Search

Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are multimodal communicators. However, in classroom interactions involving children and staff, achieving mutual understanding and accomplishing task-oriented goals by attending to the child's unaided AAC can be challenging. This study draws on excerpts of video recordings of interactions in a classroom for 6-9-year-old children who used AAC to explore how three child participants used the range of multimodal resources available to them - vocal, movement-based, and gestural, technological, temporal - to shape (and to some degree, co-control) classroom interactions. Our research was concerned with examining achievements and problems in establishing a sense of common ground and the realization of child agency. Through detailed multimodal analysis, this paper renders visible different types of practices rejecting a request for clarification, drawing new parties into a conversation, disrupting whole-class teacher talk-through which the children in the study voiced themselves in persuasive ways. It concludes by suggesting that multimodal accounts paint a more nuanced picture of children's resourcefulness and conversational asymmetry that highlights children's agency amidst material, semiotic, and institutional constraints.

This article explores the nature of the construct underlying classroom-based English for academic purpose (EAP) oral presentation assessments, which are used, in part, to determine admission to programmes of study at UK universities. Through analysis of qualitative data (from questionnaires, interviews, rating discussions, and fieldnotes), the article highlights how, in EAP settings, there is a tendency for the rating criteria and EAP teacher assessors to sometimes focus too narrowly on particular spoken linguistic aspects of oral presentations. This is in spite of student assessees drawing on, and teacher assessors valuing, the multimodal communicative affordances available in oral presentation performances. To better avoid such construct underrepresentation, oral presentation tasks should be acknowledged and represented in rating scales, teacher assessor decision-making, and training in EAP contexts.

For agentive and influential involvement in online communities, language learners and teachers need to develop critical digital literacy (CDL), conceptualized by Darvin (2017) as an awareness of "how meanings are represented in ways that maintain and reproduce relations of power" (p. 5) and thus privilege some and marginalize others online. Virtual exchange (VE) provides an ideal socio-cultural and socio-semiotic context for fostering CDL (Hauck, 2019) as it is an educational intervention that is--by default--digitally mediated. In this contribution, we examine the employment of semiotic practices for multimodal representation and how they "shape power relations with others" (Bezemer & Jewitt, 2009, p. 1), thereby drawing on a social semiotic approach (Bezemer & Kress, 2016) to CDL (Bilki et al., 2023). Our insights stem from a six-week VE between two higher education institutions in Turkey and the UK, which brought together 48 future English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers. The task-based exchanges yielded a rich dataset which allows us to illustrate how CDL is materially achieved through transformative processes observed in multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal interactions. Our findings speak to Kern's (2014, 2015) appeal for a relational pedagogy and highlight the need to promote CDL in EFL teaching and teacher education to foster critical reflection on meaning-making conventions while exercising agency to establish powerful online relations with others.

Multimodal Learning Analytics (MMLA) has huge potential for extending the work beyond traditional learning analytics for the capabilities of leveraging multiple data modalities (e.g. physiological data, digital tracing data). To shed a light on its applications and academic development, a systematic bibliometric analysis was conducted in this paper. Specifically, we examine the following aspects: (1) Analyzing the yearly publication and citation trends since the year 2010; (2) Recognizing the most prolific countries, institutions, and authors in this field; (3) Identifying the collaborative patterns among countries, institutions, and authors, respectively; (4) Tracing the evolving procedure of the applied keywords and development of the research topics during the last decade. These analytic tasks were conducted on 194 carefully selected articles published since 2010. The analytical results revealed an increasing trend in the number of publications and citations, identified the prominent institutions and scholars with significant academic contributions to the area, and detected the topics (e.g. characterizing learning processes using multimodal data, implementing ubiquitous learning platforms) that received the most attention. Finally, we also highlighted the current research hotspots attempting to initiate potential interdisciplinary collaborations to promote further progress in the area of MMLA.

This study explores a multimodal approach to teaching contemporary Chinese culture to foster university students' intercultural awareness and intercultural communication competence via a third space. Two universities in the UK took part in the study where the course contents moved from static notions of culture-as-fact in terms of national traditions to digital presentation of and live discussion about contemporary China. The pedagogy includes discussing Chinese celebrities' digital videos and films on digital platforms, and students' digital presentations in multimodal modes. Findings from students' comments in the module evaluations, students' reflective essays, and lecturers' observations prove the viability of this approach, and the data analyzed via themes address the function of the third space, the application of multimodality, and approaches to intercultural awareness and intercultural communication competence. The paper suggests that multimodality can be an effective approach to advancing theory and practice in future contemporary culture teaching.

While integrated delivery of anatomy and radiology can support undergraduate anatomical education, the interpretation of complex three-dimensional spatial relationships in cross-sectional and radiological images is likely to be demanding for novices. Due to the value of technology-enhanced and multimodal strategies, it was hypothesized that simultaneous digital and physical learning could enhance student understanding of cross-sectional anatomy. A novel learning approach introduced at a United Kingdom university medical school combined visualization table-based thoracic cross-sections and digital models with a three-dimensional printed heart. A mixed-method experimental and survey approach investigated student perceptions of challenging anatomical areas and compared the multimodal intervention to a two-dimensional cross-section control. Analysis of seven-point Likert-type responses of new medical students (n = 319) found that clinical imaging (mean 5.64 SD ± 1.20) was significantly more challenging (P < 0.001) than surface anatomy (4.19 ± 1.31) and gross anatomy (4.92 ± 1.22). Pre-post testing of students who used the intervention during their first anatomy class at medical school (n = 229), identified significant increases (P < 0.001) in thoracic cross-sectional anatomy interpretation performance (mean 31.4% ± 15.3) when compared to the subsequent abdominal control activity (24.1% ± 17.6). Student test scores were independent of mental-rotation ability. As depicted on a seven-point Likert-type scale, the intervention may have contributed to students considering cross-sectional interpretation of thoracic images (4.2 ± 1.23) as significantly less challenging (P < 0.001) than comparable abdominal images (5.59 ± 1.14). These findings could have implications for how multimodal cross-sectional anatomy learning approaches are implemented within medical curricula.

