Interpretation and generation incremental management in natural interaction systems

Human interaction develops as an exchange of contributions between participants. The construction of a contribution is not an activity unilaterally created by the participant who produces it, but rather it constitutes a combined activity between the producer and the rest of the participants who take part in the interaction, by means of simultaneous feedback. This paper presents an incremental approach (without losing sight of how turns are produced throughout time), in which the interpretation of contributions is done as they take place, and the final generated contributions are the result of constant rectifications, reformulations and cancellations of the initially formulated contributions. The Continuity Manager and the Processes Coordinator components are proposed. The integration of these components in natural interaction systems allow for a joint approach to these problems. Both have been implemented and evaluated in a real framework called LaBDA-Interactor System which has been applied to the “dictation domain”. We found that the degree of naturalness of this turn-taking approach is very close to the human one and it significantly improves the interaction cycle.     

The Key Enzyme of the Sialic Acid Metabolism Is Involved in Embryoid Body Formation and Expression of Marker Genes of Germ Layer Formation

The bi-functional enzyme UDP-N-acetyl-2-epimerase/N-acetylmannosamine kinase (GNE) is the key enzyme of the sialic acid biosynthesis. Sialic acids are negatively charged nine carbon amino sugars and are found on most glycoproteins and many glycolipids in terminal positions, where they are involved in a variety of biological important molecular interactions. Inactivation of the GNE by homologous recombination results in early embryonic lethality in mice. Here, we report that GNE-deficient embryonic stem cells express less differentiation markers compared to wild-type embryonic stem cells. As a result, GNE-deficient embryonic stem cells fail to form proper embryoid bodies (EB) within the first day of culture. However, when culturing these cells in the presence of sialic acids for three days, also GNE-deficient embryonic stem cells form normal EBs. In contrast, when culturing these cells in sialic acid reduced medium, GNE-deficient embryonic stem cells proliferate faster and form larger EBs without any change in the expression of markers of the germ layers.     

Review of Psychodynamic techniques: Working with emotion in the therapeutic relationship.

Reviews the book, Psychodynamic techniques: Working with emotion in the therapeutic relationship by Karen J. Maroda (see record 2010-01318-000). What makes Maroda’s work particularly remarkable, however, is that she not only manages to identify and explicate aspects of technique, but that the range of skills she addresses all converge on what can seem like an especially mystifying topic to new clinicians: the use of emotion in the therapeutic relationship. Maroda’s pragmatic tone seems to effortlessly weave concrete skills through the particularly vaporous topic of using emotion productively. The result is an admirably unmechanistic set of principles to aid clinicians in navigating the complex emotional terrain of the therapeutic relationship in a manner consistent with their own personal styles. One of the major strengths of Psychodynamic techniques is its breadth, and Maroda provides a good balance, including both general and specific issues related to the role of emotion in the therapeutic process. Despite the overall consistency of her attunement to the experience of the newer clinician, some of what Maroda stresses as vital to the therapeutic relationship may be unrealistic. The process of reading the book parallels the process of a successful therapy in which one has come to engage with and trust her guide and emerges a more flexible, confident, insightful person and professional. Maroda’s continued reassurances and frank openness to sharing her own vulnerabilities leaves the reader feeling infused with a sense of possibility that a fuller, deeper therapeutic relationship is possible. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

How Internet Users' Privacy Concerns Have Evolved since 2002

In 2002, the authors established a baseline for Internet users' online privacy values, finding information transfer, notice/awareness, and information storage were the top online privacy concerns. Since this survey, many privacy-related events have occurred, including changes in online trends and the creation of laws, prompting the authors to rerun the survey in 2008 to examine how these events might have affected users' online privacy concerns. In this article, they discuss the 2008 survey, which revealed that US Internet users' top three privacy concerns didn't change over the course of six years, although their level of concern did. The authors also examine differences in privacy concerns between US and international respondents. The Web extra groups the survey statements according to six dimensions of privacy concerns based on the following classifications—personalization, notice/awareness, information transfer, information collection, information storage, and access/participation.     

Adult age differences in learning from positive and negative probabilistic feedback.

