Practice Makes Progress? Homework Assignments and Outcome in Treatment of Cocaine Dependence.

The relationship between treatment outcome and the extent to which participants completed homework assignments was evaluated among 60 cocaine-dependent individuals assigned to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). Homework was assigned in 72% of all sessions and initiated by participants in 48% of the sessions in which it was assigned. Completion of homework was unrelated to participants' baseline characteristics and several indicators of treatment compliance. Participants who completed more homework assignments demonstrated significantly greater increases in the quantity and quality of their coping skills and used significantly less cocaine during treatment and through a 1-year follow-up. These data suggest that the extent to which participants are willing to complete extrasession assignments may be an important mediator of response to CBT. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Solution of a Well-Field Design Problem with Implicit Filtering

Problems involving the management of groundwater resources occur routinely, and management decisions based upon optimization approaches offer the potential to save substantial amounts of money. However, this class of application is notoriously difficult to solve due to non-convex objective functions with multiple local minima and both nonlinear models and nonlinear constraints. We solve a subset of community test problems from this application field using MODFLOW, a standard groundwater flow model, and IFFCO, an implicit filtering algorithm that was designed to solve problems similar to those of focus in this work. While sampling methods have received only scant attention in the groundwater optimization literature, we show encouraging results that suggest they are deserving of more widespread consideration for this class of problems. In keeping with our objectives for the community problems, we have packaged the approaches used in this work to facilitate additional work on these problems by others and the application of implicit filtering to other problems in this field. We provide the data for our formulation and solution on the web.     

Ethnicity, Expressed Emotion, Attributions, and Course of Schizophrenia: Family Warmth Matters.

The authors examined the role of family factors and the course of schizophrenia by carrying out additional assessments and analyses in 2 previously published studies of Mexican American and Anglo American patients and families. The authors found partial support for an attributional model of relapse for families who are low in emotional overinvolvement. Attributions of control, criticism, and warmth together marginally predicted relapse. The data also indicated that for Mexican Americans, family warmth is a significant protective factor, whereas for Anglo Americans, family criticism is a significant risk factor. These findings suggest that the sociocultural context shapes the pathways by which family processes are related to the course of illness. Moreover, the warmth findings suggest that families may contribute to preventing relapse. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Complementary Tasks to Measure Working Memory in Distinct Prefrontal Cortex Subregions in Rats.

Acquisition of odor-guided or visually-guided delayed win-shift behavior was evaluated in rats after lidocaine-induced inactivation within the agranular insular area of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) or the prelimbic area of the PFC. Additional sites and tasks were used to control for neuroanatomical and behavioral specificity of lidocaine inactivation of the agranular insular and prelimbic areas. Results showed that acquisition of the odor-guided delayed win-shift task was dependent on the agranular insular area, whereas acquisition of the visually-guided version was dependent on the prelimbic area. This dissociation suggests that the stimulus modality used is critical for revealing working memory functions of different PFC subregions. The described methods provide a complementary means to study working memory in PFC subregions using a radial-arm maze. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A non-contact method for part-based process performance monitoring in end milling operations

Surface response to excitation (SuRE) method was originally developed for structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. SuRE was used to evaluate the performance of completed milling operations. The method generates surface waves on the plate and studies the spectrum changes at selected points to detect defects and change of compressive forces. In this study, the length, depth, and width of a slot were changed step by step. The surface of the aluminum plate was excited in the 20–400 kHz range with a piezoelectric element. A laser scanning vibrometer was used to monitor the vibrations at the predetermined grid points after the dimensions of the slot were changed methodically. The frequency spectrums of measured vibrations were calculated by using the Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT). The sums of the squares of the differences (SSD) of the spectrums were calculated to evaluate the change of the spectrums. The SuRE method was able to determine if the dimensions were changed in each case at all the selected points. The scanning laser vibrometer is not feasible to be used at the shop floor. However, the study demonstrated that a piezoelectric element attached to any of the grid points would be able to evaluate the completed machining process.     

Some Systematic Supersaturated Designs

Supersaturated designs are factorial designs in which the number of factors exceeds the number of observations. Satterthwaite has suggested constructing such designs by a randomization procedure (random balance designs). In the present paper systematic designs are constructed which are, in a certain sense, m nearly orthogonal M possible. Examples of such designs are given constructed on an electronic computer and some properties of the designs are discussed.     

Books received and noted

Abstract

This study of the use of photographs during the Paris Commune, and continuing through the periods of Bonapartism, Boulangism, Royalism, and the Dreyfus Affair, is excellent in every way but two, and neither shortcoming is the fault of the author. First, the price is unaccountably high considering that, secondly, the reproduction quality is so poor. Nevertheless, in this scholarly and lively text, students of photo history will find a thorough, well-documented, and very thoughtful examination of the use of photographs, and especially captioned photos, primarily by the various opponents to the Third Republic. This is not so much a discussion of important French photographers as an attempt to identify and interpret those often anonymous images that enjoyed national circulation from 1871–1914, and to analyse their use as propaganda. To do this, the author carefully traces their political and sociological context, examines prevailing notions about the nature of photographs, and comments about the effectiveness of various photographic propaganda campaigns (although he concedes that it is difficult to determine their absolute effect on 19th-century viewers).     

Patient-specific computer modeling of blood flow in cerebral arteries with aneurysm and stent

We present the special arterial fluid mechanics techniques we have developed for patient-specific computer modeling of blood flow in cerebral arteries with aneurysm and stent. These techniques are used in conjunction with the core computational technique, which is the space?Ctime version of the variational multiscale (VMS) method and is called ??DST/SST-VMST.?? The special techniques include using NURBS for the spatial representation of the surface over which the stent mesh is built, mesh generation techniques for both the finite- and zero-thickness representations of the stent, techniques for generating refined layers of mesh near the arterial and stent surfaces, and models for representing double stent. We compute the unsteady flow patterns in the aneurysm and investigate how those patterns are influenced by the presence of single and double stents. We also compare the flow patterns obtained with the finite- and zero-thickness representations of the stent.     

Memory and the Reporting of Remittance in a Sample of Elderly Persons in Thailand

Accurate reporting of sources of income is needed in studies of intergenerational transfers and welfare of the elderly. The objective of this paper is to investigate how memory in the elderly is related to the reporting of remittances received from their children in Thailand. Using data from a longitudinal study of 1036 persons age 60 to 93 in a province in Thailand, the influence of a word recall (verbal learning and recall), and nickname recall (verbal learning and recall) on reporting of remittance was assessed. Initially, both measures were positively and significantly related to the reporting of remittance. The results remained significant only for the nickname task after controlling for education, wealth, living arrangements and disability. The results highlight the importance of cognitive issues in the quality of data and the need for attention to memory in questionnaire design.