Surgical prehabilitation aims to optimise patients' physiological reserves to better withstand the stress of surgery, reduce the risk of postoperative complications, and promote a faster and optimal recovery. The purpose of this commentary is to outline the key aspects of prehabilitation before surgery for cancer which seem to impact its effectiveness and wider implementation. Particular attention is paid to the role and integration of resistance training programmes as a key component of multimodal prehabilitation for patients with cancer. We firstly analyse some of the barriers currently hindering the implementation of prehabilitation programmes in the National Health Service (United Kingdom). Later, we describe essential aspects of resistance training design, such as exercise modality and order execution, volume and intensity, rest periods between sets or exercises, and workout frequency. Furthermore, we propose a methodology to use the perception of effort to control patients' progression during a prehabilitation programme., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Roberto Laza-Cagigas is the Operations Lead at QuestPrehabTM (formerly Kent and Medway Prehab). Tara Rampal is the CMO of QuestPrehabTM (formerly Kent and Medway Prehab). Fernando Naclerio, Marcos Seijo, and Ian Swaine declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Stylistics is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic analysis of style in language, particularly literary style. Poetry has been a staple of stylistics. Creative performance of poems and stylistic analysis, however, have rarely been bedfellows. I showcase a stylistics pedagogy for creatively interpreting poetry in higher education where students make digitally multimodal storied interpretations of poems. The pedagogy reflects contemporary internet mashup culture, recognising that students inhabit a "postdigital" world where commonplace software and resources offer opportunities for DIY juxtaposition of audio and video for different purposes -- artistic, comedic, etc. An advantage of such "Postdigital Stylistics" is that it integrates performance-based readers, marginalised in exegetical reading practices associated with print. I illustrate the pedagogy with a student video of Charles Bukowski's poem "the bluebird", accessible analysis of its foregrounded style, and explanation of how this analysis -- crucially -- motivates shot design.

Children who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) are multimodal communicators. However, in classroom interactions involving children and staff, achieving mutual understanding and accomplishing task-oriented goals by attending to the child's unaided AAC can be challenging. This study draws on excerpts of video recordings of interactions in a classroom for 6–9-year-old children who used AAC to explore how three child participants used the range of multimodal resources available to them – vocal, movement-based, and gestural, technological, temporal – to shape (and to some degree, co-control) classroom interactions. Our research was concerned with examining achievements and problems in establishing a sense of common ground and the realization of child agency. Through detailed multimodal analysis, this paper renders visible different types of practices rejecting a request for clarification, drawing new parties into a conversation, disrupting whole-class teacher talk-through which the children in the study voiced themselves in persuasive ways. It concludes by suggesting that multimodal accounts paint a more nuanced picture of children's resourcefulness and conversational asymmetry that highlights children's agency amidst material, semiotic, and institutional constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Approximately 3 million people in the United Kingdom are currently living with or beyond cancer. People undergoing treatment for cancer are at risk of complications following treatment. Increasing evidence supports the role of rehabilitation (including prehabilitation) in enhancing psychological and physical well-being in patients with cancer and improving outcomes. Active Together is an evidence-based, multimodal rehabilitation service for patients with cancer, providing support to help patients prepare for and recover from treatment. This paper presents the evaluation protocol for the Active Together service, aiming to determine its impact on patient-reported outcomes and clinical endpoints, as well as understand processes and mechanisms that influence its delivery and outcomes., Methods: This evaluation comprises an outcome and process evaluation, with service implementation data integrated into the analysis of outcome measures. The outcome evaluation will assess changes in outcomes of patients that attend the service and compare health care resource use against historical data. The process evaluation will use performance indicators, semistructured interviews, and focus groups to explore mechanisms of action and contextual factors influencing delivery and outcomes. Integrating psychological change mechanisms with outcome data might help to clarify complex causal pathways within the service., Conclusions: Evidence to support the role of multimodal rehabilitation before, during, and after cancer treatment is increasing. The translation of that evidence into practice is less advanced. Findings from this evaluation will contribute to our understanding of the real-world impact of cancer rehabilitation and strengthen the case for widespread adoption of rehabilitation into routine care for people with cancer.

Background: Suicide is the leading cause of death of children and young people under 35 in the UK, and suicide rates are rising in this age group. Schools are considered an appropriate and logical setting for youth suicide prevention activities, with universal, selective, and indicated approaches all demonstrating efficacy. Given that international best practice recommends suicide prevention programmes combine these approaches, and that to date this has not been done in school settings in the UK, this study aims to evaluate the feasibility of delivering a suicide prevention programme incorporating universal, selective, and indicated components in UK schools., Methods: This study is a feasibility cluster-randomised controlled trial (RCT) of an adapted version of the Multimodal Approach to Preventing Suicide in Schools (MAPSS) programme. The programme, initially developed in Australia, involves delivering universal psychoeducation to all pupils, screening them for suicide risk, and delivering Internet-based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (Reframe IT-UK) to those students identified as being at high-risk for suicide. The programme will be trialled in six secondary schools in Northwest England and will target Year 10 students (14- and 15-year-olds). The primary aims are to assess: 1) the acceptability and safety of delivering MAPSS in a school setting in the UK; 2) the social validity of the MAPSS programme; and 3) the feasibility of delivering a large-scale, appropriately powered, cluster-RCT and economic evaluation of this intervention in the future. Secondary aims are to assess changes over time in mental health and wellbeing outcomes., Discussion: This study is the first to evaluate a suicide prevention programme comprising universal, selective, and indicated components in UK schools. If the programme is found to be feasible, it could be more widely tested in schools and may ultimately lead to reduced rates of suicide and suicidal behaviour in young people., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Ashworth et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Factual welfare television has been described as stigmatising and individualising – representing its participants as failures in a meritocratic society. This paper, however, revisits the 2014 British documentary Benefits Street and argues that it tends to humanise its cast, showing them as trapped in two social structures of benefits (i.e. the social security system) and street (i.e. the deprived local community). Using a multimodal critical discourse studies approach, the paper analyses the verbal, visual and sound tracks of the most popular episode to explore how these modes combine to portray the structure of benefits as stultifying, and the street as a restrictive community. These structures are selectively foregrounded at the expense of the wider, arguably more impactful structures of neoliberal austerity and welfare reform that characterised the political economy of Britain in 2014. The residents' troubles, therefore, appear to be grounded in the two restrictive structures of benefits and street, and individualistic post-welfarism – surely implicated in their problems – becomes the solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Importance: The United Kingdom Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening (UKCTOCS) is the largest randomized clinical trial to evaluate screening's impact on ovarian cancer mortality, assigning women to multimodal screening (MMS) with serum cancer antigen 125 (CA-125) interpreted using a risk algorithm. If the MMS screening method is eventually shown to reduce mortality and be cost-effective, then it may be accepted by the medical community as a feasible screening tool., Objective: To estimate the cost-effectiveness of an MMS screening program in the United States., Design, Setting, and Participants: A Markov simulation model was constructed using data from UKCTOCS to compare MMS with no screening in the United States. Screening would begin at the age of 50 years for women in the general population. Published estimates of the long-term effect of MMS screening on ovarian cancer mortality and the trial's published hazard ratios were used to simulate mortality estimates up to 40 years from start of screening. Base-case costs included CA-125, ultrasound, and false-positive work-up results, in addition to a risk algorithm cost estimate of $100. The utility and costs of ovarian cancer treatment were incorporated into the model., Interventions: Screening strategies varied by costs of the algorithm and treatment for advanced ovarian cancer, rates of screening compliance, ovarian cancer incidence, and extrapolation of ovarian cancer mortality., Main Outcomes and Measures: Costs, quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), and mortality reduction of ovarian cancer screening., Results: Multimodal screening is both more expensive and more effective in reducing ovarian cancer mortality over a lifetime than no screening. After accounting for uncertainty in the underlying parameters, screening women starting at age 50 years with MMS is cost-effective 70% of the time, when decision makers are willing to pay $150 000 per QALY. Screening reduced mortality by 15%, with an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) ranging from $106 187 (95% CI, $97 496-$127 793) to $155 256 (95% CI, $150 369-$198 567)., Conclusions and Relevance: Ovarian cancer screening is potentially cost-effective in the United States depending on final significance of mortality reduction and cost of the CA-125 risk algorithm. These results are limited by uncertainty around the effect of screening on ovarian cancer mortality beyond the 11 years of UKCTOCS.

