ObjectiveCo-morbid insomnia and sleep apnea is a common and debilitating condition that is more difficult to treat compared to insomnia or sleep apnea-alone. Emerging evidence suggests that cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is effective in patients with COMISA, however, those with more severe sleep apnea and evidence of greater objective sleep disturbance may be less responsive to CBTi. Polysomnographic sleep study data has been used to predict treatment response to CBTi in patients with insomnia-alone, but not in patients with COMISA. (...) We used randomized controlled trial data to investigate polysomnographic predictors of insomnia improvement following CBTi, versus control in participants with COMISA.MethodsOne hundred and forty five participants with insomnia and sleep apnea [apnea-hypopnea index ≥ 15] were randomized to CBTi or no-treatment control. Mixed models were used to investigate the effect of pre-treatment AHI, sleep duration, and other traditional, and novel [quantitative electroencephalography ] polysomnographic predictors of between-group changes in Insomnia Severity Index scores from pre-treatment to post-treatment.ResultsCompared to control, CBTi was associated with greater ISI improvement among participants with; higher AHI, less wake after sleep onset, and less N3 sleep. No quantitative electroencephalographic, or other traditional polysomnographic variables predicted between-group ISI change.DiscussionAmong participants with COMISA, higher OSA severity predicted a greater treatment-response to CBTi, versus control. People with COMISA should be treated with CBTi, which is effective even in the presence of severe OSA and objective sleep disturbance. (shrink)

Automatic control of physiological variables is one of the most active areas in biomedical engineering. This paper is centered in the prediction of the analgesic variables evolution in patients undergoing surgery. The proposal is based on the use of hybrid intelligent modelling methods. The study considers the Analgesia Nociception Index to assess the pain in the patient and remifentanil as intravenous analgesic. The model proposed is able to make a one-step-ahead prediction of the remifentanil dose corresponding to the current (...) state of the patient. The input information is the previous remifentanil dose, the ANI variable and the electromyogram signal. Modelling techniques used are Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector machines for Regression combined with clustering methods. Both training and validation were done with a real dataset from different patients. Results obtained show the potential of this methodology to calculate the drug dose corresponding to a given analgesic state of the patient. (shrink)

Parental refusal of a recommended treatment is not an uncommon scenario in the neonatal intensive care unit. These refusals may be based upon the parents’ perceptions of their child’s projected quality of life. The inherent subjectivity of quality of life assessments, however, can exacerbate disagreement between parents and healthcare providers. We present a case of parental refusal of surgical intervention for necrotizing enterocolitis in an infant with Bartter syndrome and develop an ethical framework in which to consider the appropriateness of (...) parental refusal based upon an infant’s projected quality of life. (shrink)

OBJECTIVE: This paper addresses the question of the circumstances which lead clinicians to use legal coercion in the management of patients with severe anorexia nervosa, and explores similarities and differences between such formal coercion and other forms of 'strong persuasion' in patient management. METHOD: Logistic regression and other statistical analysis was undertaken on 75 first admissions for anorexia nervosa from a sample of 117 successive admissions to an eating disorder facility in New South Wales, Australia, where an eating disorder was (...) the primary diagnosis. Admissions with other primary diagnoses, such as bulimia nervosa (25 episodes), and entries with a co morbid diagnosis (e.g. depression or opiate overdose), were discarded, leaving 96 admissions by 75 individuals. RESULTS: Resort to measures of legal coercion into treatment was found to be associated with three main indicators: the patient's past history (number of previous admissions); the complexity of their condition (the number of other psychiatric co morbidities); and their current health risk (measured either by Body Mass Index or the risk of re-feeding syndrome). CONCLUSIONS: Our study is consistent with the few earlier studies about indicators for legal coercion in anorexia nervosa management, and suggests that clinicians use legal coercion very sparingly, distinguishing legal coercion from other forms of close clinical management of patients. (shrink)

We investigated the emergence of sociolinguistic indexicality using an artificial-language-learning paradigm. Sociolinguistic indexicality involves the association of linguistic variants with nonlinguistic social or contextual features. Any linguistic variant can acquire “constellations” of such indexical meanings, though they also exhibit an ordering, with first-order indices associated with particular speaker groups and higher-order indices targeting stereotypical attributes of those speakers. Much natural-language research has been conducted on this phenomenon, but little experimental work has focused on how indexicality emerges. Here, we present three (...) miniature artificial-language experiments designed to break ground on this question. Results show ready formation of first-order indexicality based on co-occurrence alone, with higher-order indexicality emerging as a result of extension to new speaker groups, modulated by the perceived practical importance of the indexed social feature. (shrink)

