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Generalizing remotely supervised transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS): feasibility and benefit in Parkinson's disease.
No full textBackground: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique that has been shown to improve common symptoms of neurological disorders like depressed mood, fatigue, motor deficits and cognitive dysfunction. tDCS requires daily treatment sessions in order to be effective. We developed a remotely supervised tDCS (RS-tDCS) protocol for participants with multiple sclerosis (MS) to increase accessibility of tDCS, reducing clinician, patient, and caregiver burden. The goal of this protocol is to facilitate home use for larger trials with extended treatment periods. In this study we determine the generalizability of RS-tDCS paired with cognitive training (CT) by testing its feasibility in participants with Parkinson's disease (PD).Keywords: Transcranial direct current stimulation, tDCS, Telerehabilitation, Parkinson's disease, Multiple sclerosis.Springer Open
An Oxford based organization with more than 2 decades of experience Strengthening Evidence and Know-how for Effective nutrition interventions in countries prone to crisis and high levels of malnutrition.
No full textThis presentation was from 6th Annual scientific Symposium in Nepal
Land and livelihood strategies to improve nutrition in rural India: a mixed methods study.
No full textThis presentation was from 6th Annual scientific Symposium in Nepal
Student-Centered Pedagogy in Biology: Developing a Responsive Teaching Professional Development for Graduate Student Teaching Assistants.
No full textA qualifying paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education. Abstract: Responsive teaching is an approach to pedagogy that encourages teachers to elicit, notice, attend to and respond to the substance of student thinking. There is evidence that this style of instruction in STEM classrooms can increase student depth of understanding of topics as well as encourage more equitable participation and self confidence in students. The inherent uncertainty about what kinds of ideas students might have and how best to respond to those ideas can make responsive teaching challenging for practitioners. Novice teachers may feel particularly challenged to grant students agency over their ideas and allow students to interrogate non-standard knowledge. Our broad goal is to design a professional development for a particular group of novice teachers – graduate student teaching assistants – to help train them to incorporate responsive practices into their teaching methods. The more specific goals of this paper are to explicate the benefits and challenges of this approach to instruction and then to explore the literature on teacher training to begin to design and develop the professional development. We intend to design the professional development to build on resources that these novice teachers may already possess – topical expertise and openness to multiple teaching strategies – and to use methods present in prior studies to most effectively train our teaching assistants to begin to draw out, listen for and respond to student thinking and ideas in biological science
Effect of Soaking and Germination on Phytic Acid, Inorganic Phosphorous and Proximate Composition of Pigeon Pea (Cajanus Cajan L.).
No full textThis poster shows the effect of soaking in three different (acidic, neutral and basic) conditions and subsequent germination on the phytic acid content of pigeon pea, inorganic phosphorous and its proximate composition, with emphasis on its practicability at the household level
Using Brain-Computer Interfaces to Improve Multitasking in Driving
No full textAbstract: Previous research has sought to understand and mitigate deteriorating performance during multitasking while driving, but there have not been any proposed solutions. Our system is an adaptive reading interface that builds upon implicit interface work to improve driving performance in multitasking situations - as well as the overall multitasking experience. This thesis demonstrates a proof-of-concept closed-loop solution for multitasking while driving and tests its usability through a preliminary study. Our study involved a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) device, driving simulator, and adaptive reading interface. The fNIRS device monitors brain activity and triggers expansion of the reading interface in response to brain activity evoked by the challenges presented by the driving simulation. While this is preliminary research, future work can build upon our contributions. In doing so, this research will provide insight into how to diminish the effects of task-switching while driving.Thesis (M.S.)--Tufts University, 2018.Submitted to the Dept. of Mechanical Engineering.Advisor: James Intriligator.Committee: Rob Jacob, and Nathan Ward.Keywords: Mechanical engineering, Computer science, and Psychology
