Traditional waterproofing strategies (e.g. plastic seals, superhydrophobic coatings) of strain sensors greatly limit their sensing performance (e.g., sensitivity, working-range, and working-life). Here a unique ultra-stretchable, coating-free material is developed for high-performence in harsh environments. This integrates high sensitivity (GF 2.1 to 214), wide range (up 447% strain), low resol...

As the NHS in England grapples with the longest funding squeeze in its history, the quest for greater productivity becomes ever more pressing. Two new analyses published this week show that the productivity of consultants in NHS hospitals has fallen over the past six years. The authors reject any notion that this means doctors need to work harder but argue that we need to rethink how we seek an...

The present study examined the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean- and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. Vocabulary acquisition was followed using maternal diary and checklists for the Korean...

Two experiments examined developmental changes in children's visual recognition of common objects during the period of 18 to 24 months. Experiment 1 examined children's ability to recognize common category instances that presented three different kinds of information: (1) richly detailed and prototypical instances that presented both local and global shape information, color, textural and featu...

This study tested the impact of child-directed language input on language development in Spanish-English bilingual infants (N = 25, 11- and 14-month-olds from the Seattle metropolitan area), across languages and independently for each language, controlling for socioeconomic status. Language input was characterized by social interaction variables, defined in terms of speech style ("parentese" vs...

Online comprehension of naturally spoken and perceptually degraded words was assessed in 95 children ages 12 to 31 months. The time course of word recognition was measured by monitoring eye movements as children looked at pictures while listening to familiar target words presented in unaltered, time-compressed, and low-pass-filtered forms. Success in word recognition varied with age and level o...

Infants begin to segment novel words from speech by 7.5 months, demonstrating an ability to track, encode and retrieve words in the context of larger units. Although it is presumed that word recognition at this stage is a prerequisite to constructing a vocabulary, the continuity between these stages of development has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The goal of the present study is to in...

This study extended the research on the scaffolding provided by mothers while reading picture books with their children from a focus on conversational styles related to labeling to a focus on those related to agents and actions to clarify the process by which language develops from the one-word to the syntactic stage. We clarified whether mothers decreased the degree of scaffolding in their ini...

This paper models employment relationship as a repeated principal-agent problem with private evaluation. The efficient contracts exhibit correlated movements between lagged wage and current effort that are consistent with the positive feedback between pay and morale in practice. Low morale therefore is an integral part of a well-functioning relationship. (JEL: C73, D82, J41, L14 )

The paper discusses a set of verbal prefixes which, when added to a verb together with a reflexive morpheme, change the verb’s meaning always in the same manner. The prefixes form a sequence according to the degree of intensity with which they modify the verbal action. We present the process of verb intensification in three Slavic languages, namely Czech, Slovak and Russian.