Older adults were considered a vulnerable group for the COVID-19 infection and its consequences, including problems with sleep.AimTo evaluate the prevalence of sleep disorders in older adults, to describe their sleep patterns, as well as to analyse if there were any changes in comparison with the period pre-pandemic.Materials and MethodsOnline survey used for data collection received answers from 914 elderly age range 65–90 years, from April to August 2020. Results: 71% of the sample reported a pre-existent sleep disorder, and some (...) of them worsened during the pandemic, especially Insomnia in women and Obstructive Sleep Apnea in men. No difference in sleep duration before and during the pandemic was found, although there was a worsening of some aspects related to sleep, such as sleep quality, sleep efficiency, awakening quality, sleep latency and nocturnal awakenings, especially in the female gender. Educational level influenced sleep latency, indicating higher sleep latency among those with primary education when compared with the ones with Ph.D.ConclusionThe pandemic had influenced sleep patterns among the elderly, as well as worsening of pre-existent sleep disorders. Female gender and low educational level were considered risk factors for sleep alterations, and high educational level, on its turn, appeared to be a protective factor. (shrink)

This paper examines the roles of indexicals in explicating speakers’ intentions and constructing common ground in the context of a continuum with two extreme endpoints, the intracultural at one end, and the intercultural at the other, within the framework of the socio-cognitive approach proposed and developed by Kecskes and Kecskes and Zhang. Thirteen participants from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds were recruited to represent varying degrees on the intra- and intercultural continuum. They were divided into three groups: American English speakers, (...) speakers from Asian countries, and a group of speakers, each of whom represents linguistically and culturally different countries. Eight extracts were drawn from the data of up to three hours of recordings, including discussions on one topic, and retrospective interviews retrieving the speakers’ intentions for using deixis. The results reveal that the closer the interlocutors were towards the intercultural communicative context endpoint on the continuum, the more they employed four types of indexicals as common ground construction strategies. Those strategies included the explicit manifestation of intentions, clarification, and confirmation of referent identification in actual situational context, elicitation of information, disambiguation and explanation of similar salient specifics in their home culture in an effort to sustain cooperative communication. This study enhances our understanding of different functions of indexicals in interactions on the intra- and intercultural continuum, which resulted from different levels of context interpretation and common ground. (shrink)

Three indexes have been compiled: authors of main articles (including our special departments such as ‘Projects in progress’ and ‘Notes and discussions’); essay reviews; and book reviews. Co-author...

Indexicals are linguistic expressions whose meaning remain stable while their reference shifts from utterance to utterance. Paradigmatic cases in English are ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’. Recently, a number of authors have argued that various constructions in our language harbor hidden indexicals. We say 'hidden' because these indexicals are unpronounced, even though they are alleged to be real linguistic components. Constructions taken by some authors to be associated, or to ‘co-habit’, with hidden indexicals include: definite descriptions and quantifiers more generally (hidden (...) indexical refers to a domain – Davies (1981), Westerstahl (1985), Soames (1986), Higginbotham (1988), Stanley and Williamson (1995)), propositional attitude verbs (hidden indexical refers to a mode of presentation – Richard (1990)), comparative adjectives (hidden indexical refers to comparison classes – Partee (1989), Kamp (1975), Ludlow (1989)). An interesting recent addition is the view that all nouns are associated with a hidden indexical referring to a domain restriction (Stanley and Szabo (2000), Stanley.. (shrink)

Artists, political scientists and art historians share with other professionals the challenge of apprehending and comprehending the complexity of the realities they address in their work. The co‐authors of our article coincide in the prominence they give to disturbing indexical signs (i.e., indications and traces of trauma and normalization in people, in political processes and works of art), as keys of interpretation and problematizing at the basis of their art works, their social work and their historic and political research. They (...) address the challenges and questions they face when interacting with the multiple dimensions inherent to the complex human behaviours, theoretical concepts and artistic statements on which they focus. Finally, they discuss possible aesthetic, ethical and philosophical implications of their proposals and perspectives. (shrink)

