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Representational information: a new general notion and measure\ud of information
No full textIn what follows, we introduce the notion of representational information (information conveyed by sets of dimensionally defined objects about their superset of origin) as well as an\ud
original deterministic mathematical framework for its analysis and measurement. The framework, based in part on categorical invariance theory [Vigo, 2009], unifies three key constructsof universal science – invariance, complexity, and information. From this unification we define the amount of information that a well-defined set of objects R carries about its finite superset of origin S, as the rate of change in the structural complexity of S (as determined by its degree of categorical invariance), whenever the objects in R are removed from the set S. The measure captures deterministically the significant role that context and category structure play in determining the relative quantity and quality of subjective information conveyed by particular objects in multi-object stimuli
Coping Ability of Medical and Nursing Students: A Cause of Concern
No full textBackground: Medical students today are subject to a variety of stress; academic, social, emotional or stress in the form of affliction of health during their stay at medical school. The physiological response to these depends on various factors including their inherent coping abilities. This study was designed to examine the coping ability of medical and nursing students at the time of admission to medical school. Materials and Methods: 42 medical and 34 nursing students volunteered for the study. They were administered the BAI questionnaire and classified as good and poor adjusters based on their score. Results: The study revealed an unsatisfactory overall coping ability to be prevalent among medical and nursing students. Conclusion: This study showed that there is a need for orientation and counselling of medical and nursing students at the start of college
B-cell Prolymphocytic Leukemia in a Young Male
No full textB-cell prolymphocytic leukemia [B-PLL] is a neoplasm of B prolymphocytes affecting the peripheral blood, bone marrow and spleen. The principal disease characteristics are massive splenomegaly with absent or minimal peripheral lymphadenopathy and a rapidly rising lymphocyte count. Here, we report a case of B-PLL in a 42 year old male who had come for routine health check up
Factors Contributing to Psycho-Social Ill-Health in Male Adolescents
No full textObjective: To study the prevalence of psychosocial problems in male adolescents and find out various factors contributing to psycho-social ill health. Methods: 500 adolescents were interviewed using a pre-tested structured questionnaire to elicit the information about the psychosocial problems including depression, suicidal thoughts and suicidal attempts. Association of academic performance, family problems, psychological problems and substance abuse was also included. Results: More than one third (39.6%) adolescents were having psychological problems. These problems were significantly higher in middle adolescence (14-16 years), large extended families (> 8 members) and lower socioeconomic status. Residence had no significant relation to psychological problems in the adolescents. On correlation, these adolescents with psychological problems were having significantly more academic problems, family disputes, domestic violence, lesser number of close friends and greater substance abuse. Conclusion: Considering that male adolescents from large families with lesser education and lower income had higher prevalence of psychosocial problems, it is essential for health care planners to design comprehensive family and health education programs for the adolescents. The family support, teacher student rapport and peer group communication should be strengthened to counteract unsafe behaviours in the adolescents
Chondroid Syringoma and Eccrine Spiradenoma
No full textFine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) is a well established diagnostic tool. However, most clinicians prefer to diagnose suspected skin tumors by excisional biopsy as they are easily accessible and hence benign skin adnexal tumors are rarely encountered on FNAC. There are only a very few case reports describing the fine needle aspiration cytologic features of chondroid syringoma and eccrine spiradenoma for diagnosis. Cases: First case was a 20 year old female who presented with firm,non-tender swelling in the left little finger measuring 1 cm in diameter. Smears showed clusters of round to plasmacytoid cells with moderate to abundant cytoplasm embedded in a chondromyxoid ground substance . Hence, a diagnosis of chondroid syringoma was made. Another case was a 40 year old lady who presented with a painful swelling on the anterior chest wall measuring approximately 0.8 cms in diameter. Smears were moderately cellular with cohesive sheets and clusters of bland cells of three different cell types. Hence, a probable diagnosis of eccrine spiradenoma was made and both the cases were confirmed histologically. Conclusion: Appropriate knowledge of the cytologic features of chondroid syringoma and eccrine spiradenoma helps in providing a definitive diagnosis and correct management of the patient
A comparison between the effects of three potential scar-reducing agents applied at a site of sciatic nerve repair
No full textWe have investigated the effect of three potential scar-reducing agents applied at a sciatic nerve repair site in C57-black-6 mice. Under anaesthesia the nerve was transected, repaired using four epineurial sutures, and 100 mu l of either triamcinolone acetonide (1 mg/100 mu l), an interleukin-10 peptide fragment: (125 ng/100 mu l or 500 ng/100 mu l) or mannose-6-phosphate (M6P, 200 mM or 600 mM) was injected into and around the nerve. After 6 weeks the extent of regeneration was assessed electrophysiologically by determining the ratio of the compound action potential (CAP) modulus evoked by electrical stimulation of the nerve 2 mm distal or proximal to the repair site. The conduction velocity of the fastest components in the CAP was also calculated. The percentage area of collagen staining (PAS) at the repair site was analysed using Picrosirius Red and image analysis. Comparisons were made with a placebo group (100 mu l of phosphate buffered saline) and sham-operated controls. The median CAP modulus ratio in the 600 mM M6P group was 0.44, which was significantly higher than in the placebo group (0.24, P=0.012: Kruskal-Wallis test). Conduction velocities were also faster in the 600 mM M6P group (median 30 m s(-1)) than in the placebo group (median 27.8 m s(-1); P=0.0197: Kruskal-Wallis test). None of the other treated groups were significantly different from the placebo, and all had significantly lower CAP ratios than the sham controls (P{\ensuremath{<}}0.05). All repair groups had a significantly higher PAS for collagen than sham controls. We conclude that the administration of 600 mM mannose-6-phosphate to a nerve repair site enhances; axonal regeneration. (C) 2011 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Mind: meet network. Emergence of features in conceptual metaphor.
