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[The body and its meanings].

The human body is the natural object of studies, analyses and care in the health field. The Authors, starting from this remark and taking the body language and its meaning into consideration, point out that the body contact allows either to deliver an adequate nursing care or to take off dignity and humanity. A concise review of the human body significance during the course of history makes us aware that, as a matter of fact, the different and opposite conceptions that followed one another haven't made the concept of body definitively clear. Inside the care field, the knowledge and use of the body language--complementary to the verbal one--assumes many different meanings, that can condition the relation process in a substantial way.

Body Image↗

PubMed1988

Knowledge-based educational systems.

In knowledge-based educational systems, the key concept is that information and procedures are represented in the same data structure. These structures can search for each other in flexible and, consequently, very robust ways. At the Air Force Human Resources Laboratory (AFHRL), our researchers are building computer environments that know what they know, know how people can best use them, and know how to draw inferences about their state--self-referential electronic tutors. In September 1986, artificial intelligence researchers participated in AFHRL's Research Planning Forum for Intelligent Tutorial Systems (ITS). This essay reviews the state of the philosophy, art, and science of artificial intelligence (AI) approaches to education. Then it summarizes the research issues which were presented, discussed, and better defined in this Forum--namely the nature and representation of 1) expertise modules, 2) student diagnostic modules, 3) adaptive instructional and curriculum modules, 4) instructional environments, and 5) man-machine interfaces. Advances in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and instructional discourse have provided a means for investigating human learning, for representing an individual's own "knowledge processing." Research and development in knowledge-based educational systems seems promising, not only for helping people learn how to perform complex tasks, but also for explicitly expressing how people learn to learn. Therefore, would it not be wise to establish a scientific legacy for the development of effective knowledge-based tutorial systems which is informed by the best studies of mind and meaning, language and thought, purpose and paradox?

Artificial Intelligence↗

PubMed1980

Logical relations and comprehension in conversation.

This study examines how logical relations (e.g., causality and identity) in spoken discourse affect comprehension. Research on cohesion, which shows that specific unit template structures link discourse and text together, is used to build a model of language comprehension that places template structures at the base of a context comparison operation. Subjects were engaged in ordinary conversation with a confederate trained to produce specific types of logical utterances unobtrusively. The comprehension model predicted that systematically different latencies, topical response, and remedial response of subjects would follow the test items produced by the confederate. The data support the predictions. It is shown that comprehension occurs via one processing path if there is a direct tie between the target item and the immediately prior item in discourse, and a separate processing path if the tie is between the target item and the earlier context. Subject response in conversation is shown to display useful evidence on the nature of comprehension achieved. The findings specify and extend the recent research on the integration of new information into a textual structure.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

On the buzzword approach to policy formation.

This article draws attention to an absurd feature of contemporary political life that significantly affects health service policy and calls for an urgent explanation. Policies are formed by a process that privileges rhetoric over reality, producing policies that are conceptualized at a later date. Two influential articles on clinical governance illustrate this phenomenon perfectly. Lack of clarity about its true meaning and nature is a key feature of clinical governance. The lack of clarity allows policy-makers to shift responsibility for the problems of the health service onto the workforce, who are required to interpret the deliberately vague and platitudinous statements of management in order to implement the policy. But management, through the creation of monitoring agencies, reserves the right to determine whether the policy has been correctly interpreted, thus retaining power without responsibility. Government and senior management have abandoned the communicative function of language, eschewing reasoned debate (as characterized by the use of evidence and structured argument), instead employing language exclusively for the purposes of control and manipulation. Those of us still concerned that the future of our essential services should be determined by open and reasonable debate need to discuss urgently how to explain and respond to this appalling situation.

Decision Making↗

PubMed1979

Os penis of the rat. II. Morphology of the mature bone.

A morphological description of the mature os penis and its related structures in the rat is presented. The description aims at being a natural introduction to studies of histomorphological and histochemical events during the development of the bone. The causal interest of this topic is due to a recently published observation of a rare reaction for presence of alkaline phosphatase in the proximally positioned growth cartilage of os penis. The study, thus, presents a systematical description of the position of os penis in relation to the soft tissue structures of glans penis, of gross morphology of the bone, of its periosteal covering and of the distribution of the bone types, which together form the mature bone. The observations result in an introduction of a systematical terminology, based on the Latin language. Furthermore, certain phenomena concerning a distally positioned cartilagenous process, and the distribution of bone tissue types in os penis are observed and discussed. Together with the phenomenon earlier mentioned these phenomena need further attention in future studies of the bone.

