Evaluating the feasibility of remotely administered curriculum-based measurement for students with autism: A pilot study

Students with autism may struggle to develop the academic skills necessary for success in school and beyond. Understanding and improving academic skills performance requires appropriate measurement approaches. One such option that has been minimally studied with students with autism is curriculum-based measurement (CBM). Coinciding with the need to study different approaches to academic skills measurement for students with autism was the global pandemic which forced a shift to remote service delivery with little warning. While some autistic students struggled with this shift, others thrived, raising questions about how to further support students with autism in virtual formats. The purpose of this study was to examine the feasibility of using remotely administered CBM for autistic students by studying both the practicality and acceptability of this approach. Five students with autism (Grades 2–5) participated in this pilot study, completing reading, math, and writing CBMs at three time points. Student behavior and assessor fidelity were collected to examine practicality; assessor ratings of usability provided insight regarding the acceptability of the approach. Results indicated that remotely administered CBM is feasible for some students with autism: all participants completed the study tasks with minimal behavioral difficulties, and assessor ratings of acceptability were high.     

Revisiting Cross-document Structure Theory for multi-document discourse parsing

Multi-document discourse parsing aims to automatically identify the relations among textual spans from different texts on the same topic. Recently, with the growing amount of information and the emergence of new technologies that deal with many sources of information, more precise and efficient parsing techniques are required. The most relevant theory to multi-document relationship, Cross-document Structure Theory (CST), has been used for parsing purposes before, though the results had not been satisfactory. CST has received many critics because of its subjectivity, which may lead to low annotation agreement and, consequently, to poor parsing performance. In this work, we propose a refinement of the original CST, which consists in (i) formalizing the relationship definitions, (ii) pruning and combining some relations based on their meaning, and (iii) organizing the relations in a hierarchical structure. The hypothesis for this refinement is that it will lead to better agreement in the annotation and consequently to better parsing results. For this aim, it was built an annotated corpus according to this refinement and it was observed an improvement in the annotation agreement. Based on this corpus, a parser was developed using machine learning techniques and hand-crafted rules. Specifically, hierarchical techniques were used to capture the hierarchical organization of the relations according to the proposed refinement of CST. These two approaches were used to identify the relations among texts spans and to generate multi-document annotation structure. Results outperformed other CST parsers, showing the adequacy of the proposed refinement in the theory.     

A deep vein thrombosis caused by 20209C>T mutation in homozygosis of the prothrombin gene in a Caucasian patient

Introduction:

Additional nucleotide substitutions in the 3′-untranslated region of prothrombin gene could explain some thrombotic events and also adverse pregnancy outcomes. We describe the first case of a homozygous 20209C>T mutation as the cause of deep vein thrombosis in a Spanish patient.

Case and methods:

The 56-year-old male patient with a partial tear of the Achilles tendon developed calf (tibial) deep vein thrombosis after immobilization and was treated with an anticoagulant. To determine if the deep vein thrombosis was of genetic origin, a peripheral blood DNA sample was analysed for the presence of the three most frequent mutations associated with thrombotic events: factor V Leiden (1691G>A), prothrombin (20210G>A) and methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase (677C>T). The presence or absence of the normal allele of prothrombin could not be determined using the PTH-FV-MTHFR StripAssay (Vienna Lab).

Results:

Comprehensive analysis showed that the patient had a variant interfering with the polymerase chain reaction product, we sequenced the entire prothrombin gene and found that the patient had a homozygous C>T mutation at position 20209; this interfered with the polymerase chain reaction product, which needs a C at this position to be able to bind to the wild-type probe present in the test strip.

Conclusion:

The homozygous 20209C>T mutation and the presence of the mutation 677C>T in heterozygosity explained the patient’s deep vein thrombosis because the combination of mutations would increase the risk of thrombosis. Suitable genetic counselling should be provided to the patient and first-degree relatives as it important to detect prothrombin gene variants that could increase risk for thrombotic events.     

