Peer consultation groups for psychologists in private practice: A national survey.

We report the results of the first national survey of psychologists in private practice regarding their participation in peer consultation groups. The sample (71% return) was drawn from 800 randomly selected psychologists listed in the National Register of Health Service Providers in Psychology. We found that 23% of the sample currently belonged to peer consultation groups, and 24% had belonged in the past. Of those not currently in groups, 61% expressed the desire to belong if one were available. There were virtually no significant demographic differences between current members and nonmembers. We examined the following group characteristics: formation, length of existence, size, membership, leadership, theoretical orientation, range of experience, time and place, content, and group process. Groups tended to be small, informal, and leaderless; however, we found great variation among groups on all dimensions. Findings also showed a high degree of satisfaction with membership. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The structure and management of service level agreements innetworks

The paper proposes a structure for quality-of-service (QoS)-centered service level agreements (SLA), and a framework for their real-time management in multiservice packet networks. The SLA is structured to be fair to both parties, the service provider and their customer. The SLA considered here are for QoS assured delivery of aggregate bandwidth from ingress to egress nodes; however, the control and signaling is for the more granular flows or calls. A SLA monitoring scheme is presented in which revenue is generated by the admission of flows into the network, and penalty incurred when flows are lost in periods when the service provider is not SLA compliant. In the SLA management scheme proposed, the results of a prior off-line design are used, in conjunction with measurements taken locally at ingress nodes, to classify the loading status of routes. The routing and resource management are based on virtual partitioning and its supporting mechanism of bandwidth protection. The effectiveness of SLA management is measured by the robustness in performance in the presence of substantial diversity in actual traffic conditions. A simulation testbed called D'ARTAGNAN has been built from which we report numerical results for a case study. The results show that the SLA management scheme is robust, fair and efficient over a broad range of traffic conditions     

Use of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale to measure success in a psychosocial day program

This study contrasted six subscales of the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) to determine their sensitivity to psychosocial treatment outcome. An expanded version of the BPRS was administered to 216 clients on admission to a day program. The subscale measuring hostility and suspiciousness discriminated at intake clients who were therapeutically discharged from clients who did not complete the program and predicted discharge status after the investigators controlled for the effects of demographic variables. Significant reductions in scores were obtained on five subscales for a subset of clients to whom the BPRS was readministered before discharge. The results support the use of the expanded BPRS as an evaluative tool in psychosocial rehabilitation programs.     

Study of the heart rate and energy expenditure of ponies during transport

The energy expenditure and heart rate of five Shetland ponies were measured during transport and compared with the values recorded while they were at rest and walking. Secondary aims of the study were to investigate whether there was any correlation between heart rate and energy expenditure and whether different orientations affected the values to different degrees. The measurements were recorded at one-minute intervals while the ponies were at rest, walking and being transported in four different orientations, on journeys lasting 30 minutes. There were significant increases (P < 0.001) in both heart rate and energy expenditure during transport which were similar to those associated with walking, and there was a strong correlation between the two measurements. There was no conclusive evidence that orientation affected the measurements, but it appeared that rear facing transport might have had the least effect.     

Experimental methods in hepatology. Guidelines of the German Association for the Study of the Liver (GASL). Liver perfusion--technique and applications

Purified cell-envelope polyphosphatase as well as polyphoshatase activities of cytosol and isolated vacuoles, of nuclei and mitochondria of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae were compared. The polyphosphatases of cell envelope and cytosol are similar, the polyphosphatases of nuclei, vacuoles and mitochondria differ in their kinetic properties, substrate specificity, requirements in divalent cations and in some effector actions both from these and from each other.     

Certain nonlinear partially observable stochastic optimal controlproblems with explicit control laws equivalent to LEQG/LQG problems

This paper is concerned with partially observed stochastic optimal control problems when nonlinearities enter the dynamics of the unobservable state and the observations as gradients of potential functions. Explicit representations for the information state are derived in terms of a finite number of sufficient statistics. Consequently, the partially observed problem is recast as one of complete information with a new state generated by a modified version of the Kalman filter. When the terminal cost is quadratic in the unobservable state and includes the integral of the nonlinearities, the optimal control laws are explicitly computed, similar to linear-exponential-quadratic-Gaussian (LEQG) and linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) tracking problems. The results are applicable to filtering and control of Hamiltonian systems     

Estimating the viewing parameters of random, noisy projections ofasymmetric objects for tomographic reconstruction

The ability to determine the viewing parameters of objects from their projections has enabled well established tomographic techniques to be employed in the 3D reconstruction of objects from images obtained via modalities where the orientation of the objects cannot be controlled. A method is described for the determination of the viewing parameters of randomly acquired projections of asymmetric objects. It extends upon the common lines algorithm by determining the relative orientation of projections from the location of lines of intersection among the Fourier transforms of the projections in 3D Fourier space. A new technique for finding the lines of intersection in the presence of translational displacement, and for subsequently finding the translational displacement, is presented. The complete algorithm is described and its efficacy is demonstrated using real data. A new technique for dealing with noise is also discussed