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NEW YORK (AP) ? Americans are feeling better about the economy again, but will it last this time?
A widely watched barometer of consumer confidence surged in February to its highest level in a year as Americans took note of improving job prospects among friends and family and falling unemployment, which is now at a three-year low.
The brighter assessment released Tuesday by a private research group reflected a more upbeat attitude for the nation generally as the economy picks up. That is a boon for President Obama as he seeks re-election. Polls, including a recent Associated Press-GfK survey, show the Democratic incumbent is beginning to benefit politically from improved views of the economy.
"The economy is getting momentum. Clearly, shoppers are more optimistic about their job prospects," said Amna Asaf, economist at Capital Economics.
The rising confidence among consumers gave confidence to Wall Street, too, helping it to reclaim the last of the ground it held before plunging into the depths of the Great Recession. The Dow Jones industrial average closed above 13,000 on Tuesday for the first time since May 19, 2008, four months before the fall of Lehman Brothers investment bank and the worst of the financial crisis.
Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank, called it "a momentous day for investor confidence."
Tuesday's gain puts the Dow 1,160 points below its all-time high, set Oct. 9, 2007. The Great Recession began two months later.
The milestone could draw some fence-sitting investors back into the market and add to the gains, said Brian Gendreau, market strategist at Cetera Financial Group.
But consumer confidence is still below the level of a healthy economy, and trouble could lie ahead. Rising gas prices could sully shoppers' mood and derail the economic recovery. There are also fears about a nuclear showdown with Iran and the festering European debt crisis. Those worries could hurt demand for U.S. imports and make American companies pull back in hiring.
The confidence index is closely watched because consumer spending constitutes 70 percent of U.S. economic activity.
The big question mark is the price of gasoline, which Asaf said has climbed 20 cents per gallon since the confidence survey concluded two weeks ago.
The price of gas is a big issue because it has an immediate effect on shoppers' pocketbooks, particularly low- to middle-income households that are already squeezed by higher costs for basics such as food.
The average U.S. price of a gallon of gasoline was $3.69, according to the Lundberg Survey of fuel prices released Sunday.
The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index now stands at 70.8, significantly higher than the expected 63. A reading of 90 or above indicates a healthy economy. But the index has not reached that level since December 2007, when the recession began.
Still, Tuesday's numbers were closer to levels that indicate a stable economy than to the danger zone that would suggest trouble.
A year ago, the index rose to 72 as the economic outlook was improving. The February 2011 reading was the highest since before the financial crisis in the fall of 2008. After that, the outlook soured again over the spring and summer.
Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board Consumer Research, hopes the upward trend will have staying power this time.
"Consumers are really feeling like the worst is behind them," she said. "We are finally seeing some traction, and hopefully over the next few months, that will prove sustainable."
The index dropped to an all-time low of 25.3 in February 2009. Over the past 12 months, it has been going back and forth from the high 60s to the low 40s on continued worries about the economy.
In fact, confidence fell last October to 40.9, the lowest since March 2009, during the thick of the recession.
The Conference Board survey of consumers, conducted from Feb. 1 through Feb. 15, showed shoppers are feeling better about the job market.
Those anticipating more jobs in the months ahead increased to 18.7 percent from 16.4 percent, while those anticipating fewer jobs declined to 16.9 percent from 19.1 percent.
Shoppers have good reason to feel a little better. The government reported that 243,000 jobs were added in January, pushing down the unemployment rate to 8.3 percent, the lowest in three years. Unemployment has fallen five months in a row for the first time since 1994.
Meanwhile, the four-week average of people seeking unemployment aid fell to the lowest point in four years.
Even the housing market, though still weak, is showing signs of recovery. Home values remain depressed, according to the latest snapshot from a widely followed Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index. But more people signed contracts to buy homes in January than in nearly two years, according to seasonally adjusted figures from the National Association of Realtors.
In a separate report, the Commerce Department said U.S. businesses slashed spending on machinery and equipment in January after a tax break expired. That pushed orders for long-lasting manufacturing goods down 4 percent, the biggest monthly decline in three years.
But economists suggested the drop was largely because most companies made big purchases at the end of last year to qualify for the tax credit, which expired at the end of December. They noted that demand for so-called core capital goods, a good measure of business investment plans, fell sharply in January after surging in December to an all-time high.
Durable goods are products such as appliances and cars expected to last at least three years. Orders tend to fluctuate sharply from one month to the next. But the overall trend in orders has increased steadily since the recession ended nearly three years ago.
"We see no evidence of underlying slowing in the industrial economy," said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at High Frequency Economics. "So we look for a rebound in February and the re-emergence of the upward trend over the next couple of months."
AP Economics Writers Martin Crutsinger and Derek Kravitz and AP Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.


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For today's Weird Photo Wednesday we have a monument praising coal!
Today we have television ads saying how important coal is to our energy production and how clean coal is becoming.
Back then, instead of a TV ad, we created a monument to coal and adorned it with a funny looking crown. Make sure to zoom in on the photo to see all the details. For more information about this photograph, click here. Check out all of our images in the Digital Collections.

subset: commoncrawl


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Galia Ibragimova CuradoSoloist of the Opera
The mezzo-soprano Galia Ibragimova studied singing at the Moscow Conservatory (1988-92) and at the Gnesin Academy (1992-97). She has won several awards at international singing competitions; for example, Angelica Catalani (Italy, 1997), Belvedere (Vienna, 1996) and Vincenzo Bellini (Italy, 1995). From 1998 to 2011 she was a soloist of the Prague State Opera, where she created Bizet's Carmen, Verdi's Maddalena (Rigoletto), Azucena (Il trovatore) and Amneris (Aida), Suzuki (Pucini: Madama Butterfly), Olga (Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin),Alice (Meyerbeer: Robert le Diable), Gertrude (Thomas: Hamlet), and Dulcinée (Massenet: Don Quichotte). Since January 1, 2012 she has been a soloist of the Czech National Opera. Galia Ibragimova is a permanent guest of a number of world opera stages, rendering, among other roles, Verdi's Amneris in Aida (a tour comprising 12 performances in the Netherlands, 2003; a 12-performance tour of Japan, with José Cura singing Radames, 2001; Yalil Theatre in Kazan, Russia, 2006; the title role of Bizet's Carmen (a tour comprising 13 performances in the Netherlands, 2003; the National Theatre Brno Opera's tour of Japan, 2005; Stralsund, 2006; Spain, 2006; Gars am Kamp, 2003; Boston, Atlanta, Savannah, 2005). She has also sung Adalgisa in Bellini's Norma (a 6-performance tour of the Netherlands, 2004), Azucena in Verdi's Il trovatore (Japan, 2005), Suzuki in Puccini's Madama Butterfly (Gars am Kamp, 2004), the Governess in Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and the Countess in Giordano's Andrea Chénier (Dublin, 2002). She has also enacted the roles of Dalila (Saint-Saëns: Samson et Dalila), Verdi's Eboli (Don Carlos) and Ulrika (Un ballo in maschera), Santuzza (Mascagni: Cavalleria rusticana),and the Witch (Dvořák: Rusalka). Her concert repertoire includes Mozart's and Dvořák's Requiem, Dvořák's oratorio Stabat Mater and Rachmaninoff's Vespers.
Update: January 2012


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CZECH REPUBLIC, 32/24/32, BLOND, European
Young nubile teen dancers like Mia Hilton are really hard to find. There are plenty of girls out there with great bodies, but a quality performer needs to have more than that. Watch the way Mia moves and keep a close eye on her facial expressions, you can tell there is nowhere she would rather be than stripping for you on your desktop!
Mia Hilton – Cocktail GirlOctober 23rd, 2011
CZECH REPUBLIC, 32/24/32, BLOND, European


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A pumpkin wreath (on the patio)
September 20, 2012
Share this
Last year I shared how I dress up the front of our house this time of year:
This year I wanted to do something for the back of our house – we had an AWESOME patio put in off our deck last summer and we are thoroughly enjoying it. The best part of the whole backyard is the stone fireplace we had installed.
I wanted to create a wreath I could hang on the fireplace – but it had to be able to handle the elements. Cause let's be honest…I never take the outdoor stuff in. Like…ever.
I use the fake pumpkins from Hob Lob in our window boxes every year, and they hold up year after year. So I figured I'd start there. I had a stick wreath (from Hobby Lobby…of course. You know by now all this stuff comes from there.):
I just started sticking in faux pumpkins. A few bigger ones first:
And then some smaller ones around those:
These all have a wire pic that comes out of the bottom of them, so I just stuck that into the wreath. NO GLUE baby. If the pic stuck out in the back I just bent it back into the wreath. Make sense?
I had most of the pumpkins already, but I did pick up some beady stuff (again, are you surprised??) on sale. They were in big bunches, so I took them apart:
And filled in between the pumpkins:
Three of the beady bunches (say that three times fast) were plenty for this size wreath.
It still needed some FLUFF, so I grabbed some feather jobbies as well (all this stuff is 40 percent off ALL the time at HL):
I had them in gold and brown and used both colors – I just snipped each one off the pic and stuck them in here and there:
And because I could NOT resist them…I added just a couple little butterfly pics too:
They matched too well not to. I tried to resist the butterfly cuteness but they won out. :)
It took about 20 minutes to stick everything in (no glue helps to speed things along), and I was THRILLED with how it came out:
I rigged it up around the top of the fireplace with some jute twine – I tried one of those sticky wall hooks but it didn't stay up for two seconds on that stone. The addition of the feathering things may make it a little less weatherproof – but I SWEAR I'll bring it in when it rains. I love it that much. ;)
It is the perfect fall addition to the patio!:
We spend more time out here in the fall than any other time of the year – for two reasons. 1. Summer is too hot for fires. ;) 2. Mosquitoes LOVE ME. I can't even be outside after sunset or I'm eaten alive. Uck.
