OBJECTIVE Television, Internet and print media are saturated with advertisements for unhealthy food that use marketing tactics aimed to build long-term brand loyalty and 'relationships' with children. While research in this area has largely focused on television, the current study examines children's responses to relationship-building marketing communications found in popular children's magazin...

ing away from responsibility factor allows us to simplify the MMR model laid out in section 2. The value of the outcome x to the subject and counterfactual outcome y to the “other” can now be written as: V i (x, y) = u(x) + G i ( x y ) [5] for i=0,1 where G is the function relevant in the private and G 1 in the social environments. Using simplified version of MMR our hypotheses for the BOLD sig...

Query-specific summarization of multiple documents is a useful task in the current day context of the WWW, that is containing huge amount of information. When different summarizers have access to different sets of documents for a query, generating a summary of the summaries produced by the multiple summarizers becomes an interesting and useful task. In this paper, we propose an efficient soluti...

Michigan-Dearborn. Prof. Su dedicated much of his precious time in giving guidance and provide leadership for this work. He always kept a good track of the progress by arranging weekly and monthly group meetings. His helpful advices, corrections and guidance helped steered me in the right the direction and finished this work successfully. I would also like to thank my fellow lab colleagues. The...

Abstract We report on a solvent‐free approach for the synthesis of low molecular weight, α,ω‐dihydroxy telechelic poly(β‐butyrolactone). In presence Ti(IV) alkoxides, mixtures β‐butyrolactone and diols, like di‐ or triethylene glycol, were reacted in ratios between 4:1 10:1. The oligomerization proceeds at elevated temperatures (80–100°C). Different alkoxide substituents (R = Me, i Pr, t Bu) Ti...

Background: Cell therapy of many neurodegenerative diseases using bone marrow stromal cells (BMSC) requires the differentiation of BMSC into neuronal subtype. However, the transdifferentiation of BMSC into GABAergic phenotype requires more investigation. Methods: In this study, BMSC of adult female rats were pre-induced into neuroblast-like cells using 1 mM β-mercaptoethanol (βME) and 10 M re...

It is well known that fundamental frequency (F0) is modulated by talker-specific characteristics such as sex and individual physiology and that F0 can also be affected by speech style (e.g., Loveday 1981). However, even when controlling for these factors, F0 has been shown The aim of the current study is to examine how F0 is affected by the interaction of talker-specific and language-specific c...

iSTART is an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) designed to improve students’ reading comprehension. Previous studies have indicated that iSTART is successful; however, these studies have also indicated that students benefit most from long-term interactions that can become tedious and boring. A new game-based version of the system has been developed, called iSTART-ME (motivationally enhanced). I...

We present a case study of narrative in an interactive game environment exploring how motivating text is used to create a narrative state in the mind of the player. This state in turn lends meaning to subsequent actions. We examine a set of text blocks from the game that tell a coherent, static story over a small play area and discuss the functions that text serves and the techniques used to ac...