Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The feasibility and acceptability of a therapist measure of assimilation of problematic experiences for clients with Intellectual Disability

The aim of this thesis is to develop a measure for therapists of clients with Intellectual Disability (ID) to assess change in psychotherapy. This thesis consists of two sections; a systematic literature review and an exploratory research study. Using systematic review methodology, thirteen studies were identified that investigated the effectiveness of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy with clients with ID. The studies were assessed for quality using a widely used quality rating tool and a narrative synthesis was used to describe the results. The studies were of generally poor quality; however, research has advanced from using single case studies and more robust designs are gradually being implemented, such as controlled methodologies. Continuing this trend in the implementation of more robust designs and the development of outcome measures standardised for clients with ID should be a focus of future research. The research report explored the feasibility and applicability of a measure of change in psychotherapy in routine practice with clients who have ID. The Therapist Assimilation Measure (TAM) has been designed for use with the general population and is based on the Assimilation of Problematic Experiences Scale (APES). Twelve therapists adapted the TAM and piloted its use in their practice, additionally providing feedback on their experiences with using the measure. The feedback was used in combination with item analysis and frequency distribution to further modify and shorten the TAM. The reliability of the final 24-item measure, the TAM-ID, was tested and good internal consistency (α = .58 to .92) and high inter-rater reliability (ICC = .84 to .90) was found. The assimilation model was found to be an acceptable framework to use with clients with ID.
Human electrodermal response to remote human monitoring: classification and analysis of response characteristics

This study reanalysed datasets from two past studies and attempted to identify some characteristics of human electrodermal reactions to remote monitoring by another human – an aspect of Direct Mental Interaction with Living Systems (DMILS) research. The objective was to see if an electrodermal DMILS response were similar to a sensory response and, if not, to see if there were any useful characteristics that could be used to identify the DMILS response. A second objective was to compare the electrodermal response seen in DMILS to that seen in reaction to a weak magnetic field, with the aim of starting to explore potential mechnisms or physiological response systems that might produce the observed DMILS effects. No electrodermal activity was observed that could be easily identified as comparable to a sensory reponse and there was no evidence of a consistent difference between activate and calm periods. Consistent between-participant differences were noted when comparing DMILS responsiveness to resting electrodermal activity. Overall, a consistent scale-invariant pattern was found showing response-similarities between the type of influence periods: based on the variance of electrodermal activity, there were significant differences between any type of influence attempt and rest periods (p<0.01 and p<0.0002, both 2-tailed for the two DMILS datasets used). This pattern was also seen in the magnetic field exposure data, possibly indicating similarities between DMILS and magnetic response mechanisms.
Cortical correspondence using entropy-based particle systems and local features

This paper presents a new method of constructing compact statistical point-based models of populations of human cortical surfaces with functions of spatial locations driving the correspondence optimization. The proposed method is to establish a tradeoff between an even sampling of the surfaces (a low surface entropy) and the similarity of corresponding points across the population (a low ensemble entropy). The similarity metric, however, isn't constrained to be just spatial proximity, but can be any function of spatial location, thus allowing the integration of local cortical geometry as well as DTI connectivity maps and vasculature information from MRA images. This method does not require a spherical parameterization or fine tuning of parameters. Experimental results are also presented, showing lower local variability for both sulcal depth and cortical thickness measurements, compared to other commonly used methods such as FreeSurfer.
Dual layered security protocol (DLSP)

Sensor networks consist of tiny sensor nodes which are responsible for sensing, data processing, and sending the collected data to the appropriate destination. Sensor networks are plagued by many security problems but since they operate at very limited energy resources; consequently cryptographic techniques implemented by general wired networks are not feasible. As such, we need to approach the security related problems with a different perspective which dissents from regular network security algorithms. In our proposal we attempt to devise a technique which consumes lesser amount of energy to maintain security measures in sensor networks. The technique introduced in this paper utilizes two basic techniques and merges them to yield a low energy consuming process which renders more effective security services.
SemStim: Exploiting Knowledge Graphs for Cross-Domain Recommendation

In this paper we introduce SemStim, an unsupervised graph-based algorithm that addresses the cross-domain recommendation task. In this task, preferences from one conceptual domain (e.g. movies) are used to recommend items belonging to another domain (e.g. music). SemStim exploits the semantic links found in a knowledge graph (e.g. DBpedia), to connect domains and thus generate recommendations. As a key benefit, our algorithm does not require (1) ratings in the target domain, thus mitigating the cold-start problem and (2) overlap between users or items from the source and target domains. In contrast, current state-of-the-art personalisation approaches either have an inherent limitation to one domain or require rating data in the source and target domains. We evaluate SemStim by comparing its accuracy to state-of-the-art algorithms for the top-k recommendation task, for both single-domain and cross-domain recommendations. We show that SemStim enables cross-domain recommendation, and that in addition, it has a significantly better accuracy than the baseline algorithms.
Estimating Scale of a Scene from a Single Image Based on Defocus Blur and Scene Geometry