No full textAs a human product, language reflects the psychological experience of man (Radden and Dirven, 2007). One model of language and human cognition in general is connectionism, by many linguists is regarded as mathematical and, therefore, too reductive. This opinion trend seems to be reversing, however, due to the fact that many cognitive researchers begin to appreciate one attribute of network models: feature emergence. In the course of a network simulation properties emerge that were neither inbuilt nor intended by its creators (Elman, 1998), in other words, the whole becomes more than just the sum of its parts. Insight is not only drawn from the network's output, but also the means that the network utilizes to arrive at the output.\ud
It may seem obvious that the events of life should be meaningful for human beings, yet there is no widely accepted theory as to how do we derive that meaning. The most promising hypothesis regarding the question how the world is meaningful to us is that of embodied cognition (cf. Turner 2009), which postulates that the functions of the brain evolved so as to ‘understand’ the body, thus grounding the mind in an experiential foundation. Yet, the relationship between the body and the mind is far from perspicuous, as research insight is still intertwined with metaphors specific for the researcher’s methodology (Eliasmith 2003). It is the aim of this paper to investigate the conceptual metaphor in a manner that will provide some insight with regard to the role that objectification, as defined by Szwedek (2002), plays in human cognition and identify one possible consequence of embodied cognition.\ud
If the mechanism for concept formation, or categorization of the world, resembles a network, it is reasonable to assume that evidence for this is to be sought in language. Let us then postulate the existence of a network mechanism for categorization and concept formation present in the human mind and initially developed to cope with the world directly accessible to the early human (i.e. tangible). Such a network would convert external inputs to form an internal, multi modal representation of a perceived object in the brain. The sheer amount of available information and the computational restrictions of the brain would force some sort of data compression, or a computational funnel. It has been shown that a visual perception network of this kind can learn to accurately label patterns (Elman, 1998). What is more, the compression of data facilitated the recognition of prototypes of a given pattern category rather than its peripheral representations, an emergent property that supports the prototype theory of the mental lexicon (cf. Radden and Dirven, 2007).\ud
The present project proposes that, in the domain of cognition, the process of objectification, as defined by Szwedek (2002), would be an emergent property of such a system, or that if an abstract notion is computed by a neural network designed to cope with tangible concepts the data compression mechanism would require the notion to be conceptualized as an object to permit further processing. The notion of emergence of meaning from the operation of complex systems is recognised as an important process in a number of studies on metaphor comprehension. Feature emergence is said to occur when a non-salient feature of the target and the vehicle becomes highly salient in the metaphor (Utsumi 2005). Therefore, for example, should objectification emerge as a feature in the metaphor KNOWLEDGE IS A TREASURE, the metaphor would be characterised as having more\ud
features of an object than either the target or vehicle alone. This paper focuses on providing a theoretical connectionist network based on the Elman-type network (Elman, 1998) as a model of concept formation where objectification would be an emergent feature. This is followed by a psychological experiment whereby the validity of this assumption is tested through a questionnaire where two groups of participants are asked to evaluate either metaphors or their components. The model proposes an underlying relation between the mechanism for concept formation and the omnipresence of conceptual metaphors, which are interpreted as resulting from the properties of the proposed network system.\ud
Thus, an evolutionary neural mechanism is proposed for categorization of the world, that is able to cope with both concrete and abstract notions and the by-product of which are the abstract language-related phenomena, i.e. metaphors. The model presented in this paper aims at providing a unified account of how the various types of phenomena, objects, feelings etc. are categorized in the human mind, drawing on evidence from language.\ud
References:\ud