The debate regarding the inclusion of children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) in mainstream education in the UK partly revolves around what makes the classroom environment inclusive. Through the potential offered by the specific qualitative methodologies employed, this study aimed to explore the development of teachers' pedagogical practices and learning relationships upon the inclusive education of children with special educational needs and disabilities in two primary school classes. The study considered the views and behaviours of primary school pupils with and without special educational needs, primary school teachers and teaching assistants (TAs) in one mainstream school. Drawing on a multimodal approach to discourse analysis to account for the complex relationships between symbolic and non-verbal modes of classroom signification, the study explored how meaning is produced in classrooms and children's modes of communication, as well as in teachers' practices. The two classes are compared on the basis of teaching observations, interviews, transcripts of dialogues, and analyses of classroom organisation and decoration. This paper suggests that the greatest influence on the educational and social outcomes of students with special educational needs is the behaviour and practices of the classroom teacher.

Accelerated brain aging (ABA) intricately links with age-associated neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases, emphasizing the critical need for a nuanced exploration of heterogeneous ABA patterns. This investigation leveraged data from the UK Biobank (UKB) for a comprehensive analysis, utilizing structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI), diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI), and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) from 31,621 participants. Pre-processing employed tools from the FMRIB Software Library (FSL, version 5.0.10), FreeSurfer, DTIFIT, and MELODIC, seamlessly integrated into the UKB imaging processing pipeline. The Lasso algorithm was employed for brain-age prediction, utilizing derived phenotypes obtained from brain imaging data. Subpopulations of accelerated brain aging (ABA) and resilient brain aging (RBA) were delineated based on the error between actual age and predicted brain age. The ABA subgroup comprised 1949 subjects (experimental group), while the RBA subgroup comprised 3203 subjects (control group). Semi-supervised heterogeneity through discriminant analysis (HYDRA) refined and characterized the ABA subgroups based on distinctive neuroimaging features. HYDRA systematically stratified ABA subjects into three subtypes: SubGroup 2 exhibited extensive gray-matter atrophy, distinctive white-matter patterns, and unique connectivity features, displaying lower cognitive performance; SubGroup 3 demonstrated minimal atrophy, superior cognitive performance, and higher physical activity; and SubGroup 1 occupied an intermediate position. This investigation underscores pronounced structural and functional heterogeneity in ABA, revealing three subtypes and paving the way for personalized neuroprotective treatments for age-related neurological, neuropsychiatric, and neurodegenerative diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the project discussed in this article, 30 11-year olds made an animated film in the machinima style, influenced by both film and game culture, and using a 3-D animation software tool, Moviestorm. The processes and products of the project will be analysed using a social semiotic/multimodal approach, exploring the social interests behind the integration of visual design, music, voice acting, story-writing, and animation which characterise the project. The outcomes suggest a need to move beyond established thinking and practice in media literacy practice and research in three ways. Firstly, we need to develop moving image education to recognise new genres and cultures. Secondly, we need to recognise that such productions are intensely multimodal, involving music, drama, story-writing, and visual design. Thirdly, such projects demand connected pedagogy across media, literacy, music, drama, computer science, and art.

Lung cancer (LC) is the most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the UK due to delayed diagnosis. The existing literature establishes a variety of factors which contribute to this, including the misjudgement of anatomical structure by doctors and radiologists. This study set out to develop a solution which utilises multiple modalities in order to detect the presence of LC. A review of the existing literature established failings within methods to exploit rich intermediate feature representations, such that it can capture complex multimodal associations between heterogenous data sources. The methodological approach involved the development of a novel machine learning (ML) model to facilitate quantitative analysis. The proposed solution, named EMM-LC Fusion, extracts intermediate features from a pre-trained modified AlignedXception model and concatenates these with linearly inflated features of Clinical Data Elements (CDE). The implementation was evaluated and compared against existing literature using F1 score, average precision (AP), and area under curve (AUC) as metrics. The findings presented in this study show a statistically significant improvement (p < 0.05) upon the previous fusion method, with an increase in F-Score from 0.402 to 0.508. The significance of this establishes that the extraction of intermediate features produces a fertile environment for the detection of intermodal relationships for the task of LC classification. This research also provides an architecture to facilitate the future implementation of alternative biomarkers for lung cancer, one of the acknowledged limitations of this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the lack of formalised methodology for analysing learner interaction data created in conversations on audiographic platforms. First the author shows the importance of conversations in language learning and the need for researchers to understand how users learn from these interactions. Then the author establishes that appropriate methodologies for investigating interaction data collected from online platforms have as yet emerged neither from the field of computer-assisted language learning nor from conversation analysis (CA). Three brief multimodal conversations involving language learners in platform-based tutorials are analysed. The author shows that linguistic means of communication are only one way in which to achieve learning aims and other communication modes are identified. The author concludes that the analysis and interpretation of such exchanges can be improved by a crossdisciplinary approach which consists of augmenting constructs drawn from CA with selected constructs from social semiotics.