Green intellectual capital and environmental product innovation: the mediating role of green social capital

Although the importance of intellectual capital has already been highlighted in the management literature, few articles have focused on the importance of its green counterpart, green intellectual capital. Nowadays, when environmental concerns cannot be ignored by firms, it is therefore time to explore the role of green intellectual capital in environmental improvement. For that reason, our research aims to explore the relationships between green intellectual capital components and the environmental performance of the firms. In particular, we try to show the importance of green organizational and social capital in the development of environmental product innovations, which are vital to the development and implementation of environmental strategies since, as scholars have pointed out, they generate some of the greatest environmental impacts. The empirical results show that green organizational capital has an indirect impact on environmental product innovation through green social capital, meaning that the latter is a significant mediator of that relationship, and at the same time emphasizing that informal relationships play a key role in the improvement of the environmental performance of the firm and, more specifically, in the development of environmental product innovations.     

Social capital as a driver of local knowledge exchange: a social network analysis

The objective of this paper is to take an in-depth look, from a network perspective, at the role that social capital plays in improving knowledge exchange between organizations. To do this, we consider the three dimensions of social capital: the structural dimension, as measured by the position of firms bridging structural holes; the relational dimension, as gauged by the level of trust and friendship in each relationship; and the cognitive dimension, as estimated by the presence of a shared culture. We also evaluate the level of organizational and human capital present in terms of the firms in the network. Empirical evidence has been gathered from the Madrid Science Park in Spain by applying the social network analysis methodology. The results show that the three dimensions of social capital play a significant role in increasing knowledge exchange in this network, while human and organizational capital differences are only significant for a sub-sample.     

Inducing chemotactic and haptotactic cues in microfluidic devices for three-dimensional in vitro assays

Microfluidic devices allow for the production of physiologically relevant cellular microenvironments by including biomimetic hydrogels and generating controlled chemical gradients. During transport, the biomolecules interact in distinct ways with the fibrillar networks: as purely diffusive factors in the soluble fluid or bound to the matrix proteins. These two main mechanisms may regulate distinct cell responses in order to guide their directional migration: caused by the substrate-bound chemoattractant gradient (haptotaxis) or by the gradient established within the soluble fluid (chemotaxis). In this work 3D diffusion experiments, in combination with ELISA assays, are performed using microfluidic platforms in order to quantify the distribution of PDGF-BB and TGF-β₁ across collagen and fibrin gels. Furthermore, to gain a deeper understanding of the fundamental processes, the experiments are reproduced by computer simulations based on a reaction-diffusion transport model. This model yields an accurate prediction of the experimental results, confirming that diffusion and binding phenomena are established within the microdevice.     

How do your rivals’ releasing dates affect your box office?

In this paper, we study to what extent a movie’s box-office receipts are affected by the temporal distribution of rival films. We propose a reduced-form empirical model to measure and test competition effects among films released close to each other in a standard regression framework. Such an analysis is appealing in terms of its policy implication and may provide guidance to distributors to decide on their releasing dates of their firms. We estimate this model using information on the films released in five countries: the USA, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and Spain. The geographical dimension of our data set permits us to control for unobserved heterogeneity among films released using panel data techniques, which allows us to evaluate the individual and specific effects of each film. Thus we deal with one of the most relevant features of the movie market, namely the presence of highly differentiated products.     

Globalisation in Foreign Language Teaching: Establishing Transatlantic Links in Higher Education

This article makes an explicit comparison between the reconfiguration of tertiary language education in Europe, the USA and Canada. It argues that, despite certain minor differences between continents, the same trends are operative across the Atlantic. It then examines each of them, illustrating how similar forces are at work in shaping higher education language teaching, how analogous policy frameworks are being employed to channel them and how parallel challenges and responses can be detected transatlantically. The conclusion is that unifying efforts and connecting initiatives has highly beneficial effects for advancing the application of higher education language policy worldwide.