Over-the-counter nicotine replacement therapy: Can its impact on smoking cessation be enhanced?

Nicotine replacement therapies (NRTs) are efficacious smoking-cessation aids. However, only minimal increases in smoking cessation followed NRTs being made available over-the-counter (OTC), which presumably made these treatments more readily available. To better understand why the United States did not experience improvements in smoking cessation following the OTC availability of NRTs, it is useful to review factors that determine NRT's impact on smoking cessation and how these factors played out with the introduction of OTC NRT. The authors contend that for NRTs to have a greater impact on public health, increases are needed in the number of individuals making a quit attempt, the proportion using NRTs in a quit attempt, and the effectiveness of each quit attempt. Even small increases in the impact of OTC NRTs could yield significant benefits in terms of morbidity and mortality. The remainder of this article provides examples of interventions designed to target each of the aforementioned factors individually as well as examples of interventions that link increased cessation attempts, increased NRT reach, and increased NRT efficacy in order to synergistically enhance the impact of OTC NRTs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Converging operations for perceptual defense.

Discusses some recent experimental attempts to provide converging operations for a concept of perceptual defense. For present purposes, perceptual defense is defined as a relative failure of perception per se due to the emotional character of the stimulus. Experiments are evaluated and discussed mainly in terms of their ability to eliminate as an explanation the response-bias hypothesis for differential accuracy between neutral and emotional words. In addition, following Blum, a stimulus-effect hypothesis is described and applied; all the experiments discussed require, if differences in accuracy of recognition are to be attributed to perceptual variation, converging operations to eliminate this hypothesis. It is argued as well that the search for converging operations for perceptual defense has implications for methodology in other areas of perception. (20 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Experimental attempts to produce phenylketonuria in animals: A critical review.

Studies attempting to produce PKU in animals are extensively reviewed. While some studies claim to have produced and consequently even prevented PKU in animals, such claims were found to be unjustified at this stage of research. Behavioral and biochemical criteria for assessing PKU are discussed along with certain methodological problems inherent in such work. The experimental production of PKU, on the other hand, offers an important model for the study of the relations between development, intellectual functioning, and biochemistry. (2 p. ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recent Life Events Preceding Suicide Attempts in a Personality Disorder Sample: Findings From the Collaborative Longitudinal Personality Disorders Study.

Few studies have examined the relationship between life events, suicide attempts, and personality disorders (PDs), in spite of the strong associations between PDs and suicidal behavior, and the poor coping strategies often exhibited by these individuals. The authors examined whether participants with PDs who attempted suicide during the first 3 years of a prospective, longitudinal study were more likely to experience specific life events in the month during and preceding the suicide attempt. Of 489 participants with PDs, 61 attempted suicide during the 3-year, follow-up interval. Results indicated that negative life events, particularly those pertaining to love-marriage or crime-legal matters, were significant predictors of suicide attempts, even after controlling for baseline diagnoses of borderline PD, major depressive disorders, substance use disorders, and a history of childhood sexual abuse. Therefore, certain types of negative life events are unique risk factors for imminent suicide attempts among individuals with PDs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Generalized birth and death processes with applications to queues with repeated attempts and negative arrivals

We consider the stochastic behaviour of a Markovian bivariate process {(C(t), N(t)), t0} whose statespace is a semi-stripS={0,1}×. The intensity matrix of the process is taken to get a limit distributionP _ij =lim _t+ P{(C(t), N(t))=(i, j)} such that {P _0j ,j }, or alternatively {P _1j ,j }, satisfies a system of equations of birth and death type. We show that this process has applications to queues with repeated attempts and queues with negative arrivals. We carry out an extensive analysis of the queueing process, including classification of states, stationary analysis, waiting time, busy period and number of customers served.     

中职生学习VB．NET的几点教学尝试

Visual Basic．NET（以下简称VB．NET）是学习程序设计语言最合适的入门级课程,由于其相比其他语言具有简单易懂、容易上手的特点而备受初学者的喜爱。该课程理论性、实践性强,教学难度大,学生往往会在学习的过程中慢慢失去兴趣,对于中职生来说更是如此。本文就如何激发中职生的学习VB．NET的兴趣,提高教学质量作几点探讨。     

气井防堵措施及解堵方法探讨

榆林气田地处鄂尔多斯盆地,冬春季节持续时间较长,气温低,气井在生产过程中,经常出现油管堵塞、采气树冻堵、采气管线堵塞等现象,给气井生产带来不便,尤其是在冬季供气高峰期,降低气井非正常关井次数,提高气井开井时率,是气井平稳生产、保证外供气任务顺利完成的基础,结合现场生产情况,对气井堵塞原因进行分析,提出了防止气井堵塞的措施,并结合现场实际对解堵方法进行探讨,提出建议。     

An attribute-based and object-oriented approach with system implementation for change impact analysis in variant product design

Variant product design is critical to the continued survival of a product in the demand-changing market. As variant product design involves numerous and concurrent attempts at requirement and product modification, a change impact analysis (CIA) becomes essential in order to capture both the potential and contextual impacts of a change proposal, and thereby ensure the consistency of the product’s integrated content throughout the process of carrying out any changes. In this regard, this paper presents an attribute-based, object-oriented approach for effectively and comprehensively performing the CIA tasks in variant product design. This approach models the integrated content of a product by characterizing its components and associated requirements with attributes and linkages. It then features an object-oriented change propagation design in order to handle the dynamic and recursive CIA loops. This approach is also able to show the collective impact when multiple changes are attempted. A computerized prototype, EPCII_EC, is implemented in order to realize the approach, and an illustrative product case with a comparative evaluation is provided in order to validate the work. Issues and limitations of this study are also discussed and suggestions are provided for future studies.     

On extreme values of orbit lengths in M/G/1 queues with constant retrial rate

In the design of waiting facilities for the units in a retrial queue, it is of interest to know probability distributions of extreme values of the orbit length. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the asymptotic behavior of the maximum orbit length in the queue with constant retrial rate, as the time interval increases. From the classical extreme value theory, we observe that, under standard linear normalizations, the maximum orbit length up to the nth time the positive recurrent queue becomes empty does not have a limit distribution. However, by allowing the parameters to vary with n, we prove the convergence of maximum orbit lengths to three possible limit distributions when the traffic intensity approaches 1 from below and n approaches infinity.

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Received: October 7, 1999 / Accepted: November 21, 2000