The Investigation of the Behavior of Microorganisms by Computerized Television

Instrumentation is described which permits, along with simultaneous subjective observation, the rapid recording and quantification of the overt behavior of motile microorganisms under varying conditions. From a chain of standard commercially available units (with the exception of a single especially designed one) there has emerged a totality which provides unique advantages to the student of overt behavior. It consists of a primary optical system through which the organisms are televised, a standard video tape recorder, a unit which we have christened the ``bugwatcher' that processes the video signal from the tape for quantification of data by a computer, and finally, a digital computer.     

Attitudes toward the lower- and middle-class psychiatric patient as a function of authoritarianism among mental health students.

There is evidence that many clinicians' activities with lower-class patients may be influenced more by attitudes reflecting a middle-class orientation than by objective criteria. Authoritarianism seems especially germane to the problems of social class bias. For the evaluative dimension of the semantic differential, it was predicted that lower-class case histories would be judged more negatively by those Ss who were more authoritarian as measured by the California F Scale. This prediction was confirmed for a group of 24 psychiatric residents and bordered on significance for a group of 16 social work students. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Adjoint sensitivity analysis in nuclear reactor fuel behavior modeling

A computer program, SCODE, has been developed for calculating sensitivities for EPRI's SPEAR-ALPHA nuclear fuel performance code FCODE-ALPHA. Eleven critical parameters are assessed for the effects of their independent variations on 33 basic variables in the FCODE-ALPHA model. The enormous wealth of sensitivities that result, consisting of 363 quantities per axial node per time step, are calculated following FCODE-ALPHA computations on each time step. SCODE is based on adjoint sensitivity analysis, which is an analytic technique, obviating the need for numerical differentiation via repeated code runs at varied parameter values. Evaluation of sensitivities is reduced to a problem in linear algebra and is handled by standard matrix manipulations. Compared with the customary numerical differentiation approach, SCODE offers advantages of significant runtime reduction, exactitude of results, and on-line computation of sensitivities.