Animals↗

PubMed1997

Theory of Electrode Polarization in Dielectrophoresis and Electrorotation

Experimental observations, previously reported in the low frequency regime of the spectrum in dielectrophoresis and electrorotation of plant protoplasts, have revealed serious discrepancies between the predictions of the "Shelled Model" and measurements. Much work has also been carried out in the theoretical realm to reconcile these discrepancies by introducing such mechanisms as charge flow on the surface of the cell and micromotion, but in all this the effects of electrode polarization have been neglected. Part of the problem lies in the rather formidable nature of the analysis that must be carried out with nonuniform fields since the entire system of governing partial differential equations must be considered. In the case of uniform fields it is convenient to formulate the problem in the language of ordinary differential equations. This problem is further exacerbated by the lack of a well defined boundary condition at the outer limit of the double layer. We have used the method of Green's functions, since this allows the consideration of partial differential equations in a more natural way than the other methods, in order to formulate the problem. The lack of a well defined boundary condition at the outer surface is dealt with by taking an integral transform of the governing equations and thus recovering a relationship between the applied and the far fields. The results of our analysis show that the double layer relaxation, in the selected model, is a very simple single relaxation process and its effect is to diminish the discrepancies between theory and experiment. Copyright 1997 Academic Press. Copyright 1997Academic Press

Journal Article↗

PubMed2004

A plant dialect of the histone language.

The genome contains all the information needed to build an organism. However, during differentiation and development, additional epigenetic information determines the functional state of cells and tissues. This epigenetic information can be introduced by cytosine methylation and by marking nucleosomal histones. The code written on histones consists of post-translational modifications, including acetylation and methylation. In contrast to the universal nature of the DNA code, the histone language and its decoding machinery differ among animals, plants and fungi. Plant cells have retained totipotency to generate the entire plant and maintained the ability to dedifferentiate, which suggests that the establishment and maintenance of epigenetic information differs from animals. Here, I aim to summarize the histone code and plant-specific aspects of setting and translating the code.

Acetylation↗

PubMed1999

Segmentation of yeast DNA using hidden Markov models.

MOTIVATION: Compositionally homogeneous segments of genomic DNA often correspond to meaningful biological units. Simple sliding window analysis is usually insufficient for compositional segmentation of natural sequences. Hidden Markov models (HMM) with a small number of states are a natural language for description of compositional properties of chromosome-size DNA sequences. RESULTS: The algorithms were applied to yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae chromosomes (YC) I, III, IV, VI and IX. The optimal number of HMM states is found to be four. The optimal four-state HMMs for all chromosomes are very similar, as well as the reconstructed segmentations. In most cases the models with k + 1 states are obtained by 'splitting' one of the states in the model with k states, and the corresponding increase of the level of detail in segmentation. The high AT states usually correspond to intergenic regions. We also explore the model's likelihood landscape and analyze the dynamics of the optimization process, thus addressing the problem of reliability of the obtained optima and efficiency of the algorithms.

Algorithms↗

PubMed2004

GCS: a grammatical coding system for natural language data.

This article presents a rationale and description of GCS, or Grammatical Coding System. GCS is a general-use grammatical coding system designed for research on the language of normal and language-impaired children or adults and is especially useful for studies in which a relatively large number of participants are involved. It implements recent theoretical developments in linguistics to characterize development and/or language disorder in children and adults. In addition to the coding system, a computerized method for reading coded transcripts and calculating relevant descriptive statistics is presented. A full coded transcription is included in the Appendix. A detailed GCS manual may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Electronic Data Processing↗

PubMed1987

The detection of errors in sentences after right hemisphere brain damage.

Several experiments have shown that non-aphasic, right hemisphere-damaged adults encounter difficulty solving syllogistic reasoning problems. In order to confirm and further explore the nature of this deficit with different linguistic material, patients with focal cerebral insult were asked to detect logical errors in sentences describing familiar causal situations. The findings revealed significant impairments in detecting errors after insult to anterior portions of the right hemisphere and to the left hemisphere, but qualitatively different patterns of errors in these two groups of patients. We conclude that the right hemisphere may make a unique contribution to sentence processing.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

What happened in the origin of human consciousness?

