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Arterial spin labelling perfusion MRI analysis for the Human Connectome Project Lifespan Ageing and Development studies
The Human Connectome Project Lifespan studies cover the Development (5-21) and Aging (36-100+) phases of life. Arterial spin labelling (ASL) was included in the imaging protocol, resulting in one of the largest datasets collected to-date of high spatial resolution multiple delay ASL covering 3,000 subjects. The HCP-ASL minimal processing pipeline was developed specifically for this dataset to pre-process the image data and produce perfusion estimates in both volumetric and surface template space, though quality control is not performed. Applied to the whole dataset, the outputs of the pipeline revealed significant and expected differences in perfusion between the Development and Ageing cohorts. Visual inspection of the group average surface maps showed that cortical perfusion often followed cortical areal boundaries, suggesting differential regulation of cerebral perfusion within brain areas at rest. Group average maps of arterial transit time also showed differential transit times in core and watershed areas of the cerebral cortex, which are useful for interpreting haemodynamics of functional MRI images. The pre-processed dataset will provide a valuable resource for understanding haemodynamics across the human lifespan
Assessing bilingual language proficiency with a yes/no vocabulary test: the role of form-meaning vocabulary knowledge
Validated yes/no vocabulary tests that measure bilinguals' language proficiency based on vocabulary knowledge have been widely used in psycholinguistic research. However, it is unclear what aspects of test takers' vocabulary knowledge are employed in these tests, which makes the interpretation of their scores problematic. The present study investigated the contribution of bilinguals' form-meaning knowledge to their item accuracy on a Malay yes/no vocabulary test. Word knowledge of Malay first- (N = 80) and second-language (N = 80) speakers were assessed using yes/no, meaning recognition, form recognition, meaning recall and form recall tests. The findings revealed that 59% of the variance in the yes/no vocabulary test score was explained by the accuracy of the meaning recognition, form recognition and meaning recall tests. Importantly, the item analysis indicated that yes/no vocabulary tests assess primarily knowledge of form recognition, supporting its use as a lexical proficiency measure to estimate bilinguals' receptive language proficiency
Three-dimensional runout characterisation for rotationally symmetric components
Rotationally symmetric components are ubiquitous to modern devices, and their precision manufacture is necessary to keep costs and manufacture time down, as well as reduce waste and possibly hazardous component failure. Here we present a potential updated standard for characterising the runout of rotationally symmetric machined parts in three-dimensions, and evaluated using virtual instrumentation, enabling an accurate characterisation of the three dimensional (3D) surface deformation of a part from minimal surface information. For any 3D characterisation method to be widely adopted by the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics community, it must be fully compatible with previous methods and standards. As such, the proposed method produces a 3D runout vector based on four standard profile measurements. To evaluate the efficacy of the proposed runout method, a technique for evaluating the errors of commonly used virtual instruments has been developed. This evaluation technique produces a single-valued quantification of the deviation of the instrument outputs compared to the input parameters, decoupled from the errors on the instrument itself
Local-photon model of the momentum of light
Recently we introduced a local photon approach for modeling the quantized electromagnetic field in position space. Using this approach, we define the momentum of light in this paper as in quantum mechanics as the generator for spatial translation. Afterward, we analyze the momentum dynamics of photonic wave packets which transition from air into a denser dielectric medium. Our analysis shines new light onto the Abraham-Minkowski controversy, which highlights the intricacies involved in the characterization of the momentum of the electromagnetic field. Although our results align with Minkowski's theory and with the definition of the canonical momentum of light in quantum electrodynamics, there are also some crucial differences
Locating the Ethics of ChatGPT—Ethical Issues as Affordances in AI Ecosystems
ChatGPT is a high-profile technology that has inspired broad discussions about its capabilities and likely consequences. There has been much debate concerning ethical issues that it raises which are typically described as potentially harmful (or beneficial) consequences of ChatGPT. Concerns relating to issues such as privacy, biases, infringements of intellectual property, or discrimination are widely discussed. The article pursues the question of where these issues originate and where they are located. This article suggests that these ethical issues of the technology are located in the technology’s affordances. Affordances are part of the relationship between user and technology. Going beyond existing research on affordances and ChatGPT, the article suggests that affordances are not confined to the relationship between humans and technology. A proper understanding of affordances needs to consider the role of the socio-technical ecosystem within which these relationships unfold. The article concludes by explaining the implications of this position for research and practice
The effect of common ground on sarcasm interpretation: Evidence from intercultural communications