Using an imaging system in which the image plane can be tilted with respect to the optical axis of the lens, the image of a large-scale scene that appears to be a miniature to human eyes can be captured. This phenomenon suggests that the image contains information regarding the scale of the scene and that human vision can extract this information and recognize the scene scale from a single image. In this study, we consider how human vision can perform this single-view scale estimation. Although it is obvious that the existence of defocus blur in the image that simulates a shallow DOF plays an essential role in the scale estimation, we propose that this alone is not sufficient to explain the estimation mechanism. By incorporating a few assumptions, we theoretically show that scale estimation is made possible when (1) the 3D structure of the scene can be recovered from the image and furthermore, (2) the structure is combined with the defocus blur. Further, we present a simple algorithm for scale recognition and demonstrate its working using a real image.
Ontology Authoring Inspired By Dialogue

This paper introduces a dialogue-based ontology authoring interface. The aim of this interface is to simplify the ontology authoring process for the users. The design of the interface is based on the insights that have emerged from research into human language and explorations of authoring activities in Prot ´ eg ´ e. We will discuss our initial ﬁndings regarding ontology authoring patterns and how we aim at modelling user’s goals and intentions. We will also discuss the challenges arising whilst generating interesting and comprehensible feedback.
Who’s messing with whose mind?

Regulation of advertising to children is receiving increased attention. We need to distinguish areas where practice needs reform from criticism based on flawed models of how advertising works and from wrongly perceived changes in advertising practice. This paper summarises the criticisms by Nairn and Fine (IJA, 27(3), 2008). It then sets out what seems to be reliable (i.e. the common ground) before raising concerns with other assertions. The argument that children cannot cope with advertising because their rational faculties are not yet developed collapses as it turns out, as Nairn and Fine concede, that the same applies for any age group. Maybe more controls are needed for product placement and/or advertising masquerading as editorial, but neither of these are areas where the rights of, or responsibilities to, children differ from adults. In other words, Nairn and Fine confound their concern for children with their antipathy to certain forms of advertising to all age groups. Nairn and Fine may also be confusing changes in advertising theory with changes in advertising practice. After reviewing other areas of contention, this paper concurs with the final Nairn and Fine recommendation, namely that the advertising industry should review self-regulation in regard to advertising to children.
Dynamic music elements : tempo and key signature effects on mood, alertness and calmness

The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between mood, alertness and calmness and particular musical elements; tempo and key signature. A sample of 44 participants was used and each participant was presented a song to listen to. A measure of mood was also noted before and after the song was presented and the MDMQ (Multi-Dimensional Mood State Questionnaire) was used to obtain measures of mood, alertness and calmness after the song. Song familiarity, preference in genre and levels of musical/classical training were also taken into account. Results found there was an increase in mood when presented with a song in a minor key and a fast tempo and also that there was a gender difference in mood change from before and after the song was presented. This has some implications for music psychology and musical therapy that are discussed and some limitations surrounding the sample size and methodology were also stated. Possible future directions in research were presented in order to forward the current study’s direction into improving the area of music therapy.
Creating artificial global history to improve branch prediction accuracy

Modern processors require highly accurate branch prediction for good performance. As such, a number of branch predictors have been proposed with varying size and complexity. This work identifies techniques to improve the accuracy of most predictors. It is especially effective with smaller, simpler predictors, allowing those predictors to be competitive with more expensive and complex variants. Modern branch predictors rely heavily on global history to produce accurate branch predictions. However, not all regions of control flow are correlated with recently executed branches. For these regions, the extra information encoded in the global history does more harm than good. This work performs artificial modifications to the global history register to improve branch prediction accuracy, targeting regions with limited branch correlation. This approach is applied to a number of realistic modern branch predictors of varying size. The total number of mispredicts in select SPEC2000 benchmarks and the Championship Branch Prediction traces can be reduced by 12% overall for a 32 Kb alloyed perceptron predictor. 2Bc-gskew, A21264, filter, and gshare predictors also benefit from these techniques.
Writing a structured abstract for the thesis

