This qualitative study used a phenomenological approach to understand the experience of 10 later-life mothers who had a first child at age 35 or older and were in the process of raising a teenager. Data were collected with semi-structured interviews and analyzed using thematic coding. Initial findings suggest maternal age contributes to a positive parenting outcome due to life experience, emotional maturity and financial security. Drawbacks include fatigue and reduced fertility that limited family size, as well as competing life stages such as retirement and college. Older mothers felt in the mainstream. Clinical implications are discussed. / Master of Science

Yes / Objective To identify the injury history features reported by patients with ACL injuries and determine whether history may be used to identify patients requiring follow-up appointments from acute trauma services. Multi-site cross-sectional service evaluation using a survey questionnaire design conducted in the UK. The four injury history features investigated (LIMP) were ‘Leg giving way at the time of injury’, ‘Inability to continue activity immediately following injury’, ‘Marked effusion’ and ‘Pop (heard or felt) at the time of injury’. 194 patients with ACL injury were identified of which 165 (85.5%) attended an acute trauma service. Data on delay was available for 163 (98.8%) of these patients of which 120 (73.6%) had a follow-up appointment arranged. Patients who had a follow-up appointment arranged waited significantly less time for a correct diagnosis (geometric mean 29 vs 198 days; p<0.001) and to see a specialist consultant (geometric mean 61 vs 328 days; p<0.001). Using a referral threshold of any 2 of the 4 LIMP injury history features investigated, 95.8% of patients would have had a follow-up appointment arranged. Findings support the value of questioning patients on specific injury history features in identifying patients who may have suffered ACL injury. Using a threshold of 2 or more of the 4 LIMP history features investigated would have reduced the percentage of patients inappropriately discharged by 22.2%. Evidence presented suggests that this would significantly reduce the time to diagnosis and specialist consultation minimising the chance of secondary complications.

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to determine whether patients exhibiting third molar agenesis also exhibit delayed development and/or eruption of the adjacent second molar. The initial panoramic radiographs of 739 patients, 13-17 years of age, from the University of Iowa's Department of Orthodontics were examined. The developmental stage of each second molar according to Demirjian's 8-stage classification system, the eruption stage of each second molar, along with the presence or absence of each third molar were recorded, and Pearson chi-squared tests were used to determine differences in developmental and eruptive timing between those missing third molars and those with third molars present. We conclude that patients missing their maxillary third molars exhibit delayed development of the adjacent maxillary second molars. In addition, patients missing any of their four third molars exhibit delayed eruption of their adjacent second molars. The findings also suggest that mandibular second molars develop later than, but erupt earlier than, maxillary second molars.