To develop and validate a deep learning (DL) system for predicting each point on visual fields (VFs) from disc and OCT imaging and derive a structure–function mapping. Retrospective, cross-sectional database study. A total of 6437 patients undergoing routine care for glaucoma in 3 clinical sites in the United Kingdom. OCT and infrared reflectance (IR) optic disc imaging were paired with the closest VF within 7 days. EfficientNet B2 was used to train 2 single-modality DL models to predict each of the 52 sensitivity points on the 24-2 VF pattern. A policy DL model was designed and trained to fuse the 2 model predictions. Pointwise mean absolute error (PMAE). A total of 5078 imaging scans to VF pairs were used as a held-out test set to measure the final performance. The improvement in PMAE with the policy model was 0.485 (0.438, 0.533) decibels (dB) compared with the IR image of the disc alone and 0.060 (0.047, 0.073) dB with to the OCT alone. The improvement with the policy fusion model was statistically significant (P < 0.0001). Occlusion masking shows that the DL models learned the correct structure–function mapping in a data-driven, feature agnostic fashion. The multimodal, policy DL model performed the best; it provided explainable maps of its confidence in fusing data from single modalities and provides a pathway for probing the structure–function relationship in glaucoma. We used a large, real-world dataset to train a multimodal interpretable deep learning method to predict visual field sensitivity values in patients with glaucoma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounding is a fundamental human practice for cooperation and collaboration in a joint activity, when more than two people interact. Emergency care is one such interactive situation, and whether a trauma team can efficiently establish and increment their common ground at an appropriate timing during the complex and fluid activity of emergency medical treatment is key to maximise collective competence to best perform as a trauma team. This article investigates recurrent patterns in the grounding process between the trauma team leader and the members, comparing the practices between Japan and the UK, using an eye-tracking device. The embodied practice of grounding was multimodally described, applying both quantitative multimodal corpus analytic and qualitative interactional linguistic approaches. The analysis has shown that five grounding episodes reoccurred, most of which were more ego-centric and one of them ba -centric interactions, drawing on intersubjectivity and the theory of ba in Western and Eastern philosophy respectively. • Compares grounding processes in simulated trauma interactions in the UK and Japan. • Multimodally investigates trauma leaders' requesting, using an eye-tracker. • The interactions in the UK data are ego-centric, while those in Japan ba -centric. • To efficiently establish a common ground is key to maximise collective competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The study reported in this article focuses on an exploration of the role and nature of play in young children's use of toys that connect physical and digital domains. Purpose: The purpose of the article is to explore the nature of the connections that are made in play that transverses physical and virtual domains. The article draws on posthuman theory to explain some of the complexity of the play that occurs in these contexts. Research Design: The research took place in the United Kingdom, and the overall study consisted of four distinct stages: (a) A survey of 2,000 parents of children aged 0-5 years, focusing on children's access to and use of tablet apps; (b) case studies of preschool children's use of apps in six families; (c) observations of children aged 3-5 years in a school using apps; and (d) content and multimodal analysis of apps. The focus of this article is on (b), although some of the survey data from the first stage of the study are also shared to provide context. Data Collection and Analysis: The focus for this article is the play of a three-year-old girl, Amy. In addition to ethnographic data constructed over a 2-month period (field notes, interviews, photographs, and films), Amy's mother collected data between the researchers' visits by making films of her daughter's use of apps. Amy also collected data herself by wearing a GoPro chestcam. The data that inform the analysis in this article are from a film created by Amy (11:05 minutes) and a video filmed by Amy's mother (5.21 minutes). Data were both inductively analyzed using multimodal (inter)action analysis and deductively analyzed using a posthumanist approach. Findings: Amy's play connected digital and nondigital components in complex ways. An app and related physical object that typify the Internet of Toys provided opportunities for Amy's play to take place across physical and digital domains, and the inorganic objects embedded in the electronic toy and related app were an important element of this play, shaping Amy's responses at times. However, Amy's play was not always determined by the design of the electronic objects, and she demonstrated agency within play episodes. There were multiple connections made across a variety of domains/dimensions, which added to the complexity of the play. Conclusions/Recommendations: Young children's play increasingly connects digital and nondigital domains, and posthumanist theories can enhance understanding of how connections across these time/spaces are made.

Outliers in neuroimaging represent spurious data or the data of unusual phenotypes that deserve special attention such as clinical follow‐up. Outliers have usually been detected in a supervised or semi‐supervised manner for labeled neuroimaging cohorts. There has been much less work using unsupervised outlier detection on large unlabeled cohorts like the UK Biobank brain imaging dataset. Given its large sample size, rare imaging phenotypes within this unique cohort are of interest, as they are often clinically relevant and could be informative for discovering new processes. Here, we developed a two‐level outlier detection and screening methodology to characterize individual outliers from the multimodal MRI dataset of more than 15,000 UK Biobank subjects. In primary screening, using brain ventricles, white matter, cortical thickness, and functional connectivity‐based imaging phenotypes, every subject was parameterized with an outlier score per imaging phenotype. Outlier scores of these imaging phenotypes had good‐to‐excellent test–retest reliability, with the exception of resting‐state functional connectivity (RSFC). Due to the low reliability of RSFC outlier scores, RSFC outliers were excluded from further individual‐level outlier screening. In secondary screening, the extreme outliers (1,026 subjects) were examined individually, and those arising from data collection/processing errors were eliminated. A representative subgroup of 120 subjects from the remaining non‐artifactual outliers were radiologically reviewed, and radiological findings were identified in 97.5% of them. This study establishes an unsupervised framework for investigating rare individual imaging phenotypes within a large neuroimaging cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of new digital technologies and their gradual introduction into the language classroom, the Internet enables students to reach out beyond the confines of traditional teaching and learning settings, allowing previously non-existent access to foreign languages and cultures. On the one hand, the web allows learners to find authentic information and expand their knowledge; on the other, computer-mediated communication tools enable students to establish contact with target language learners and native speakers by engaging in telecollaborative exchanges. The tools at students' disposal are becoming increasingly more powerful, often combining different modes of communication in one single environment. In 2005, students of French at Carnegie Mellon University, US and French learners at the Open University, UK worked synchronously and asynchronously in online environments with native francophone students enrolled on a masters' programme in distance education at the Universite de Franche Comte, France. Completing a set of three collaborative tasks, synchronous meetings took place over 10 weeks in the Open University's online audio-graphic tuition environment "Lyceum", which provides multiple synchronous audio channels as well as synchronous text chat and several shared graphical interfaces. In addition to the output produced in this medium (oral, written and graphic) in the target languages (French and English), the project output, a shared reflection on cultural similarities and differences, took the form of several collaborative, asynchronous blogs. This contribution draws on data from pre- and post- treatment questionnaires, recordings of the online interactions, work published by the students in the blogs and discussions among learner and tutor participants exploring aspects of online partnership learning such as learning environment-specific affordances and their impact on task design as well as student and tutor perceptions of connectivity and interacvity. (Contains 2 figures and 8 notes.)