I added some mums for some more pops of color, but didn't have any extra planters. So I hid the cheapy plastic pots with some burlapy fabric I had:
I just tore off a strip and wrapped some twine around it to keep it on there. I wanted those cute wood planters some of the mums come in, but the stinkin' mums are more than DOUBLE the cost just for those simple little planters with them. Nah way.
Last year I had big mums in the pots, but the plants I put in there earlier this summer are doing so well I will leave them:
I have no idea what they are, but they grow big and full – love them! The petunias survived our drought summer -- the twisty evergreen trees I planted in the spring did not. :)
The placemat pillows have been out constantly for the past year (even some of the winter…told you I don't take stuff in) and other than being a little faded, they are doing quite well!:
The patio is ready for plenty of crisp fall evenings – around here they usually consist of a fire, some wine, maybe some marshmallows and a barking (but adorable) dog:
When are you heading over? Bring an extra blanket and you'll be set. ;)


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Walkaroo men Sandal - WC4409
Availability: Out of stock
These Walkaroo floater's straps are adjustable, especially over the widest part of the foot, giving the footwear complete customisability in terms of width fitting. And the Velcro fastenings, makes them very easy to put on and take off as you need to. You can pair these Walkaroo up with your jeans, tracks, sweatpants or chinos for a casual & sporty look. Care Instruction: No polish or shiner is needed just use a clean cloth to remove the dust.
- Manufactured & Marketed by : Walkaroo International Pvt. Ltd.
- Regd. Office Details : Walkaroo International Pvt Ltd. Plot No 10-12, SIDCO Industrial Estate, Malumichampatti Coimbatore 641 050 India
- Commodity : Footwear
- Number of Commodity : 2N (1 Pair)
- Return and Exchange Period : 7 days
- Delivery Time : 5 - 7 business days
- Customer Care Contact Phone No: 1800-572-2999
- Customer Care Mail Id : firstname.lastname@example.com
Write Your Own Review


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The R programming language continues to permeate the big data environment. Data analysis platform provider 1010data has added R to its arsenal, allowing its many enterprise customers to interrogate their data with the statistics-oriented programming language.
"We know that a lot of data scientists and modelers have grown up using R, and that is the environment they are comfortable with," said Jed Alpert, 1010data vice president of marketing. "They build data models in R and then have the power of our platform to run the analytics on all of the data."
Founded in 2010, 1010data provides organizations with a set of services for analyzing large data sets, eliminating the need to set up systems to do the work in house.
With the new option of using the R language, organizations won't need to train their data scientists in the 1010data's own query language. Like other 1010data services, R can be accessed through a browser.
The new service will also benefit long-time users of R who wish to use the language to investigate larger data sets, something that has been fairly difficult until recently. The stock implementation of R is a single-threaded application, which means it can't be used effectively on data sets distributed across multiple servers. For the service, 1010data developed their own software to run R against large, distributed data sets.
With millions of users worldwide, R is one of the most widely used programming languages specifically designed for statistical computing and predictive analytics, alongside SAS, MatLab, Mathematica and a number of Python libraries. Its popularity has grown as more organizations take on big data analysis to learn more about their customers and improve operations.
"R is really good at allowing users to modify different statistical analysis methods to meet their needs," said Chris Simon, 1010data senior analyst.
A number of other companies have also recently extended R for big data use. Hewlett-Packard created Distributed R, an open source package to run the language across computer clusters. Microsoft, which recently purchased R distributor Revolution Analytics, offers the R language as an interface for its machine learning cloud service.
More than 700 organizations use 1010data, including many large companies in the fields of retail, manufacturing, telecommunications, and financial services. The New York-based 1010data maintains more than 19 trillion rows of data on behalf of these clients.


text:
|Out of stock
Carbo Fiddles
These smooth-running powerful performers make trimming easy, no matter how hard the wind blows. Carbo Air blocks are made of tough reinforced composite in a size and style to fit any system: singles, doubles, triples; soft and hard attach. Perfect for main, jib and spinnaker sheets on dinghies and sportboats; control lines on boats of all sizes.
Lightweight, strong and reliable fiber-reinforced composite construction.
Ball bearings, sheave, and sideplates are UV-stabilized.


text:
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Maria Watches Over Us, Season 1
One of the great things about the anime market in the US is that it's much more varied than it was back when DVDs were new (and that goes double for the VHS-era.) Once it was hard to find an anime series being released in R1 that didn't have mecha, lots of fights, or a harem. That's not the case now, there are a lot of great show that appeal to a wide variety of tastes. Case in point: Maria Watches Over Us. This is a shoujo-ai (girls love) show revolving around the events at an all-girls school where tradition is very important. While the show is slow-paced and occasionally veers a bit towards the melodramatic it's also filled with engaging characters that make it enjoyable to watch. If you give it a chance, odds are you'll be sucked in and hooked.
Yumi Fukuzawa has just been admitted to a celebrated Catholic all-girls school in Tokyo, the Lillian Girls' Academy. One of the traditions that the school has is that first year students get paired up with an upperclassman who becomes their "seour" ("sister" in French.) Seour's have a special relationship; the older students help the younger girls become socially connected, but the acts of one seour can reflect upon the other. So it's important to pick a good match.
Yumi, much to her surprise, is picked to be Sachiko Ogasawara's seour. Sachiko is the daughter of a very rich and powerful man, and is also a member of the important student council. It seems to be a poor match at the beginning, Yumi is quiet and unassuming while Sachiko is one of the big students on campus. The fact that she's paired with such a prominent person sends Yumi into fits of terror. After all, if she makes a social blunder it would look badly upon Sachiko, and she couldn't have that.
The show is all about atmosphere and getting the audience to feel what the characters are feeling. To that extent the program works surprisingly well... if you can let yourself just go with the flow and not question it too much. It's easy to get engrossed in the characters and their problems. The people who populate the show are fully realized (for an anime series) and it's hard not to like them. Seeing Sachiko wrestle, in her early years at the school, with wanting to be friendly and just one of the girls but still feeling to maintain the aloof and dignified demeanor that her parents expect of her can bring out feelings of pity and sadness faster than most other anime I've seen.
Yet that identifying with the characters is also the series weak point. If you can't get into a character's mind for one reason or another and get pulled out from the emotion the series can appear overly melodramatic. That's a real danger since the stories (told in two or three episode arcs) are really superficial for the most part. When a girl becomes filled with angst and worry because she's not sure if someone liked their Valentine's day present it's easy to think "Geeze, just go ask." There are a couple plots that revolve around simple misunderstandings too, and these can get a little tiresome. If someone would just say "What did you mean?" everything would be cleared up in an instant.
Even with the fact that the show takes itself a bit too seriously at times (there's little humor and practically no action at all) it's a well done show. The girl-love aspect is (with one exception) never explicitly stated, only hinted at in very subtle ways, which is nice. Obviously character driven, that aspect works very well and though the plots occasionally leave something to be desired, this is a show unlike many others.
The DVD:
This set comes with the original Japanese audio track and optional English subtitles. Like The Right Stuf's other recent releases, there is no English dub track. The show itself is very calm so there are no impressive audio effects and the dialog-driven program has its soundtrack firmly anchored on the screen. There aren't any common flaws, distortion and background noise are totally absent, making this a solid sounding show.
The program arrives with its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio in tact. The show looks good, with only some minor aliasing to mar the presentation. The color palate used is rather subdued with mainly quiet tones used. There aren't any bright vivid costumes or scenes to jump off the screen, but these DVDs reproduce the creator's intention well.
The set also comes with a series of character profiles, some liner notes, and seven "specials" short gags based on the show featuring SD versions of the characters. I found these very enjoyable as they poked fun at the show itself and did a good job of it.
Final Thoughts:
This show is a hard one to rate. It is very good for what it is: a clam, slice-of-life show that takes place in a girl's school. The only problem is that I didn't care for shoujo-ai too much. Taking that into account, I did enjoy many of the episodes in this set, while I would occasionally roll my eyes at some contrived plot devices. In any case I can't say that this gentle character driven story isn't worth checking out, so I'll recommend it, especially to fans of shoujo-ai programs. They shouldn't miss this one.
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Difference between revisions of "Graduate Research Day"
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#Jamie Cochrane
#Jamie Cochrane
*Meme Competition
*Meme CompetitionKeiko Gutierrez
[[File:Meme competition 2021.jpg]]
[[File:Meme competition 2021.jpg]]
Revision as of 18:46, 11 February 2021
Graduate Research Day Info - Feb 11, 2021
Save the date!
Date: February 11, 2021
Time: 9:30am-4:00pm
Location: Airmeet
Register here (eventbrite)!
Note: Airmeet works best with Chrome (ver. >79), Firefox (ver. >76), MS Edge. Other browser will likely encounter issues during interactions.
Airmeet User Guide For Attendees
Abstracts listed on this page are in order of presentation.
9:30-10:05 AM Keynote 1: Dr. Mayu Nishimura
Talk Title: From visual development to effective learning.
Bio: Mayu Nishimura, Ph.D., joined PNB in August 1, 2020 as a teaching professor. Her research interests span broad areas of object recognition, visual perception, and memory development. More recently, Mayu has been advocating for early screening for visual problems in young children to prevent permanent blindness and difficulties reading. Mayu's talk will provide an overview of her changing interests, from basic research to applied research and now, knowledge translation.
