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Plans and Artefacts: Tracing Glasgow’s Heritage
No full textAs part of Glasgow 850, Dr Ailsa Boyd and Arianna Magyaricsova explore the history of Glasgow’s Cooper & Co., and the impact their founders have had on The Hunterian’s collection
Speech rate effects on the realisation of multiple acoustic cues to the Japanese stop voicing contrast
Get PDFThe production of speech at different tempos has consequences for the articulation and perception of linguistic contrasts. For example, in fast speech, segments are often temporally constricted and subject to articulatory undershoot. Although listeners can compensate for rate differences in perceiving phonological contrasts, less is known about how the structure of multiple cues to a contrast is conditioned by changes in speech rate. This study explores how speech rate modulates seven temporal and nontemporal spectral cues to the Japanese stop voicing contrast in spontaneous speech. It is observed that individual cues are subject to variation as a function of speech rate, where all cues undergo reduction or neutralisation in fast speech and the relative importance of each cue changes as a function of speech rate. Ratios between the duration of the stop and surrounding vowels are most informative at slow rates, and the degree of closure voicing is most informative at faster rates. These findings illustrate how the realisation and informativity of multiple cues to a linguistic contrast are conditioned by the articulatory constraints present at different speech rates
Indebting the Green Transition. Civil Society and Academic Priorities at the Nexus of Sovereign Debt and the Climate Crisis
No full textA transformer-based framework for counterfactual estimation of antihypertensive treatment effect on COVID-19 infection risk - a proof-of-concept study
Get PDFBackground:
Transformer-based neural networks excel in modelling high-dimensional, time-series data with complex dependencies. This proof-of-concept study applies a transformer-X-learner framework to estimate treatment effects using real-world data, using antihypertensive drug exposure and COVID-19 risk as an exemplar.
Methods:
We conducted a case-control study of 303,220 NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde patients aged ≥40 years during the first two COVID-19 pandemic waves. Using a transformer-X-learner framework that incorporated temporal patterns in medication usage and comorbidities, we controlled for confounding effects and estimated individual and average treatment effects ACEIs, beta-blockers (BBs), calcium channel blockers (CCBs), thiazides (THZs), and statins on 180-day SARS-CoV-2 infection risk.
Results:
The transformer-X-learner framework outperformed traditional approaches, achieving an F1 score of 0.82 and area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.78. ACEIs showed a negligible overall impact on COVID-19 risk (ATE: 0.97%±5.5), while BBs (-8.3%±7.3%) and CCBs (-9.7%±8.1%) were protective. Statins (3.5%±6.1%) and THZs (4.3%±10.8%) showed slight increases in risk. Treatment effects were consistent across age, gender, and socioeconomic categories.
Conclusions:
ACEIs do not substantially increase the risk of COVID-19 infection while the protective effects of BBs and CCBs warrant further investigation. This study highlights the potential of transformer-based causal inference models as a powerful tool for evaluating treatment safety and efficacy in complex healthcare scenarios
Computationally efficient spatio-temporal disease mapping for big data
Get PDFDisease mapping models estimate the spatio-temporal variation in population-level disease risks or rates across a set of K areal units for N
time periods, aiming to identify temporal trends and spatial hotspots. Highly parameterised Bayesian hierarchical models with over K N random effects are commonly used to estimate this spatio-temporal variation, which are assigned autoregressive and conditional autoregressive prior distributions. These models work well when there are tens of thousands of data points, but are likely to be computationally burdensome when this rises to hundreds of thousands or above. This paper proposes a computationally efficient alternative, which can fit a range of spatio-temporal disease trends almost as well as existing highly parameterised models but only takes around 5% to 40% of the time to implement. It achieves this by modelling the average spatial and temporal trends in the data with autoregressive type random effects, which are augmented by an observation-driven process using functions of earlier data as additional covariates in the model. The efficacy of this methodology is tested by simulation, before being applied to the motivating study that estimates the spatio-temporal trends in asthma, cancer, coronary heart and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease prevalences for K = 32, 751 small areas over N = 13 years in England
Associations of emotional experience with gaming duration and risk of gaming disorder among adolescent gamers: an ecological momentary assessment study
Get PDFBackground and aims:
Affect has been shown to be associated with gaming disorder (GD), but little is known about how its temporal tendency may predict excessive gaming. We aimed to evaluate how affect intensity and fluctuations may predict gaming duration and risk of GD among adolescent gamers.
Design:
A longitudinal study with ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to collect participants' data at four time points throughout the day during a 14-day observation period.
Setting:
July and August 2023 in Hong Kong SAR, China.
Participants:
A total of 317 adolescents (37.2% female; Mage = 15.5) who self-identified as regular gamers.
Measurements:
The major measures were daily game time, GD (Internet Gaming Disorder Scale; IGDS9-SF) and affect intensity (the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule; PANAS), while affect fluctuations were captured by obtaining the root mean squared of successive differences of the PANAS scores.