Purpose: To provide an integrate multimodal imaging characterization of peripheral drusen in the eyes with and without macular signs of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and to analyze their association with macular findings. Methods: In this retrospective, cross-sectional study, subjects with peripheral drusen were imaged with the Optos (Optos PLC, Dunfermline, Scotland, UK) and Spectralis devices to obtain referenced spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) images. Two experienced graders independently graded the ultra-widefield (UWF) pseudocolor and fundus autofluorescence (FAF) images for the presence of peripheral drusen and analyzed peripheral druse features using OCT. Main outcome measures included quantitative and qualitative assessment of peripheral drusen. Results: Fifty-seven eyes (30 subjects) were included in the analysis. Mean ± SD age was 77.6 ± 9.2 years (range 54–97 years). On pseudocolor images, graders identified the presence of drusen in all the enrolled eyes (Cohen's kappa was 1.0). On FAF images, Cohen's kappa was 0.71. In the topographical assessment, peripheral drusen were detected in 23 cases in the temporal region, in 40 cases in the nasal region, in 40 cases in the inferior region, and in 42 cases in the superior region. On SD-OCT images, peripheral drusen had a high reflective core in 97.1% of cases, while remaining drusen were characterized by a low reflective core. The macula was affected by early/intermediate AMD in 23 eyes (43.5%) and late AMD in 6 eyes (10.5%). Conclusions: We provided an integrate multimodal imaging assessment of peripheral drusen in the eyes with and without AMD. Peripheral drusen were characterized by distinguished features that may suggest that these lesions constitute a distinct disease, rather than representing an expansion of AMD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is limited research regarding the continuity, stability, and role of country of origin in preterm infant temperament across the first year of life. This prospective longitudinal study examined patterns of mean‐level continuity and individual‐differences stability of select scales of temperament at 6 and 12 months in preterm infants from three countries, Chile (n = 47), United Kingdom (n = 44), and United States (n = 50). Temperament was assessed with the Infant Behavior Questionnaire and observed using the Bayley Behavior Rating Scale. Continuity and stability across infant age, country effects, and interactions of country and age on preterm infant temperament were examined. Chilean mothers rated infants higher in soothability, duration of orienting, and orientation/engagement compared with mothers from the United Kingdom and/or United States. Continuity of temperament from 6 to 12 months varied by country: Chilean mothers reported increasing smiling and laughter and activity level from 6 to 12 months, and mothers from the United Kingdom reported decreasing smiling and laughter and increasing fear from 6 to 12 months. Infant temperament was stable in all three countries. Correlations evidenced low concordance between maternal reports and examiner observations of infant temperament at 12 months. However, among Chilean infants, higher maternal reported activity level was associated with higher examiner observed orientation/engagement score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic discourse has been a much-explored field of research, especially scientific academic discourse. Recently, research interest has also focused on institutional academic discourse; in particular, CDA research has pointed out how university discourse has undergone a process of marketization. In changing their communicative style, universities tend to borrow commercial models and words from the business domain and use persuasive techniques. In addition, significant theoretical investigation on the interaction between visuals and language has demonstrated that technological developments have led to the fact that visuals are becoming increasingly central in communicative events. Against this framework the present paper aims at exploring how students, one of the main addressees of web-mediated university communication, are depicted in both visual and written components of the websites. To this purpose, a corpus of web pages of UK universities has been assembled. The corpus-based analysis of the AcWaC-Eu corpus, a 40-million word corpus, has been integrated by a multimodal analysis of a subcorpus of English university websites. The analyses have highlighted the existing trend of representing students as 'consumers' to whom a full array of services and possibilities is offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The role of health care worker hand hygiene in preventing health care associated infections (HCAI) is well-established. There is less emphasis on the hand hygiene (HH) of hospitalized patients; in the context of COVID-19 mechanisms to support it are particularly important. The purpose of this study was to establish if providing patient hand wipes, and a defined protocol for encouraging their use, was effective in improving the frequency of patient HH (PHH)., Design: Before and after study., Settin: General Hospital, United Kingdom., Participants: All adult patients admitted to 6 acute elderly care/rehabilitation hospital wards between July and October 2018., Methods: Baseline audit of PHH opportunities conducted over 6 weeks. Focus group with staff and survey of the public informed the development of a PHH bundle. Effect of bundle on PHH monitored by structured observation of HH opportunities over 12 weeks., Results: During baseline 303 opportunities for PHH were observed; compliance with PHH was 13.2% (40/303; 95% confidence interval 9.9-7.5). In the evaluation of PHH bundle, 526 PHH opportunities were observed with HH occurring in 58.9% (310/526); an increase of 45.7% versus baseline (95% confidence interval 39.7%-51.0%; P < .001)., Conclusion: Providing patients with multiwipe packs of handwipes is a simple, cost-effective approach to increasing PHH and reducing the risk of HCAI in hospital. Health care workers play an essential role in encouraging PHH., (Copyright © 2021. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Introduction: Esophagectomy is the mainstay of treatment for patients with resectable esophageal cancer, and chemotherapy and chemoradiation have become essential adjuncts to improve survival. Controversy remains regarding the optimal perioperative therapy., Methods: This review focuses on three landmark, randomized, controlled trials that have greatly influenced esophageal cancer management and established chemotherapy and chemoradiotherapy as standard of care: Medical Research Council Adjuvant Gastric Infusional Chemotherapy Trial (MAGIC); The United Kingdom Medical Research Council Esophageal Cancer Trial (OEO2); and Chemoradiotherapy for Oesophageal Cancer Followed by Surgery Study (CROSS)., Results: The findings from these landmark studies are reviewed and summarized., Conclusion: Chemotherapy regimens are heterogeneous but centered around platinum-based therapy and should be included in the management for all appropriate patients. Ongoing and future studies will further delineate the roles of various chemo- and chemoradiotherapy regimens and also will investigate the promising area of immunotherapy in the treatment of esophageal cancer.