We Had Faces: Morisot, Self-Portraiture, and the Female Face in Nineteenth-Century Art
No full textAbstract: The French Impressionist Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) occupied an important place among the leading artistic figures of her time, such as Édouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, and many others. This study addresses the pictorial and identity issues present in Morisot's three self-portraits from 1885, by examining the artist's engagement in a history of artmaking and in picturing subjectivity. Analysis of specific self-portraits from leading French artists and contemporaneous images of Morisot reveal the ways in which she produces figures that attempt to combine painterly and motherly signs into a single identity. Through a discussion of literature on self-portraiture and feminist theory, this project builds upon the earlier scholarship to focus on a careful investigation of Morisot's self-conceptualization in pastel and oil paint. This thesis ends with a study of Morisot's relationship with her daughter, noting the way the artist frames their familial connection and painting legacy.Thesis (M.A.)--Tufts University, 2018.Submitted to the Dept. of Art and Art History.Advisor: Jeremy Melius.Committee: Eric Rosenberg, and Emily Gephart.Keyword: Art history
Skip Regex: Parsing without Deciding
No full textAbstract: Each regular expresion corrisponds to a set of strings, or language. Reg- ular expression engines can be used to quickly decide if a particular string is in that language and to perform submatch extraction (parsing) on a regex containing capture groups. While there has been significant work that focuses on either decid- ing regular expressions or parsing them, to the best of our knowledge no one has considered the two problems separately. This thesis presents skip regex, an engine for performing regular expression parsing without considering the decision problem. We show that this facilitates optimizations such as skipping over sections of input or quickly scanning towards particular literal strings, and argue through examples that the capability to parse without deciding is a useful and applicable one, partic- ularly in the case of regular expressions where the performance difference between DFAs and NFA simulations means that regex are often currently decided twice in practice. While DFAs can decide regular expressions quickly, they struggle to pro- vide features such as submatch extraction. Because of the difference in speed of the two approaches, existing engines often first decide the input with a DFA and then use an NFA to parse the matching subset of input. Skip regex provide the ability to parse without deciding, and provide a performance improvement even when the input must be decided.Thesis (M.S.)--Tufts University, 2018.Submitted to the Dept. of Computer Science.Advisor: Kathleen Fisher.Committee: Samuel Guyer, and Nathan Foster.Keyword: Computer science
Lifestyle and environmental assessment tools in relation to adiposity for military populations
No full textAbstract: In 2011, an estimated 63.6% of all US military were overweight or obese, which is comparable to the rate observed in the civilian population. Not only are major chronic diseases and healthcare costs associated with obesity, but in military personnel obesity is also linked to musculoskeletal injuries and heat-related illness in hot climate conditions. Furthermore, overweight and obesity jeopardize job security: military personnel may not be retained because of their inability to meet fitness standards, which include weight. Thus, obesity can endanger military careers, affect operational readiness and put the long-term welfare of the military and national security at risk. Accurate measurements of adiposity are thus a priority need for military personnel. Additionally, though optimal nutrition is known to serve an important role in the health and physical readiness of military personnel, how well the diets of military personnel adhere to the current nutritional recommendations set forth by the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) remains unclear. The main objective of this dissertation research is to evaluate lifestyle and environmental assessment tools currently used by US military researchers and to propose evidence-based improvements to strengthen them. First, at the individual level and in the context of the military's goals, we determined the level of agreement between several anthropometric measures of adiposity and explored whether a combination of measures would be more valid for screening overweight and obesity than body mass index (BMI) alone. We found that BMI combined with circumference-based equation (CBE) measures of body fat was the best combination to categorize overweight/obesity in our study sample. BMI+CBE had the relatively highest sensitivity and lowest false discovery rate, as well as a moderate level of agreement with bioelectrical impedance