Effective components of TORDIA cognitive–behavioral therapy for adolescent depression: Preliminary findings.

In this report, we conducted a secondary analysis of the Treatment of SSRI-Resistant Depression in Adolescents (TORDIA) study to explore the impact of specific cognitive–behavioral therapy (CBT) treatment components on outcome. In TORDIA, 334 youths (ages 12 to 18 years) with major depressive disorder who had failed to respond to an adequate course of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) medication were randomized to a medication switch (either to an alternative SSRI or venlafaxine) with or without 12 weeks of adjunctive CBT. Participants who had more than 9 CBT sessions were 2.5 times more likely to have adequate treatment response than those who had 9 or fewer sessions. CBT participants who received problem-solving and social skills treatment components, controlling for number of sessions and other confounding variables, were 2.3 and 2.6 times, respectively, more likely to have a positive response. These preliminary findings underscore the importance of receiving an adequate number of sessions to attain an adequate clinical response. Finally, social skills and problem solving may be active elements in CBT for adolescent depression and should be considered in treatment by those working with seriously depressed youths. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The History of ICRP and the Evolution of its Policies

Within 12 months of the discovery of X rays in 1895, papers appeared in the literature reporting adverse effects from high exposure. In 1925, the first International Congress of Radiology, held in London, considered the need for a protection committee, which it established at its second congress in Stockholm in 1928. This paper celebrates the 80^th anniversary of ICRP by tracing the history of the development of its policies, and identifying a few of the personalities involved from its inception up to the modern era. The paper follows the progress from the early controls on worker doses to avoid deterministic effects, through the identification of stochastic effects, to the concerns about public exposure and increasing stochastic risk estimates. The key features of the recommendations made by ICRP from 1928 up to the most recent in 2007 are identified.     

Unconfined fluid electrospun into high quality nanofibers from a plate edge

We demonstrate an easily-implemented, edge-plate geometry for electrospinning and produce high quality nanofibers from unconfined polymer fluids. We show that for electrospinning in general, the electric field gradient, not just the electric field amplitude, is a critical parameter for successful self-initiated jetting. Considering a single spinning site, the edge-plate configuration resulted in the same or a higher fabrication rate as traditional needle electrospinning, while producing nanofibers similar in quality (diameter, diameter distribution, and collected mat porosity); moreover, this novel configuration operates without the possibility of clogging and has high potential for scale-up. We analyze the fundamental physical processes which underlie edge-plate electrospinning, including electric field, working distance, and feed rate dependence and the resultant changes to the linear and whipping regions, and thus to the fiber diameter. We conclude that the edge-plate configuration functions in a remarkably similar manner to traditional needle electrospinning.     

Forum A historical context for theories underpinning the production of the built environment

The quest for ‘theory’ in the Building Research & Information special issue ‘Developing Theories of the Built Environment’ (36(3) 2008) needs to be understood within a larger historical and political context. It would benefit from engaging with a rich vein of work on the production of the built environment over the last 30 years. Theory inherently develops in the political context in which it exists; if it fails to do so, it may be dangerous. This commentary traces the intellectual underpinning concerned with understanding the process of change in the built environment, particularly the result of changes in social relations and the social labour process. The production of the built environment is seen as encompassing all the social processes concerned with producing the built environment, built products, buildings and infrastructure, and out of natural resources, whilst consumption is applied to all the processes involved in consuming these, including the well-being of tenants. And between these are situated the processes of exchange, distribution, and circulation, involving complex webs of relations between developers, builders, and landlords and landowners. The challenge is not only to engage and learn from past work, but also to state explicitly what is currently driving the need for a theory (or set of theories).

La quête de la « théorie » dans ce numéro spécial de Building Research & Information consacré aux théories du développement du milieu bâti (volume 36(3), 2008) doit être comprise dans un contexte historique et politique plus large. Elle aurait intérêt à s'appuyer sur les nombreux travaux concernant la production du cadre bâti publiés au cours de ces 30 dernières années. La théorie se développe, de manière inhérente, dans le contexte politique dans lequel elle existe; dans le cas contraire, la situation pourrait devenir dangereuse. Cet article analyse le raisonnement intellectuel sous-jacent concernant la compréhension du processus de changement dans le milieu bâti, notamment les conséquences des changements dans les relations sociales et dans le processus social du travail. La production du cadre bâti est considérée comme englobant tous les processus sociaux liés à la production du cadre bâti, des produits de construction, des bâtiments et des infrastructures et aux ressources naturelles alors que la consommation s'applique à tous les processus qui entrent en jeu dans la consommation de ceux-ci, y compris le bien-être des occupants. Entre ces deux notions, on trouve les processus d'échange, de distribution et de circulation qui font intervenir des réseaux de relations entre promoteurs, constructeurs, bailleurs et propriétaires fonciers. La difficulté ne vient pas seulement du fait qu'il faut tirer profit des travaux et de l'expérience passés mais qu'il faut également expliquer ce qui motive aujourd'hui la nécessité d'une théorie (ou d'un ensemble de théories).