Studies investigating recognition memory (RM) in schizophrenia report a selective deficit in autonoetic awareness and intact levels of noetic awareness for visual stimuli. It has been suggested that abnormalities in autonoetic awareness result from a breakdown in frontal strategic memory processes involved in encoding and retrieval and executive functions linked to reality monitoring and decision making.The aims of this thesis were to investigate four predictions arising from these proposals: (1) If decrements in autonoetic awareness arise from a ‘central’ impairment, then these abnormalities should not be domain-specific; (2) if autonoetic awareness abnormalities arise from a breakdown in executive processes, then these abnormalities should correlate with executive dysfunction; (3) because autonoetic awareness is a necessary correlate of episodic memory, then patients with schizophrenia should also be impaired in contextual memory; and (4) autonoetic awareness abnormalities are likely to be more severe in schizophrenia, a condition associated with marked executive dysfunction relative to major depressive disorder, in which executive dysfunction is less marked.The remember/know paradigm was used to investigate RM across four modalities (verbal, visual, auditory and olfactory) in three groups: patients with schizophrenia (N=19), patients with major depressive disorder (N=21), and normal controls (N=24). A subgroup of the same schizophrenia patients (N=14) were also tested for temporalorder memory for words, line drawings and abstract drawings. Autobiographical memory was assessed in patients using the Autobiographical Memory Interview. Executive function and working memory were assessed using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and the Letter-Number Sequencing Test, respectively.Autonoetic awareness abnormalities were evident in patients with schizophrenia for voices (p<0.05) and smells (p<0.05). These deficits were restricted to schizophrenia, with patients with major depressive disorder performing intermediate to both schizophrenia patients and normal controls. A subgroup of the same schizophrenia patients also exhibited impaired temporal-order memory (p<0.05), but this impairment was restricted to words and also evident in patients with major depressive disorder (p<0.05). Executive dysfunction and reduced working memory was restricted to patients with schizophrenia, but none of these measures correlated with decrements in autonoetic awareness or temporal-order memory. Autobiographical memory for both patient groups was within the normal range. : Impaired autonoetic awareness for voices and smells in the same cohort of schizophrenia patients provide some support for proposals that abnormalities in autonoetic awareness stem from a breakdown in ‘central’ rather than domain-specific processes. Furthermore, these patients were also impaired for temporal-order memory, which suggests that strategic memory processes were also implicated in these schizophrenia patients.
Deverbal Compound Noun Analysis Based on Lexical Conceptual Structure

This paper proposes a principled approach for analysis of semantic relations between constituents in compound nouns based on lexical semantic structure. One of the difficulties of compound noun analysis is that the mechanisms governing the decision system of semantic relations and the representation method of semantic relations associated with lexical and contextual meaning are not obvious. The aim of our research is to clarify how lexical semantics contribute to the relations in compound nouns since such nouns are very productive and are supposed to be governed by systematic mechanisms. The results of applying our approach to the analysis of noun-deverbal compounds in Japanese and English show that lexical conceptual structure contributes to the restrictional rules in compounds.
The Mitchell Library WordCloud: Beyond Boolean Search

Libraries are increasingly offering on-line digital access to their collections. However, traditional search-based interfaces are restrictive and do not encourage the user to explore the collection in the same way that a physical collection does. We present the Mitchell WordCloud, a novel on-line interface to the David Scott Mitchell collection of the State Library of New South Wales. Based on interface design principles for explorative search, it presents the user with a word cloud derived from the collection and a list of titles. As the user drags words from the word cloud to tell the system what they like or dislike the title list is reordered. The surrounding interface elements -- image bar, time line and Dewey bar -- provide complementary insights into the collection. The traditional vector space model for measuring text similarity was extended to take account of user dislikes and to order words in the word cloud. User studies confirmed that the Mitchell WordCloud is easy to use and encourages exploration.
Subjectivity of Time Perception: A Visual Emotional Orchestration

The aim of the present study was to examine how visual emotional content could orchestrate time perception. The experimental design allowed us to single out the share of emotion in the specific processing of content-bearing pictures, i.e., real-life scenes. Two groups of participants had to reproduce the duration (2, 4, or 6 s) of content-deprived stimuli (gray squares) or differentially valenced content-bearing stimuli, which included neutral, pleasant, and unpleasant pictures (International Affective Pictures Systems). Results showed that the effect of content differed according to duration: at 2 s, the reproduced duration was longer for content-bearing than content-deprived stimuli, but the difference between the two types of stimuli decreased as duration increased and was not significant for the longest duration (6 s). At 4 s, emotional (pleasant and unpleasant) stimuli were judged longer than neutral pictures. Furthermore, whatever the duration, the precision of the reproduction was greater for non-emotional than emotional stimuli (pleasant and unpleasant). These results suggest a dissociation within content effect on timing in the visual modality: relative overestimation of all content-bearing pictures limited to short durations (2 s), and delayed overestimation of emotional relative to neutral pictures at 4 s, as well as a lesser precision in the temporal judgment of emotional pictures whatever the duration. Our results underline the relevance for time perception models to integrate two ways of assessing timing in relationship with emotion: accuracy and precision.
Noradrenergic modulation of respiratory motor output during tadpole development: role of α-adrenoceptors

