Home-based assessments require in-depth analyses of daily living difficulties. No assessment tool that has been validated with visually impaired adult subjects has allowed such analysis. This research adapted a home-based person-environment interaction assessment tool designed for persons who are visually impaired. The Model of Competence, an explanatory model of the person-environment relation...

Discriminative capacities for vibrotactile spatiotemporal patterns were examined in 62 college students with three tasks: identification, masking, and discrimination of the letters "X" and "O" presented tactually on the Optacon, a reading machine for blind persons. Individual differences in performance and interrelations among scores within and across paradigms were explored. In identification,...

Language processing depends on a left-lateralized network of frontotemporal cortical regions. This network is remarkably consistent across individuals and cultures. However, there is also evidence that developmental factors, such as delayed exposure to language, can modify this network. Recently, it has been found that, in congenitally blind individuals, the typical frontotemporal language netw...

Using a recently developed protein folding algorithm, a prediction of the tertiary structure of the KIX domain of the CREB binding protein is described. The method incorporates predicted secondary and tertiary restraints derived from multiple sequence alignments in a reduced protein model whose conformational space is explored by Monte Carlo dynamics. Secondary structure restraints are provided...

Hybrid methods combine experimental data and computational modeling to analyze protein structures that are elusive to structure determination. To spur the development of hybrid methods, we propose to test them in the context of the CASP experiment and would like to invite experimental groups to participate in this initiative.

The question whether evolution is blind is usually presented as a choice between no goals at all ('the blind watchmaker') and long-term goals which would be external to the organism, for example in the form of special creation or intelligent design. The arguments either way do not address the question whether there are short-term goals within rather than external to organisms. Organisms and the...

BACKGROUND To measure the effectiveness of procedural video compared to live demonstration in transferring skills for fabricating orthodontic Adam's Clasp. MATERIALS AND METHODS Forty-nine fourth-year undergraduate male dental students were randomly assigned to two groups. The students in group A (n = 26) attended a live demonstration performed by one faculty, while students in group B (n = 2...

An experiment was carried out to test the thesis that people employ sensory-motor conceptual metaphors to understand metaphorical expressions. Congenitally blind and sighted participants paraphrased metaphorical expressions derived from the UNDERSTANDING is GRASPING and UNDERSTANDING is SEEING conceptual metaphors, and evaluated to what extent they felt they had understood them. On the one hand...