Large scale production of indium antimonide film for position sensors in automobile engines

We use low pressure MOVPE to grow indium antimonide films on groups of eight 3 inch GaAs wafers per run. The films are used for the production of magnetoresistive position sensors for the car industry. To meet the narrow specifications for automotive components, the standard deviation of the sheet resistivity, and the thickness of the films have been reduced below 1.5%. This uniformity is the result of an optimization process encompassing the determination of the best susceptor temperature and the optimum flow. The gas velocity was found to have a large impact on the uniformity of the layers. Rotation of the wafers and the use of an optimum gas velocity results in extremely uniform layers.     

Caring for patients with liver cancer

An audit of the clinical use of EEG in mentally handicapped patients was performed over a three-year period. EEG requests seemed inappropriate in more than one-quarter of cases. Changes in clinical practice during the 10 months following presentation of these audit results were examined. There was a marked reduction in EEG requests, which were subsequently used in a more cost-effective and clinically appropriate way. There was also a reduction in the time taken to process requests.     

The Cognitive Interview: A meta-analytic review and study space analysis of the past 25 years.

The Cognitive Interview (CI) is a well-established protocol for interviewing witnesses. The current article presents a study space analysis of laboratory studies of the CI together with an empirical meta-analysis summarizing the past 25 years of research. The study space comprises 57 published articles (65 experiments) on the CI, providing an assessment of the boundary conditions underlying the analysis and application of this interview protocol. The current meta-analysis includes 46 published articles, including 20 articles published since the last meta-analysis conducted a decade earlier (K?hnken, Milne, Memon, & Bull, 1999). Reassuringly for practitioners, the findings of the original meta-analysis were replicated with a large and significant increase in correct details and a small increase in errors. In addition we found that there were no differences in the rate at which details are confabulated. Importantly, the effect sizes were unaffected by the inclusion of recent studies using modified versions of the CI. The CI appeared to benefit older adult witnesses even more than younger adults. We highlight trends and gaps in research and discuss how our findings can inform policy and training decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

English speakers attend more strongly than Spanish speakers to manner of motion when classifying novel objects and events.

Three experiments provide evidence that the conceptualization of moving objects and events is influenced by one's native language, consistent with linguistic relativity theory. Monolingual English speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in an English-speaking context performed better than monolingual Spanish speakers and bilingual Spanish/English speakers tested in a Spanish-speaking context at sorting novel, animated objects and events into categories on the basis of manner of motion, an attribute that is prominently marked in English but not in Spanish. In contrast, English and Spanish speakers performed similarly at classifying on the basis of path, an attribute that is prominently marked in both languages. Similar results were obtained regardless of whether categories were labeled by novel words or numbered, suggesting that an English-speaking tendency to focus on manner of motion is a general phenomenon and not limited to word learning. Effects of age of acquisition of English were also observed on the performance of bilinguals, with early bilinguals performing similarly in the 2 language contexts and later bilinguals showing greater contextual variation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An updated analysis of the ocean surface wind direction signal in passive microwave brightness temperatures

We analyze the wind direction signal for vertically (v) and horizontally (h) polarized microwave radiation at 37 GHz, 19 GHz, and 11 GHz; and an Earth incidence angle of 53/spl deg/. We use brightness temperatures from SSM/I and TMI and wind vectors from buoys and the QUIKSCAT scatterometer. The wind vectors are space and time collocated with the radiometer measurements. Water vapor, cloud water and sea surface temperature are obtained from independent measurements and are uncorrelated with the wind direction. We find a wind direction signal that is noticeably smaller at low and moderate wind speeds than a previous analysis had indicated. We attribute the discrepancy to errors in the atmospheric parameters that were present in the data set of the earlier study. We show that the polarization combination 2v-h is almost insensitive to atmospheric changes and agrees with the earlier results. The strength of our new signals agrees well with JPL aircraft radiometer measurements. It is significantly smaller than the prediction of the two-scale sea surface emission model for low and intermediate wind speeds.