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<p>  </p> <p>It is well established that people are highly sensitive to timing in interaction and that delay of response is consequential in shaping the interaction (Davidson, 1984; Jefferson, 1989; Pomerantz, 1984; Roberts, Francis, & Morgan, 2006). There is also crosslinguistic evidence that people of different language backgrounds orient to these delays as problematic, though with different levels of tolerance (Roberts, Margutti, & Takano, 2011). However, few studies, if any, have focused on the timing of responsive actions such as laughter or open class repair initiators (OCRI; e.g., English “what?” or Japanese <em>nani).</em> Both types of actions fill the slot of responses but are semantically-underspecified. They provide no overt comment on the speaker’s talk; although laughter does have a sociocultural association with humor and positive affect. In effect, laughter and OCRI are “agnostic” responses whose interpretations are highly dependent on contextual factors. This dissertation explores the phenomena of laughter and OCRIs in relation to timing and delay and the possibility of crosslinguistic variation by examining delayed laughter and delayed OCRI in American English and Japanese via two inter-related studies.</p> <p>The first phase examined delayed laughter and delayed OCRI in naturally-occurring conversation (telephone calls) using the analytic framework of Conversation Analysis (CA). The data for this analysis came from the CallFriend – English (Northern US) and CallFriend – Japanese corpora of audio-only telephone call conversations between friends and are accessible through the TalkBank database (MacWhinney, 2007). The English corpus contains 31 half-hour conversations, and the Japanese corpus consisted or 32 half-hour conversations. The results suggest little crosslinguistic variation in the sequence and function of delayed laughter and delayed OCRI. However, the results of this phase indicate that delayed laughter is often found as a hearer’s response to the speaker’s delicate and is typically oriented to by the speaker as an affiliative signal, unless additional indications of disaffiliation also co-occur in the interaction. Delayed laughter also functions as a forecast of an upcoming action that may spark trouble in the interaction or pose a face threat (such as an imperative.) On the other hand, delayed OCRI seem to indicate the hearer’s surprise at some sequential trouble, such as a disjunctive topic, or in a sequence of disaffiliation.</p> <p>The second phase takes these insights gleaned from the CA phase and investigates them experimentally by asking native speakers of English and Japanese to report their perceptions of laughter or OCRI at one of three different delay lengths. Participants for this study were recruited via the online crowdsourcing platforms Amazon Mechanical Turk (for English native speakers; n = 413) and Crowdworks (for Japanese native speakers; n = 240). Participants were asked to complete an online Qualtrics survey in which they listen to short, simulated telephone calls and rate their perceptions of agreement, surprise, and avoidance in the context of a recipient’s delayed laughter or OCRI. The experiment was conducted as a between-groups design, so for each language group, participants were exposed to either the laughter or the OCRI condition at one of three delay levels (0ms, 400ms, or 600ms). The results support the CA findings, as the participants reported that laughter expressed more agreement and avoidance than OCRI, and OCRI expressed more surprise than laughter, regardless of delay length. As with the CA findings, there was little crosslinguistic variation, but there was indication that native English speakers were more likely than Japanese speakers to perceive laughter as an expression of agreement and OCRI as an expression of surprise.</p> <p>The overall results suggest that delayed laughter is typically oriented to as an affiliative action by the co-participant while OCRI is more of a neutral action that has the potential to be a face-threatening action. Because these non-linguistic features are understudied, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of how the perceptions of seemingly agnostic responses are shaped by temporal characteristics and interactional sequence. </p>

Model checking problems suffer from state space explosion. State space explosion is the number of states in the graph increases exponentially with the number of variables in the state description. Searching the large graphs required in model checking requires an efficient algorithm. This dissertation explores several methods to improve an externalmemory search algorithm for model checking problems. A tool implementing these methods is built on top of the Murphi model checker. One improvement is a state cache for immediate detection leveraging the properties of state locality. A novel type of locality, intralayer locality is explained and shown to exist in a variety of search spaces. Another improvement, partial delayed duplicate detection, exploits interlayer locality to reduce search times. An automatic partitioning function is described that allows hash-based delayed duplicate detection to be used without domain knowledge of the state space. A phased delayed duplicate detection algorithm combining features of hash-based delayed duplicate detection and sorting-based delayed duplicate detection is explained and compared to the other methods.

Die Fallot-Tetralogie ist ein angeborener Herzfehler, der sich aus der Kombination von vier verschiedenen anatomischen Fehlbildungen zusammensetzt. In der Diagnostik kommen bevorzugt die Echokardiografie und die Magnetresonztomografie (MRT) zum Einsatz. Die MRT stellt dabei bei der Erfassung volumetrischer Parameter, insbesondere beim echokardiographisch nicht immer vollständig einsehbaren rechten Ventrikel, den Goldstandard dar. Zudem bietet die MRT die Möglichkeit der Gewebecharakterisierung, inklusive der Darstellung von myokardialer Fibrose. In dieser Studie wurden 67 Patienten nach korrigierter Fallot-Tetralogie mittels MRT untersucht. Dabei lag der Schwerpunkt auf der Visualisierung und Quantifizierung der myokardialen Fibrose mittels Delayed Enhancement-Technik in beiden Ventrikeln. Ziel war es, die Prädilektionsstellen von Delayed Enhancement nach Korrektur einer Fallot-Tetralogie zu beschreiben und seine Beziehung zum Auftreten von ventrikulären Arrhythmien und weiteren kardialen und anamnestischen Parametern zu ermitteln. Es stellte sich heraus, dass Delayed Enhancement bevorzugt im rechten Ventrikel zu finden ist. Es konnte kein Zusammenhang mit dem Auftreten ventrikulärer Arrhythmien, zum Patientenalter während der Korrektur-Operation sowie zu volumetrischen- und Ergometriedaten hergestellt werden. Das Auftreten ventrikulärer Arrhythmien war jedoch signifikant abhängig sowohl vom Patientenalter zum Zeitpunkt der Korrektur-Operation als auch vom Patientenalter zum Zeitpunkt der MRT-Untersuchung.