10:05-10:50 AM Symposium 1
Tovah Kashetsky
Effect of Experience on Collective Decision-Making and Social Organization
Tovah Kashetsky, Grant Doering, and Reuven Dukas
Expertise built from experience allows individuals to perform significantly better than novices on a complex task. Social groups can also demonstrate expertise. Within social groups, collective decision-making is crucial for maintaining cohesion, but it is unknown whether a group's collective decision-making skills can improve with experience. To investigate this, we tested whether repeated experience with choosing between multiple nests during emigration in house-hunting ants (Temnothorax ambiguus) would improve the speed and efficiency with which colonies reach consensus. We hypothesize that experience with decision-making would improve colony performance on future decisions. We first ran preliminary experiments to quantify nest features that colonies prefer in order to construct artificial nests of varying attractiveness. We will provide 20 colonies experience with a choice between a good- and poor-quality nest during emigration, and 20 colonies with no choice during emigration (a single nest). Lastly, we will test all colonies to decide between a good- and poor-quality nest during a final emigration. So far, we found that colonies with experience decision-making do indeed appear to be faster and more efficient at decisions than colonies without experience decision-making. We will also run a social network analysis on 3 colonies from both groups to examine temporal changes in social organization. This will provide us with a mechanistic explanation for how improvements in collective decision-making arise from the actions of individuals. Studying decision-making in ants will allow us to achieve an improved understanding of the development and mechanisms behind expertise.
Hanna Haponenko
Depth-specific IOR effect when attention shifts from far to near space relative to viewer
Hanna Haponenko, Hong Jin Sun
Inhibition of return (IOR) is a phenomenon where responses to a peripheral target are delayed if the target appears more than 300ms in the same location as a previous cue. IOR has been extensively shown to operate in 2D scenes. It is not fully understood whether IOR is determined by relative location between cue and target in retinal coordinates or world coordinates. Such a question can be studied by examining IOR in 3D scenes. We compared IOR when cues and targets appeared at same or different depth planes and when depth information was provided by monocular cues. When the cue and target appeared at different depths, a vertical offset was created on-screen, a potential confound to depth perception. We removed the contribution of this confound by contrasting the 3D condition with a 2D control condition that matched cue and target positions but removed all context simulating 3D space. Results showed that IOR magnitude decreased for the different-depth condition compared to the same-depth condition in 3D displays. IOR magnitude also decreased as a function of vertical offset in corresponding 2D displays. Most importantly, such magnitude reduction in 3D displays was higher than that in the 2D displays, but only when the difference in depth was caused by the target appearing at a nearer position compared to the cue. We thus have identified a depth-specific IOR effect in a setting strictly comprised of monocular depth cues, which occurs only when attention shifts from far to near space relative to the viewer.
Joanna Spyra
Memory for global musical structures: Dissecting musical features for their contribution to memory for nonadjacent tonal centers
Joanna Spyra & Dr. Matthew Woolhouse
Memory for musical keys is exceptionally poor. Studies have found that participants maintain a memory for key for only 11-20 seconds after key-change occurs. But music is a complex stimulus with many features; how do these features, such as rhythmical activity or timbre, contribute to the maintenance of memory for past musical sequences? In the Digital Music Lab, we employ a paradigm called "nonadjacent key relationships" to tease apart these musical features and examine their unique effects on memory for key. This paradigm divides stimuli into three sections: (1) a key-defining nonadjacent section, (2) an intervening section in a different key, and (3) a probe cadence either in the original key or in a third key (forming an ABA or CBA relationship between the three sections). Participants are asked to rate the probe for its goodness-of-completion, the idea being that if a memory for the original key remains—despite intervening information—participants will rate the ABA condition higher than the CBA condition. Using this as a baseline, we can manipulate various musical features and compare the strength of completion ratings. If a feature boosts memory, goodness-of-completion should receive a similar boost when compared to CBA conditions. Indeed, this is a pattern we found in many musical features. Results confirm that though memory for key itself may be weak, it is supported by common features we use in music composition every day.
10:50–11:00 AM Break
11:00-11:45 AM Symposium 2
Emily Wood
Body sway reflects nonverbal communication in a string quartet learning to play unfamiliar music together
Emily Wood, Dobri Dotov, Andrew Chang, Dan Bosnyak, Lucas Klein & Laurel Trainor
Ensemble musicians must anticipate their partners' actions to coordinate playing a piece together. To achieve this, musicians attend to sensorimotor signals embedded in their partners' body sway movements. Indeed, a musician's body sway movements reveal their upcoming intent regarding phrasing, tempo, and dynamics, which helps their partners anticipate how and when to play next. We have previously measured the body sway of expert musicians in small ensembles with motion capture, and used Granger Causality (GC) to calculate bidirectional influence, or information flow, between the body sway of each musician in the ensemble. We showed that information flow was greater from assigned leaders to assigned followers than vice versa, and that group information flow was greater when musicians played with emotional expression than without. Here, we show how information flow changes in an ensemble that learns to play unfamiliar music together. A professional string quartet came into the LIVELab and played two unfamiliar pieces of music together eight times in succession while body sway motion data was recorded. Linear mixed effect modelling showed that information flow within the group decreased significantly across trials for both pieces, suggesting that musicians relied on body sway to help them play together when the pieces were most novel (trial 1), but this reliance decreased as they gained familiarity with playing the pieces together. We are currently completing cross-correlation analyses to examine how the similarity of group body sway movements changes across trials. Overall, our studies show that body sway reflects nonverbal communication in musical ensembles.
Wei (Vivian) Fang
Dominance pulls faces closer
Wei Fang, Cristina I. Galusca, Zhe Wang, Yu-Hao Sun, Olivier Pascalis, Naiqi G. Xiao
Perceived social traits, such as dominance and trustworthiness, affect other people's behaviors. While the impact of social traits has been consistently found in high-level cognitive processing, it is unclear whether social traits also modulates perceptual processing of faces. To this end, we investigated how facial dominance affects the perceived distance of faces.
We used an implicit but highly robust perceptual illusion to measure the perceived distance: when two identical faces are presented vertically (one above the other), relative to the top face, the bottom one appears closer. Observers exhibit a strong bias to indicate the bottom face is bigger.
We examined how facial dominance influences the perceived distance with a set of computer-generated Dominant and Submissive faces. If facial dominance makes faces perceived closer, participants will likely report the bottom one is bigger. To probe the generality of this effect, we tested this effect in Canada, China, and France (N = 30/country) with faces from three races (African, Asian, and Caucasian).
Across the three countries, participants showed a significant bias in choosing the bottom face as the bigger (Mean bottom responses = 72.03%, p < .001), replicating the illusion. Moreover, Dominant faces led to a stronger illusion than Submissive faces (p = .009), suggesting that facial dominance led faces to be perceived closer. No effect of face race or country were found.
As facial dominance is often associated with negative signals, our finding suggests an evolutional mechanism in the visual system, which amplifies dangerous signals in the environment.
Hannah M. Anderson
Variation and correlations of behavioral lateralization
Hannah M. Anderson, David N. Fisher, Brendan L. McEwen, Justin Yeager, Jonathan N. Pruitt, James B. Barnett
Sensory and behavioral laterality, or "handedness," is widespread across the animal kingdom and is thought to increase neural efficiency and dual information processing. Historically, research on behavioral lateralization has focused on among-individual variation, but the importance of within-individual variation in behavior is being increasingly acknowledged. Among-individual laterality correlations can indicate both neural multitasking or linkage of stimuli and/or behaviors; however, within-individual correlations of lateralization have yet to be explored experimentally. We adopted a multivariate approach to investigate lateralization at both the population and individual level in two species of terrestrial frog: the poison frog Ameerega bilinguis and their Batesian mimic Allobates zaparo. In contrast to other research on the subject we found no evidence for among-individual correlations but did find evidence for within-individual correlations, a previously unexplored form of lateralization. We discuss possible meanings for these results and their broader implications to both lateralization and broader behavioral research.
11:45 AM - 12:15 PM Keynote 2: Dr. Gabriel Xiao
Talk Title: Biased early social development by perceptual experiences.
Bio: Dr. Gabriel Xiao joined the Department in 2020 as an assistant professor. Dr. Xiao has been recently awarded Tier 2 Canada Research Chair and a NSERC Discovery Grant. He investigates the development of cognitive capacities in infancy, with a focus on the fundamental mechanisms that translate real-world experiences into adaptive changes in perceptual and social capabilities at the early stages of life. To achieve this goal, he uses various research methods, including behavioural, eye-tracking, computational modeling, and neuroimaging techniques.
Dr. Xiao is originally from China. He came to Canada in 2010 to do Ph.D. work under the supervision of Dr. Kang Lee at the University of Toronto. After receiving a Ph.D. degree in Developmental Psychology, he moved to Princeton University as a post-doc researcher to work with Dr. Lauren Emberson. When not at work, he enjoys street photography and video games, allowing him to wander at will in real and virtual worlds.
12:15 - 13:00 Lunch Break
1:00-2:00 PM Symposium 3
Leigh Greenberg
Visualizing critical information for the perception of androgyny
Leigh Greenberg, Patrick J. Bennett, Allison B. Sekuler
Androgynous face stimuli typically are generated by morphing strongly masculine and strongly feminine faces, based on an assumption that androgynous faces are equally masculine and feminine. Our past work challenged that assumption, finding that faces could be perceived simultaneously as androgynous and strongly gendered. The current study uses a reverse correlation technique (Dotsch & Todorov, 2011) to examine the stimulus characteristics that make a face look more or less androgynous. Observers viewed a pair of male or female faces embedded in Gaussian white noise and chose the face that appeared more androgynous. The two noise fields varied across trials, but were anti-correlated within each trial. Noise fields were sorted based on observer responses and averaged to create a Classification Image (CI) and antiCI. Preliminary results showed that the spatial structure in the CI was related to perceived androgyny: when the CI and antiCI were added to the base face images, the base+CI was clearly more androgynous than the base alone or the base+antiCI. Currently, we are investigating the similarity of CIs obtained from different observers and from different base male and female faces. To verify our findings, we plan to have new observers view CI and antiCI pairs and judge which is more androgynous. We also plan to use this technique to create additional CIs that represent concepts related to androgyny, such as masculinity and femininity. The results of these studies will shed light on our understanding of how the visual system processes face gender information.
