural-repeat/aural-match contrast in bilateral frontal (Brodmann's area [BA] 3, 4, 5, 6, 9), left parietal (BA 2, 3), left temporal (BA 38), and right temporal (BA 20, 21, 37) regions (stimulus input) and underactivated in right frontal (BA 24, 32) and right insula (BA 48) regions (response production); they underactivated in BA 19/V5 during the visual-decode/aural-match contrast (response production). Individual brain analysis for children with dyslexia revealed that during the aural-repeat/aural-match contrast (stimulus input), phonological treatment decreased and normalized activation in left supramarginal gyrus and postcentral gyrus. Nonphonological treatment increased and normalized activation during the visual-decode/aural-match contrast (response production) in BA19/V5 and changed activation in the same direction as good readers during aural-repeat/aural-match contrast (stimulus input) in left postcentral gyrus. The significance of the findings for competing theories of dyslexia is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A systematic approach to integral snap-fit attachment design

Traditional integral snap-fit attachment design focuses almost exclusively on the individual locking features, such as cantilever hooks, bayonet-fingers, compressive hooks and others. The positioning and orientation of other significant features on parts, such as those that facilitate or enhance engagement and eliminate unwanted degrees of freedom left by locking features, i.e. locating features and enhancements, are not considered. This paper builds on relatively new methodologies and guidelines for arranging all attachment features on plastic parts comprising snap-fit assembly. Classification of features into categories of locking features, locating features and enhancements of these is used as the basis for discussion. A systematic approach to attachment design is presented.     

Extending the Unified Modeling Language for ontology development

There is rapidly growing momentum for web enabled agents that reason about and dynamically integrate the appropriate knowledge and services at run-time. The dynamic integration of knowledge and services depends on the existence of explicit declarative semantic models (ontologies). We have been building tools for ontology development based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). This allows the many mature UML tools, models and expertise to be applied to knowledge representation systems, not only for visualizing complex ontologies but also for managing the ontology development process. UML has many features, such as profiles, global modularity and extension mechanisms that are not generally available in most ontology languages. However, ontology languages have some features that UML does not support. Our paper identifies the similarities and differences (with examples) between UML and the ontology languages RDF and DAML+OIL. To reconcile these differences, we propose a modification to the UML metamodel to address some of the most problematic differences. One of these is the ontological concept variously called a property, relation or predicate. This notion corresponds to the UML concepts of association and attribute. In ontology languages properties are first-class modeling elements, but UML associations and attributes are not first-class. Our proposal is backward-compatible with existing UML models while enhancing its viability for ontology modeling. While we have focused on RDF and DAML+OIL in our research and development activities, the same issues apply to many of the knowledge representation languages. This is especially the case for semantic network and concept graph approaches to knowledge representations. Initial sbmission: 16 February 2002 / Revised submission: 15 October 2002 Published online: 2 December 2002     

Automatic prostate cancer detection model based on ensemble VGGNet feature generation and NCA feature selection using magnetic resonance images

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Prostate cancer is one of the most common types of cancer in men and its frequency is 28 per hundred thousand in the world. This cancer is detected using...     

Pedestrian Height Estimation and 3D Reconstruction Using Pixel-resolution Mapping Method Without Special Patterns

Machine Intelligence Research - Extracting the three-dimensional (3D) information including location and height of a pedestrian is important for vision-based intelligent traffic monitoring systems....     

Generating Design Suggestions under Tight Constraints with Gradient‐based Probabilistic Programming

We present a system for generating suggestions from highly‐constrained, continuous design spaces. We formulate suggestion as sampling from a probability distribution; constraints are represented as factors that concentrate probability mass around sub‐manifolds of the design space. These sampling problems are intractable using typical random walk MCMC techniques, so we adopt Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), a gradient‐based MCMC method. We implement HMC in a high‐performance probabilistic programming language, and we evaluate its ability to efficiently generate suggestions for two different, highly‐constrained example applications: vector art coloring and designing stable stacking structures.     

Application of nitrile butadiene rubber for flexible,chemically protective coating

Rheological properties of toluene solutions of nitrile butadiene rubber, of different molecular weights (M_w, 290,000,320,000, and 450,000) and acrylonitrile contents (30 and 40 percent), were investigated at low (0.1 S^?1) to medium (20,0 S^?1) shear rates, in order to determine their feasibility for dip-coating applications. The effect of a surface-active additive, bentonite, and the solid content (15 and 20 wt percent) on solution viscosity was of main interest. At low zero-shear viscosity (<50 Pa·S) an excessive sagging of the wet film was experienced; at high zeroshear viscosity (>100 Pa-·S) the coating showed poor leveling. Zeroshear viscosity was found to be less affected by bentonite than oligomer-based solutions, at the same time, the solid content and the molecular weight of the polymer had more pronounced effects. With a proper balance of the parameters, seamless coating films were achieved, with excellent tensile and tear properties, and good permeation resistance against benzene.     

Algorithms for Marketing-Mix Optimization

Algorithms for determining quality/cost/price tradeoffs in saturated markets are considered. A product is modeled by d real-valued qualities whose sum determines the unit cost of producing the product. This leads to the following optimization problem: given a set of n customers, each of whom has certain minimum quality requirements and a maximum price they are willing to pay, design a new product and select a price for that product in order to maximize the resulting profit.