Abstract Each year two million secondary-school students across West Africa sit coordinated exams. Pass rates fluctuate enormously, fueling speculation about cheating and short-term policy changes. To investigate these hypotheses, we construct hybrid exams containing items spanning 2011-2019 administer to 4,380 students. Exam difficulty alone explains 80 percent of pass rate fluctuatio...

With the ever-increasing size of software and hardware components and the complexity of configurations, large-scale analytics systems face the challenge of frequent transient faults and permanent failures. As an indispensable part of big data analytics, MapReduce is equipped with a speculation mechanism to cope with run-time stragglers and failures. However, we reveal that the existing speculat...

Introduction: Previous studies have shown that exercise enhances cognitive and functional capacities in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this study, we investigated the effect of long-term (60 days) and short- term (10 days) exercise on the spatial memory deficits in an animal model of AD. Methods: Fifty male rats were divided into 5 groups 1) intact, 2) sham, 3) sham-Alzheimer 4) ...

background: airport workers are continuously exposed to different levels of radiofrequency microwave (rf/mw) radiation emitted by radar equipments. radars are extensively used in military and aviation industries. over the past several years, our lab has focused on the health effects of exposure to different sources of electromagnetic fields such as cellular phones, mobile base stations, mobile ...

This opinion article argues that noise (randomness) in neural activity is the limiting factor in visual working memory (WM), determining how accurately we can maintain stable internal representations of external stimuli. Sharing of a fixed amount of neural activity between items in memory explains why WM can be successfully described as a continuous resource. This contrasts with the popular con...

Listeners with normal hearing show considerable individual differences in speech understanding when competing speakers are present, as in a crowded restaurant. Here, we show that one source of this variance are individual differences in the ability to focus selective attention on a target stimulus in the presence of distractors. In 50 young normal-hearing listeners, the performance in tasks mea...

The segregation of brain fiber tractography data into distinct and anatomically meaningful clusters can help to comprehend the complex brain structure and early investigation and management of various neural disorders. We propose a novel stacked bidirectional long short-term memory(LSTM) based segmentation network, (BrainSegNet) for human brain fiber tractography data classification. We perform...

In this study we investigated whether we could distinguish the use of specific verbal and visual short term memory (STM) processes in children, or whether the differences in memory performance could be interpreted only in terms of quantitative differences. First, the number of processes involved in the responses on six STM tasks (serial order reconstruction) of 210 primary school children aged ...