Racial microaggression? How do you know?

Comments on article by Sue et al. (see record 2007-07130-001) on racial microaggression in clinical practice. In April 2007 during a paper presentation at the University of Florida, I encountered Derald Wing Sue's account of a real-life incident in which he argued that a racial microaggression was committed against him. The story involved Sue and his colleague being asked by the flight attendant to move from where they originally sat in the plane in order to balance the weight in what seemingly was a small (propeller) aircraft. I was left wondering whether Sue had considered this alternative hypothesis for the flight attendant's service behavior instead of what would otherwise confirm his racial microaggression claim. The dissemination of biases and self-interests would be a tragic twist to both multicultural psychology's mission and the American Psychological Association's expressed interest in advancing psychology as an evidence-based science. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is crime in Mexico a disamenity? Evidence from a hedonic valuation approach

Since Roback’s seminal work (J Polit Econ 90(6):1257–1278, 1982), the literature on hedonic prices has evaluated the role of amenities in equilibrating regional differentials in nominal wages and prices. While these studies generally find evidence for traditional amenities and disamenities in developed countries, there remains little research on how characteristics such as violence affect the equilibrium in less developed countries. This article explores violence and other local characteristics as an amenity or disamenity for Mexico and employs the hedonic wage and rent theory proposed by Roback. This research uses a multilevel estimation technique using data from the Mexican Household Income and Expenditure Survey, along with other information from the municipal and state levels. This article finds evidence to suggest that illegal earning opportunities outweigh crime disamenity by inhabitants of some traditional drug-trafficking regions, because such crime appears to be the modus vivendi in those regions in a way that does not reduce economic performance.     

Development of an Experimental Device to Study High Temperature Oxidation

An experimental device was designed and constructed to study the oxidation behaviour of steel. The device consists in a special chamber mounted within the frame of a servo-hydraulic testing machine holding the sample being studied. The atmosphere within the chamber can be controlled to be either inert or oxidation by flowing either nitrogen or dry air: a flow of 14 Nl/min was used for replacing either atmosphere in less than 0.1 s. The sample of steel was heated up to the testing temperature by induction. The testing procedure was designed to be flexible enough for heating up and cooling down the sample without oxidation. The device allowed for scales that ranged from a few micrometers to close to 300 μm. The growth kinetics recorded in this work was found to agree with previous published data. It can be concluded that the present device allows for studying the behaviour of thin crusts of steel oxide, which are classified as tertiary and can damage the surface of the steel during rolling.     

Real-time operation of mobile robots using linear image arrays

A vision system using a pair of Linear Image Arrays is proposed for use with mobile robots for factory environments. This vision system was developed to perform the function of guidance, navigation, and obstacle detection. Using a standard 16-bit microprocessor for all of the computing tasks, low cost, small size, and low power consumption can be obtained. Real-time operation is achieved by using line images, which provide less data than two-dimensional images. However, this results in the need for special image processing techniques. Guidance and navigation are achieved using a new technique called the difference of medians, a robust method of detecting and locating known features in line images. Obstacle detection is performed by locating feature points in thresholded images and determining the distances to these feature points by template matching. A distance map is then generated, from which obstacles can be located. the algorithms used are chosen for their efficiency, with the result that a pair of images can be analyzed in less than 0.5 s.     

Depressive symptom patterns among older women.

The structure of depressive symptom patterns was investigated in a community sample of 344 women between the ages of 51 and 92 who were administered the SCL-90—R Depression and Additional Symptoms Scales. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test alternative measurement hypotheses implied by clinical formulations of depressive symptom patterns among elderly persons. The findings show support for the hypothesis that 2 somewhat different depressive syndromes, along with 4 more delimited forms of distress, underlie symptom-reporting patterns. Implications of these findings for future research on the relation between aging and depression are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)