At some point in its evolutionary history, our species Homo sapiens ceased to be a nonlinguistic, nonsymbolic organism, living in the world as presented to it by Nature, and instead began to exist in a world that it reconstructs in its own mind. Most scientists since Darwin have been content to explain this extraordinary transformation in human consciousness by the operation of natural selection. However, the human fossil and archaeological records indicate that modern human symbolic consciousness is not the culmination of the long trend that natural selection would predict. Instead, it shows that major change in the human past has been episodic and rare and that, as far as can be determined from the archaeological record, the passage from nonsymbolic to symbolic cognition is a recent event as well as an unprecedented one. So recent, indeed, that it significantly postdates the acquisition of modern human anatomy as expressed in skeletal structure. It, thus, appears most likely that the biological (neural) capacity underwriting the radically new behavioral mode arose as an incidental exaptation in the same process that produced the new skeletal structure of Homo sapiens, but that it lay unexpressed until it was "discovered" by means of a cultural innovation, plausibly the invention of language. As in the case of the modern anatomical structure, it appears that the new capacity was initially expressed in Africa and that its various behavioral potentials were sequentially discovered in a drawn-out process that is continuing today. An "accidental" origin of the human capacity helps understand why so many human behaviors have proven self-destructive and contradictory, a feature of our species that reductionist, selection-based scenarios are hard-put to explain.

Animals↗

PubMed2001

Deficits in irregular past-tense verb morphology associated with degraded semantic knowledge.

Two distinct mechanisms are often considered necessary to account for generation of the past-tense of English verbs: a lexical associative process for irregular forms like speak-->spoke, and a rule-governed process ("add -ed") for regular and novel forms like talk-->talked and wug-->wugged. An alternative account based on a parallel-distributed processing approach proposes that one complex procedure processes all past-tense types. In this alternative view, neuropsychological dissociations are explained by reduced input from word meaning that plays a greater role in successful generation of the past-tense for lower frequency irregular verbs, and by phonological deficits that disproportionately affect regular and novel forms. Only limited evidence has been available concerning the relationship between knowledge of word meaning and verb-tense processing. The study reported here evaluated the past-tense verb abilities of 11 patients with semantic dementia, a neurodegenerative condition characterised by degraded semantic knowledge. We predicted and confirmed that the patients would have essentially normal ability to generate and recognise regular (and novel) past-tense forms, but a marked and frequency-modulated deficit on irregular verbs. Across the set of 11 patients, the degree of impairment for the irregular past-tense was significantly correlated with the degree of comprehension impairment as measured by verb synonym judgements. These results, plus other features of the data such as the nature of the errors to irregular verbs, are discussed in relation to currently developing theories of the language system.

Aged↗

PubMed1994

The development of phonological skills.

In this paper we consider the nature and consequences of the development of phonological skills in children. We begin with evidence for developmental refinements in phonological processes. These developments, in turn, affect a variety of other skills. We consider two particular examples: the relationship between the development of speech skills and verbal short-term memory and the development of children's phonological awareness. The development of phonological awareness is related to the acquisition of literacy, which, in turn, brings about further refinements in phonological skills.

Child↗

PubMed1999

[Migrant populations at the Hôpital de l'Enfance of Lausanne (HEL): evaluation inquiry, taking care and contribution of cultural mediators-translators].

The number of patients belonging to migrant populations who consult Lausanne's Hôpital de l'Enfance (HEL) has increased massively in an exponential manner. HEL is a facility dedicated to children with a vocation of public health and training in a university setting and it has to make a point of developing an adequate and pertinent health care system for these populations. In order to do this, a study was undertaken in the form of a prospective survey including over a thousand ambulatory patients. Administrative data (origin, date of migration, nature of the permit and legal situation), social data (home language, professional situation, number of siblings), medical (diagnosis) and psychosomatic data (sleep, enuresis) was recorded as well as data testing the level of understanding between carrier and patient. The study allowed us to define priorities of intervention: introduction of a service of translators--cultural mediators trained by the association "Appartenances" (as well as on going follow-up and assessment of this service), training of health care workers in the fields of cultural mediation and the different aspects of migrant population medicine and, finally, the creation of a steering group within the Institution. Having allowed rapid and spectacular improvement in the quality of the service provided by the HEL, this process is also included in the will to improve health care given to migrant populations at local and national levels in accordance with the priorities defined by the WHO in this domain. It is this experience which is reported in this paper.

Child↗

PubMed2002

Defining the broader phenotype of autism: genetic, brain, and behavioral perspectives.

