4,589 research outputs found
The effects of very early Alzheimer's disease on the characteristics of writing by a renowned author
No full textIris Murdoch (I.M.) was among the most celebrated British writers of the post-war era. Her final novel, however, received a less than enthusiastic critical response on its publication in 1995. Not long afterwards, I.M. began to show signs of insidious cognitive decline, and received a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, which was confirmed histologically after her death in 1999. Anecdotal evidence, as well as the natural history of the condition, would suggest that the changes of Alzheimer's disease were already established in I.M. while she was writing her final work. The end product was unlikely, however, to have been influenced by the compensatory use of dictionaries or thesauri, let alone by later editorial interference. These facts present a unique opportunity to examine the effects of the early stages of Alzheimer's disease on spontaneous written output from an individual with exceptional expertise in this area. Techniques of automated textual analysis were used to obtain detailed comparisons among three of her novels: her first published work, a work written during the prime of her creative life and the final novel. Whilst there were few disparities at the levels of overall structure and syntax, measures of lexical diversity and the lexical characteristics of these three texts varied markedly and in a consistent fashion. This unique set of findings is discussed in the context of the debate as to whether syntax and semantics decline separately or in parallel in patients with Alzheimer's disease
1861, January 26 - Correspondence - J.R. Logan to A.B. Patterson
No full textCorrespondence between John R. Logan and Alexander B. Patterson regarding votes taking place in the North Carolina Legislature on the matter of secession from the United States.
Accession Number: 1986.070.020
Donor: Lynn Kirbyhttps://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/cleveland-county-historical-collection-thomas-and-narcissa-patterson-family-collection/1006/thumbnail.jp
Prototypicality, distinctiveness, and intercorrelation: analyses of the semantic attributes of living and nonliving concepts
No full textMany cognitive psychological, computational, and neuropsychological approaches to the organisation of semantic memory have incorporated the idea that concepts are, at least partly, represented in terms of their fine-grained features. We asked 20 normal volunteers to provide properties of 64 concrete items, drawn from living and nonliving categories, by completing simple sentence stems (e.g., an owl is __, has __, can__). At a later date, the same participants rated the same concepts for prototypicality and familiarity. The features generated were classified as to type of knowledge (sensory, functional, or encyclopaedic), and also quantified with regard to both dominance (the number of participants specifying that property for that concept) and distinctiveness (the proportion of exemplars within a conceptual category of which that feature was considered characteristic). The results demonstrate that rated prototypicality is related to both the familiarity of the concept and its distance from the average of the exemplars within the same category (the category centroid). The feature database was also used to replicate, resolve, and extend a variety of previous observations on the structure of semantic representations. Specifically, the results of our analyses (1) resolve two conflicting claims regarding the relative ratio of sensory to other kinds of attributes in living vs. nonliving concepts; (2) offer new information regarding the types of features - across different domains - that distinguish concepts from their category coordinates; and (3) corroborate some previous claims of higher intercorrelations between features of living things than those of artefacts
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Financial Summit: J.R. Briggs & Dave Briggs
No full textDave and J.R. Briggs speak on stewardship of finances.
Dave Briggs currently serves as the stewardship director at Central Christian Church of Arizona. Previously he served in a similar role at Willowcreek Church and prior to that was a finance manager for GE for 27 years. He has developed numerous financial seminars and classes and regularly speaks at churches and conferences around the country. Dave and his wife Debbie had two sons attend Taylor and served for three years on the Taylor Parents’ Cabinet.
J.R. Briggs wears a variety of ministry hats. On a local level, he serves as one of the pastors of The Renew Community. He is also the Founder and Director of Kairos Partnerships and Director of Leadership and Congregation Formation for the Ecclesia Network. He is a life coach, consultant, frequent speaker, and author of seven books. He and his wife Megan, along with their two sons Carter and Bennett, live in the Philadelphia area
Neuropsychology of frontotemporal dementia
No full textFrontotemporal dementia (FTD), also known as frontal variant (fv-FTD) or behavioral variant (bv-FTD), presents with disturbed behavior. The chapter describes two language variants: semantic dementia (SD), known also as temporal variant FTD (tv-FTD) and a progressive nonfluent aphasic syndrome (PNFA). A wide range of neuropsychological tests have been applied to patients with FTD in order to characterize their deficits, and to distinguish them from patients who have other neurodegenerative disorders. Symptoms in FTD are related to the underlying structures involved in the pathological process, and not to the nature of the pathology itself. There are reliable symptom clusters which define syndromes, but there is several language and behavioral features that show significant overlap between the different variants of FTLD. Future work needs to continue to delineate the relevant neural substrates of the disturbed cognition in these patients. As the nature of the disease becomes clearer, it is likely that the disease will be recognized in more patients, particularly those over the age of 65 who have previously been given a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. Despite substantial progress in delineating the features of this disease, there remains no effective treatment, either symptomatic or curative
The effect of turbulence on particle impaction om a cylinder in a cross flow
No full textParticle impaction on a cylinder in a cross flow is investigated with the use of Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS), with a focus on the effect of turbulence on the impaction efficiency. It is found that for particles with Stokes numbers in the boundary stopping mode there is up to ten times more front side impaction for turbulence with a large integral scale, than for a corresponding laminar flow. The back side impaction efficiency is also found to be influenced by the turbulence. The highest back side impaction efficiency is found for turbulence with small integral scales
Longitudinal profiles of semantic impairment for living and nonliving concepts in dementia of Alzheimer's type
No full textTwo types of theoretical account have been proposed to explain the phenomenon of category-specific impairment in tests of semantic memory: One stresses the importance of different cortical regions to the representation of living and nonliving categories, while the other emphasize the importance of statistical relationships among features of concepts belonging to these two broad semantic domains. Theories of the latter kind predict that the direction of a domain advantage will be determined in large part by the overall damage to the semantic system, and that the profiles of patients with progressive impairments of semantic memory are likely to include a point at which an advantage for one domain changes to an advantage for the other. The present series of three studies employed semantic test data from two separate cohorts of patients with probable dementia of Alzheimer's type (DAT) to look for evidence of such a crossover. In the first study, longitudinal test scores from a cohort of 58 patients were examined to confirm the presence of progressive semantic deterioration in this group. In the second study, Kaplan-Meier survival curves based on serial naming responses and plotted separately for items belonging to living and nonliving domains indicated that the representations of living concepts (as measured by naming) deteriorated at a consistently and significantly faster rate than those of nonliving concepts. A third study, carried out to look in detail at the performance of mildly affected patients, employed an additional cross-sectional cohort of 20 patients with mild DAT and utilized a graded naming assessment. This study also revealed no evidence for a crossover in the advantage of one domain over the other as a function of disease severity. Taken together with the model of anatomical progression in DAT based on the work of Braak and Braak (1991), these findings are interpreted as evidence for the importance of regional cerebral anatomy to the genesis of semantic domain effects in DAT
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