I happen to believe that though human experiences are to be characterized as pluralistic they are all rooted in the one reality. I would assume the thesis of pluralism but how could I maintain my belief in the realism? There are various discussions in favor of realism but they appear to stay within a particular paradigm so to be called “internal realism”. In this paper I would try to justify my belief in the reality by discussing a special use of (...) indexicals. I will argue for my indexical realism by advancing the thesis that indexicals can be used as an inter-agentic referential term. Three arguments for the thesis will be presented. The first argument derives from a revision of Kaplan-Kvart’s notion of exportation. Their notions of exportation of singular terms can be analyzed as intra-agentic exportation in the context of a single speaker and theirs may be revised so as to be an inter-agentic exportation in the context of two speakers who use the same indexicals. The second is an argument from the notion of causation which is specifically characterized in the context of inter-theoretic reference. I will argue that any two theories may each say “this” in order to refer what is beyond its own theory. Two theories address themselves to ‘this’ same thing though what ‘this’ represents in each theory turn out to be different objects all together. The third argument is an argument which is based on a possibility of natural reference. Reference is used to be taken mostly as a 3-place predicate: Abe refers an object oi with an expression ej. The traditional notion of reference is constructive and anthropocentric. But I would argue that natural reference is a reference that we humans come to recognize among denumerably many objects in natural states: at a moment mi in a natural state there is a referential relation among objects o1, o2, o3, . . , oj, o j+1, . . which interact to each other as agents of information processors. Natural reference is an original reference which is naturally given and to which humans are passive as we derivatively refer it by using ‘this’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:53. AN INDEX OF HUME'S REFERENCES IN A TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE The index below of Hume's references in the Treatise te the works of other authors excludes those which are accurate and full in his text (of which there are few) and those which are so general, e.g., to Spinoza's atheism, that no passage is specifiable. Hume mentions other writings, for which this index is (...) compiled, in several different ways. Occasionally he mentions the author's name, the title of his book and gives a reference which is less specific than it could be. These have been identified. Often he mentions an author's name only, e.g., de Retz, and in such cases the fullest possible reference has been given. One of Hume's notable intellectual gifts was his ability to distil several pages of a book into one or two sentences of crisp and accurate synthesis. (This skill is most apparent in his summaries of articles in Bayle' s Dictionary in his "Notes on Philosophy", of which the manuscript is in the Royal Society of Edinburgh Library.) In these instances, page references are impossible and the closest indication one can give is a section or chapter. Some of his references are anonymous, e.g., as an 'elegant writer' says, and so are some quotations. These have been identified with one exception. One anonymous reference (number 24 below) requires explanation because it is both anachronistic and interesting. Hume refers to an observation by "a late eminent philosopher". It is anachronistic because the book to which he refers was published after the Treatise; it is interesting because it provides further evidence of Hutcheson's influence on Hume and the latter' s regard for him. The explanation, for Hutcheson was still alive when Vol.11 of the Treatise appeared in 1739, is that 'late' is here being used in the sense of 'recent' - Hutcheson himself uses the word in the same way in referring to Mandeville when the latter was 54. alive. (An enquiry concerning moral good and evil. Section 1, VI.) Further, the System circulated widely among Hutcheson's friends in Scotland and over so many years that it finally appeared posthumously. That Hume could not cite a published work also accounts for the anonymity of the reference to someone he admired. It is often impossible to determine in which language or in which edition Hume read a particular author. Where there is evidence as to which language he used, the title has been given in that language. There are now so many extant editions of the Treatise that Volume, Part, Chapter and Section references are given, as well as the pagination of Selby-Bigge' s edition, so that readers of other editions may be able to use the index. 1.Vol. 1. Title-page. Tacitus, The Histories, Bk. I. 1. 2.Part 1, Sect. 1, p. 2, n. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, Bk. I, Chap. I, 8. 3.Sect. VII, p. 17, n. George Berkeley, A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Introductixi, Sect. 7, e_t seq. 4.Part II, Sect. II, p. 30, n. Nicolas de Malezieu, Elementa Geometrica. 5.Sect. Ill, p. 35, n. John Locke, Essay, Bk. II, Chap. XIV. 6.Sect. IV, p. 43, n. Antoine Arnauld, La logique ou l'art de penser. Part I, Chap. 5. (In some editions Pierre Nicole is named as co-author. The book is also known as the Port Royal Logic). 7.Sect. IV, p. 46, n. Isaac Barrow, Mathematical Lectures. 8.Part III, Sect. Ill, p. 80, n. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy, Part Second, Chap. 9. And Tripos : in Three Discourse. Ill, of Liberty and Necessity. 55. Sect. Ill, p. 80, n. e.g., Samuel Clarke, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, Props. I-III, et. seq. 10.Sect. Ill, p. 81, n. John Locke, Essay, Bk. IV, Chap. X. 11.Sect. VIII, p. 100 and appendix Vol. Ill, p. 630. Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, Bk. V. 1.2. 12.Sect. XIII, p. 153. Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz, Mémoires, Bk. III. The second 'observation' is from Book... (shrink)

