1,720,966 research outputs found
Evaluating Handwriting Skills through Human-Machine Interaction: A New Digitalized System for Parameters Extraction
No full textHandwriting is an important component of academic curricula and grapho-motor skills (GMS) support learning, reading, memory and self-confidence. Teachers and clinicians report increase in children experiencing problems with acquiring fluid and legible handwriting. To date gold-standard tests evaluating children's GMS, mostly rely on pen and paper tests, requiring extensive coding time and subject to high inter-rater variability. This work presents preliminary data on a new digital platform for Grapho-motor Handwriting Evaluation & Exercise (GHEE), attempting to overcome limitations of available digitalized methods for GMS evalution. In fact, contrary to previous systems, GHEE design originated from comparisons among multiple standardized tests and was based on a human-machine interaction approach. GHEE hardware and software is presented as well as data on preliminary testing. Cursive handwriting data from six adult volunteers was analyzed according to six parameters of relevance, both automatically (i.e., using GHEE software) and manually (i.e., by a human coder). Comparisons among machine and human data sets allowed parsing out parameters to be extracted automatically and parameters requiring human-machine interaction. Results confirmed platform efficacy and feasibility of the proposed approach
Handwriting in primary school: comparing standardized tests and evaluating impact of grapho-motor parameters
Get PDFA growing number of primary school students experience difficulties with grapho-motor skills involved in handwriting, which impact both form and content of their texts. Therefore, it is important to assess and monitor handwriting skills in primary school via standardized tests and detect specific grapho-motor parameters (GMPs) which impact handwriting legibility. Multiple standardized tools are available to assess grapho-motor skills in primary school, yet little is known on between-test agreement, on impact of specific GMPs on children's overall performance and on which GMPs may be specifically hard to tackle for children that are starting to consolidate their handwriting skills. These data would be extremely relevant for clinicians, therapists and educators, who have to choose among different assessment tools as well as design tailored intervention strategies to reach adequate performance on different GMPs in cases of poor handwriting. To gain better understanding of currently available standardized tools, we compared overall performance of 39 Italian primary school children (19 second graders and 20 third graders) experiencing difficulties with handwriting on three standardized tests for grapho-motor skills assessment and explored the impact of individual GMPs on child performance. Results showed some agreement between tests considering all children in our sample, but no agreement in second grade and only limited agreement in third grade. Data also allowed highlighting significant correlations between some GMP scores and children's overall performance in our sample. Finally, children in our sample appeared to experience specific difficulties with some GMPs, such as letter joins and alignment
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Assessment of feeding teats: An experimental study
No full textThis work aims to present a quantitative metric to assess the impact of feeding teats on the nutritive sucking of newborns. Two different teat models are compared: a classical model (model C), and a model provided with two opposite recesses to match the anatomical characteristics of the mouth of a newborn (model I). This latter feeding teat model has been specifically designed to promote the attachment of the baby, thus improving her/his nutritive sucking performance.Feeding teats are instrumented with a device to assess nutritive sucking (the Feeding Assessment Monitor, FAM). The device records feeding pressures and a software extracts quantitative features already used and validated in clinical applications.Comparative cross-over analysis on 30 healthy newborns, demonstrates the appropriateness of the proposed metric to reveal differences in the teat models. In particular, our data confirm the better attachment of newborns when fed with the I model: they show a longer feeding, with higher level of depressurization, higher regularity, and higher number of sucking events
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe 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
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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