Findings:
Both overall negative affect intensity [β = 0.3816, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.0941–0.6691, P = 0.0095] and fluctuations (β = 0.5123, 95% CI = 0.0567–0.9679, P = 0.0277) were statistically significantly associated with the follow-up IGDS9-SF score. In terms of positive affect, only affect fluctuations were statistically significantly associated with IGDS9-SF score (β = 0.4457, 95% CI = 0.0279–0.8636, P = 0.0367). At within-person level, both daily negative affect intensity (exponentiated β = 1.0159, 95% CI = 1.0018–1.0302, P = 0.0265) and fluctuations (exponentiated β = 1.0144, 95% CI = 1.0030–1.0258, P = 0.0130) were statistically significantly associated with daily game time. Daily positive affect intensity (exponentiated β = 1.0136, 95% CI = 1.0025–1.0248, P = 0.0166) was statistically significantly associated with increased daily game time at within-person level. The association between daily positive affect fluctuations and game time was statistically non-significant.
Conclusions:
Both intensity and fluctuations of negative affect may predict gaming duration and risk of gaming disorder among Hong Kong adolescents. For positive affect, emotion intensity may be more related to gaming duration, and emotion fluctuations may be more related to adolescents' risk of gaming disorder
Practical routes to preregistration: a guide to enhanced transparency and rigour in neuropsychological research
Get PDFPreregistration is the act of formally documenting a research plan before collecting (or at least before analysing) the data. It allows those reading a final research report to know which aspects of a study were decided before sight of the data, and which were added later. This enables informed evaluation of the severity with which scientific claims have been tested. We, as the British Neuropsychological Society Open Research Group, conducted a survey to explore awareness and adoption of open research practices within our field. Neuropsychology involves the study of relatively rare or hard-to-access participants, creating practical challenges that, according to our survey, are perceived as barriers to preregistration. We survey the available routes to preregistration, and suggest that the barriers are all surmountable in one way or another. However, there is a tension, in that higher levels of bias control require greater restriction over the flexibility of preregistered studies, but such flexibility is often essential for neuropsychological research. Researchers must therefore consider which route provides the right balance of rigour and pragmatic flexibility to render a preregistered project viable for them. By mapping out the issues and potential solutions, and by signposting relevant resources and publication routes, we hope to facilitate well-reasoned decision-making and empower neuropsychologists to enhance the transparency and rigour of their research. Although we focus neuropsychology, our guidance is applicable to any field that studies hard-to-access human samples, or involves arduous or expensive means of data collection
Improving the Multi-GBPS Signal Integrity Using Goubau-Inspired Hybrid Surface Wave Lines
Get PDFSingle-wire transmission lines (SWTL) guiding conformal surface waves are attractive for low-loss broadband
non-line-of-sight (NLOS) links. However, they suffer from a
fundamental limitation that is an HF stop-band, between 1 and
100 MHz, unresolved across state-of-the-art implementations.
Here, a loosely-coupled 2-wire surface-wave line structure is
proposed, inspired by the Goubau SWTL, and is evaluated from
analytical impedance calculations to practical signal integrity
measurements. The line is fed using two flexible coplanar
waveguide (CPW) tapered Vivaldi launchers, with an additional
ground wire is incorporated. The proposed structure reduces the
maximum insertion loss from over 40 dB to under 20 dB, lowering
the rejection compared to standard Goubau lines, with under 0.3
dB/cm attenuation under 4.5 GHz. Digital signalling is measured
up to 3.6 GBPS through eye diagrams, standard and Manchester
(IEEE 802.3)-encoded, showing successful communication. The
line is validated in a wearable application, showing the first multiGBPS wearable experimental demonstration
Comparability of the activPAL CREA and GHLA algorithms for determining posture and physical activity in free-living adults
Get PDFBackground:
The thigh-worn activPAL has been a primary device used for classifying posture (lying, sitting, standing, stepping, and cycling) in laboratory and free-living environments. Occasionally, activPAL releases software-based algorithm updates, but it is not clear if these algorithms produce equivalent outcomes.
Purpose:
To compare activity and posture outcomes from activPAL’s CREA and GHLA algorithms.
Methods:
Adult participants in the LIFT trial (n = 350) provided 6,038 valid days of data from wearing the activPAL3 micro on the right thigh for 7 days on four occasions. Then, CREA and GHLA algorithm daily data were downloaded in the PALbatch software and were compared using correlations, mean absolute differences, mean absolute percent differences, and equivalence testing (within 3%).
Results:
Point estimate for most activity metrics were similar, though not identical, between the CREA and GHLA algorithms. Correlations between algorithms were excellent (r = .99–1.00) for all metrics including posture outcomes, sitting, and stepping bouts and for sitting time (r = .97). Mean absolute differences for all postural outcomes were ≤7.1 min (and mean absolute percent difference ≤3.5%), except for sitting (14 min; mean absolute percent difference 3.2%). Of the 29 compared outcome variables (postural outcomes, sitting bouts, and stepping bouts), 24 were equivalent to within 3%, indicating excellent agreement between the CREA and GHLA algorithms.
Conclusions:
Most outcome metrics for the thigh-worn activPAL accelerometer calculated using the embedded CREA and GHLA algorithms were highly comparable (within a strict 3% equivalence range) and would permit comparisons across studies regardless of which algorithm was used
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