Szwedek, Aleksander. 2002. Objectification: From Object Perception To Metaphor Creation. In B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk and K. Turewicz (eds). Cognitive Linguistics To-day, 159-175. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.\ud
Radden, Günter and Dirven, René. 2007. Cognitive English Grammar. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company\ud
Eliasmith, Chris. 2003. Moving beyond metaphors: understanding the mind for what it is. Journal of Philosophy. C(10):493- 520.\ud
Elman, J. L. et al. 1998. Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press\ud
Turner, Mark. 2009. Categorization of Time and Space Through Language. (Paper presented at the FOCUS2009 conference "Categorization of the world through language". Serock, 25-28 February 2009).\ud
Utsumi, Akira. 2005. The role of feature emergence in metaphor appreciation, Metaphor and Symbol, 20(3), 151-172
Le parole che non ti ho detto. Semantica dell'affettività.\ud
No full textA differenza di discipline come la psicologia e la sociologia, rami della filosofia che hanno adottato il principio della misurazione come strumento di verifica dei modelli proposti, mantenendo però un’attitudine alla speculazione ed alla definizione di costrutti astratti (i “gruppi sociali” della sociologia, inesistenti nella realtà, o le istanze psichiche della psicologia, quali l’attaccamento, di cui si fatica a trovare correlati biologici con una reale fondazione evoluzionistica), le branche che derivano dalle neuroscienze conservano l’esigenza di una certezza dei risultati che può essere prodotta solo dalla verifica empirica di costrutti che abbiano insieme un ben preciso statuto ontologico ed un altrettanto inderogabile misurabilità. \ud
L’area della psicopatologia si trova a mal partito nel corrispondere a queste esigenze elementari della ricerca scientifica: sappiamo ancora poco di come funziona il cervello, la sede presuntiva della “psiche” oggetto della psicopatologia, ed ancor meno sappiamo di come quella stessa “psiche” vada incontro alla deriva patologica che si esprime nelle diverse declinazioni della nosografia attualmente condivisa. Trovare il bandolo della matassa di questo aggrovigliato gomitolo, che è la base stessa di ogni e qualsivoglia approccio alla terapia dei disturbi mentali e della sofferenza psichica, è impresa cui le neuroscienze stentano a fornire un contributo sostanziale. \ud
A fronte di queste difficoltà, un tentativo suscettibile di esplorazione è quello che affronti di petto il nucleo duro del problema: definire ex novo i “mattoni costitutivi” della psicopatologia, gli elementi, cioè, che costituiscono oggetto principale dei processi che esitano poi nelle sindromi clinicamente definite. Il territorio dell’affettività, in particolare, e cioè l’insieme di emozioni, sentimenti ed affetti, comprende una delle aree maggiormente critiche della psicopatologia, quella che contribuisce in modo determinante a circoscrivere il campo di alcune delle principali e più diffuse condizioni psicopatologiche: i disturbi del controllo dell’ansia ed i disturbi dell’umore.\u
Theory of Cognitive Distortions: Over-Generalisation and Mislabeling
No full textIn a previous paper (Compléments pour une théorie des distorsions cognitives, Journal de Thérapie Comportementale et Cognitive, 2007), we introduced some elements aimed at contributing to a general theory of cognitive distortions. Based on the reference class, the duality and the system of taxa, these elements allow to define the general cognitive distortions as well as the specific cognitive distortions. This model is extended here to the description of two other classical cognitive distortions: over-generalisation and mislabelling. The definition of the two latter cognitive distortions is based on preliminary distinction between three levels of reasoning: primary, secondary and ternary pathogenic arguments. The latter analysis also leads to define two other cognitive distortions which insert themselves into this framework: ill-grounded inductive projection and confirmation bias
A Generalized Method for Integrating Rule-based Knowledge into Inductive Methods Through Virtual Sample Creation
No full textHybrid learning methods use theoretical knowledge of a domain and a set of classified examples to develop a method for classification. Methods that use domain knowledge have been shown to perform better than inductive learners. However, there is no general method to include domain knowledge into all inductive learning algorithms as all hybrid methods are highly specialized for a particular algorithm. We present an algorithm that will take domain knowledge in the form of propositional rules, generate artificial examples from the rules and also remove instances likely to be flawed. This enriched dataset then can be used by any learning algorithm. Experimental results of different scenarios are shown that demonstrate this method to be more effective than simple inductive learning