OBJECTIVE To identify the source (press releases or news) of distortions, exaggerations, or changes to the main conclusions drawn from research that could potentially influence a reader's health related behaviour. DESIGN Retrospective quantitative content analysis. SETTING Journal articles, press releases, and related news, with accompanying simulations. SAMPLE Press releases (n = 462) on...

We present an analysis of migration effects on seismic reflection images of very shallow targets. Reflection objectives in engineering, groundwater, and environmental investigations commonly occur at depths between 2 and 50 m. Because the observation surface is near these imaged reflectors, optical distortion may be so small that migration will not have any effect on the seismic image and may t...

The apical hook of tomato seedlings is exaggerated by phytochrome actions, while in other species such as bean, pea and Arabidopsis, the hook is exaggerated by ethylene and opens by phytochrome actions. The present study was aimed to clarify mainly whether ethylene is responsible for the phytochrome-mediated hook exaggeration of tomato seedlings. Dark-grown 5-day-old seedlings were subjected to...

A local smoothing operator applied in the reverse direction is used to obtain planar shape enhancement and exaggeration. Inversion of a smoothing operator is an inherently unstable operation. Therefore, a stable numerical scheme simulating the inverse smoothing effect is introduced. Enhancement is obtained for short time spans of evolution. Carrying the evolution further yields shape exaggerati...

In Chapter 1, the high incidence of exaggerated hearing test results in the South African mining industry, as well as the negative impact this exaggeration potentially has in terms of cost and the effectiveness of audiological centres, was described. This sets the scene for this study which attempts to evaluate one possible way to address deliberate exaggeration of hearing loss on the part of n...

ABSTRACTAcoustic-phonetic exaggeration of infant-directed speech (IDS) is well documented, but few studies address whether these features are modified with a child's age. Mandarin-speaking mothers were recorded while addressing an adult and their child at two ages (0 ; 7-1 ; 0 and 5 ; 0) to examine the acoustic-phonetic differences between IDS and child-directed speech (CDS). CDS exhibits an ex...

We explored the effects of feedback on symptom reporting. Two experimental groups (n=15 each) were given a scenario with the option to exaggerate symptoms. Compared with a control condition (n=15), both groups scored significantly higher on the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology. Next, one group was confronted in a sympathetic way about their symptom validity test failure, wherea...