Who said what? Source memory for narrator and character agents in literary short stories.

One dimension of reading literacy involves the tracking of agents associated with the text. In a literary short story, there is a society of character agents and pragmatic agents. This study investigated the relative salience of different classes of agents in memory. Two experiments measured source memory as an index of agent salience in long-term memory. Patterns of source memory scores supported an invisible third-person narrator hypothesis and an agent amalgamation hypothesis, but not a structural prominence hypothesis: First-person narrator > nonnarrator character > third-person narrator > 0. Statement detection parameters did not significantly differ among the 3 classes of agents, so differences in source memory could not be explained by differences in the content of the speech acts. Source memory scores also could not be explained by surface features of the text, differences among readers, and sophisticated guessing on the basis of a story abstract. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Toward an integrative perspective on bereavement.

For nearly a century, bereavement theorists have assumed that recovery from loss requires a period of grief work in which the ultimate goal is the severing of the attachment bond to the deceased. Reviews appearing in the 1980s noted a surprising absence of empirical support for this view, thus leaving the bereavement field without a guiding theoretical base. In this article, the authors consider alternative perspectives on bereavement that are based on cognitive stress theory, attachment theory, the social functional account of emotion, and trauma theory. They then elaborate on the most promising features of each theory in an attempt to develop an integrative framework to guide future research. The authors elucidate 4 fundamental components of the grieving process—context, meaning, representations of the lost relationship, and coping and emotion-regulation processes—and suggest ways in which these components may interact over the course of bereavement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Monitoring and Repair of the Milwaukee City Hall Masonry Tower

The Milwaukee City Hall was built between 1893 and 1898 and is located in downtown Milwaukee, one block east of the Milwaukee River. The 300?ft (91.4?m) long building, nine stories high over its main portion, is a trapezoid in plan. On the south side, there is a 393?ft (119.8?m) tall South Tower located above the main entrance to the building. On three sides, the South Tower rises from the street level to the 13th level and the roof above, and on the north side, it is connected to the rest of the building up to the ninth floor. The South Tower is a hybrid steel and masonry structure consisting of masonry perimeter walls and a central core, four-sided steel truss supporting the floors and roof. The building is a perimeter-load-bearing masonry structure supported on wood piles. The city of Milwaukee had been aware of distress, in the form of cracks and loose masonry, in the South Tower for a number of decades. In 2002, the city took action to investigate the causes and significance of distress, and to develop a repair program. The scope of our work included review of the available structural drawings and documents, inspection of the tower, measurement and monitoring of movements, monitoring of thermal response, structural analyses of the hybrid steel and masonry structure, and development of repair recommendations. The repair program presently is under construction. This paper describes the monitoring program, analyses of the causes for distress, and the implemented repair concepts for the observed distress in the South Tower of the Milwaukee City Hall.     

Characterization of the morphological and lattice orientational microstructure of As-Cast aluminum ingot

The morphological and lattice orientational microstructure of commercial-purity aluminum ingot (1100 series) is investigated by section analysis and individual measurements of crystallite orientation from electron backscattering diffraction (EBD). These measurements render possible the determination of the sectional grain-area distribution, the number-of-sides per grain section distribution, the mean grain-interception length, the orientation distribution function, and the nearest-neighbor orientation coherence function. It is found that the morphological measures of the aluminum ingot are consistent with predictions based upon the classical Johnson-Mehl model. A small anisotropy of grain shape is observed, with the grains exhibiting a 17 pct larger dimension in the axial direction of the ingot compared with radial and hoop directions. The orientational measures indicate that the ingot has a random texture with random spatial orientation coherence relationships. Formerly Visiting Scholar, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602, is retired.     

Satisfaction with a new job after unemployment: Consequences of job loss for older professionals.

Participants were surveyed after joining a self-help group for unemployed professionals over the age of 40 and again 1 year later. A hidden cost of job loss, especially for older workers, may be decreased satisfaction with the new job obtained after a period of unemployment. Of the 24 initially unemployed participants who sought jobs, 1 year later 16 were reemployed, and 8 were still seeking jobs. The 16 reemployed participants indicated significantly less satisfaction in their new positions, compared to the ones held previously, with regard to pay and benefits. There was no change in satisfaction with co-workers. Satisfaction with supervision, the nature of the work, and prospects for promotion had increased. Positive self-esteem and internal locus of control at the initial survey were positively correlated with job satisfaction after reemployment. Contrary to expectations, age was also positively correlated with satisfaction in the new job. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A saturation analysis of error-spectrum shaping quantizers

Error spectrum shaping (ESS) quantizers are analyzed in the context of realistic FIR reconstruction filters and nonzero probability of saturation. Conditions for stable operation are derived, and a suboptimal but effective and computationally efficient design method is proposed. Excellent agreement is obtained between the analysis and simulations. Even under these more stringent constraints, ESS quantizers are shown to achieve significant signal-to-quantization-noise ratio (SQNR) gains when quantizing oversampled Gaussian sources     

Generating Future Land-Use and Transportation Plans for High-Growth Cities Using a Genetic Algorithm

Abstract:   An elitist genetic algorithm was used to find a diverse non-dominated set of optimal future zoning and street plans for two high-growth cities in the United States of America. Plans were judged with regard to housing capacity, employment capacity, greenspace, traffic congestion, and change from the status quo. A multiobjective fitness function was used. The genetic algorithm offers the possibility of efficiently searching over tens of thousands of plans for a trade-off set of non-dominated plans. The trade-off set ranged from a minimum change plan, where undeveloped farmland was rezoned as commercial or residential land, to a minimum traffic congestion plan where commercial and residential usage were spread throughout the cities rather than concentrated in one or two areas. The algorithm is general enough to be applied to other cities and metropolitan regions.     

Social support and the effectiveness of group therapy.

Collected self-report data from 37 pretest clients and 26 of the same clients at posttest who participated in 6 counseling center therapy groups. Questionnaires assessed 6 functionally different types of social support provided from 2 sources, therapy group members vs persons outside the group, together with pre- and posttest levels of 3 distress symptoms, which were depression, self-esteem, and psychological symptoms of stress. Significant improvement in symptoms was noted during the 8-wk interventions, and this improvement was related to the availability of social support, depending on the type and source of support. In general, support from sources outside the therapy group appeared to have the most impact. Levels of certain types of support differed in groups depending on whether or not the group was composed of members with a common presenting concern. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nicotine decreases attentional bias to negative-affect-related Stroop words among smokers

The present study examined the hypothesis that nicotine is associated with reduced attentional bias to affective and smoking-related stimuli in a modified Stroop task. A total of 56 habitual smokers were each tested on 4 days with 14 mg nicotine patches and placebo patches, counterbalanced, as a within-subjects factor in a double-blind design. A modified Stroop using negative-affect words, smoking words, color words, and neutral words was presented via computer in blocked format. As predicted, nicotine, relative to placebo, was associated with decreased attentional bias to negative words. Nicotine speeded performance during smoking-word and color-word blocks to the same degree as during neutral words and thus appeared to also have a nonspecific performance-enhancing effect. In an exploratory analysis, nicotine-attention effects occurred only in the initial presentation of pairs of blocked word pages. Nicotine also was associated with improved mood. The results are discussed in terms of affect-attention and smoking literatures.     

On the effect of high-pressure treatment on the surface activity of β-casein

High-pressure treatment (up to 800 MPa) of the milk protein β-casein has an insignificant effect on the time-dependent surface tension of a dilute solution of this disordered protein at pH 7. This is in contrast to a solution of globular protein, bovine serum albumin (BSA), which is substantially affected at 200 MPa and above.