Schizophrenia is a highly heritable psychiatric disorder characterized by widespread functional and structural brain abnormalities. However, previous association studies between MRI and polygenic risk were mostly ROI-based single modality analyses, rather than identifying brain-based multimodal predictive biomarkers. Based on schizophrenia polygenic risk scores (PRS) from healthy white people within the UK Biobank dataset (N = 22,459), we discovered a robust PRS-associated brain pattern with smaller gray matter volume and decreased functional activation in frontotemporal cortex, which distinguished schizophrenia from controls with >83% accuracy, and predicted cognition and symptoms across 4 independent schizophrenia cohorts. Further multi-disease comparisons demonstrated that these identified frontotemporal alterations were most severe in schizophrenia and schizo-affective patients, milder in bipolar disorder, and indistinguishable from controls in autism, depression and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. These findings indicate the potential of the identified PRS-associated multimodal frontotemporal network to serve as a trans-diagnostic gene intermediated brain biomarker specific to schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is highly heritable and characterized by widespread brain abnormalities. Here, the authors identify schizophrenia polygenic risk associated multimodal frontotemporal network that can serve as a transdiagnostic brain signature specific to schizophrenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the images that British political parties posted on Facebook during the 2019 UK elections. Verbal and nonverbal resources in the visuals were examined to look at the following strategies: Broadcasting Policy, Mobilization, Attacking Opponents, and Image Management. Overall, attacking opponents was the most common strategy for verbal and nonverbal resources. Attacks against opponents were also associated with a higher number of likes and shares. A substantial portion of text in the images was used to talk about policies, in particular by the two largest parties, the Conservative Party and Labour Party. Visuals posted on Facebook by the Labour Party generated the highest number of audience reactions. Specific differences among political parties were also analyzed and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study aims to present the diagnostic characteristics of multimodal intraoperative monitoring (IOM) in spinal deformity surgery and to define and categorise the neuromonitoring events, as well as propose an algorithm of action., Materials and Methods: We reviewed 1,155 consecutive patients (807 female, 348 male) who underwent deformity correction using standardised perioperative care, cortical/cervical somatosensory evoked potentials (SSEPs), and upper/lower limb transcranial electrical motor evoked potential (MEPs) by a single surgeon. The mean age at surgery was 13.8 years (range 10-23.3). We categorised IOM events as true, transient true, and false positive or negative. Diagnostic performance criteria were calculated., Results: The most common diagnosis was adolescent idiopathic scoliosis in 717 (62%) patients. We identified 3 true positive monitoring events occurring in 2 patients (0.17%), 8 transient true positive (0.69%), and 8 transient false positive events (0.69%). There were no false negative events and no patient had postoperative neurological complications. The multimodal IOM technique had a sensitivity of 100%, specificity of 99.3%, positive predictive value of 55.6%, and negative predictive value of 100%. Sensitivity was 100% for MEPs and multimodal monitoring compared to 20% for cortical or cervical SSEPs. The frequency of true or transient true positive events was higher (p = 0.07) in Scheuermann's kyphosis (3/91 patients, 3.3%) compared to adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (6/717 patients, 0.84%)., Conclusion: Multimodal IOM is highly sensitive and specific for spinal cord injury. This technique is reliable for the assessment of the condition of the spinal cord during major deformity surgery. We propose an algorithm of intraoperative action to allow close cooperation between the surgical, anaesthetic, and neurophysiology teams and to prevent neurological deficits., (© 2019 The Author(s) Published by S. Karger AG, Basel.)

