Conducting Psychological Research in Medical Settings: Challenges, Limitations, and Recommendations for Effectiveness Research.

Efficacy research is insufficient and ineffective in changing practice, despite a large supporting psychotherapy efficacy literature. Concurrently, demand for supporting data and the burden on everyday practice for generating these data is increasing. The disconnect between efficacy and effectiveness is due to a lack of conceptual and methodological tools for testing efficacious procedures in real-world settings, particularly medical contexts. This article articulates the position that effectiveness studies pose more complex questions that require an alteration of conceptual and methodological frames of reference in order to make behavioral services available to the broadest patient base. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Decision-Theoretic Approach to Network Fault Diagnosis and Follow-up Action

Fault management and security of computer networks present new challenges of increasing complexity. Decision procedures for fault diagnosis, security-related threats, and follow-up actions must, however, be evaluated on the basis of sound theoretical foundations and economic costs of various strategies. This paper presents a minimum expected cost solution for fault diagnosis and corrective actions. Several notions new to fault management are introduced. The methodology is applicable to both non-malicious and malicious faults. As a novel security-related application, the problem of choosing between two strategies for containing the spread of network worms is discussed.     

Enzymatic extraction of fucoxanthin from brown seaweeds

Brown seaweeds contain a number of bioactive compounds. The xanthophyll, fucoxanthin, has in vivo efficacy against disorders such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and cancer. Organic solvents are traditionally employed to extract fucoxanthin, but carry a toxic chemical and environmental burden. The aim of this study was to optimise a fucoxanthin extraction method using enzymes, water, low‐temperature dehydration and mechanical blending, to produce yields comparable to those achieved with an organic solvent (acetone). Response surface methodology was applied, using Fucus vesiculosus as a model species. A fucoxanthin yield of 0.657 mg g^?1 (dry mass) was obtained from F. vesiculosus blade using the enzymatic method, equivalent to 94% of the acetone‐extracted yield. Optimum extraction parameters were determined to be enzyme‐to‐water ratio 0.52%, seaweed‐to‐water ratio 5.37% and enzyme incubation time 3.05 h. These findings may be applied to the development of value‐added nutraceutical products from seaweed.     

Past is prologue: Teachers composing narratives about digital literacy

This study examines the technological literacy autobiographical narratives (TLANs) written by 23 graduate students enrolled in a teacher-preparation course, Teaching Writing in a Digital Age. The purpose of this research was to understand the meanings and values these future composition teachers ascribed to technological literacy in their own past histories, as well as potential sources of reluctance or resistance to engage technological literacy in the teaching of composition. Findings from these TLANs suggest that participants’ past experiences with technology in school were often less compelling than extracurricular motives for using technology, such as social contact, playful experimentation, and the pursuit of existing interests. The article also explores the TLAN as a pedagogical activity and its potential for helping future instructors realign their orientations toward digital literacies.     

Growing a list

It is easy to find expert knowledge on the Internet on almost any topic, but obtaining a complete overview of a given topic is not always easy: information can be scattered across many sources and must be aggregated to be useful. We introduce a method for intelligently growing a list of relevant items, starting from a small seed of examples. Our algorithm takes advantage of the wisdom of the crowd, in the sense that there are many experts who post lists of things on the Internet. We use a collection of simple machine learning components to find these experts and aggregate their lists to produce a single complete and meaningful list. We use experiments with gold standards and open-ended experiments without gold standards to show that our method significantly outperforms the state of the art. Our method uses the ranking algorithm Bayesian Sets even when its underlying independence assumption is violated, and we provide a theoretical generalization bound to motivate its use.     

Comparison of gas‐ and liquid‐phase polymerization of propylene with heterogeneous metallocene catalyst

Sorption measurements are executed to study the sorption behavior of propylene in a semicrystalline polymer. Decreasing values for the Flory–Huggins interaction parameter with increasing temperature are obtained. Large deviations are found, especially at higher temperatures, compared to data from the literature. Propylene is polymerized in liquid and gaseous propylenes with Me₂Si[Ind]₂ZrCl₂/MAO/SiO₂ as the metallocene catalyst. Lower relative reaction rates are found in the gas phase compared to the experiments in the liquid phase. The activation energies from the experiments in both phases are on the same order of magnitude. However, the literature versus experimental sorption data has a large effect on the determined kinetic parameters. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 81: 1193–1206, 2001     

Spanish Content on Hospital Websites: An Analysis of U.S. Hospitals' in Concentrated Latino Communities

This study explores the nature and extent of Spanish language translation of hospital websites. A quantitative content analysis of 121 U.S. hospital websites located in Hispanic communities was conducted. Results indicate that a significant number of U.S. hospitals fail on their websites to offer equal content for Spanish language users. The study also examines several factors potentially associated with the incidence of website translation. First, organizational factors such as hospital size, ownership type and formal statements of diversity commitment are investigated. Second, demographic factors such as county population size and Hispanic population size are also considered. Hispanics' use of the Internet, the digital divide, culture's impact on Internet use, and eHealth provide a background for discussion of the findings.