Counselor and therapist gender bias? More questions than answers.

Examined inconsistent evidence for counselor and therapist gender bias in empirical investigations and literature reviews. Three sets of possible explanations for inconsistent findings are proposed and illustrated with examples: conceptual and definitional problems with the concept of gender bias; methodological shortcomings in key studies in this area; and the influence of researchers' beliefs and values on interpretation of research findings. We suggest that any conclusions about counselor and therapist gender bias are premature, that existing research must be reevaluated in light of the limitations that have been identified, and that future research that avoids these pitfalls must be conducted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

InterPlay: Horizontal Scale-Up and Transition to Design in Scenario-Based Programming

We describe InterPlay, a simulation engine coordinator that supports cooperation and interaction of multiple simulation and execution tools, thus helping to scale up the design and development cycle of reactive systems. InterPlay involves a number of related ideas. In the first, we concentrate on the interobject design approach involving live sequence charts (LSCs) and its support tool, the Play-Engine, enabling multiple Play-Engines to run in cooperation. This makes possible the distributed design of large-scale systems by different teams, as well as the refinement of parts of a system using different Play-Engines. The second idea concerns combining the interobject approach with the more conventional intraobject approach, involving, for example, statecharts and Rhapsody. InterPlay makes it possible to run the Play-Engine in cooperation with Rhapsody, and is very useful when some system objects have clear and distinct internal behavior, or in an iterative development process where the design is implementation-oriented and the ultimate goal is to end up with an intraobject implementation. Finally, we have expanded the Play-Engine's ability to delegate some of the system's functionality to complex GUIs. This enables beneficial interaction with "smart” GUIs that have built-in behavior of their own, and which are more naturally implemented in code.     

Elastic constants of porous silver compacts after acid assisted consolidation at room temperature

Acid assisted consolidation (AAC) is a technique that provides elevatedlevels of cohesiveness to silver powder compacts without recourse to a high temperature treatment. Ultrasonic techniques were used to measure the elastic constants of high purity silver compacts as a function of several processing variables. The elastic moduli of untreated (NT) samples were found to be significantly lower than those of samples that had undergone AAC and compacted at the same pressure. Post compaction sintering increases the elastic constants of both AAC and NT samples. The results indicate that the elastic constants are dependent not only on the density that was attained but also on the processing route that was followed. The elastic constant of a porous metal, M, can be expressed as M = M ₀ g, where M ₀ is the elastic modulus of the bulk metal, g is a geometrical factor that reflects the interparticle contact area and is a quality factor that depends on the nature of the interparticle interfaces. The results suggest that sound wave velocity is a parameter more appropriate than density for predicting the elastic moduli of porous metallic compacts.     

A lower bound on the integral of the nonlinear filtering error

A lower bound on the nonlinear filtering error derived on the basis of information theoretic considerations will be proposed. The tightness of this bound will be shown in an example.     

On the figure of merit model for SEU rate calculations

Petersen has introduced a one parameter characterization of a device by the Figure Of Merit (FOM). It was claimed that this parameter was sufficient to estimate the SEU rate in almost all orbits. The present paper presents an analytic study of the FOM concept and compares the FOM model with other empirical models. It is found that indeed the FOM parameter gives, in most cases, a good agreement with the rates found using the full SEU cross section plots of the devices. The agreement is poorer in cases where a high portion of the proton flux comes from low energy protons and for very SEU-hard devices. This is demonstrated for certain devices (FPGAs) where the FOM predicted by proton may be smaller by an order of magnitude than the FOM from heavy ions     

Immunomodulation of murine experimental SLE-like disease by interferon-gamma

The objective of this study was to assess the impact of murine recombinant IFN-gamma and anti-IFN-gamma monoclonal antibody on the BALB/c mice experimental model of lupus. BALB/c female mice were immunized with a human anti-DNA antibody that carries the 16/6 idiotype. These mice were divided into several therapeutic groups according to different treatment strategies; injection with mouse recombinant IFN-gamma, anti-IFN-gamma mAb, phosphate-buffered saline (PBS), irrelevant mouse IgG and control groups that were neither treated nor immunized with the human anti-DNA antibody. The administration of IFN-gamma, intensified the degree of clinical, histological and serological parameters in this model of BALB/c murine lupus. This immunomanipulation decreased the mice longevity. All the laboratory parameters reflected acceleration of the disease in the IFN-gamma treated group as an elevated sedimentation rate, decreased white blood cell count and the development of massive proteinuria. One month after the boost injection, all the mice that were immunized with the anti-DNA antibody, developed high titers of autoantibodies; however, following an additional month, their levels declined in the IFN-gamma treated group. These findings were in concordance with an increased glomerular deposition of immune complexes in the IFN-gamma treated mice. IFN-gamma upregulated the levels of IL-4 and increased the number of IL-4 and IL-6 secreting splenocytes. In conclusion IFN-gamma administration can aggravate the clinical and laboratory outcome of 16/6 id induced lupus in BALB/c mice.     

The MPE toolkit for supporting distributed applications

This paper presents a toolkit for supporting the execution of coarse-grain, parallel (distributed) applications under the MOSIX multicomputer operating system. These tools use standard UNIX System V process control and message-passing facilities, as well as the dynamic process migration mechanisms of MOSIX. The MPE tools can be used to modify sequential applications that were originally written for execution in a uniprocessor environment, to run efficiently in a distributed environment, consisting of several loosely coupled independent computers that communicate by messages. After presenting the MPE tools, the paper gives examples of several sequential algorithms that have been modified for execution in such a distributed multicomputer, as well as the resulting execution speed-ups that were obtained.