Papers by Liberman Torres
This report summarizes major effort to build a discharge tube and associated apparatus capable of... more This report summarizes major effort to build a discharge tube and associated apparatus capable of withstanding temperatures to 300 C and pressure to 150 psia, and to parameterize the HgBr laser fluorescence and laser output with respect to nitrogen and Ne buffer gas densities. Prior parameterization has been limited to buffer gas densities of about 1.3 Amagat since the laser tube was made Pyrex and therefore could not sustain more than about 15 psi internal over pressure. By enclosing the Pyrex laser tube inside a stainless steel pressure vessel, we have overcome this pressure limitation by maintaining a positive external pressure upon the laser tube. The steel tank was pressurized with nitrogen to avoid oxidation of the tube connections. Thus, the discharge tube, by being enclosed in a nitrogen protective atmosphere, withstands both the high temperature operation and the high internal operating pressures. Fluorescence, laser output, voltage and current waveforms were taken at various nitrogen fill pressures up to 300 Torr with Ne buffer gas densities up to 5 Amagat. For our experimental tube, the HgBr laser output and fluorescence efficiency was maximum at a nitrogen fill pressure of 150 Torr and increased with neon buffer gas density up to the maximum tested of 5 Amagat at a reservoir temperature of about 150 C.
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Human-computer Interaction, 2012
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Pediatric Research, 1977
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Mental Health Services Research, 1999
Interventions are needed to improve the quality of care for schizophrenia. However, in designing ... more Interventions are needed to improve the quality of care for schizophrenia. However, in designing these interventions it would be helpful to understand better which patients are at highest risk for poor-quality care and why care for this disorder is often of poor quality. We study the extent to which patient and treatment factors are associated with poor-quality care in 224 patients randomly sampled from two mental health clinics. Quality of medication management is evaluated using an established method based on national treatment recommendations. Multivariate regression is used to study the effect of patient and treatment factors on treatment quality, controlling for provider. Risk for poor-quality care was greater for patients who were more severely ill, older, and less compliant with treatment recommendations. There were trends toward poor management of symptoms in men and substance abusers, and poor management of side effects in Black patients. Provision of poor-quality care was associated with failure to document symptoms and side effects in the medical record. Interventions to improve care for schizophrenia should attend to the need for accurate clinical assessment and strategies for managing challenging clinical situations.
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Ecological Psychology, 2010
Historically, the field of phonetics has sought to validate competing theories of perception by s... more Historically, the field of phonetics has sought to validate competing theories of perception by searching for auditory or articulatory invariants. But speech communication differs from many forms of perception in that it is reciprocal: listeners are also speakers. This reciprocity is typically found in animal signaling systems, where the signal has evolved as a form of intentional interaction. We present a view of speech that takes account of this intentionality. Expanding upon direct realism's claim that affordances are perceived instead of symbols, we argue that the direct perception of speech requires the existence of “interaction affordances” arising from the dialogical process. In speech this moves us away from abstract objects of perception, for example, vocal tract gestures, and toward the objective half of a social affordance—the intentional speaker. We conclude by exploring the implications of this shift arguing that unification of the self and the environment in the perception of affordances provides an embodied account of speech that allows for optimization and variation within a loosely constrained auditory signal and continually changing articulatory gesture.
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The chapters in this book provide ample evidence that age-related hearing loss is caused by multi... more The chapters in this book provide ample evidence that age-related hearing loss is caused by multiple factors combining genetic traits with a constant barrage of lifetime insults to the hearing organ. Such insults may include noise exposure in occupational settings or at leisure (from loud machinery to iPods or rock concerts), chemicals and solvents in the work place, life style (drinking, smoking), diseases (diabetes, infections), and even the adverse “ototoxic” effects of medications on the inner ear. It is not even necessary that the insults be severe enough to cause immediate damage. Kujawa and Liberman (2006) subjected adult mice to a noise level that did not induce any threshold shifts two weeks after exposure. However, as the animals aged, they showed a continuing primary neural degeneration and deterioration of neural responses. Age-related changes in the central auditory system add to the complexity of the problem. Determining the cause(s) of hearing difficulties in an aging patient is challenging to say the least, let alone the question of how to prevent or treat such hearing impairment.