Achieving progress in understanding the cause, nature, and treatment of autism requires an integration of concepts, approaches, and empirical findings from genetic, cognitive neuroscience, animal, and clinical studies. The need for such integration has been a fundamental tenet of the discipline of developmental psychopathology from its inception. It is likely that the discovery of autism susceptibility genes will depend on the development of dimensional measures of broader phenotype autism traits. It is argued that knowledge of the cognitive neuroscience of social and language behavior will provide a useful framework for defining such measures. In this article, the current state of knowledge of the cognitive neuroscience of social and language impairments in autism is reviewed. Following from this, six candidate broader phenotype autism traits are proposed: (a) face processing, including structural encoding of facial features and face movements, such as eye gaze; (b) social affiliation or sensitivity to social reward, pertaining to the social motivational impairments found in autism; (c) motor imitation ability, particularly imitation of body actions; (d) memory, specifically those aspects of memory mediated by the medial temporal lobe-prefrontal circuits; (e) executive function, especially planning and flexibility; and (f) Language ability, particularly those aspects of language that overlap with specific language impairment, namely, phonological processing.

Autistic Disorder↗

PubMed1996

Paradoxical functional facilitation in brain-behaviour research. A critical review.

The aim in this review article is to document research findings that have shown paradoxical effects of nervous system changes, whereby direct or indirect neural damage may result in facilitation of behavioural functions. Such findings have often been ignored or undervalued in the brain-behaviour research literature. A further aim is to consider possible mechanisms and theoretical insights related to this facilitation. Analyses of relevant studies show that two major types of paradoxical functional facilitation (PFF) effects may be distinguished. (i) Situations where damage to intact brain tissue brings to normal or near normal a previously subnormal or abnormal level of functioning. I refer to improved levels of functioning in such contexts as restorative PFF effects. One of the best documented examples of such PFF effects is the 'Sprague effect', whereby collicular lesions may bring about an improvement in visual functioning following an initial occipital lesion. (ii) Situations where a subject with nervous system pathology or sensory loss performs better than normal control subjects on a particular task. I refer to improved levels of performance in these contexts as enhancing PFF effects. Restorative and enhancing PFF effects have been found in a range of domains, including memory, sensory and perceptual functions, and language functioning. A potential contribution of PFF effects is that they highlight two important neural mechanisms, i.e. inhibition and compensatory plasticity. Two broad classes of theoretical insights related to PFF effects are therefore discussed: (i) inhibitory mechanisms, which form part of an interactive view of brain function where competitive opponent-processing is a significant feature; (ii) 'compensatory augmentation', which occurs as a specific manifestation of CNS plasticity. Both of these mechanisms are considered in relation to paradoxical increases in CBF and anatomical annexation effects that are seen in neurological patients and in subjects with sensory loss. Paradoxical functional facilitation paradigms represent a powerful methodological tool for confirming or refuting hypotheses in brain-behaviour research. The counter-intuitive nature of PFF findings provides a particularly persuasive set of evidence in support of neural, conceptual or computational models of brain function that specifically predict paradoxical facilitation of cognitive functioning.

Behavior↗

PubMed2003

Therapist self-disclosure with children, adolescents, and their parents.

Many therapists who work with children and adolescents make extensive use of self-disclosure. However, these interventions have received little attention in the literature, and the basis for using them has not been well established. A developmental/relational perspective on the therapeutic process provides a cogent foundation using therapist self-disclosure with children, adolescents, and their parents. Therapist self-disclosure facilitates the negotiation of many important therapeutic tasks. Clinicians working with children and adolescents almost always work concurrently with parents, yet the nature of this work has not been clearly conceptualized. I advance a collaborative model for parent work, highlighting the essential role of therapist self-disclosure. Extensive clinical examples of therapist self-disclosure with children, adolescents, and their parents are provided.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2004

Management of anomia.

Anomia is a complex, commonly occurring symptom of aphasia with different underlying causes. A number of behavioral approaches to rehabilitation of anomia have been described. Some are restitutive in nature and attempt to reactivate lexical-semantic or phonological representations to improve word retrieval. Others are intended to reorganize language functions by engaging alternative cognitive systems to mediate word retrieval or by exploiting residual abilities to circumvent the impairment. A better appreciation of the characteristics of an individual's naming deficit may assist the clinician in selecting appropriate interventions for restitution or substitution of function in the management of this disorder.

Anomia↗