Matching treatment focus to patient social investment and support: 18-month follow-up results.

Patients were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 treatments: brief broad-spectrum (BBS), extended relationship enhancement (ERE), or extended cognitive–behavioral (ECB). A hierarchical latent growth model was used to analyze the data of 188 patients (82%) followed for 18 months. ERE treatment was significantly more effective in increasing abstinence of patients entering treatment with a network unsupportive of abstinence or with a low level of investment in their network, whereas BBS treatment was more effective for patients with either (a) both a social network unsupportive of abstinence and a low level of network investment or (b) high investment in a network supportive of abstinence. ECB outcomes were neither as good as those matched nor as bad as those mismatched to the different exposures of relationship enhancement. This suggests that dose of relationship enhancement should be determined after assessing patient relationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Non-participants in utility energy conservation programmes

Utility conservation programmes are designed to benefit both participants and non-participants. This article outlines the issues involved in designing conservation programmes for utilities and determining the appropriate amount of incentives that can be provided to participants without harming non-participants. More importantly, the article discusses the issue of access to the programmes by utility customers. It concludes that it is the existing restrictions to participation, and not the level of compensation, that are of greatest concern to non-participants. A number of utility programmes designed to eliminate the problem of non-participation are reviewed.     

Male-female interactions across the female estrous cycle: A comparison of two species of dwarf hamster (Phodopus campbelli and Phodopus sungorus).

Recent studies in our laboratory have suggested that monogamy may be the preferred mating system in the Djungarian hamster (Phodopus campbelli), whereas the available evidence for the closely related Siberian hamster (P. sungorus) does not show the same pattern. Here we examine the behavior of male–female dyads of both species interacting during 1-hr tests in large, familiar habitats containing defensible nest boxes, food, and water. Levels of aggression within pairs were low, compared with those seen during brief intrasexual encounters, whereas affiliative behaviors, such as sniffs, were high. P. campbelli scent marked more than twice as frequently as P. sungorus. Females of both species scent marked at a constant rate irrespective of their location in the habitat, whereas males scent marked at a higher rate in the female's home area. Two major features of the copulatory pattern differed between the two species: (a) The duration of the ejaculatory lock was five times longer in P. sungorus than in P. campbelli. (b) Both species had approximately the same number of mounts in each ejaculatory series, but the intromission/mount ratio was significantly higher in P. sungorus. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Wood processing variables and adhesive joint performance

In order to obtain a bonded wood product from the tree, wood must be subjected to a series of processes. These include, among others, vital processes like drying of the green wood and machining of the surfaces of the dried wood in preparation for bonding. However, when wood is machined with dull blades, thermal degradation of the wood frequently occurs. The effects of kiln drying and thermal degradation of wood on the performance of the adhesive joints subsequently formed from such wood were investigated. Tapered double cantilever beam (TDCB) test specimens obtained from hard maple and phenol–resorcinol–formaldehyde (PRF) adhesives were used in the investigations. The enhancement of fracture energy due to the reduction in the moisture content of wood, the improved performance of adhesive joints due to rejointing of wood surfaces before bonding, and the reduction of adhesive joint strength resulting from thermal degradation of wood are presented and discussed.     

Fast parallel Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient algorithms for robot manipulator dynamics simulation

In this paper fast parallel Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) algorithms for robot manipulator forward dynamics, or dynamic simulation, problem are presented. By exploiting the inherent structure of the forward dynamics problem, suitable preconditioners are devised to accelerate the iterations. Also, based on the choice of preconditioners, a modified dynamic formulation is used to speedup both serial and parallel computation of each iteration. The implementation of the parallel algorithms on two interconnected processor arrays is discussed and their computation and communication complexities are analyzed. The simulation results for a Puma Arm are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed preconditioners. With a faster convergence due to preconditioning and a faster computation of iterations due to parallelization, the developed parallel PCG algorithms represent the fastest alternative for parallel computation of the problem withO(n) processors.     

Degradation reduction in optics imagery using Toeplitz structure

This paper is concerned with improvement in optical image quality by image restoration. Image restoration is an ill-posed inverse problem which involves the removal or minimization of degradations caused by noise and blur in an image, resulting from, in this case, imaging through a medium. Our work here concerns the use of the underlying Toeplitz structure of such problems, and associated techniques for accelerating the convergence of iterative image restoration computations. Denoising methods, including total variation minimization, followed by segmentation-based preconditioning methods for minimum residual conjugate gradient iterations, are investigated. Regularization is accomplished by segmenting the image into (smooth) segments and varying the preconditioners across the segments. By taking advantage of the Toeplitz structure, our algorithms can be implemented with computational complexity of onlyO (ln ² logn), wheren ² is the number of pixels in the image andl is the number of segments used. Also, parallelization is straightforward. Numerical tests are reported for atmospheric imaging problems, including the case of spatially varying blur. Research supported in part by a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. Research sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant F49620-97-1-1039. Research sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research under grant F49620-97-1-0139, and by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-96-23356. Research sponsored by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-96-23356.     

EUC BECOMES ENTERPRISE COMPUTING

Client/server, open systems, joint application development, and legacy systems—what happens when the silver bullet meets the glass house? And what does all of this have to do with end-user computing, anyway? Read this column and find out.     

Automated zebrafish chorion removal and single embryo placement: optimizing throughput of zebrafish developmental toxicity screens

The potential of the developing zebrafish model for toxicology and drug discovery is limited by inefficient approaches to manipulating and chemically exposing zebrafish embryos-namely, manual placement of embryos into 96- or 384-well plates and exposure of embryos while still in the chorion, a barrier of poorly characterized permeability enclosing the developing embryo. We report the automated dechorionation of 1600 embryos at once at 4 h postfertilization (hpf) and placement of the dechorionated embryos into 96-well plates for exposure by 6 hpf. The process removed ≥95% of the embryos from their chorions with 2% embryo mortality by 24 hpf, and 2% of the embryos malformed at 120 hpf. The robotic embryo placement allocated 6-hpf embryos to 94.7% ± 4.2% of the wells in multiple 96-well trials. The rate of embryo mortality was 2.8% (43 of 1536) from robotic handling, the rate of missed wells was 1.2% (18 of 1536), and the frequency of multipicks was <0.1%. Embryo malformations observed at 24 hpf occurred nearly twice as frequently from robotic handling (16 of 864; 1.9%) as from manual pipetting (9 of 864; 1%). There was no statistical difference between the success of performing the embryo placement robotically or manually.     

Analyzing subjectivity in therapeutic discourse: Rogers, Perls, Ellis, and Gloria revisited.

Analyzed the film Three Approaches to Psychotherapy (E. L. Shostrom, 1966), which depicts C. Rogers (client-centered therapy), A. Ellis (rational-emotive therapy), and F. S. Perls (Gestalt therapy) interviewing the same client, Gloria. Verbal exchanges between participants were analyzed, using T. S. Essig and R. L. Russell's (1988) categories for analyzing psychological relations between subjects and events in discourse. Predictable patterns in how therapists of different theoretical orientations represent subjectivity in discourse can be screened with these categories. Classification categories are appended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)