Jesse Pazdera
Pitch induces illusory percepts of time
Jesse K. Pazdera, Laurel J. Trainor
Accurate tempo-tracking in auditory perception helps us to direct our attention to critical moments in speech and music. However, past research suggests that perceived tempo can be influenced by other, nontemporal features of an auditory stimulus. For example, people tend to rate music as faster when it is played in a higher octave than when it is played in a lower octave. It has therefore been suggested that pitch height alters tempo perception. However, previous studies have typically compared only one lower register with one higher register, leaving pitch height confounded with other factors like cochlear sensitivity that also change across octaves. My research this year has focused on mapping out these illusory tempo effects over six octaves to disambiguate these factors and better understand how tempo perception varies across the broader range of human hearing. These findings will help us to develop theories as to why seemingly unrelated acoustic information is capable of affecting time perception, and they may teach us something new about how our brains process time. In this talk I will discuss the results of a few of our latest experiments, as well as our working theory as to how pitch induces illusory percepts of time.
Brendan McEwen
Camouflage, conspicuousness, & antipredator behaviour in an Amazonian poison frog & non-toxic mimic
Brendan L. McEwen, Isaac D. Kinley, Hannah M. Anderson, Justin Yeager, Jonathan N. Pruitt, James B. Barnett
The Amazonian rainforest is a dynamic environment brimming with predation threats, and prey species occupying these habitats are under immense pressure to reduce these pressures on their survival. While some species avoid detection through cryptic strategies, i.e. camouflage, others aim to make their presence known to predators by signaling toxic defenses with bright colouration – an evolutionary strategy known as Aposematism. Conventional wisdom would suggest that camouflage and aposematism are mutually exclusive survival strategies, but emerging evidence suggests that aposematic species may simultaneously be cryptic to predators under certain conditions. Aposematic species' signaling can be parasitized and co-opted by non-toxic species through Batesian Mimicry, affording predator avoidance to these non-defended species. However, mimics are often imperfect in ways that may affect how conspicuous they are to would-be-predators. Further, even while mimicking a toxic species, mimics are under much greater predation threat than their models and may need to behave differently in the face of danger. We examined differences in conspicuousness between the toxic Amazonian frog Ameerega bilinguis and its non-toxic mimic Allobates zaparo using simulated predator vision and human detectors. We then attempt to associate these differences in detectability to differences in antipredator behaviour trials performed in their natural habitat. We find that components of body colouration leads the non-toxic mimic A. zaparo to be more conspicuous than its toxic model A. bilinguis to both simulated predator visual systems and human detectors, and find evidence for a behavioural antipredator adaptation in A. zaparo to compensate for its lack of chemical defense.
Elizabeth Phillips
A vocal-melodic theory of the evolutionary origins of musical scales
Elizabeth Phillips, Steven Brown
The predominant theory of the origin of musical scales stems from the observation that some musical intervals are related to frequency ratios present in the natural harmonic series. From the time of the ancient Greeks onward, harmonicity theory has influenced the practice of instrumental tuning in Western music. However, the voice is the most ancestral and universal pitched instrument and it cannot be pre-tuned the way that instruments can. As a result, sung notes are notoriously imprecise in their tuning properties. In the present study, we analyzed the precision and tuning of notes from vocal melodies – from both European folk and non-Western indigenous traditions – relative to flute melodies of both folk and classical European origin. The results showed that, whereas Western instrumental melodies conformed somewhat to harmonicity, vocal melodies showed significant pitch imprecision and a general disregard for harmonic tuning principles. Importantly, these vocal effects were present regardless of culture, suggesting that they arise from physiological limitations in the vocal-production mechanism. These results highlight striking differences in the pitch-class properties of the voice and musical instruments. Given that song is the most ancestral form of pitched music, these results point to shortcomings in the harmonicity theory and thus call for the development of a vocal-melodic theory of the origin of musical scales. This evolutionary theory should be built cross-culturally, by investigating how the biological- and cultural-evolution mechanisms constraining all vocal music may consistently shape musical scale structure.
2:00 - 2:45 PM Poster Session
Rachael Finnerty
Online Group Music Therapy: A proactive approach
Rachael Finnerty, Laurel Trainor
This research explores the efficacy of online group music therapy as a proactive intervention for university students to manage stress and anxiety in comparison to the standard of care, verbal counseling. Students are randomly assigned to one of: 1) online active group music therapy, 2) online receptive group music therapy, 3) online group verbal therapy, 4) wait-listed control group, 5) no-intervention control group. Demographic information, music background and the Ten Item Personality Index are collected. Before and after each online therapy session, students rate their stress (Likert scale), complete the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (State) questionnaire and provide heart rate variability using a phone app. The online therapy groups run once a week for six-weeks. All participants complete the WHO-Quality of Life (short-form), the Perceived Stress Scale and provide a hair sample for cortisol analysis before and after the six-week intervention. We expect stress and anxiety to decrease in all three online therapy groups from before to after each session as well as from before to after the six-week intervention, whereas we expect little change in the two control groups. Data collection is ongoing in cohorts of 50 (10 per group), with a goal to test 200 participants. The efficacy of online group music therapy will be compared to the verbal standard of care. If online group music therapy is effective, it could become a relatively low-cost proactive approach to managing stress and anxiety, lowering the strain on health care supports on campuses, and enhancing overall student well-being.
Cindy Tran
Learning conversations in the operating room: The impact of new surgical coaching tool
Cindy Tran, Jennifer Zering, Kathleen Howcraft, Ranil Sonnadara
Introduction: Despite evidence positioning coaching techniques as a central component of competency-based medical education (CBME), implementations of coaching are highly heterogenous in medical education to date. In the present study, we explored the impact of a new surgical coaching checklist on teaching and learning experiences in the operating room (OR).
Method: Eight staff and eight surgical trainees used the new coaching checklist for four weeks. Following this, they participated in individual interviews. Questions explored experiences with the coaching tool, barriers and facilitators to use of the tool, and perceived effectiveness of the tool. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed for themes.
Results: Staff and trainees reported that the checklist was helpful, providing opportunities for persistent interactions, facilitating more direct feedback, and creating a consistent, structured framework for teaching in the OR. The tool was most effective when both parties believed its use would add value to the teaching encounter. Lack of preparation, individual teaching preferences, inability to communicate openly, and competing time demands impeded usage of the tool.
Conclusions: The surgical coaching tool fosters good educational practice and more positive teaching and learning experiences, encouraging a more collaborative teaching environment. The adoption of coaching techniques continues to become increasingly important as more programs shift towards CBME curriculums. Future work will further explore how the tool will help provision and interpretation of meaningful feedback and improving the culture around assessment in CBME.
Seyedbehrad Dehnadi
Exploration of the Bayesian Model of Tactile-Spatial Perception
Seyedbehrad Dehnadi, Daniel Goldreich, Jonathan Tong, Lux Li
Our brains are remarkably adept at producing an accurate perception of the world from the noisy and ambiguous sensory information they receive. The process by which sensory neurons encode physical stimuli as neural signals is relatively well understood. Much less is known about how the brain infers what the physical stimulus was from the neural response it evoked.
A promising computational model of perceptual inference is the Bayesian model. This statistical model proposes that perception is a dynamic process that combines stimulus information with our past experiences. While this model has been effective in replicating human performance on visual and auditory-based perceptual decision-making tasks, it has scarcely been applied in studies of tactile perception. As a result, it is not known whether the Bayesian model of perception is generalizable to all senses.
My thesis explores whether a Bayesian observer with access to cortical firing rates can replicate human tactile perception. To date, we have broadly replicated human performance on an Adaptation Induced Repulsion Illusion, a Sequential Two-Point Discrimination task, a Two-Point Orientation Discrimination task, and a Classic Two-Point Discrimination task. Our preliminary results suggest that the awareness of the Bayesian decoder regarding stimulus history is an important factor in perceptual performance. We hope that our model will deepen scientific understanding of perceptual processing and make predictions that are beneficial to the construction of tactile neuroprosthetics.
Konrad Swierczek
Predicting the dynamic perception of musical key: a cognitive model
Konrad Swierczek, Matthew Woolhouse
Musical key, a set of salient pitches within a piece of music, is a central part of experiencing western tonal harmony: even casual listeners are adept at detecting key. Traditional music-theoretic and earlier psychological models evaluate the key of a piece by diatonic-set membership or arbitrary functional labels. While this approach is effective when modelling largely diatonic music, it is less effective in relation to western chromatic music, i.e. repertoire that uses all twelve pitch classes. Indeed, chromaticism has become such a ubiquitous part of the western musical tradition, including pop, that it may even contribute to the formation of key. If the perception of key is not simply the product of diatonic scale membership, what other factors might influence how it arises? We hypothesize that tonal attraction (the perception of pull, push, inertia, and resolution in music) is, in part, responsible for the formation of major and minor key tonal hierarchies: unambiguously directed attraction promotes the perception of a key, while ambiguously directed attraction does not. The proposed formal model of musical key uses "interval cycle proximity" (a cognitive grouping mechanism), rare-interval/diatonic similarity, short-term memory, and psychoacoustic factors to predict the dynamic perception of key across a piece of music by encultured listeners. Since the model is based on cognitive and sensory processes rather than functional labels, it is particularly effective at interpreting previously ambiguous passages of music where a key is either obscured or is in conflict with music theory.