Frailty, a prevalent clinical syndrome in aging adults, is characterized by poor health outcomes, represented via a standardized frailty-phenotype (FP), and Frailty Index (FI). While the relevance of the syndrome is gaining awareness, much remains unclear about its underlying biology. Further elucidation of the genetic determinants and possible underlying mechanisms may help improve patients' outcomes allowing healthy aging. Genotype, clinical and demographic data of subjects (aged 60–73 years) from UK Biobank were utilized. FP was defined on Fried's criteria. FI was calculated using electronic-health-records. Genome-wide-association-studies (GWAS) were conducted and polygenic-risk-scores (PRS) were calculated for both FP and FI. Functional analysis provided interpretations of underlying biology. Finally, machine-learning (ML) models were trained using clinical, demographic and PRS towards identifying frail from non-frail individuals. Thirty-one loci were significantly associated with FI accounting for 12% heritability. Seventeen of those were known associations for body-mass-index, coronary diseases, cholesterol-levels, and longevity, while the rest were novel. Significant genes CDKN2B and APOE, previously implicated in aging, were reported to be enriched in lipoprotein-particle-remodeling. Linkage-disequilibrium-regression identified specific regulation in limbic-system, associated with long-term memory and cognitive-function. XGboost was established as the best performing ML model with area-under-curve as 85%, sensitivity and specificity as 0.75 and 0.8, respectively. This study provides novel insights into increased vulnerability and risk stratification of frailty syndrome via a multi-modal approach. The findings suggest frailty as a highly polygenic-trait, enriched in cholesterol-remodeling and metabolism and to be genetically associated with cognitive abilities. ML models utilizing FP and FI + PRS were established that identified frailty-syndrome patients with high accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses four examples of bookplates printed in Edwardian Britain (1901–1914) to demonstrate how the adoption of an ethnohistorical approach to social semiotics can vastly strengthen multimodal analysis. It argues that situating choices of image, colour, typography and materiality in archival research and the broader sociohistorical context of the Edwardian period can help to uncover the external motivations for a bookplate's structure. The case study reveals that bookplate designs were primarily influenced by the social status and wealth of owners, as well as the specific, well-established norms of the bookplate genre. It also highlights the significance of connecting semiotic choices to the traditions of Edwardian society and the ways in which meanings can shift over time. The findings demonstrate the importance of grounding hypotheses concerning the function and form of artefacts in concrete historical documents, in addition to the vast potential of this methodology for exploring other texts within a particular historical period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an investigation of a Higher Education institution's webpages for prospective students. The study is used to illuminate how different conceptions of internationalisation are, or are not, represented to home and international students in university marketing. Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to investigate the webpages' discursive strategies through detailed analysis of linguistic features and images. The research explores how discourses frame or sideline conceptions of internationalisation, and it shows that in this case the dominant discourse of internationalisation is a narrow and exclusionary one. The paper concludes that in the webpages of this non-elite university a broader version of internationalisation is being marginalised in a neoliberal climate perhaps because it cannot be quantified, does not fit the individual consumer model, and so is squeezed out under the pressures of other discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theorists of modern comics and graphic narratives point to seventeenth-century English illustrated broadsheets as being the primitive beginning of sequential graphic reading practice. Examination of both topical and decorative broadsheets designed for public display in the mid and late seventeenth century, however, reveal a more complex, multimodal reading experience that was accessible and appealing to the wide range of literacies that operated during this period. Broadsheets' sophisticated blending of visual, oral, and textual practices can be made more visible through the lens of our contemporary discussions of multimodal reading and learning practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK Government has produced an array of televised information adverts or ‘campaigns’ to increase public awareness of COVID-19 and promote compliance with its subsequent policy. Research has shown that compliance with public health policy is influenced by fearful visual-verbal campaign messaging strategies, and that emotive representations of ‘risk’ are generally perceived to be more effective than non-emotive discourse. However, how the Government has semiotically constructed and utilised fear within their COVID-19 campaigns to nudge public compliance remains unexplored. Preliminary analysis of seventeen COVID-19 adverts revealed four sequential phases to the Government’s pandemic response: responsibility, management, mitigation, and reflection. An in-depth Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of four selected adverts (one screenshot per advert, per phase), revealed that fear was constructed using less conventional meaning potentials in favour of more implicit multimodal semiotic interactions. By portraying a ‘good’ pandemic subject as one who makes ‘moral’ and ‘rational’ decisions to comply with COVID-19 policy, pre-existing societal inequalities which might hinder compliance, particularly for the socioeconomically disadvantaged groups of society, were reduced and problematised. This raises ethical concerns over notions of ‘expertise’ and the ‘rationalising’ of ‘irrational’ lifestyles. Future research should further explore multimodal nudges in public health campaigns to hold producers accountable. The UK Government has produced an array of televised information adverts or ‘campaigns’ to increase public awareness of COVID-19 and promote compliance with its subsequent policy. Research has shown that compliance with public health policy is influenced by fearful visual-verbal campaign messaging strategies, and that emotive representations of ‘risk’ are generally perceived to be more effective than non-emotive discourse. However, how the Government has semiotically constructed and utilised fear within their COVID-19 campaigns to nudge public compliance remains unexplored. Preliminary analysis of seventeen COVID-19 adverts revealed four sequential phases to the Government’s pandemic response: responsibility, management, mitigation, and reflection. An in-depth Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of four selected adverts (one screenshot per advert, per phase), revealed that fear was constructed using less conventional meaning potentials in favour of more implicit multimodal semiotic interactions. By portraying a ‘good’ pandemic subject as one who makes ‘moral’ and ‘rational’ decisions to comply with COVID-19 policy, pre-existing societal inequalities which might hinder compliance, particularly for the socioeconomically disadvantaged groups of society, were reduced and problematised. This raises ethical concerns over notions of ‘expertise’ and the ‘rationalising’ of ‘irrational’ lifestyles. Future research should further explore multimodal nudges in public health campaigns to hold producers accountable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent (2016) Office for National Statistics report stated that dementia is now “the leading cause of death” in England and Wales. Ever fixated with the syndrome (an unfailingly newsworthy topic), the British press was quick to respond to the bulletin, consistently headlining that dementia was the nation’s “biggest killer,” while (re)formulating other aspects of the report in distorting and emotive metaphorical terms. In this paper we examine how the media, through use of a recurring set of linguistic and visual semiotic tropes, portrayed dementia as an agentive entity, a “killer,” which remorselessly attacks its “victims.” Such a broadly loaded and sensationalist representation, we argue, not only construed dementia as a direful and pernicious disease, but also, crucially, obscured the personal and social contexts in which the syndrome is understood and experienced (not least by people with dementia themselves). This intensely lurid type of representation not only fails to address the ageist misinformation and common misunderstandings that all too commonly surround dementia, but is also likely to exacerbate the stress and depression frequently experienced by people with dementia and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing the accuracy and intelligence of short-term load forecasting system can improve modern power systems management and economic power generation. In recent decades, the optimized machine learning methods have been widely used in load forecasting problems because of their predictability with higher accuracy and robustness. However, most related researches only use evolutionary algorithms for parameters fine-tuning and ignore the evolutionary algorithm based decision-making support and the matching relation between the used evolutionary algorithm and machine learning method, which greatly limit the improvement of forecasting system. To dissolve the above issues, a data-driven evolutionary ensemble learning forecasting model is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a novel multimodal evolutionary algorithm based on comprehensive weighted vector angle and shift-based density estimation is proposed. Secondly, based on the proposed multimodal evolutionary algorithm, an intelligent decision-making support scheme including predictive performance evaluation, model properties analysis, structure and fusion strategy optimization, and optimal model preference selection is designed to improve the random vector functional link network based ensemble learning model and boost the forecasting accuracy. Thirdly, experimental studies on 15 test problems with up to 6000 decision variables are conducted to validate the excellent optimization ability of the proposed evolutionary algorithm. Finally, the proposed evolutionary ensemble learning method is compared with 6 other representative forecast methods on real-world short-term load forecasting datasets from Australia, Great Britain, and Norway. The experiment results verify the superiority and applicability of the proposed method. • A new multimodal evolutionary algorithm (MMOWVA) is being proposed. • MMOWVA is validated by comparison experiments on 15 multimodal problems. • An expandable intelligent scheme is offered to make decision-makers convenient. • An evolutionary ensemble learning model is designed to improve forecast accuracy. • Experiment results demonstrate a higher forecast accuracy of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Floods pose multi-dimensional hazards to critical infrastructure and society and these hazards may increase under climate change. While flood conditions are dependent on catchment type and soil conditions, seasonal precipitation extremes also play an important role. The extreme precipitation events driving flood occurrence may arrive non-uniformly in time. In addition, their seasonal and inter-annual patterns may also cause sequences of several events and enhance likely flood responses. Spatial and temporal patterns of extreme daily precipitation occurrence are characterized across the UK. Extreme and very heavy daily precipitation is not uniformly distributed throughout the year, but exhibits spatial differences, arising from the relative proximity to the North Atlantic Ocean or North Sea. Periods of weeks or months are identified during which extreme daily precipitation occurrences are most likely to occur, with some regions of the UK displaying multimodal seasonality. A Generalized Additive Model is employed to simulate extreme daily precipitation occurrences over the UK from 1901 to 2010 and to allow robust statistical testing of temporal changes in the seasonal distribution. Simulations show that seasonality has the strongest correlation with intra-annual variations in extreme event occurrence, while Sea Surface Temperature (SST) and Mean Sea Level Pressure (MSLP) have the strongest correlation with inter-annual variations. The north and west of the UK are dominated by MSLP in the mid-North Atlantic and the south and east are dominated by local SST. All regions now have a higher likelihood of autumnal extreme daily precipitation than earlier in the twentieth century. This equates to extreme daily precipitation occurring earlier in the autumn in the north and west, and later in the autumn in the south and east. The change in timing is accompanied by increases in the probability of extreme daily precipitation occurrences during the autumn, and in the number of days with a very high probability of an extreme event. These results indicate a higher probability of several extreme occurrences in succession and a potential increase in flooding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlabelled: (68)Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT scanning is a widely accepted method for imaging of neuroendocrine tumors. This cross-sectional study was performed to review the first 8 y of patient data from a large (68)Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT database in order to establish the impact of the modality on patient treatment and survival., Methods: Demographic data, clinical outcome, survival, and change in management after (68)Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT were evaluated., Results: Between May 2005 and August 2013, 1,258 (68)Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT scans were obtained in 728 patients with confirmed or suspected neuroendocrine tumors. In most patients, the primary site was located in the midgut (26.4%). Analysis of NET grading in patients with known histopathologic data revealed that 35.7% had NET grade G1, 12.2% G2, and 8.7% G3. The most common indications for (68)Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT were follow-up (24.4%) and initial tumor staging (23.4%). Of the 1,258 (68)Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT scans completed, 75.7% were positive and 24.3% negative; there were 14 false-positive and 29 false-negative scans. The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were 97%, 95.1%, 96.6%, 98.5%, and 90.4%, respectively. In 40.9% of patients, the treatment plan was changed after the scans, owing mainly to new, unexpected findings. Statistically significant differences in survival were shown between patients with G1, G2, and G3 grade tumors (P < 0.0001) and also between patients with bone metastasis versus patients with soft-tissue metastasis (P < 0.0001)., Conclusion: (68)Ga-DOTATATE PET/CT scanning is safe and influences management in a large proportion of patients. Prognosis was dependent on tumor grade, and the presence of bone metastasis was associated with worse overall survival., (© 2016 by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging, Inc.)