Mots clés: cadre bâti, cadres conceptuels, consommation, processus de travail, cadre politique, production, relations sociales     

Hiding data: a high-capacity distortionless approach

The widespread use of 3D models has become an interest in steganography. In this paper, we present a novel data hiding method for 3D models. Based on the representation information, the key idea is to consider the vertex index as a message block. A message consists of three types of message blocks, namely, unique, repeated and 1-bit or 0-bit repetitions blocks. Three embedding methods, namely, vertex index embedding (VIE), dynamic-length bit-string mapping (DBM), and repeated bits embedding (RBE), each best for a respective type of message block are devised. All message vertices are then arranged in the light of proposed vertex order and output as the stego-model. The message block is extracted from the vertex of the stego-model by the order of vertex sequence and its index in the ordered vertex list. While integrating the proposed methods our scheme gains high capacity compared to existing techniques while preserving reasonable robustness. In addition, our method is efficient, 25 times faster than previous techniques. With high capacity, several novel applications like content annotation for large documents, 3D meta model for related resources, etc., becomes possible, making the 3D model as an excellent data container.     

Potential application of gas chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry in the measurement of coeluting isomers

Despite the unprecedented popularity of separation chromatography, the measurement of coeluting isomeric chemicals remains an extremely difficult task. We developed an analytical scheme capable of measuring two coeluting isomers using a single chromatographic column and a gas chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry system. The protocol utilized two product ion fragments generated from a common parent ion associated with the isomers for quantitation. The utility of the analytical scheme was demonstrated with the measurements of several pairs of coeluting polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) isomers in standard solutions and fish liver samples. Best results were given when a set of stringent constraints for the abundance ratio of the two product ion fragments was satisfied. Analyses of seven fish liver samples collected from nearshore San Diego, CA, indicated that the domain that had been previously reported to comprise PCB 153 and PCB 168 actually contained PCB 153 only. Although only a selected number of PCB congeners were examined, the results presented indicate that the analytical scheme has the potential to be used to determine the concentrations of all chromatographically coeluted isomers.     

Mesh fusion using functional blending on topologically incompatible sections

Three-dimensional mesh fusion provides an easy and fast way to create new mesh models from existing ones. We introduce a novel approach of mesh fusion in this paper based on functional blending. Our method has no restriction of disk-like topology or one-ring opening on the meshes to be merged. First of all, sections with boundaries of the under-fusing meshes are converted into implicit representations. An implicit transition surface, which joins the sections together while keeping smoothness at the boundaries, is then created based on cubic Hermite functional blending. Finally, the implicit surface is tessellated to form the resultant mesh. Our scheme is both efficient and simple, and with it users can easily construct interesting, complex 3D models.     

Concurrent software verification with states, events, and deadlocks

We present a framework for model checking concurrent software systems which incorporates both states and events. Contrary to other state/event approaches, our work also integrates two powerful verification techniques, counterexample-guided abstraction refinement and compositional reasoning. Our specification language is a state/event extension of linear temporal logic, and allows us to express many properties of software in a concise and intuitive manner. We show how standard automata-theoretic LTL model checking algorithms can be ported to our framework at no extra cost, enabling us to directly benefit from the large body of research on efficient LTL verification. We also present an algorithm to detect deadlocks in concurrent message-passing programs. Deadlock- freedom is not only an important and desirable property in its own right, but is also a prerequisite for the soundness of our model checking algorithm. Even though deadlock is inherently non-compositional and is not preserved by classical abstractions, our iterative algorithm employs both (non-standard) abstractions and compositional reasoning to alleviate the state-space explosion problem. The resulting framework differs in key respects from other instances of the counterexample-guided abstraction refinement paradigm found in the literature. We have implemented this work in the magic verification tool for concurrent C programs and performed tests on a broad set of benchmarks. Our experiments show that this new approach not only eases the writing of specifications, but also yields important gains both in space and in time during verification. In certain cases, we even encountered specifications that could not be verified using traditional pure event-based or state-based approaches, but became tractable within our state/event framework. We also recorded substantial reductions in time and memory consumption when performing deadlock-freedom checks with our new abstractions. Finally, we report two bugs (including a deadlock) in the source code of Micro-C/OS versions 2.0 and 2.7, which we discovered during our experiments. This research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants no. CCR-9803774 and CCR-0121547, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) under contract no. N00014-01-1-0796, the Army Research Office (ARO) under contract no. DAAD19-01-1-0485, and was conducted as part of the Predictable Assembly from Certifiable Components (PACC) project at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). This article combines and builds upon the papers (CCO⁺04) and (CCOS04). Received December 2004 Revised July 2005 Accepted July 2005 by Eerke A. Boiten, John Derrick, Graeme Smith and Ian Hayes     

Optimal recovery schemes in fault tolerant distributed computing

Clusters and distributed systems offer fault tolerance and high performance through load sharing. When all n computers are up and running, we would like the load to be evenly distributed among the computers. When one or more computers break down, the load on these computers must be redistributed to other computers in the system. The redistribution is determined by the recovery scheme. The recovery scheme is governed by a sequence of integers modulo n. Each sequence guarantees minimal load on the computer that has maximal load even when the most unfavorable combinations of computers go down. We calculate the best possible such recovery schemes for any number of crashed computers by an exhaustive search, where brute force testing is avoided by a mathematical reformulation of the problem and a branch-and-bound algorithm. The search nevertheless has a high complexity. Optimal sequences, and thus a corresponding optimal bound, are presented for a maximum of twenty one computers in the distributed system or cluster.Received: 26 May 2004, Published online: 14 March 2005