Emma Marsden
The role of impulsivity in criminality and substance misuse among Canadian federal offenders
Emma Marsden, Lana Vedelago, Vanessa Morris, James MacKillop & Michael Amlung
Substance use disorders (SUDs) are prevalent in 70% of offenders in the Canadian criminal justice system. Impulse control deficits, such as difficulty inhibiting inappropriate behavioural responses, have been shown to contribute to SUDs and criminal behaviour. However, research on these inter-connected variables remains limited. The current study sought to address this gap by examining the relation between history of substance misuse and impulsivity in offenders and non-incarcerated controls. Data were collected in partnership with Correctional Services Canada. Participants included 103 incarcerated offenders (66% male; 58% White) and 90 non-incarcerated controls (61% male; 84% White). Impulsivity was measured through a self-report questionnaire assessing five domains of impulsive personality traits and five computerized tasks assessing response inhibition, risk-taking, and discounting of future rewards. History of substance use problems were assessed using self-report questionnaires and offender intake archival data. Examining preliminary group differences between offenders and controls revealed a significant main effect of substance use status on impulsivity measure subscale, lack of premeditation, [F(1,158)= 8.542, p=.004] and three indices of risk-taking generated from the BART: total number of exploded balloons [F(1,158)= 4.344, p=.039], average number of pumps across unexploded balloons [F(1,158)= 5.240, p=.023], and total number of pumps across all trials [F(1,158)= 5.758, p=.018]. There were no significant main effects of substance use status on the other computerized tasks. However, final results will be presented at the meeting. Findings may provide insight into the role of substance misuse in offender populations and the importance of continuous risk assessment during incarceration.
Carly McIntyre-Wood
Neuroanatomical Foundations of Delayed Reward Discounting Decision Making II: Sulcal Morphology and Fractal Dimensionality
C. McIntyre-Wood, C. Madan, M. Owens, L, Sweet, J. MacKillop
Excessive delayed reward discounting (DRD) is a form of maladaptive decision making linked to substance use disorders (SUD). Elucidating the underlying neuroanatomical factors may offer important insights into the etiology of SUD. We used structural MRI scans of 1038 Human Connectome Project participants (Mage=28.86, 54.7% female) to explore two novel measures of neuroanatomy related to DRD: 1) sulcal morphology (SM; depth and width) and 2) fractal dimensionality (FD), or complexity, of parcellated cortical and subcortical regions. Partial correlations were explored between measures using DRD as a dependent variable and a number of covariates. To ascertain unique contributions to DRD, significant indicators were then entered into iterative hierarchical regressions guided by the correlation magnitude. Increased sulcal depth in 7, width in 1, and FD in 31 cortical regions were significantly (p<.05) associated with lowered DRD. When considering SM and FD, the right inferior frontal depth and left central width and depth; and left middle temporal, lateral occipital and entorhinal and right lateral orbitofrontal and rostral anterior cingulate FD uniquely contributed DRD, respectively. When considering SM and FD simultaneously, the right inferior frontal depth and central width; and left middle temporal, lateral occipital, and entorhinal, and right lateral orbitofrontal cortex FD uniquely contributed to DRD. These results implicate SM and FD as novel neuroanatomical foundations of the DRD decision-making phenotype and as neurobiological candidates for understanding the link between DRD and SUD.
Peter Najdzionek
Subjective financial status as a novel covariate in delayed discounting paradigms: Validation in relation to tobacco use disorder
Peter Najdzionek, Carly McIntyre-Wood, James MacKillop
Delay discounting (DD) of monetary rewards is robustly associated with substance addiction, and assessment typically includes household income as a covariate. However, factors such as children, geographical location, and inflation may undermine the validity of this measure. We investigated a novel measure of subjective, in relation to household income, DD, and smoking habits.
Subjective income was quantified on a 4-point scale, ranging from "not enough to pay some bills no matter how hard you try", to "enough money for extras". Two archival datasets were analyzed, one from the Peter Boris Center for Research Addiction in Hamilton, Ontario (n=1432, M age=38.93, 58.24% female); and one from Athens, Georgia, USA (demographic information pending). To further understand how subjective income, household income, and DD pertain to smoking habits, income measurements underwent correlational analysis with principal component derived DD scores, and hierarchical multiple regression was performed.
Within both datasets, As predicted, subjective financial status was highly correlated with household income (r=.56, p<.001; r=.51, p<.001); Both subjective financial status (r= -.18, p<.001; r= -.19, p<.001) and household income (r= -.098, p<.001; r= -.15, p<.001) were significantly associated with impulsive DD. Multiple hierarchical regressions showed both models (one model without objective income, one model with objective income) significantly predicted smoking status, between models, adding objective income significantly improved the model.
These initial results suggest that the subjective financial status indicator may be similarly valid to a traditional indicator, with the advantage of being independent of geography, currency, cost of living and inflation.
Maya Flannery
Why do I Like This Song? Music Acoustic Features and Beyond
Maya Flannery and Matthew Woolhouse
Music listening behaviour, the collection of songs in one's favourite playlist for example, is linked to differences between individuals. Such differences are often quantified by measures of personality, like the Big Five Inventory, to inform the relatively stable behavioural traits of a listener. Other factors, however, like mood and environment and their interaction, are rarely considered in research, leading to much of the variance in music preference yet to be explained. Furthermore, to describe listening behaviour, reliable categorization methods of music are required. Music has frequently been organized by a variety of genre categories, from broad music dimensions (e.g., "Sophisticated") to obscure sub-genres (e.g., "Acid Jazz"), or by the psychological attributes (e.g, "Complex") that are perceived in a given piece. These categories are often conceptually abstract and do not reliably describe how music sounds. In an effort to improve interpretations of music preference, our recent study in the Digital Music Lab found personality traits to be linked to music categorized by Music Acoustic Features (MAFs), such as the mode, tempo, or register of a piece. These features provide a context to objectively understand musical preferences. Unlike genre, we can systematically manipulate MAFs and evaluate their effects. We aim to further investigate the nuances of these relationships: how do individuals who vary in their personality, mood, and environment, prefer music that varies in mode, tempo, and its abundance of other qualities? And what do these relationships say about the importance of music in people's lives?
Jiali Song
What is the frame of reference of the effect of depth on visual-spatial attention?
Jiali Song, Patrick J. Bennett, Allison B. Sekuler, Hong-jin Sun
Most of what we know about visual-spatial attention has been on a 2D plane, however, little is known about how attention varies with distance. In the current study, we examined whether the distribution of attention along the depth-axis depends on the distance of fixation in a simulated driving context. Participants were asked to follow a lead car at a constant distance in a virtual 3D environment where distance is simulated by pictorial cues and optical flow. Fixation distance was manipulated between subjects by randomly assigning participants to follow a lead car at one of three virtual car-following distances (9.25, 18.5, 37 m). Attention along the depth axis was assessed with a target detection task where targets could appear at one of two eccentricities (12, and 24 degrees) and three target distances (9.25, 18.5, 37 m). Preliminary results indicate that detection is slower for farther target distances but more sensitive for intermediate target distances. However, car-following distance did not modulate the effect of target distance, although there were fewer misses and faster reaction time in the intermediate car-following distance condition. These results suggest that attention to virtual, far target distances in a driving context may be different from attention along the depth-axis in personal/peri-personal space.
Negeen Halabian & Kinza Naeem
Characterizing lifespan changes in the expression of SARS-CoV-2 receptors and co-receptors in the human brain
N. Halabian, B. Kumagai, K. Naeem, D. Ahuja, E. Jeyanesan, K. M. Murphy
Many individuals infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus will experience neurological symptoms ranging from headaches to more severe events such as delirium and ischemic stroke. The symptoms tend to differ across age groups. For example, younger adults with COVID-19 are vulnerable to stroke, while older adults also experience delirium. Even children may be affected, with distinct neurological symptoms in children with severe systemic inflammatory response to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Symptoms may result from the direct effects of the SARS-CoV-2 virus on the brain. At present, there is little information about lifespan changes in the expression of the virus receptor, ACE2, in the human brain that might help to understand the age-related impacts of COVID-19. We used transcriptomic data from postmortem tissue samples to determine the lifespan trajectories for a network of 37 SARS-CoV-2-related genes in16 areas of the human brain. we used high dimensional analyses to identify 4 clusters of brain areas with common developmental trajectories. The clusters represent anatomical regions: frontal cortex, parietal cortex, occipital/temporal cortex, and subcortical areas. Finally, we used a new analysis and visualization technique (PHATE) to compare the development of the 16 brain areas using all 37 SARS-CoV 2-related genes. The high dimensional analyses identified regional and age-related differences in the expression of SARS-CoV-2-related genes in the human brain. The long-term neurological consequences of COVID-19 have the potential to be debilitating. Thus, this new information about lifespan changes in the expression of SARS-CoV-2 receptors and co-receptors may help understand neurological symptoms in COVID 19 patients.
Rachelle Ho
Connectivity After Concussion: Altered connectivity in frontal and temporal regions in adolescents with
Rachelle A. Ho, Saurabh B. Shaw, Nicholas A. Bock, Carol DeMatteo, Geoffrey B. Hall
Background: Following concussion, prediction of who will go on to experience long-term symptoms is important for treatment plans, especially in children and adolescents. Evaluating resting state networks may provide early insight into persisting concussion symptoms.
Purpose: Our purpose is to investigate the functional connectivity of networks in youth following concussion, in order to assess its relationship to symptom severity, identify regions that differentiate individuals with symptoms lasting beyond six months, and characterize the change in these networks across recovery.
Methods: Youth with concussion between ages 10-18 years were recruited and scanned using resting state fMRI. Symptoms were tracked up to 6 months. "Resolvers" were defined as participants whose symptoms resolved within six months, whereas "Non-resolvers" were defined as participants with lingering symptoms beyond 6 months.
Results: Connectivity of the frontal regions of the default mode network was negatively related to symptom severity. Connectivity of the temporal regions was significantly different between the resolvers from the non-resolvers and showed an age-related trend.
Conclusion: Connectivity of the default mode network following concussion relates to both severity of reported symptoms and length of recovery in youth. Specifically, lower connectivity in the right superior frontal and medial prefrontal gyri is correlated with greater symptomology. In addition, a positive relationship between the connectivity of the temporo-occipital regions and symptom severity was shown in participants who resolved their concussion. However, a negative relationship was identified in those experiencing symptoms beyond six months.