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Osteoporosis International, 1999
This randomized, double-masked, placebo-controlled trial evaluated the safety, tolerability and e... more This randomized, double-masked, placebo-controlled trial evaluated the safety, tolerability and effects on bone mineral density (BMD) of alendronate in a large, multinational population of postmenopausal women with low bone mass. At 153 centers in 34 countries, 1908 otherwise healthy, postmenopausal women with lumbar spine BMD 2 standard deviations or more below the premenopausal adult mean were randomly assigned to receive oral alendronate 10 mg (n = 950) or placebo (n = 958) once daily for 1 year. All patients received 500 mg elemental calcium daily. Baseline characteristics of patients in the two treatment groups were similar. At 12 months, mean increases in BMD were significantly (p≤0.001) greater in the alendronate than the placebo group by 4.9% (95% confidence interval 4.6% to 5.2%) at the lumbar spine, 2.4% (2.0% to 2.8%) at the femoral neck, 3.6% (3.2% to 4.1%) at the trochanter and 3.0% (2.6% to 3.4%) for the total hip. The incidence of nonvertebral fractures was significantly lower in the alendronate than the placebo group (19 vs 37 patients with fractures), representing a 47% risk reduction for nonvertebral fracture for alendronate-treated patients (95% confidence interval 10% to 70%; p= 0.021). Incidences of adverse events, including upper gastrointestinal adverse events, were similar in the two groups. Therefore, for postmenopausal women with low bone mass, alendronate is well tolerated and produces significant, progressive increases in BMD at the lumbar spine and hip in addition to significant reduction in the risk of nonvertebral fracture.
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Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2012
This paper provides a selective review of data on phonology, audition, vision, and learning abili... more This paper provides a selective review of data on phonology, audition, vision, and learning abilities in developmental dyslexia, with a specific focus on patterns of normal alongside poor performance. Indeed we highlight the difficulties of interpreting poor performance, and we criticize theories of dyslexia that are exclusively suited to explaining poor performance, at the risk of overgeneralizing and predicting deficits in many more situations than are observed. We highlight a number of tasks and conditions where individuals with dyslexia seem to show perfectly normal performance, and we discuss the value of taking such data seriously into account and the difficulties of current theories to explain them. Finally, we discuss the experimental challenges for tasks investigating the nature of cognitive deficits in dyslexia and in other developmental disorders and the challenges for any proper theory of dyslexia aiming to explain cases of normal as well as poor performance.
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Journal of Computational Neuroscience, 1994
Stellate cells in the cat antero-ventral cochlear nucleus (AVCN) maintain a robust rate-place rep... more Stellate cells in the cat antero-ventral cochlear nucleus (AVCN) maintain a robust rate-place representation of vowel spectra over a wide range of stimulus levels. This rate-place representation resembles that of low threshold, high spontaneous rate (SR) auditory nerve fibers (ANFs)at low stimulus levels, and that of high threshold, lowmedium SR ANFsat high stimulus levels. One hypothesis accounting for this phenomenon is that AVCN stellate cells selectively process inputs from different SR population of ANFs in a level-dependent fashion. In this paper, we investigate a neural mechanism that can support selective processing of ANF inputs by stellate cells. We study a physiologically detailed compartmental model of stellate cells. The model reproduces PST histograms and rate-versus-level functions measured in real cells. These results indicate that simple and plausible distribution patterns of excitatory and inhibitory inputs within the stellate cell dendritic tree can support level dependent selective processing. Factors affecting selective processing are identified. This study thus represents a first step towards the development of a computational model of the AVCN stellate cell receptive field.
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Pediatric Cardiology, 2010
A 16-year-old female patient with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome and supraventricular tachycardia... more A 16-year-old female patient with Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome and supraventricular tachycardia underwent radiofrequency (RF) catheter ablation of an accessory pathway in the left lateral area. During RF ablation she developed reversible ST segment elevation secondary to coronary artery spasm. Coronary angiography demonstrated the ablation catheter in close proximity to the circumflex coronary artery, with no evidence of coronary artery injury. Subsequently, conduction by way of the accessory pathway was successfully eliminated with cryoablation with no further coronary spasm or injury.
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Papers by Liberman Torres