SUMMARY Noradrenaline (NA) is an important modulator of respiratory activity. Results from in vitro studies using immature rodents suggest that the effects exerted by NA change during development, but these investigations have been limited to neonatal stages. To address this issue, we used in vitro brainstem preparations of an ectotherm, Rana catesbeiana, at three developmental stages: pre-metamorphic tadpoles, metamorphic tadpoles and fully mature adult bullfrogs. We first compared the effects of NA bath application (0.02-10 μmol l-1) on brainstem preparations from both pre-metamorphic (Taylor-Köllros stages VII-XI) and metamorphic tadpoles (TK stages XVIII-XXIII) and adult frogs. The fictive lung ventilation frequency response to NA application was both dose- and stage-dependent. Although no net change was observed in the pre-metamorphic group, NA application decreased fictive lung burst frequency in preparations from more mature animals. These effects were attenuated by application ofα -adrenoceptor antagonists. Conversely, NA application elicited dose- and stage-dependent increases in fictive buccal ventilation frequency. We then assessed the contribution of α-adrenoceptors towards these responses by applying specific agonists (α1: phenylephrine;α 2: clonidine; concentration range from 10 to 200 μmol l-1 for both). Of the two agonists used, only phenylephrine application consistently mimicked the lung burst frequency response observed during NA application in each stage group. However, both agonists decreased buccal burst frequency, thus suggesting that other (β) adrenoceptor types mediate this response. We conclude that modulation of both buccal and lung-related motor outputs change during development. NA modulation affects both types of respiratory activities in a distinct fashion, owing to the different adrenoceptor type involved.
Cyclin E Uses Cdc6 as a Chromatin-Associated Receptor Required for DNA Replication

Using an in vitro chromatin assembly assay in Xenopus egg extract, we show that cyclin E binds specifically and saturably to chromatin in three phases. In the first phase, the origin recognition complex and Cdc6 prereplication proteins, but not the minichromosome maintenance complex, are necessary and biochemically sufficient for ATP-dependent binding of cyclin E–Cdk2 to DNA. We find that cyclin E binds the NH2-terminal region of Cdc6 containing Cy–Arg-X-Leu (RXL) motifs. Cyclin E proteins with mutated substrate selection (Met-Arg-Ala-Ile-Leu; MRAIL) motifs fail to bind Cdc6, fail to compete with endogenous cyclin E–Cdk2 for chromatin binding, and fail to rescue replication in cyclin E–depleted extracts. Cdc6 proteins with mutations in the three consensus RXL motifs are quantitatively deficient for cyclin E binding and for rescuing replication in Cdc6-depleted extracts. Thus, the cyclin E–Cdc6 interaction that localizes the Cdk2 complex to chromatin is important for DNA replication. During the second phase, cyclin E–Cdk2 accumulates on chromatin, dependent on polymerase activity. In the third phase, cyclin E is phosphorylated, and the cyclin E–Cdk2 complex is displaced from chromatin in mitosis. In vitro, mitogen-activated protein kinase and especially cyclin B–Cdc2, but not the polo-like kinase 1, remove cyclin E–Cdk2 from chromatin. Rebinding of hyperphosphorylated cyclin E–Cdk2 to interphase chromatin requires dephosphorylation, and the Cdk kinase–directed Cdc14 phosphatase is sufficient for this dephosphorylation in vitro. These three phases of cyclin E association with chromatin may facilitate the diverse activities of cyclin E–Cdk2 in initiating replication, blocking rereplication, and allowing resetting of origins after mitosis.
Cranial neural crest cells form corridors prefiguring sensory neuroblast migration

The majority of cranial sensory neurons originate in placodes in the surface ectoderm, migrating to form ganglia that connect to the central nervous system (CNS). Interactions between inward-migrating sensory neuroblasts and emigrant cranial neural crest cells (NCCs) play a role in coordinating this process, but how the relationship between these two cell populations is established is not clear. Here, we demonstrate that NCCs generate corridors delineating the path of migratory neuroblasts between the placode and CNS in both chick and mouse. In vitro analysis shows that NCCs are not essential for neuroblast migration, yet act as a superior substrate to mesoderm, suggesting provision of a corridor through a less-permissive mesodermal territory. Early organisation of NCC corridors occurs prior to sensory neurogenesis and can be recapitulated in vitro; however, NCC extension to the placode requires placodal neurogenesis, demonstrating reciprocal interactions. Together, our data indicate that NCC corridors impose physical organisation for precise ganglion formation and connection to the CNS, providing a local environment to enclose migrating neuroblasts and axonal processes as they migrate through a non-neural territory.