14:50-15:00 Break
3:00 - 3:30 PM Lightning Talks
Vidhi Patel
Elucidating the Neuroprotective Mechanisms of Phytocannabinoids
Vidhi Patel & Ram Mishra
Background: Neurodegeneration is the gradual loss of neuron structure or function, including neuronal death. A cause of neurodegeneration is the persistent activation of the unfolded protein response (UPR), which leads to cell death caused by endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress. Cannabinoids, such as delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), were neuroprotective in cellular and animal models of neurodegeneration due to their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. However, there is limited evidence on the role of THC and CBD in ER stress mediation.
Objective: To investigate the neuroprotective mechanisms of THC and CBD using a cellular model of ER stress. Cell viability and the gene expression of UPR proteins will be measured to investigate the effects of treating with cannabinoids prior to exposure to ER stress.
Results: Cell viability increased significantly with THC or CBD pre-treatment but was not significantly altered when the cannabinoids were combined. There was a significant increase in the gene expression of an ER chaperone (GRP78), neurotrophic factor (MANF), and an anti-apoptotic gene (BCL-2) with cannabinoid pre-treatment before ER stress induction.
Significance: These results suggest that exposure to cannabinoids before ER stress induction may shift the UPR to a more adaptive response compared to the terminal UPR response that results in neuronal death. Understanding the role of ER stress in the neuroprotective properties of cannabinoids will provide greater detail about the underlying mechanisms of neurodegeneration and the potential of using cannabinoid treatments to mitigate neurodegeneration.
Lucas Klein
Can machine learning help us understand the musical cocktail party problem?
Lucas Klein & Laurel Trainor
The ability to allocate attention selectively to one of many sound streams underlies the so-called 'cocktail party problem.' Previous research has shown that multi-variate analysis of single-trial electroencephalography (EEG) recordings can be used to identify the attended speech stream in multi-speaker environments. However, few studies have applied this method using naturalistic music stimuli, despite the importance of selective listening for hearing and playing music. For example, orchestra conductors must learn to listen to one section over another, ensemble musicians listen for cues in each other's playing, and duettists must be able to distinguish their own playing from their partners'.
Cortico-Acoustic Correlation (CACor), a measure of synchronization between the audio stimulus and EEG projections derived using regression filters, has been applied successfully to single-trial data. The spectrogram reconstructed from EEG signals during listening to the attended stream solo was more highly correlated with the audio stimulus than that reconstructed from the unattended stream. Here, we propose to adopt a stimulus reconstruction method to decode auditory selective attention to one of two instruments concurrently playing the high and low parts of a series of contrapuntal melodic sequences.
A model that can successfully identify the target of attention during music listening could inspire a host of new tasks aimed at understanding attentional mechanisms involved in live performance. By collecting EEG while multiple musicians perform and again while they listen to recordings, algorithms could be trained to decode each musician's attention to each other's sound as they play.
Jamie Cochrane
Effects of varying facial region visibility on perception
Jamie Cochrane, Leigh Greenberg, Solmaz Vakili
With the current need for constant mask-wearing, many are asking how facial covers will hinder perception. Facial perception is a vital part of social interactions. With that, recent study by Freud et al. 2020 found that masks significantly hinder face recognition. This finding is somewhat conflicting with other data that suggest that the horizontal eye region is the crucial area for face recognition (Gold, Sekuler, & Bennett, 2004; Sekuler, Gaspar, Gold, & Bennett, 2004). Ideally, if the eye region is preferentially important to facial recognition, masks would not meaningfully hinder perception. Therefore, further investigation is needed to conclude the effects of masks. This study plans to explore the potential detriment a mask can have on one's immediate recognition. Previously, masked facial recognition studies have focused on memory performance, using such methods as the Cambridge face memory task. To remove memory as a confound, this investigation will implement a five-alternative forced-choice task. Participants will fixate on a target face for half a second before the stimuli changes to five alternative faces. The participants must choose the alternative face that matches the target. For comparison, two groups plus a control will be used, varying the method of lower facial visibility: one full-face control, one masked group, and one lower facial removal group. Based on the previous knowledge, it is hypothesized masks will hinder performance, but to what extent is unknown.
Janice Yan
Exploring the social consequences of sexual conflict using bedbug social networks
Janice Yan & Reuven Dukas
Bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) are an ideal model for studying the social implications of sexual conflict because of their notably harmful mode of copulation – traumatic insemination. Repeated traumatic inseminations reduce female longevity and lifetime reproductive output due to the energetic costs of wound healing and increased likelihood of infection. As a result, we expect the high fitness costs associated with repeated traumatic matings to result in divergent social preferences between the sexes. To investigate the impact of sexual harassment on social structure, we devised a novel experimental arena that provides bedbug populations with several high-quality shelters as well as an artificial "host" to facilitate natural foraging behaviour. Using a combination of video-recordings and live observation, we will track sexual and social interactions between individually marked bedbugs over several days. With this data, we can use social network analysis to analyze and visualize bedbug social structure and assess various predictions about how the presence of intense sexual conflict influences animal sociality. We will be examining the prediction that female bedbugs engage in less social interactions overall and occupy more peripheral network positions compared to males as well as whether females preferentially seek associations with other females as a strategy to reap the benefits of group-living while mitigating the costs of unsolicited sexual attention.
James Mirabelli
An Investigation of Associations between Auditory-Verbal Hallucinations, Trauma, and Executive Dysfunction in Borderline Personality Disorder
James Mirabelli
Auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVH) appear in 25 to 50% of those with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). However, little is known about the etiology and treatment of AVH within a BPD context. The current study aims to investigate the relation between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, executive dysfunction (ED), and AVH in BPD. Traumatic memory intrusions and ED appear in both BPD and PTSD. In both incidence and content, AVH are related to traumatic experiences in BPD. Similarly, PTSD presence and symptom severity, particularly intrusions, are associated with AVH in PTSD samples. Furthermore, PTSD and ED severity are related within PTSD. Deficits in source monitoring—an executive function governing perception of memory and thought origin—may impede perception of intrusions as internally generated. It is therefore hypothesized that PTSD symptoms relate to AVH in BPD directly through decontextualized intrusions as AVH content, and indirectly through ED-related source monitoring deficits allowing intrusions to manifest as AVH. BPD-diagnosed outpatients will complete questionnaires assessing PTSD severity and AVH presence. All participants will complete computerized neurocognitive ED measures. AVH-present participants will be assessed for AVH severity. ED and PTSD severity will be compared between the AVH-present and absent groups, and ED will be assessed as a mediator between PTSD and AVH severity in the AVH-present group. AVH interfere with BPD treatment, and are associated with poorer clinical outcomes and exacerbated suicidality. Therefore, there is an urgent need to investigate AVH in BPD. This study will potentially provide the first psychotherapeutic treatment target for AVH in BPD.
15:30-16:00 Keynote 3: Dr. Katrina Choe
Talk Title: Unraveling mechanisms of social deficits in a genetic model of autism spectrum disorders (ASD).
Bio: Dr. Katrina Choe joined the Department in 2020 as an assistant professor. Dr. Choe applies a multi-level, integrative research strategy to study gene mutations associated with psychiatric disorders. Dr. Choe identifies how genes affect neurobiology and disrupt social behaviours. Her lab uses genetic models of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to identify neurobiological pathways related to the behavioural characteristics of ASD.
In recent work, Dr. Choe found that oxytocin may positively affect the social behaviour of individuals with ASD by strengthening the connectivity of social circuitry. Dr. Choe initiated this research as a post-doctoral fellow in the Geschwind laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, in collaboration with scientists at the University of Cambridge, University of California, Los Angeles University of Heidelberg.
Before her post-doctoral studies, Dr. Choe completed her doctoral thesis on the hydration state-dependent control of vasopressin neuron excitability using in vitro electrophysiological techniques (Charles Bourque lab, McGill University). She has published 13 papers in various journals, including Neuron, NeuroImage and the Journal of Neuroscience. National awards from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have supported her research. Dr. Choe enjoys travelling, hiking, snowboarding, trying out new cuisines, and watching nature documentaries when away from the lab.
16:00-16:10 Closing
Top three:
- Oral Presentation: $75
- Tovah Kashetsky
- Emily Wood
- Jesse Pazdera
- Poster Presentation: $75
- Emma Marsden
- Negeen Halabian & Kinza Naeem
- Cindy Tran
- Lightning Talks: $50
- Janice Yan
- Lucas Klein
- Jamie Cochrane
- Meme Competition: Keiko Gutierrez


text:
Seha hires 131 UAE nationals
Abu Dhabi, September 8, 2011
Seha, the Abu Dhabi Health Services Company, recently recruited 131 UAE nationals in its health facilities, aiming to employ and train UAE nationals in their home country.
A total of 75 Emiratis are taking part in an internship programme, while another 56 Emiratis who have already completed their internships will enter accredited residency programs for specialist training.
"Seha is building a sustainable, healthcare system where UAE nationals assume a larger role in healthcare delivery and are supported in professional development along the way so they can contribute to healthcare needs in the country," said Madiha Al Marzouqi, head of recruitment and manpower planning section, Human Resources Department, at Seha.
"Seha's internship programme helps incubate UAE nationals to the point they become able additions to the healthcare workforce in various specializations."
"Seha is dedicated to becoming an employer of choice for UAE nationals, and increasing the number of Emiratis in the healthcare sector," Al Marzouqi added.
Post residency, candidates can either start practicing general medicine or apply for a four year higher education program to specialize in a specific branch of medicine.
Seha also offers scholarships to undergraduate and graduate UAE national medical students to deepen the pool of skilled candidates in healthcare. – TradeArabia News Service


text:
As supercomputers grow more powerful, they'll also grow more vulnerable to failure, thanks to the increased amount of built-in componentry. A few researchers at the recent SC12 conference, held last week in Salt Lake City, offered possible solutions to this growing problem.
