York University

About: York University is a education organization based out in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Politics. The organization has 18899 authors who have published 43357 publications receiving 1568560 citations.

Acquisition of Literacy in Bilingual Children: A Framework for Research

Abstract: Much of the research that contributes to understanding how bilingual children become literate is not able to isolate the contribution of bilingualism to the discussion of literacy acquisition for these children. This article begins by identifying three areas of research that are relevant to examining literacy acquisition in bilinguals, explaining the contribution of each, and associating each type of research with a skill required by monolingual children in becoming literate. Three prerequisite skills for the acquisition of literacy are competence with the oral language, understanding of symbolic concepts of print, and establishment of metalinguistic awareness. A review of the literature explores the extent to which these skills that influence literacy acquisition in monolinguals develop differently for bilingual children. The conclusion is that the relation between bilingualism and the development of each of the three skills is different, sometimes indicating an advantage (concepts of print), sometimes a disadvantage (oral language competence), and sometimes little difference (metalinguistic concepts) for bilingual children. Therefore, bilingualism is clearly a factor in children's development of literacy, but the effect of that factor is neither simple nor unitary. Since the publication of this article, our research has continued to explore the themes set out in this framework and provided more detail for the description of how bilingualism affects the acquisition of literacy. Two important advances in this research are the finding that some aspects of reading ability, notably phonological awareness, are rooted in general cognitive mechanisms and transfer easily across languages, whereas others, such as decoding, are more language dependent and language-specific and need to be relearned with each new writing system (Bialystok, Luk, & Kwan, 2005). Second, writing systems and the differences between them have a greater impact on children's acquisition of literacy than previously believed. Not surprisingly, this relation has been found for emerging ability with phonological awareness (Bialystok, McBride-Chang, & Luk, 2005) but, more surprisingly, has recently been shown to have a subtle influence on children's emerging concepts of print (Bialystok & Luk, in press). The interpretation that bilingualism must be considered in terms of both advantages and disadvantages has also been pursued in studies of cognitive and linguistic processing in adults. Recent research has shown that adult bilinguals display disadvantages on tasks measuring lexical retrieval and fluency (Michael & Gollan, 2005) but advantages on tasks assessing cognitive control of attention (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004). This approach leads to a more detailed and, ultimately, more accurate description of how bilingualism affects cognitive performance.

Crowdsourcing, citizen sensing and sensor web technologies for public and environmental health surveillance and crisis management: trends, OGC standards and application examples

Abstract: 'Wikification of GIS by the masses' is a phrase-term first coined by Kamel Boulos in 2005, two years earlier than Goodchild's term 'Volunteered Geographic Information'. Six years later (2005-2011), OpenStreetMap and Google Earth (GE) are now full-fledged, crowdsourced 'Wikipedias of the Earth' par excellence, with millions of users contributing their own layers to GE, attaching photos, videos, notes and even 3-D (three dimensional) models to locations in GE. From using Twitter in participatory sensing and bicycle-mounted sensors in pervasive environmental sensing, to creating a 100,000-sensor geo-mashup using Semantic Web technology, to the 3-D visualisation of indoor and outdoor surveillance data in real-time and the development of next-generation, collaborative natural user interfaces that will power the spatially-enabled public health and emergency situation rooms of the future, where sensor data and citizen reports can be triaged and acted upon in real-time by distributed teams of professionals, this paper offers a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of the overlapping domains of the Sensor Web, citizen sensing and 'human-in-the-loop sensing' in the era of the Mobile and Social Web, and the roles these domains can play in environmental and public health surveillance and crisis/disaster informatics. We provide an in-depth review of the key issues and trends in these areas, the challenges faced when reasoning and making decisions with real-time crowdsourced data (such as issues of information overload, "noise", misinformation, bias and trust), the core technologies and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards involved (Sensor Web Enablement and Open GeoSMS), as well as a few outstanding project implementation examples from around the world.

Evidence for quark-matter cores in massive neutron stars

Abstract: The theory governing the strong nuclear force—quantum chromodynamics—predicts that at sufficiently high energy densities, hadronic nuclear matter undergoes a deconfinement transition to a new phase of quarks and gluons1. Although this has been observed in ultrarelativistic heavy-ion collisions2,3, it is currently an open question whether quark matter exists inside neutron stars4. By combining astrophysical observations and theoretical ab initio calculations in a model-independent way, we find that the inferred properties of matter in the cores of neutron stars with mass corresponding to 1.4 solar masses (M⊙) are compatible with nuclear model calculations. However, the matter in the interior of maximally massive stable neutron stars exhibits characteristics of the deconfined phase, which we interpret as evidence for the presence of quark-matter cores. For the heaviest reliably observed neutron stars5,6 with mass M ≈ 2M⊙, the presence of quark matter is found to be linked to the behaviour of the speed of sound cs in strongly interacting matter. If the conformal bound $${c}_{\rm{s}}^{2}\le 1/3$$ (ref. 7) is not strongly violated, massive neutron stars are predicted to have sizable quark-matter cores. This finding has important implications for the phenomenology of neutron stars and affects the dynamics of neutron star mergers with at least one sufficiently massive participant. The cores of neutron stars could be made of hadronic matter or quark matter. By combining first-principles calculations with observational data, evidence for the presence of quark matter in neutron star cores is found.

The Seventh Visual Object Tracking VOT2019 Challenge Results

Abstract: The Visual Object Tracking challenge VOT2019 is the seventh annual tracker benchmarking activity organized by the VOT initiative. Results of 81 trackers are presented; many are state-of-the-art trackers published at major computer vision conferences or in journals in the recent years. The evaluation included the standard VOT and other popular methodologies for short-term tracking analysis as well as the standard VOT methodology for long-term tracking analysis. The VOT2019 challenge was composed of five challenges focusing on different tracking domains: (i) VOTST2019 challenge focused on short-term tracking in RGB, (ii) VOT-RT2019 challenge focused on "real-time" shortterm tracking in RGB, (iii) VOT-LT2019 focused on longterm tracking namely coping with target disappearance and reappearance. Two new challenges have been introduced: (iv) VOT-RGBT2019 challenge focused on short-term tracking in RGB and thermal imagery and (v) VOT-RGBD2019 challenge focused on long-term tracking in RGB and depth imagery. The VOT-ST2019, VOT-RT2019 and VOT-LT2019 datasets were refreshed while new datasets were introduced for VOT-RGBT2019 and VOT-RGBD2019. The VOT toolkit has been updated to support both standard shortterm, long-term tracking and tracking with multi-channel imagery. Performance of the tested trackers typically by far exceeds standard baselines. The source code for most of the trackers is publicly available from the VOT page. The dataset, the evaluation kit and the results are publicly available at the challenge website.

Epidemiology of chronic non-cancer pain in Europe: narrative review of prevalence, pain treatments and pain impact

Abstract: Estimates on the epidemiology of chronic non-cancer pain vary widely throughout Europe. It is unclear whether this variation reflects true population differences or methodological factors. Such epi...