Although sarcasm is commonly used worldwide, little is known about the interpretation of sarcasm in intercultural communications. We conducted an experiment investigating the effect of common ground in intercultural communication by manipulating communicators’ cultural background, with high common ground communicators from the same culture and low common ground communicators from different cultures. Specifically, 201 UK participants and 201 Chinese participants read scenarios describing speakers and recipients from the UK or China. The target comment was either literal or sarcastic criticism. Participants rated the critical comment in terms of how sarcastic, aggressive, amusing, and polite they perceived it to be. Results showed that critical comments made between characters who had low common ground (i.e. UK speaker and Chinese recipient, Chinese speaker and UK recipient) were considered as being more aggressive than those with high common ground (i.e. UK speaker and UK recipient, Chinese speaker and Chinese recipient). Sarcastic criticism, specifically, was viewed as being less amusing when characters had low common ground compared to those with high common ground. The findings have implications for theories developed to explain the social functions of sarcasm, specifically, mutual knowledge shared between communicators plays an important role in sarcasm interpretation in intercultural communications
The challenge of assessing impaired awareness of hypoglycaemia in diabetes in the era of continuous glucose monitoring: A narrative review of evidence and translation into clinical practice
Iatrogenic hypoglycaemia remains a major barrier in diabetes care. Over time, and with repeated hypoglycaemic episodes, the physiological responses to hypoglycaemia can become blunted, resulting in impaired awareness of hypoglycaemia (IAH). In IAH, the onset of cognitive dysfunction precedes the onset of autonomic symptoms, often preventing appropriate self-treatment, thus increasing the frequency of severe hypoglycaemia (SH). Historically, IAH has been assessed with questionnaires, such as the Gold and Clarke scores, which were developed in the 1990s. A stepwise change in diabetes management in the last few decades has been the deployment of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). CGM allows people with diabetes to set alarms that can warn them of hypoglycaemia or even impending hypoglycaemia, thus providing a degree of ‘technological’ awareness. This creates a challenge in assessing awareness status, as people may be alerted to low-sensor glucose events before they experience any symptoms. CGM also allows the introduction of new measures of hypoglycaemia exposure such as time below range, which might complement traditional methods of risk assessment. These changes in the field prompt a need for reassessment of the measures of IAH. This narrative review evaluates the current epidemiology of SH and IAH, explores different measures of IAH, and evaluates the relationship between CGM metrics, IAH and SH. We conclude that a clinical approach involving traditional questionnaires, or newer updated alternatives such as the Hypo A-Q awareness scale, combined with CGM metrics and clinical assessment of human factors is recommended in the absence of a clearly superior measure
Local h∗-polynomials for one-row Hermite normal form simplices
The local h∗-polynomial of a lattice polytope is an important invariant arising in Ehrhart theory. Our focus is on lattice simplices presented in Hermite normal form with a single non-trivial row. We prove that when the off-diagonal entries are fixed, the distribution of coefficients for the local h∗-polynomial of these simplices has a limit as the normalized volume goes to infinity. Further, this limiting distribution is determined by the coefficients for a particular choice of normalized volume. We also provide an analysis of two specific families of such simplices to illustrate and motivate our main result
Attribute Conditioning is insensitive to cue competition and is not predicted by the Big Five Personality Traits
When a neutral stimulus is paired with a stimulus denoting an attribute, the neutral stimulus inherits that attribute (i.e., Attribute Conditioning; AC). The current experiments examined whether this effect is sensitive to cue competition, specifically blocking (Experiment 1, n = 245) and overshadowing (Experiment 2, n = 213), and whether personality traits can predict this effect (n = 458). Participants were shown cartoon images of people (CSs) paired with healthy or unhealthy foods (USs) and completed the Big Five Inventory. An AC effect was evident—people paired with healthy foods were rated healthier than people paired with unhealthy foods. However, there was no evidence of cue competition or personality traits impacting the AC effect, although females displayed a stronger AC effect than males. These findings indicate that AC is a robust phenomenon of relevance to social learning processes but is insensitive to factors that influence other forms of conditioning
Evaluating Language Model Vulnerability to Poisoning Attacks in Low-Resource Settings
Pre-trained language models are a highly effective source of knowledge transfer for natural language processing tasks, as their development represents an investment of resources beyond the reach of most researchers and end users. The widespread availability of such easily adaptable resources has enabled high levels of performance, which is especially valuable for low-resource language users who have typically been overlooked when it comes to NLP applications. However, these models introduce vulnerabilities in NLP toolchains, since they may prove vulnerable to attacks from malicious actors with access to the data used for downstream training. By perturbing instances from the training set, such attacks seek to undermine model capabilities and produce radically different outcomes during inference. We show that adversarial data manipulation has a severe effect on model performance, with BERT's performance dropping by more than 30% on average across all tasks at a poisoning ratio greater than 50%. Additionally, we conduct the first evaluation of this kind in the Basque language domain, establishing the vulnerability of low-resource models to the same form of attack