Doctoral students' comparative evaluations of best and worst psychotherapy supervision.

68 male and 74 female advanced clinical and counseling psychology graduate students from 37 programs completed questionnaires comparing their best and worst supervisory experiences in terms of context, personal attributes of the supervisor, and specific interactional aspects. Results indicate that quality of supervision was not related to self-reported intellectual or emotional resources of trainees; training site; population serviced; or the gender, experience, sociability, or primary career activity of the supervisor. The best discriminators of quality were perceived expertise and trustworthiness of the supervisor, duration of training, and an emphasis on personal growth issues over the teaching of technical skills. Highly regarded supervisors were psychodynamic as opposed to behavioral, established supportive relationships, and communicated expectations and feedback clearly. Sexist behavior and authoritarian treatment were particularly detrimental to quality of supervision. These differences were not mediated by prior experience, gender, or theoretical orientation of the respondents. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automated vehicle detection in forward-looking infrared imagery

We describe an algorithm for the detection and clutter rejection of military vehicles in forward-looking infrared (FLIR) imagery. The detection algorithm is designed to be a prescreener that selects regions for further analysis and uses a spatial anomaly approach that looks for target-sized regions of the image that differ in texture, brightness, edge strength, or other spatial characteristics. The features are linearly combined to form a confidence image that is thresholded to find likely target locations. The clutter rejection portion uses target-specific information extracted from training samples to reduce the false alarms of the detector. The outputs of the clutter rejecter and detector are combined by a higher-level evidence integrator to improve performance over simple concatenation of the detector and clutter rejecter. The algorithm has been applied to a large number of FLIR imagery sets, and some of these results are presented here.     

Groups at work: lessons from research into large-scale coordination

Study of large-scale coordination seeks us to understand work between and across groups beyond earlier conceptions of social human factors. Revealing the complexity of work domains and the subtle yet effective ways that workers negotiate its challenges opens the way to develop support tools that are grounded in a scientific understanding. This first special issue in Large-Scale Coordination shows the breadth of application research from air traffic control to the military and multi-agency emergency response. A second special issue later this year will show depth of research at large scale in healthcare.     

Microscopic and macroscopic models of photo-induced volume changes in amorphous selenium

We have proposed a new explanation for the photo-induced volume changes in chalcogenide glasses. We have found that the covalent bond breaking occurs in these glasses with excited electrons, whereas holes contribute to the formation of inter-chain bonds. We have calculated the charge distribution in a-Se, too.     

The SBASE domain library: a collection of annotated protein segments

SBASE is a database of annotated protein domain sequences representingvarious structural, functional, ligand binding and topogenicsegments of proteins. The current release of SBASE contains27 211 entries which are provided with standardized names inorder to facilitate retrieval. SBASE is cross-referenced tothe major protein and nucleic acid databanks as well as to thePROSITE catalog of protein sequence patterns [Bairoch, A. (1992)Nucleic Acids Res., 20, Suppl., 2013–2118]. SBASE canbe used to establish domain homologies through database searchusing programs such as FASTA [Lipman and Pearson (1985) Science,227, 1436–1441], FASTDB [Brutlag et al. (1990) Comp. Appl.Biosci., 6, 237–245] or BLAST3 [Altschul and Lipman (1990)Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 87, 5509–5513], which is especiallyuseful in the case of loosely defined domain types for whichefficient consensus patterns cannot be established. The useof SBASE is illustrated on the DNA binding protein Brain-4.The database and a set of search and retrieval tools are freelyavailable on request to the authors or by anonymous ‘ftp’file transfer from <ftp.icgeb.trieste.it>.     

Evaluation of Ah Genotype on PAH: DNA Binding and Metabolite Excretion in Mice Fed Coal Tar

Female C57BL/6J and DBA/2J mice were fed a diet containing 0.3% coal tar for 14 days. Urine was collected during the last 24 hr of diet administration for metabolite analysis. Lung and liver tissues were evaluated for chemical:DNA adduct formation using 32 P-postlabeling. 1-Hydroxypyrene levels were 3.5 times greater in urine of DBA/2J than C57BL/6J mice, while a difference of only 1.3-fold was observed for urinary 3-hydroxybenzo[ a ]pyrene. Lung chemical:DNA adduct levels were greater in C57BL/6J than DBA/2J mice, with averages of 0.33 - 0.47 and 0.16 - 0.12 pmole adducts/mg DNA, respectively. Chemical:DNA adduct levels for liver tissues, however, were 2.5 times greater for DBA/2J than C57BL/6J mice. These results are contrary to those obtained in previous studies where a single hydrocarbon was administered. The abundance of PAHs present in coal tar may have evoked metabolic responses not governed by the Ah receptor, thereby accounting for the contradictory results.     

Improving γ-radiation stability of pvc—a review

PVC has a significant tendency to degrade under γ irradiation. Therefore, considerable efforts have been made to improve its γ-radiation stability. The purpose of this review is to summarize recent results in this area, with a special emphasis on the improvement of color stability of PVC-based materials used in medical applications.     

Diversity space of multicarrier continuous‐variable quantum key distribution

The diversity space of multicarrier continuous‐variable quantum key distribution (CVQKD) is defined. The diversity space utilizes the resources that are injected into the transmission by the additional degrees of freedom of the multicarrier modulation. We prove that the exploitable extra degree of freedom in a multicarrier CVQKD scenario significantly extends the possibilities of single‐carrier CVQKD. The manifold extraction allows for the parties to reach decreased error probabilities by utilizing those extra resources of a multicarrier transmission that are not available in a single‐carrier CVQKD setting. We define the multidimensional manifold space of multicarrier CVQKD and the optimal tradeoff between the available degrees of freedom of the multicarrier transmission. We extend the manifold extraction for the multiple‐access AMQD‐MQA (multiuser quadrature allocation) multicarrier protocol. The additional resources of multicarrier CVQKD allow the achievement of significant performance improvements that are particularly crucial in an experimental scenario.     

Cellular toxicity of carbon-based nanomaterials

The cellular toxicity of carbon-based nanomaterials was studied as a function of their aspect ratio and surface chemistry. These structures were multiwalled carbon nanotubes, carbon nanofibers, and carbon nanoparticles. Their toxicity was tested in vitro on lung tumor cells. Our work clearly indicated that these materials are toxic while the hazardous effect is size-dependent. Moreover, cytotoxicity is enhanced when the surface of the particles is functionalized after an acid treatment.