Objective: Past research has investigated age differences in frontal-based decision making, but few studies have focused on the behavioral effects of striatal-based changes in healthy aging. Feedback learning has been found to vary with dopamine levels; increases in dopamine facilitate learning from positive feedback, whereas decreases facilitate learning from negative feedback. Given previous evidence of striatal dopamine depletion in healthy aging, we investigated behavioral differences between college-aged and healthy older adults using a feedback learning task that is sensitive to both frontal and striatal processes. Method: Seventeen college-aged (M = 18.9 years) and 24 healthy, older adults (M = 70.3 years) completed the Probabilistic Selection task, in which participants are trained on probabilistic stimulus-outcome information and then tested to determine whether they learned more from positive or negative feedback. Results: As a group, the older adults learned equally well from positive and negative feedback, whereas the college-aged group learned more from positive than negative feedback, F(1, 39) = 4.10, p effect = .3. However, these group differences were not due to older individuals being more balanced learners. Most individuals of both ages were balanced learners, but while all of the remaining young learners had a positive bias, the remaining older learners were split between those with positive and negative learning biases (χ2(2) = 6.12, p     

Reducing Water Seepage with Anionic Polyacrylamide: Application Methods and Turbidity Effects

Researchers used column and flume experiments with uniform silica sand with and without suspended solids to examine the extent and longevity of hydraulic conductivity reduction (HCR) resulting from three anionic polyacrylamide (PAM) application methods, liquid injection, slurry surface, and granular surface application. Low turbidity (0.4 NTU) liquid injection column tests showed 20–65% HCR, likely caused by an extensional viscosity mechanism. HCR increased as turbidity increased, especially at low PAM concentrations. High turbidity (100 NTU) liquid injection column tests showed 66–77% HCR, likely through surficial PAM–clay aggregate filtration. Column and adsorption tests strongly suggest PAM–sand adsorption does not cause substantial HCR. In low turbidity flume tests, PAM slurry application to the sand surface produced up to 100% HCR, likely through a viscosity mechanism, and granular application to the media surface produced up to 100% HCR, likely through fixed surficial polymer gel formation. Hydraulic conductivity returned to control-adjusted pretreatment levels following PAM application in all tests except granular surface application at high mass loads or with high turbidity.     

Calcination temperature effect on La0.67Ca0.33MnO3 nanoparticle using simple citrate pyrolysis process

A new simple route was used to synthesize nanosized crystalline La_0.67Ca_0.33MnO₃ perovskite type complex oxide by simple citrate pyrolysis process using a metal salts, La, Ca, Mn as starting materials. To obtain the LCMO nanoparticles the precursor was carried out at various calcination temperatures viz. 500° C, 600° C, 700° C, 800° C for very short time only ～ 60 minutes. The synthesized LCMO nanoparticles were characterized by powder XRD, FTIR, TGA/DTA, SEM. The precursor could be completely decomposed into complex oxide at temperature below 500° C according to the TGA/DTA results. XRD demonstrates that the decomposed species is composed of perovskite-type structure at calcination temperature of 600° C for 60 minutes. The crystalline size that depends on the calcination temperature of the precursor is in the range of 11–22 nm as determined by Scherrer Formula. All the prepared samples have high purity perovskite structure which is orthorhombic. The chemical bonds were identified by the measurements of Infrared IR transmission spectra carried out with powder samples in which KBr was used as a carrier. The IR spectra revealed that stretching and bending modes influenced by calcination temperature. Morphology and grain size were studied through scanning electron microscopy.     

Must psychologists change the way they analyze their data?

Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, and van der Maas (2011) argued that psychologists should replace the familiar “frequentist” statistical analyses of their data with Bayesian analyses. To illustrate their argument, they reanalyzed a set of psi experiments published recently in this journal by Bem (2011), maintaining that, contrary to his conclusion, his data do not yield evidence in favor of the psi hypothesis. We argue that they have incorrectly selected an unrealistic prior distribution for their analysis and that a Bayesian analysis using a more reasonable distribution yields strong evidence in favor of the psi hypothesis. More generally, we argue that there are advantages to Bayesian analyses that merit their increased use in the future. However, as Wagenmakers et al.'s analysis inadvertently revealed, they contain hidden traps that must be better understood before being more widely substituted for the familiar frequentist analyses currently employed by most research psychologists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perturbed quantization steganography

In this paper, we use the recently proposed wet paper codes and introduce a new approach to passive-warden steganography called perturbed quantization. In perturbed quantization, the sender hides data while processing the cover object with an information-reducing operation that involves quantization, such as lossy compression, downsampling, or A/D conversion. The unquantized values of the processed cover object are considered as side information to confine the embedding changes to those unquantized elements whose values are close to the middle of quantization intervals. This choice of the selection channel calls for wet paper codes as they enable communication with non-shared selection channel. Heuristic is presented that indicates that the proposed method provides better steganographic security than current JPEG steganographic methods. This claim is further supported by blind steganalysis of a specific case of perturbed quantization for recompressed JPEG images.