Lateralization is a fundamental characteristic of many behaviors and the organization of the brain, and atypical lateralization has been suggested to be linked to various brain-related disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Right-handedness is one of the most prominent markers of human behavioural lateralization, yet its neurobiological basis remains to be determined. Here, we present a large-scale analysis of handedness, as measured by self-reported direction of hand preference, and its variability related to brain structural and functional organization in the UK Biobank (N = 36,024). A multivariate machine learning approach with multi-modalities of brain imaging data was adopted, to reveal how well brain imaging features could predict individual's handedness (i.e., right-handedness vs. non-right-handedness) and further identify the top brain signatures that contributed to the prediction. Overall, the results showed a good prediction performance, with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) score of up to 0.72, driven largely by resting-state functional measures. Virtual lesion analysis and large-scale decoding analysis suggested that the brain networks with the highest importance in the prediction showed functional relevance to hand movement and several higher-level cognitive functions including language, arithmetic, and social interaction. Genetic analyses of contributions of common DNA polymorphisms to the imaging-derived handedness prediction score showed a significant heritability (h2=7.55%, p <0.001) that was similar to and slightly higher than that for the behavioural measure itself (h2=6.74%, p <0.001). The genetic correlation between the two was high (r g =0.71), suggesting that the imaging-derived score could be used as a surrogate in genetic studies where the behavioural measure is not available. This large-scale study using multimodal brain imaging and multivariate machine learning has shed new light on the neural correlates of human handedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the way that war monuments infuse our public physical spaces, and therefore our internal mental spaces, with discourses that legitimise war, soldiery and militarism in different ways at different times creating different kinds of physical environments. In critical theory and cultural studies there has been a growing interest in the way that physical spaces have psychological roles and house human thoughts and feelings - that our social and cultural memories exist in a way that intertwined with our natural and constructed environments. Commentators have noted, however, that there is still need for more systematic methods to be developed for analysing the materiality of objects such as monuments and other buildings to show precisely how they communicate as physical entities that constitute spaces. Using multimodal discourse analysis this paper carries out such an analysis looking at case studies of British war monuments, from early in the twentieth century and later in the twenty-first century. In the tradition of social semiotics, the paper seeks to describe the available semiotic resources that allow us to communicate through objects in space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few decades, the building evidence that CO 2 e emissions lead to climate change has pointed to a need to reduce CO 2 e emissions. This research uses five scenarios in the context of UK import trade to assess total CO 2 e emissions and costs of import re-routing containers. The overall objective is to assess possible carbon mitigation strategies for UK supply chains by using a combination of alternative ports and revised multimodal strategies. The model adopted includes three elements: port expansion, container handling and freight transport. The alternative scenarios explore different settings modal shift and short sea shipping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of transportation networks and their increasing interconnections, although positive, has the downside effect of an increasing complexity which make them difficult to use, to assess, and limits their efficiency. On average in the UK, 23% of travel time is lost in connections for trips with more than one mode, and the lack of synchronization decreases very slowly with population size. This lack of synchronization between modes induces differences between the theoretical quickest trip and the 'time-respecting' path, which takes into account waiting times at interconnection nodes. We analyse here the statistics of these paths on the multilayer, temporal network of the entire, multimodal british public transportation system. We propose a statistical decomposition - the 'anatomy' - of trips in urban areas, in terms of riding, waiting and walking times, and which shows how the temporal structure of trips varies with distance and allows us to compare different cities. Weaknesses in systems can be either insufficient transportation speed or service frequency, but the key parameter controlling their global efficiency is the total number of stop events per hour for all modes. This analysis suggests the need for better optimization strategies, adapted to short, long unimodal or multimodal trips. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The view of language from a social semiotic perspective is clear. Language is one of many semiotic resources we employ in our communicative practices. That is to say that while language is at times dominant, it always operates within a multimodal frame and furthermore, at times modes other than language are dominant. The 2014 National Curriculum for the UK, on the other hand, values pupils’ face-to-face classroom interaction in terms of standard spoken English (i.e. in terms of the mode of language alone). This paper offers examples demonstrating how embodied modes such as gesture, posture, facial expression, gaze and haptics work in conjunction with speech in children's collaborative construction of knowledge. In other words, what may have been previously conceived as gaps and silences – often interpreted as an absence of language – are in fact instantiations of the work of semiotic modes other than language. In order to consider this closely, this paper offers evidence from a multimodal micro-analysis of pupil-to-pupil, face-to-face interaction in one science lesson in a Year Five UK Primary classroom. It demonstrateshowchildren's meaning-making is achieved through apt use of all available semiotic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]