The study’s objective is to analyze the structure of knowledge organization studies conducted worldwide. This applied research has been conducted with a scientometrics approach using the co-word analysis. The research records consisted of all articles published in the journals of Knowledge Organization and Cataloging & Classification Quarterly and keywords related to the field of knowledge organization indexed in Web of Science from 1900 to 2019, in which 17,950 records were analyzed entirely with plain text format. The total number of keywords (...) was 25,480, which was reduced to 12,478 keywords after modifications and removal of duplicates. Then, 115 keywords with a frequency of at least 18 were included in the final analysis, and finally, the co-word network was drawn. BibExcel, UCINET, VOSviewer, and SPSS software were used to draw matrices, analyze co-word networks, and draw dendrograms. Furthermore, strategic diagrams were drawn using Excel software. The keywords “information retrieval,” “classification,” and “ontology” are among the most frequently used keywords in knowledge organization articles. Findings revealed that “Ontology*Semantic Web”, “Digital Library*Information Retrieval” and “Indexing*Information Retrieval” are highly frequent co-word pairs, respectively. The results of hierarchical clustering indicated that the global research on knowledge organization consists of eight main thematic clusters; the largest is specified for the topic of “classification, indexing, and information retrieval.” The smallest clusters deal with the topics of “data processing” and “theoretical concepts of information and knowledge organization” respectively. Cluster 1 (cataloging standards and knowledge organization) has the highest density, while Cluster 5 (classification, indexing, and information retrieval) has the highest centrality. According to the findings of this research, the keyword “information retrieval” has played a significant role in knowledge organization studies, both as a keyword and co-word pair. In the co-word section, there is a type of related or general topic relationship between co-word pairs. Results indicated that information retrieval is one of the main topics in knowledge organization, while the theoretical concepts of knowledge organization have been neglected. In general, the co-word structure of knowledge organization research indicates the multiplicity of global concepts and topics studied in this field globally. (shrink)

In the past two decades, especially after the financial crisis of 2007–09, the literature for examining the availability of integration between the stock exchanges in developed and developing markets has grown. The importance of this topic stems from the significant implications of the linkage between exchange markets on various decisions taken by interested parties, such as policymakers and investors, in the decisions for portfolio diversification. This study examines the relationship between a developing stock exchange index, Amman Stock Exchange (...) class='Hi'>Index, and the number of international indices, including S&P 500, NASDAQ, Nikkei, DAX, CAC, and HSI for 2008-2019. To validate the availability of the linkage between the indices, the author includes various tests of a correlation coefficient, stepwise regression analysis, and artificial neural network. Despite the results indicating that the ANN is more efficient than linear regression in investigating the availability of the relationship between ASEI and international indices, stepwise regression and neural network support this relationship. Furthermore, ANN results revealed that the S&P 500 index and year have the most substantial relationship with ASEI. Our research is theoretically and practically important; policymakers and investors can benefit from our findings. Future studies may explore the effect of different international stock market indices on ASEI or other developing markets. Further studies can use macroeconomic factors to build prediction models for stock market indices. (shrink)

This study aims to identify research trends of scaffolding in the field of science education. To this end, both descriptive analysis and co-word analysis were conducted to examine the selected articles published in the Social Science Citation Index journals from 2000 to 2019. A total of 637 papers were retrieved as research samples through rounds of searching in Web of Science database. Overall, this study reveals a growing trend of science educators' academic publications about scaffolding in the recent two (...) decades. In these sample papers, from 1,487 non-repeated keywords, we extracted 286 author-defined keywords shared by at least two studies as a benchmark dictionary. A series of co-word analyses were then conducted based on the dictionary to reveal the underlying co-occurring relationships of the words in title and abstract of the sample papers. Results showed that “scaffolding,” “support,” and “design” were the top three most frequently used keywords during 2000 and 2019. Visualization of co-word networks in each 5-year period further helps clarify both educators' common research foci and relevant research trends. Derived discussion and potential research directions are also provided. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how Peirce’s core definition of Index extends even to Objects which do not co-occur in space and time with their referent. Although the arguments are philosophical in nature, they are supported by developmental and empirical findings. The case of absent Objects as constituting Objects of indexical use is the primary focus; and rationale is offered from Peirce’s early and later work to bolster this claim. The analysis proffers the bold assertion that Index, especially in its (...) Degenerate use without an Interpretant, qualifies as the most primary sign vehicle, and that Index to absent Objects determines whether indexical use is Degenerate or Genuine. (shrink)

