Two studies of the long-term follow-up of minimal therapist contact treatments of vascular and tension headache.

Tension and vascular headache patients, initially treated with biofeedback and/or relaxation training in either a minimal therapist contact protocol (3 visits) or an intensive individual protocol (10 or 16 visits) were followed-up prospectively for 2 years. In the first study, for the first 6 months of follow-up, half of all patients continued to keep headache diaries and were seen monthly and the other half had only minimal contact. The results at 1-year follow-up, based on 4 weeks of daily headache diaries, revealed equally good maintenance from both treatment protocols and from both follow-up conditions. In Study 2, we found that patients remained improved over pretreatment baseline levels at the 2-year follow-up regardless of initial treatment intensity. Approximately three quarters of vascular patients who were initially improved at posttreatment remained improved at 2 years. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Converting interpreters into compilers

There is an effective and quite general method of manually deriving compilers from programming-language interpreters without dealing directly with machine language. The method is an implementation of the largely theoretical and under-appreciated concept of partial computation, but can be understood on its own terms. It involves the translation of a source program's intermediate form into the interpreter's implementation language. This paper shows how the method can be used to transform both a sample iterative interpreter and a sample recursive interpreter into compilers. The result can be a large gain in program execution speed. Other advantages of the method, including the ease and practicality of applying it, are discussed.     

Frames of Reference in Mobile Augmented Reality Displays.

In 3 experiments, the authors investigated spatial updating in augmented reality environments. Participants learned locations of virtual objects on the physical floor. They were turned to appropriate facing directions while blindfolded before making pointing judgments (e.g., "Imagine you are facing X. Point to Y"). Experiments manipulated the angular difference between the learning heading and the imagined heading and between the actual heading and the imagined heading. The effect of actual-imagined on pointing latency was observed for naive users but not for users with brief training or instructions concerning the fact that objects can move with body movements. The results indicated that naive users used an environment-stabilized reference frame to access information arrays, but with experience and instruction the nature of the representation changed from an environment stabilized to a body stabilized reference frame. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of functionalization and boron and nitrogen substitution on some properties of carbon nanotubes

Molecular orbital calculations of the ionization potential of single wall carbon nanotubes having donor NH₂ and acceptor NO₂ groups bonded to the side walls and ends and boron and nitrogen substituted for carbon show substantial increases in ionization potential compared to carbon nanotubes with no functional groups and no carbon substitutions. The presence of a carbon vacancy on the side wall also causes a substantial increase in the ionization potential. The effect of tube length on the ionization energy is also calculated. The calculations also suggest that at appropriate levels of boron and nitrogen doping the armchair carbon nanotubes could be high temperature organic ferromagnetic materials.     

Investigations of two-stage-pseudospark switches for high-currentapplications

To avoid the lowering of the holdoff voltage due to the electrode erosion in one stage high current pseudospark switches (PSS), a two stage PSS with no axial aperture in the intermediate electrode was tested. For investigations a pulse generator was used generating peak currents up to 120 kA at a maximum voltage of 30 kV with a period length of 5 μs of a weakly damped sine wave with 90% current reversal. In comparison with a one stage PSS the breakdown characteristic was shifted to higher pressure. With a free floating intermediate electrode, the device could not be triggered, however, with additional capacities of a few nF between the three electrodes the discharge was ignited. The discharge in the second gap is triggered by the pseudospark discharge in the cathode gap, discharging the auxiliary capacities. Simultaneously, observation of both gaps with fast shutter photography showed an independent movement of the discharges in the two gaps. In the cathode gap as current increases, the discharge moves away from the center to the plane electrode surface as has been observed in the one stage PSS. However, in the anode gap the discharge moves away from the center after a contraction to the center. The two discharges are transmitted to metal vapor arc type discharges as the erosion patterns prove. With this kind of a two stage PSS holdoff voltages exceeding 35 kV would be possible. The characteristic switch data, i.e., delay and jitter, are nearly equal to a one stage PSS     

Pseudolesions in liver sonography

Two different molecular forms of cholecystokinin (CCK) were studied with respect to their modulatory effect on non-MHC restricted or natural killer (NK) cell cytotoxicity. NK activity of peripheral blood mononuclear cells was found to be hardly affected by co-incubation with either CCK-8 or CCK-33 within a physiological concentration range against K-562 or Caco-2 tumour target cells. NK activity by lamina propria mononuclear cells isolated from histologically normal intestinal mucosa was found to be enhanced dose-dependently by incubation with CCK-8 in the 4-h assay against K-562, but not in the prolonged 18-h assay or against Caco-2 targets. In contrast, CCK-8 showed a tendency to inhibit NK activity in the prolonged 18-h assay against K-562; however, these alterations were not found to be statistically significant. CCK-33 was not found to modulate the NK activity of lamina propria mononuclear cells. It is suggested that NK activity by lamina propria mononuclear cells may be stimulated preferentially by CCK-8 because this molecular form of CCK in particular predominates in the nervous tissue of the intestinal mucosa.     

A numerical model for multiphase flow based on the GMPPS formulation. Part I: Kinematics

The CFD modeling of two-dimensional multiphase flows is a useful tool in industry, although accurate modeling itself remains a difficult task. One of the difficulties is to track the complicated topological deformations of the interfaces between different phases. This paper describes a marker-particle method designed to track fluid interfaces for fluid flows of at least three phases. The interface-tracking scheme presented in this paper is the first part of a series of papers presenting our complete model based on a one-field Godunov marker-particle projection scheme (GMPPS). In this part, we shall focus on the presentation of the interface-tracking scheme and the kinematic tests we conducted to examine the scheme’s ability to accurately track interfacial movements typified by vorticity-induced stretching and tearing of the interface. Our test results show that for a set of carefully designed and commonly used error measures, relative percentage errors never exceed 2% for all of the tests and grid sizes considered, provided a sufficient number of marker particles are used. We shall also demonstrate that the method is of second-order accuracy and the interface transition width remains constant never exceeding three cell widths.