analysis, which we used as the criterion measure. This combination was notably stronger in females. Second, we aimed to strengthen the 5-item Healthy Eating Score (HES-5) that is currently part of the military's Global Assessment Tool to improve its correlation with the 2015 Healthy Eating Index (2015-HEI), a current measure of dietary adherence to the DGA. By doing so, our goal was to provide an improved nutrition assessment tool for future military studies when collecting detailed dietary data is impractical. We examined the addition of items to assess breakfast frequency, post-exercise recovery fueling snack frequency (RFsnack), and sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption. We found that the addition of SSBs (8oz/serv) and RFsnack significantly improved the correlation between the HES-5 and the HEI-2015. Their inclusion in the HES-5 could improve the validity of this field measure. Lastly, at the environmental level, we examined perspectives on the implementation and utility of the Creating Active Communities and Healthy Environments Toolkit, a new Toolkit from the Army Public Health Center developed to assess the health-promoting attributes of the built environment on military installations. Participants identified the need for (1) detailed manuals to improve Toolkit and Action Plan Guide functionality; (2) leadership's enforcement of policies and their prioritization of health-promoting improvements to the built environment; and (3) consideration of finances in Action Plan Guide recommendations. Our findings suggest the opportunity for substantial impact on military obesity research: they elucidate methods to more accurately measure and address obesity and dietary trends, which represents an important step in the further development of health promoting policies and messages related to food environments in military settings.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2018.Submitted to the Dept. of Nutritional Epidemiology.Advisor: Aviva Must.Committee: Ken Chui, Patricia Deuster, and Nicola McKeown.Keywords: Nutrition, Statistics, and Military studies
The role of mergers in triggering AGNs and starbursts
No full textAbstract: In this thesis I present three studies aiming at understanding the role of mergers and environment in triggering active galaxies and starbursts. First, I describe a study of the star formation properties of a sample of galaxy mergers at 0.3 < z < 2.5 with galaxy nuclei separations of 3-15 kpc and identi- fied in the CANDELS/3D-HST surveys by using a recent method to select mergers (Chapter 2). The sample of mergers lie at the interface between early-stage merg- ers selected in close galaxy pairs and post-merger galaxies which present disturbed morphologies. The star formation properties of the 168 merging systems identified with this method are compared with those of non-merging galaxies (Chapter 3). We find no significant difference in the star formation activity when galaxies with masses log(M/M⊙) > 10 are compared. However, at lower masses, a higher fraction of star-bursting galaxies is found in the merging systems compared to non-merging systems at the same stellar mass. We also find that the members in the merger with lower masses are more affected by the interaction, since they present higher specific star formation rates compared to the higher mass galaxy in the system. Second, I present preliminary results in a study of the incidence of AGNs in galaxy mergers (Chapter 4). We use a subsample of mergers found in Chapter 3 (mergers in the COSMOS field) and cross-match with the Chandra COSMOS- Legacy Survey in order to search for X-ray selected AGNs in this sample. We find that the total fraction of AGNs in mergers is higher (∼15%) than in non-merging galaxies (∼5%). However, no trend in the fraction of AGNs as a function of redshift and nuclei projected separation is found with this small sample (60 merging galax- ies out of which 9 have AGNs). These preliminary results suggest that merging has an impact in the triggering of AGNs. More conclusive results will be found as more ii merger samples are included from the other four CANDELS fields and by selecting AGNs based on radio and MIR observations. In Chapter 5, I present a study of the environments of 49 hyper-luminous, heav- ily obscured, z ∼ 2 quasars observed at 870 μm with the Atacama Large Millimeter- submillimeter Array. We find that 17 of the 49 sources present additional galaxies (23 sources) within the primary beam. Source counts were calculated for these field and found that they are 10 times higher than expectations for unbiased fields, in- dicative of heavily obscured quasars preferentially inhabiting over-dense regions. Finally, I present the conclusions and future directions (Chapter 6).Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2018.Submitted to the Dept. of Physics.Advisors: Anna Sajina, and Danilo Marchesini.Committee: Ken Olum, Cristian Staii, and Alberto Fernandez-Soto.Keyword: Astronomy