The co-reporting theory holds that for every A-sentence-token there is a B-sentence that differs in sense but reports the same event orstate of affairs. Thus, if it is now t7, what is reported by now tokening “It is t7 now” is identical with what is reported by tokening “It is t7 at t7.” Quentin Smith has argued that the fact that the sentence-tokens differ in sense but are co-reporting is compatible with the A-theory supposition that their difference in sense consists (...) in the fact that the A-sentence-token alone conveys the information that t7 has an irreducible A-property of presentness. I counter argue that every time the indexical “now” is tokened it expresses, not an irreducible A-property, but a unique individual essence of a moment of time which can be apprehended only at that time. (shrink)

This article demonstrates how Peirce’s core definition of Index extends even to Objects which do not co-occur in space and time with their referent. Although the arguments are philosophical in nature, they are supported by developmental and empirical findings. The case of absent Objects as constituting Objects of indexical use is the primary focus; and rationale is offered from Peirce’s early and later work to bolster this claim. The analysis proffers the bold assertion that Index, especially in its (...) Degenerate use without an Interpretant, qualifies as the most primary sign vehicle, and that Index to absent Objects determines whether indexical use is Degenerate or Genuine. (shrink)

We give several characterizations of weakly minimal abelian structures. In two special cases, dual in a sense to be made explicit below, we give precise structure theorems: 1. When the only finite 0-definable subgroup is {0}, or equivalently 0 is the only algebraic element (the co-strongly minimal case); 2. When the theory of the structure is strongly minimal. In the first case, we identify the abelian structure as a "near-subspace" A of a vector space V over a division ring D (...) with its induced structure, with possibly some collection of distinguished subgroups of A of finite index in A and (up to $acl(\emptyset)$ ) no further structure. In the second, the structure is that of V/A for a vector space and near-subspace as above, with the only further possible structure some collection of distinguished points. Here a near-subspace of V is a subgroup A such that for any nonzero d ∈ D, the index of $A\cap dA$ in A is finite. We also show that any weakly minimal abelian structure is a reduct of a weakly minimal module. (shrink)

A collection of twelve essays by John Perry and two essays he co-authored, this book deals with various problems related to "self-locating beliefs": the sorts of beliefs one expresses with indexicals and demonstratives, like "I" and "this." Postscripts have been added to a number of the essays discussing criticisms by authors such as Gareth Evans and Robert Stalnaker. Included with such well-known essays as "Frege on Demonstratives," "The Problem of the Essential Indexical," "From Worlds to Situations," and "The Prince and (...) the Phone Booth" are a number of important essays that have been less accessible and that discuss important aspects of Perry's views, referred to as "Critical Referentialism," on the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

BackgroundDeciphering the amount of work provided by different co-authors of a scientific paper has been a recurrent problem in science. Despite the myriad of metrics available, the scientific community still largely relies on the position in the list of authors to evaluate contributions, a metric that attributes subjective and unfounded credit to co-authors. We propose an easy to apply, universally comparable and fair metric to measure and report co-authors contribution in the scientific literature. MethodsThe proposed Author Contribution Index (ACI) (...) is based on contribution percentages provided by the authors, preferably at the time of submission. Researchers can use ACI to compare the contributions of different authors, describe the contribution profile of a particular researcher or analyse how contribution changes through time. We provide such an analysis based on contribution percentages provided by 97 scientists from the field of ecology who voluntarily responded to an online anonymous survey.ResultsACI is simple to understand and to implement because it is based solely on percentage contributions and the number of co-authors. It provides a continuous score that reflects the contribution of one author as compared to the average contribution of all other authors. For example, ACI(i) = 3, means that author i contributed three times more than what the other authors contributed on average. Our analysis comprised 836 papers published in 2014-2016 and revealed patterns of ACI values that relate to career advancement.ConclusionThere are many examples of author contribution indices that have been proposed but none has really been adopted by scientific journals. Many of the proposed solutions are either too complicated, not accurate enough or not comparable across articles, authors and disciplines. The author contribution index presented here addresses these three major issues and has the potential to contribute to more transparency in the science literature. If adopted by scientific journals, it could provide job seekers, recruiters and evaluating bodies with a tool to gather information that is essential to them and cannot be easily and accurately obtained otherwise. We also suggest that scientists use the index regardless of whether it is implemented by journals or not. (shrink)