Today's high-performance computing (HPC) systems can have 100,000 nodes or more -- with each node built from multiple components of memory, processors, buses and other circuitry. Statistically speaking, all these components will fail at some point, and they halt operations when they do so, said David Fiala, a Ph.D student at the North Carolina State University, during a talk at SC12.
[ Also on InfoWorld: China moves to beat U.S. in exascale computing. | Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter. ]
The problem is not a new one, of course. When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's 600-node ASCI (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) White supercomputer went online in 2001, it had a mean time between failures (MTBF) of only five hours, thanks in part to component failures. Later tuning efforts had improved ASCI White's MTBF to 55 hours, Fiala said.
But as the number of supercomputer nodes grows, so will the problem. "Something has to be done about this. It will get worse as we move to exascale," Fiala said, referring to how supercomputers of the next decade are expected to have 10 times the computational power that today's models do.
Today's techniques for dealing with system failure may not scale very well, Fiala said. He cited checkpointing, in which a running program is temporarily halted and its state is saved to disk. Should the program then crash, the system is able to restart the job from the last checkpoint.
The problem with checkpointing, according to Fiala, is that as the number of nodes grows, the amount of system overhead needed to do checkpointing grows as well -- and grows at an exponential rate. On a 100,000-node supercomputer, for example, only about 35 percent of the activity will be involved in conducting work. The rest will be taken up by checkpointing and -- should a system fail -- recovery operations, Fiala estimated.
Because of all the additional hardware needed for exascale systems, which could be built from a million or more components, system reliability will have to be improved by 100 times in order to keep to the same MTBF that today's supercomputers enjoy, Fiala said.
Fiala presented technology that he and fellow researchers developed that may help improve reliability. The technology addresses the problem of silent data corruption, when systems make undetected errors writing data to disk.
Basically, the researchers' approach consists of running multiple copies, or "clones" of a program, simultaneously and then comparing the answers. The software, called RedMPI, is run in conjunction with the Message Passing Interface (MPI), a library for splitting running applications across multiple servers so the different parts of the program can be executed in parallel.
RedMPI intercepts and copies every MPI message that an application sends, and sends copies of the message to the clone (or clones) of the program. If different clones calculate different answers, then the numbers can be recalculated on the fly, which will save time and resources from running the entire program again.
"Implementing redundancy is not expensive. It may be high in the number of core counts that are needed, but it avoids the need for rewrites with checkpoint restarts," Fiala said. "The alternative is, of course, to simply rerun jobs until you think you have the right answer."
Fiala recommended running two backup copies of each program, for triple redundancy. Though running multiple copies of a program would initially take up more resources, over time it may actually be more efficient, due to the fact that programs would not need to be rerun to check answers. Also, checkpointing may not be needed when multiple copies are run, which would also save on system resources.
"I think the idea of doing redundancy is actually a great idea. [For] very large computations, involving hundreds of thousands of nodes, there certainly is a chance that errors will creep in," said Ethan Miller, a computer science professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, who attended the presentation. But he said the approach may be not be suitable given the amount of network traffic that such redundancy might create. He suggested running all the applications on the same set of nodes, which could minimize internode traffic.
In another presentation, Ana Gainaru, a Ph.D student from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, presented a technique of analyzing log files to predict when system failures would occur.
The work combines signal analysis with data mining. Signal analysis is used to characterize normal behavior, so when a failure occurs, it can be easily spotted. Data mining looks for correlations between separate reported failures. Other researchers have shown that multiple failures are sometimes correlated with each other, because a failure with one technology may affect performance in others, according to Gainaru. For instance, when a network card fails, it will soon hobble other system processes that rely on network communication.
The researchers found that 70 percent of correlated failures provide a window of opportunity of more than 10 seconds. In other words, when the first sign of a failure has been detected, the system may have up to 10 seconds to save its work, or move the work to another node, before a more critical failure occurs. "Failure prediction can be merged with other fault-tolerance techniques," Gainaru said.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's email address is firstname.lastname@example.com.


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Deep Drawable Steels: Part One
Thermo-Mechanical Treatment (TMT) of Non-Ferrous Alloys: Part One
A DataPLUS kiegészítő adatmodul, amely korróziós adatokat, anyag kötés információkat, anyagméreteket, tűrési adatokat, valamint bevonatokra vonatkozó információkat tartalmaz többezer fémes és nemfémes anyaghoz.
Kattintson ide az információk megtekintéséhez
Overview of Total Materia database2022. január 12
Overview of Total Materia database2022. január 13
A Total Materia néhány hónapi használata és a különböző lehetőségek kipróbálása után csak megköszönni tudom kiváló munkájukat és a folyamatos frissítéseket./p>
A Total Materia marad az egyetlen eszköz, amelyet erre a célra fogunk használni.
Massimo Manfredini
Bonfiglioli Industrial Gearmotors, Bologna, Italy
Küldetésünk egyszerű: anyaginformáció-igény eseténa Total Materia legyen a mérnöki szakma elsőszámú ésegyetlen választása.
Prof. Dr. Viktor Pocajt, CEOKey to Metals AG
Surface treatments are an extremely important factor in preventing a wide variety of material failures including fatigue, wear, corrosion and oxidation.
Aluminizing and thermo-chemical diffusion process is carried out at high temperatures, typically in the range of 800–1000°C with a prolonged soaking time to aid the diffusion potential.
The surface of materials is the only part that has to co-exist with the external environment, however, majority of engineering failures originate from the surface which then results in the components failures such as fatigue, wear, corrosion and oxidation. To further improve these surface properties various surface modifications can be done through different techniques through which a suitable coating material is deposited onto the surface.
Aluminizing is a thermo-chemical diffusion treatment where in the surface layer of the material is impregnated with aluminum. It is primarily used on steels, but also on nickel and cobalt based alloys to obtain greater creep resistance, hardness and corrosion resistance.
The aluminizing process is usually operating at a relatively high temperature of 800–1000°C with prolonged soaking time taking into account the diffusion concept. To decrease the grain growth, carbide precipitation and distortion, there are many investigations relating a low-temperature aluminizing process, which is operating at a temperature below 700°C. However, the diffusion rate of aluminum atoms decreases with decreasing temperature, although many concerns are relieved by a low-temperature aluminizing process. Consequently, it cannot be refuted that the aluminizing time will be extended for the low-temperature aluminizing process. Bulk plastic deformation is a way to enhance the diffusion rate as reported in. However, the aluminizing process emphasizes only at the surface and in near-surface regions. Thus, plastic deformation only at the surface and in near-surface regions should be considered to improve the diffusion rate for the thermochemical surface treatments.
There are several techniques that have been used to obtain a layer of aluminium over a steel surface on a commercial scale. These include; electrolytic coating, cladding, pack, gas, spray (metalizing) and hot-dip aluminizing.
Pack Coating:
Coatings can be applied by pack coating processes, where the compounds containing Al or Cr are placed inside a powder mixture of aluminum oxide and an activator to produce a metal halide vapor. These vapors will deposit on the surface of the work piece.
Vapor Phase Coating:
A more advanced method is to process parts in a vapor phase coating system, where the workpiece is placed above the donor materials, so the surface of the parts will not be contaminated by contact with the powder. Vapor Phase Aluminizing (VPA) and Vapor Phase Chromizing (VPC) are typical coating processes.
Chemical Vapor deposition (CVD):
The most advanced method of coating is to produce the elements to be applied either outside or inside the coating chamber by reacting donor material with halide forming gasses, controlling the rate of deposition by adjusting the temperature and gas flow rates over or through the work piece.
1. M.B.Isiko: Aluminizing of plain carbon steel-Effect of temperature on coating and alloy phase morphology at constant holding time, NTNU-Trondheim, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, PhD, July 2012;
2. Chapter 2, Literature Survey, Accessed May 2018;
3. W. Yutanorm, P. Juijerm: Diffusion enhancement of low-temperature pack aluminizing on austenitic stainless steel AISI 304 by deep rolling process, Kovove Mater. 54 2016 227–232, DOI: 10.4149/km 2016 4 227;
4. Gas Turbine Component Coating Systems, Accessed June 2018;
5. Aluminizing, IBC Group, Accessed June 2018;
6. Aluminizing: A great coating for metals used in heat treat processes, 2017, Accessed June 2018.
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The Total Materia database contains many thousands of aluminum materials across a large range of countries and standards.
Where available, full property information can be viewed for materials including chemical composition, mechanical properties, physical properties, advanced property data and much more.
Using the Advanced Search page, define the search criteria by selecting 'Aluminum' in the Group of Materials pop-up list. It maybe that you need to further narrow the search criteria by using the other fields in the Advanced Search page e.g. Country/Standard.
Then click Submit
A list of materials will then be generated for you to choose from.
After clicking a material from the resulting list, a list of subgroups derived from standard specifications appears.
From here it is possible to view specific property data for the selected material and also to view similar and equivalent materials in our powerful cross reference tables.
Click on the property data link of interest to you to view specific property data.
For you're a chance to take a test drive of the Total Materia database, we invite you to join a community of over 150,000 registered users through the Total Materia Free Demo.


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Young Women Worry More about Money than Health, According to Survey
SAN FRANCISCO, November 22, 2016 /BUSINESS WIRE/ — A recent survey from Schwab Retirement Plan Services, Inc. finds there are significant gaps between the way male and female Millennials approach planning and saving for retirement.
Millennial men are close to evenly split on whether they are more concerned about being healthy enough or having enough money to enjoy retirement, while Millennial women are overwhelmingly more concerned with financial security once they stop working.
