Bringing text display digital radio to consumers with hearing loss

Radio is migrating to digital transmission, expanding its offerings to include captioning for individuals with hearing loss. Text display radio requires a large amount of word throughput with minimal screen display area, making good user interface design crucial to its success. In two experiments, we presented hearing, hard-of-hearing, and deaf consumers with National Public Radio stories converted to text and examined their preferences for and reactions to midsized and small radio text displays. We focused on physical display attributes such as text color, font style, line length, and scrolling type as well as emergency alert messages and emergency prompts for drivers, announcer identification schemes, and synchronization of audio and text. Results suggest that midsized, Global Positioning System (GPS)-style displays were well liked, synchronization of audio and text was important to comprehension and retrieval of story details, identification of announcers was served best with a combination of name change in parenthesis and color change, and a mixture of color and flashing symbols was preferred for emergency alerting.     

Effect of postsecondary education on the economic status of persons who are deaf or hard of hearing

This article examines the effect that postsecondary education has on earnings and the duration of time spent in the Social Security disability programs for young persons who are deaf or hard of hearing. Our hypothesis is that investments in postsecondary training increase the likelihood of employment for persons who are deaf or hard of hearing and thus reduce dependency on disability-related income support programs. A longitudinal data set based upon records from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and Social Security administrative records is used for this analysis. We find that those who graduate, even those who graduate with vocational degrees, experience significant earnings benefits and reductions in the duration of time spent on federal disability programs when compared with those who do not graduate with a degree. This finding suggests that reductions in the duration of time spent on Social Security programs are not limited to those with the highest level of scholastic aptitude and that investments in post-secondary education can benefit a broad group of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. In addition, the data show that individuals who attend college, but withdraw before graduation, fair no better economically than individuals who never attended college.     

Longitudinal patterns of emerging literacy in beginning deaf and hearing readers

The emerging reading and spelling abilities of 24 deaf and 23 hearing beginning readers were followed over 2 years. The deaf children varied in their language backgrounds and preferred mode of communication. All children were given a range of literacy, cognitive and language-based tasks every 12 months. Deaf and hearing children made similar progress in literacy in the beginning stages of reading development and then their trajectories began to diverge. The longitudinal correlates of beginning reading in the deaf children were earlier vocabulary, letter-sound knowledge, and speechreading. Earlier phonological awareness was not a longitudinal correlate of reading ability once earlier reading levels were controlled. Only letter name knowledge was longitudinally related to spelling ability. Speechreading was also a strong longitudinal correlate of reading and spelling in the hearing children. The findings suggested that deaf and hearing children utilize slightly different reading strategies over the first 2 years of schooling.     

Prenatal parenthood

In this article, we discuss the intuitive knowledge mothers have of their unborn baby. We propose a shift in focus from caregivers' merely providing information to first listening to pregnant mothers as they share their intuitive knowledge of their baby. This approach enables mothers and fathers or partners to know they are already parents to their unborn baby and empowers them to get in touch with their baby's presence and who he or she is during pregnancy. This intuitive knowledge may be a protective behavior that will enable mothers to keep babies safe during pregnancy.     

Statistical learning of action: The role of conditional probability

Identification of distinct units within a continuous flow of human action is fundamental to action processing. Such segmentation may rest in part on statistical learning. In a series of four experiments, we examined what types of statistics people can use to segment a continuous stream involving many brief, goal-directed action elements. The results of Experiment 1 showed no evidence for sensitivity to conditional probability, whereas Experiment 2 displayed learning based on joint probability. In Experiment 3, we demonstrated that additional exposure to the input failed to engender sensitivity to conditional probability. However, the results of Experiment 4 showed that a subset of adults—namely, those more successful at identifying actions that had been seen more frequently than comparison sequences—were also successful at learning conditional-probability statistics. These experiments help to clarify the mechanisms subserving processing of intentional action, and they highlight important differences from, as well as similarities to, prior studies of statistical learning in other domains, including language.     

Two components of responding in Pavlovian lick suppression

The present research examined the temporal distribution of responding in a lick suppression paradigm. In Experiment 1, rats were trained with either a 30- or a 120-s conditioned stimulus (CS), which was followed either by a footshock (unconditioned stimulus [US]) or nothing. Licking during the CS was suppressed only in the former condition. Suppression was more pronounced early in the CS. In Experiment 2, rats were exposed to two 30-s or two 120-s CSs, with delivery of the shock being contingent on CS1 for half of the animals and on CS2 for the other half. For both the paired and the unpaired conditions, suppression at the beginning of CS1 was observed for all the groups. By discounting the possibility of generalization between CS1 and CS2, it appears that this initial suppression was not a conditioned response to the CS, but an unconditioned one due to mere exposure to the shock US.     

我的吻在哪里

小女孩儿名叫辛迪。她有一个和睦的家,日子过得很不错。但这个家从一开始就缺少了一样东西,只不过辛迪还没有意识到。辛迪9岁那年,有一天到朋友德比家去玩儿,留在那儿过夜。睡觉时,德比的妈妈给两个女孩儿盖上被子,并亲吻了她们,祝她们晚安。"我爱你。"德比的妈妈说。"我也爱你。"德比说。辛迪惊奇得睡不着觉。因为在这之前从没人吻     

博物馆之夜

夜闯博物馆我顿了顿,等侍者拿走菜单,才开口:“如果我们偷偷溜出旅馆,自己去博物馆,一定会出事的。”“不,不会的,托尼。”贾尼丝说,“我查过了,博物馆礼拜六晚上通常九点关门,我们只要赶在去看音乐剧的卡尔森小姐和其他同学回来之前回到旅馆就行了。”“来得及吗?”我有点担心。“这次作业我必须拿个好分数。”贾尼丝说,“否则,他们会把我从尖子班开除的。”“我也是。”贾森附和道,“上次我收集的资料不够,起码得再去一趟。”他们全都盯着我。点了点头:“好吧,反正我也要花更多的时间画我的动物草图,那些图要用在论文里。不过,在走之前,我…     

Hilbert‘s Sixteenth Problem and Its Generalization

This paper deals with Hilbert‘s 16th problem and its generalizations.The configurations of all closed branches of an algebraic curve of degreee n are discussed.The maximum number of sheets for an algebraic equation of degree n and the maximum number of limit cycles for a planar algebraic autonomous system are achieved.The author also considers different generalizations and some related problems.