Experience, Context, and the Visual Perception of Human Movement.

Why are human observers particularly sensitive to human movement? Seven experiments examined the roles of visual experience and motor processes in human movement perception by comparing visual sensitivities to point-light displays of familiar, unusual, and impossible gaits across gait-speed and identity discrimination tasks. In both tasks, visual sensitivity to physically possible gaits was superior to visual sensitivity to physically impossible gaits, supporting perception-action coupling theories of human movement perception. Visual experience influenced walker-identity perception but not gait-speed discrimination. Thus, both motor experience and visual experience define visual sensitivity to human movement. An ecological perspective can be used to define the conditions necessary for experience-dependent sensitivity to human movement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Off-Site Exposure to Respirable Aerosols Produced during the Disk-Incorporation of Class B Biosolids

Field experiments were conducted at a Class B biosolids land application site in central Arizona to measure, model, and source-track the off-site transport of aerosols emitted when biosolids were disk-incorporated into soils. Real-time PM10 monitoring provided time-resolved aerosol information sufficient for verifying both off-site concentration and off-site exposure time model results. Under the conditions considered and at a distance of 165?m from the aerosol source, biosolids disk-incorporation resulted in an intermittent exposure to biosolids-derived aerosol concentration between 15 and 40?μg/m3 and an inhalable biosolids dose between 2 and 8?μg. Transport modeling predicted that these doses will decrease with increasing wind speed. In addition, three DNA sequence-based biosolids source tracking methods were applied to aerosol samples and confirmed the presence of biosolids in aerosols at 5, 65, and 165?m from the aerosol source. Field measurements and modeling indicate that the nature of biosolids-derived aerosol exposure is a series of intermittent high concentration puffs, rather than a continuous low concentration.     

An educational resource for information literacy in higher education: Functional and users analyses of the e-COMS academic portal

As in today’s knowledge society the Internet is playing an important role in the information literacy of university students the goal of this paper is to analyse, after its first year on the Web, the informational impact of an e-learning resource developed by Granada’s University lecturers (the e-COMS educational portal), a pioneer in Spain for training in information literacy. From the objective and subjective data provided by the own portal and by it users, two different and complementary kinds of analysis (functional and users’) are performed. Assessment of various capabilities, among which visibility and usability stand out, is provided. The highly positive but improvable results offer a detailed analysis of the functional aspects of the portal itself and of the users’ relations with this information resource. From these analyses strengths and weaknesses are extracted and some proposals for improvement are derived.     

89-GHz fT room-temperature silicon MOSFETs

The authors report the implementation of deep-submicrometer Si MOSFETs that at room temperature have a unity-current-gain cutoff frequency (f_T) of 89 GHz, for a drain-to-source bias of 1.5 V, a gate-to-source bias of 1 V, a gate oxide thickness of 40 Å, and a channel length of 0.15 μm. The fabrication procedure is mostly conventional, except for the e-beam defined gates. The speed performance is achieved through an intrinsic transit time of only 1.8 ps across the active device region     

Continuous-wave laser action in Er3+:YLF at 3.41 μm

Continuous-wave laser emission at 3.41 μm from an erbium-doped LiYF₄ crystal (Er³⁺:YLF) at 77 K is demonstrated. Operation of this four-level laser is based on the Er^{3+ 4}F_9/2-⁴I_9/2 transition. An output power of 12 mW and a slope efficiency of 2% have been achieved     

Uniform Polarization Scattering With Fiber-Coil-Based Polarization Controllers

A detailed study of fiber-coil-based polarization controllers (PCs) is performed. First, a method to deterministically calculate the PC configuration in order to transform between any two states of polarization is presented. In a second stage, the case in which the configuration angles are randomly changed is studied. The cases of a single PC and of the system obtained with the concatenation of several PCs are analyzed. For both cases, a general expression for the variance of the Stokes parameters is obtained. Using this expression, it is demonstrated that it is possible to achieve uniform polarization scattering using a concatenation of fiber-coil-based PCs. Finally, it is shown that fiber-coil-based PCs can be used to emulate both first- and second-order polarization-mode dispersions     

Modal Kalman filtering based impedance relaying

An algorithm is presented for computer distance relaying. It is based on modal Kalman filtering (MKF) to estimate fundamental phasors, MKF exploits all the measurement information available from a three-phase line and is founded on enhanced models of the electromagnetic transients noise. To support the modeling of noise for different faults, a study of nontrivial electrical networks with accurate electromagnetic transients modeling is made for 400 kV transmission lines. MKF fits the behavior of the different modal noise for the Clarke phasors, but it is invariant for each type of fault, assuring robustness and minimum error variance. To computer distance, Clarke αB phasors are transformed to +/- symmetrical components, and then a well-known expression is used to computer the positive impedance. Statistical analysis if presented to assess observation time versus estimation accuracy for the different types of line faults     

The Chick Chorioallantoic Membrane Model: A New In Vivo Tool to Evaluate Breast Cancer Stem Cell Activity

The high plasticity of cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) allows them to differentiate and proliferate, specifically when xenotransplanted subcutaneously into immunocompromised mice. CSCs are highly tumorigenic, even when inoculated in small numbers. Thus, in vivo limiting dilution assays (LDA) in mice are the current gold standard method to evaluate CSC enrichment and activity. The chick embryo chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) is a low cost, naturally immune-incompetent and reproducible model widely used to evaluate the spontaneous growth of human tumor cells. Here, we established a CAM-LDA assay able to rapidly reproduce tumor specificities—in particular, the ability of the small population of CSCs to form tumors. We used a panel of organotropic metastatic breast cancer cells, which show an enrichment in a stem cell gene signature, enhanced CD44⁺/CD24^−/low cell surface expression and increased mammosphere-forming efficiency (MFE). The size of CAM-xenografted tumors correlate with the number of inoculated cancer cells, following mice xenograft growth pattern. CAM and mice tumors are histologically comparable, displaying both breast CSC markers CD44 and CD49f. Therefore, we propose a new tool for studying CSC prevalence and function—the chick CAM-LDA—a model with easy handling, accessibility, rapid growth and the absence of ethical and regulatory constraints.