In the nationwide survey of people 25 to 35 years old who participate in a 401(k) plan, female Millennials report uncertainty and stress related to saving enough for a comfortable retirement in far greater numbers than their male counterparts. Both groups are interested in receiving personalized, professional help with their retirement savings efforts, though more women than men expressed a desire for such advice.
Being healthy or having enough money?
When asked which concerns them more – being healthy enough to enjoy retirement or having enough money to enjoy retirement – 54 percent of Millennial men and just 30 percent of Millennial women surveyed say being healthy is the greater concern. Forty-six percent of men and 70 percent of women, the overwhelming majority, say having enough money is the greater concern.
This is true even though male and female Millennials say they are in good shape, physically and financially, in virtually equal numbers. Eighty-six percent of Millennial men and 84 percent of Millennial women report being in good personal health, and 77 percent of Millennial men and 79 percent of Millennial women report being in good financial health.
Female Millennials' concerns about having enough money in retirement are borne out in their anticipated age of retirement. Roughly a third (31%) of Millennial women think they will still be working at age 70, compared to 22 percent of Millennial men who feel the same way, suggesting these women are concerned they will need a few extra years of income to ensure a comfortable retirement.
"A variety of social and economic factors impact the way men and women view money, and our survey showed that this is already affecting the youngest generation of workers," said Catherine Golladay, senior vice president of participant services and administration at Schwab Retirement Plan Services. "It is important for women and men alike to have access to and take advantage of critical resources, such as professional 401(k) advice and financial wellness programs, to help close the gap in retirement savings confidence."
The Confidence Gap
According to the survey, there is a large disparity in confidence between Millennial men and women when they think about their own retirement preparedness. The data shows that more than half of Millennial men (55%) believe they are saving enough to retire when they want to, compared to 42 percent of women.
This divide can be explained in part by the uncertainty associated with 401(k) investing. Sixty-one percent of Millennial women and 44 percent of Millennial men surveyed feel they don't know what their best 401(k) investment options are. Likewise, a full 75 percent of female Millennials and 59 percent of male Millennials wish they had an easier way to know how to choose their 401(k) investments.
Saving for retirement is causing this generation plenty of stress as well. For example:
- Only 36 percent of Millennial women feel totally on top of their 401(k) investments, and 42 percent feel a lot of stress about choosing the right 401(k) investments.
- For Millennial men, 55 percent feel totally on top of their 401(k) investments, and more than one-third (35%) feel 401(k) investing-related stress.
Help Wanted
Younger workers both male and female say they are relying on themselves for the money they'll need in retirement (89% of both groups), and a 401(k) is the largest or only source of retirement savings for most (72% of men and 74% of women).
Recognizing the importance of this vehicle to their financial future, most Millennials say they want help from a professional in managing their 401(k) investments. Millennial women are even more favorable to personalized 401(k) advice than their male counterparts, 79 percent compared to 67 percent.
More Millennial women than men would also like help with specific aspects of retirement planning, like managing current expenses to save more money for retirement (45% of women and 25% of men) and calculating just how much money they'll need to save for retirement (65% of women and 52% of men).
Professional 401(k) advice can also go a long way towards boosting Millennials' retirement saving confidence, especially for young women:
- Only a quarter (26%) of Millennial women feel very or extremely confident in their 401(k) investment decisions when working on their own, compared to 57 percent of Millennial men.
- With the help of a financial professional, the gap essentially disappears: 76 percent of men and 75 percent of women would feel very or extremely confident with the aid of investment advice.
The survey also showed that Millennials would welcome employer-provided education, tools and resources to help with their overall financial health. The vast majority – 87 percent of male and 92 percent of female Millennials – say they are interested in using a financial wellness program at work.
"Our experience has shown that taking advantage of professional advice can help 401(k) participants save more, be more diversified and stay the course during times of market volatility," Golladay added. "Millennials have the benefit of time on their side, so the earlier they consult with a professional and formulate a savings plan, the better they can prepare for retirement."
About the Survey
This online survey of U.S. 401(k) participants was conducted by Koski Research for Schwab Retirement Plan Services, Inc. Koski Research is neither affiliated with, nor employed by, Schwab Retirement Plan Services, Inc. The survey is based on 288 interviews and has a 3 percent margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level. Survey respondents worked for companies with at least 25 employees, were current contributors to their 401(k) plans and were 25-35 years old. Survey respondents were not asked to indicate whether they had 401(k) accounts with Schwab Retirement Plan Services, Inc. All data is self-reported by study participants and is not verified or validated. Respondents participated in the study between June 2 and June 8, 2016.
About Charles Schwab
At Charles Schwab we believe in the power of investing to help individuals create a better tomorrow. We have a history of challenging the status quo in our industry, innovating in ways that benefit investors and the advisors and employers who serve them, and championing our clients' goals with passion and integrity.


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The Database and Encyclopedia is a major digital resource for the study of the dissenting academies in the British Isles from 1660 to 1860. When complete it will contain historical accounts of individual academies, biographical articles about leading tutors, and biographical data for thousands of students educated at the academies over two centuries. It also provides the most comprehensive guide to archival sources for the study of dissenting academies ever created. Academy history articles provide authoritative institutional histories based on primary sources. Tutor biographies give comprehensive accounts of many major figures in the religious and intellectual history of Britain. For the period before 1730, the Database and Encyclopedia has drawn heavily on Mark Burden, A Biographical Dictionary of Tutors at the Dissenters' Private Academies, 1660–1729.
The whole resource forms an indispensable guide to the subject for researchers working in the areas of religious, intellectual, political, social, educational, and literary history.
The database was created by Inga Jones and Simon Dixon, with the technical assistance of Dmitri Iourinski, and under the direction of Isabel Rivers and David Wykes, and it contains contributions from leading scholars with specialist knowledge of the history of Protestant dissent in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. Help has been given by many scholars, librarians, and archivists whose contributions are recognised on the Acknowledgements page. Since the launch of the database in 2011 new content has been added regularly by Inga Jones, Isabel Rivers, David Wykes, and Mark Burden, and Dmitri Iourinski has added a number of new search facilities.
Citations should take the form Dissenting Academies Online: Database and Encyclopedia, http://dissacad.english.qmul.ac.uk/. Citations of academy histories and tutor biographies should follow the byline at the foot of the cited article.
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In this step-by-step tutorial you will learn how to create a sparkly female portrait through playing with transparency and overlapping vector shapes. In this tutorial you'll also learn to experiment with colors and just letting go of your creativity. Let's get started!
Every few weeks, we revisit some of our reader's favorite posts from throughout the history of the site. This tutorial was first published in May of 2011.
Tutorial Assets
We'll be using this stock image (provided by Tigg-stock) throughout this tutorial. What we want to achieve in this tutorial is a similar result to my vector illustration, missin___like_candy.
Step 1
Start by creating a new A4 Print Document, which is 8.5x11 inches. I use this standard size for prints.
Step 2
Now select File > Place to bring the stock photo into the background and name the layer "IMAGE." Remember to put a name on every new layer you make to keep it organized and to avoid confusion.
Step 3
Create a new Layer above the image. Label it "BASE," as this will be your guide in filling up shapes. Using the Pen Tool (P), start tracing the figure of the image to create a silhouette. Then you may add your desired gradient fill. Throughout the tutorial, you may go back to this layer and make changes with the colors to match with the overlapping vector shapes, which we'll go through later.
Step 4
Now create another layer and name it "BASE2." Start tracing the hair for the base color using the Pen Tool (P). You may also add your desired gradient to create nice effects after we start overlapping the shapes later. Just experiment with it and choose the colors that pleases your eyes.
Step 5
Create another layer and name it "LEMON," this will be for our headphones. Use the Ellipse Tool (L) to create an oval shape for the side of the headphones.
Step 6
Now we'll add detail to the headphones. On the same layer create shapes surrounding the oval to make it more like an orange or lemon. Use flat colors first and later you may want to add some gradients to it.
Step 7
Now we'll start adding details to the face by creating a new layer called "FACE DETAIL."
Step 8
Using the Pen Tool, start tracing the eyes and fill it with your desired colors. You can also make the eyelashes longer to give more emphasis to the eyes. Do the same for the nose and the lips. The reason to use your own colors is so you have your own version of this illustration, instead of creating the exact same tutorial image.
Step 9
Now, we are going to add overlapping shapes to our illustration starting with the face. Create a new layer above the "BASE" layer and name it "BASE-detail." As you can see in the image below, I tried to create random shapes and filled them with different colors. You may select each of the shapes you created and adjust the opacity depending on your desired outcome.
Step 10
Do the same with the neck and the shoulders. You can hide the "BASE" layer to make the stock photo visible. Through this, you'll be able to follow the light and shadows of the image. Use this as your reference in choosing your colors.
Step 11
Above the "FACE-detail" layer, create another one and name it "LIPS." Start creating shapes following the contour of the lips, and add white for the highlights. See the image below for reference.
Step 12
Now we will add more details to our lemon headphones. Create a new layer above the "LEMON" layer. Using the Ellipse tool create circles around the headphone and create droplets. Put white highlights afterwards. You can create your own desired details for the headphones as well.
Step 13
Now we'll add details to the hair. This might take more time to finish if you really wanted to give that hair a lot of details. Above the "BASE2" layer, I made the "HAIR-detail" layer and started tracing the strands of the hair from out stock image using the Pen Tool (P). You may want to experiment with the colors further. In this, I tried to use pink, but later changed it to match with the skin.
Step 14
Now let's add the background. Create a new layer below our image using the Rectangle Tool (M), which fills the canvas, and color it with a gradient of your choice.
Step 15
Now we're almost finish with our portrait. Let's add more details and highlights using the Pen Tool (P), and draw small shapes scattered on our image to create a glittery effect.
With just a few Illustrator commands such as the Pen Tool and playing with transparencies, you were able to create a dazzling illustration. You only have to play with your imagination and let go of your creativity. Now share your work on your favorite online art community. The final image is below.