Correction to Lombardo and Foschi (2003).

Reports an error in the original article by G. P. Lombardo and R. Foschi (History of Psychology, 2003, 2, 123-142). In the reference list, several works by Pierre Janet were identified as being Paul Janet. The correct references are provided, where Paul Janet is identified by the initial P. and Pierre Janet is identified by the initials P. M. F.. (The following abstract of this article originally appeared in record 2003-03729-003.) Since the 1920s, the road to the acknowledgment of personality psychology as a field of scientific psychology that has individuality as its object began with the founding of the discipline by Gordon W. Allport. Historians of psychology have made serious attempts to reconstruct the cultural, political, institutional, and chronological beginnings of this field in America in the 20th century. In this literature, however, an important European tradition of psychological studies of personality that developed in France in the 2nd half of the 19th century has been overlooked. The aim of this article is to cast some light on this unexplored tradition of psychological personality studies and to discuss its influence on the development of the scientific study of personality in the United States. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The ParTriCluster Algorithm for Gene Expression Analysis

Analyzing gene expression patterns is becoming a highly relevant task in the Bioinformatics area. This analysis makes it possible to determine the behavior patterns of genes under various conditions, a fundamental information for treating diseases, among other applications. A recent advance in this area is the Tricluster algorithm, which is the first algorithm capable of determining 3D clusters (genes × samples × timestamps), that is, groups of genes that behave similarly across samples and timestamps. However, even though biological experiments collect an increasing amount of data to be analyzed and correlated, the triclustering problem remains a bottleneck due to its NP-Completeness, so its parallelization seems to be an essential step towards obtaining feasible solutions. In this work we propose and evaluate the implementation of a parallel version of the Tricluster algorithm using the filter-labeled-stream paradigm supported by the Anthill parallel programming environment. The results show that our parallelization scales well with the data size, being able to handle severe load imbalances that are inherent to the problem. Further more, the parallelization strategy is applicable to any depth-first searches.     

Analytical Electromagnetic Solution for Bragg Mirrors With Graded Interfaces and Guidelines for Enhanced Reflectivity

Bragg mirrors, the key element of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, always present graded interfaces when current is pumped through them, so as to reduce their series resistance and related heating problems. We present here an analytical solution for the electromagnetic fields in graded Bragg mirrors. It allows to generate reference reflection and transmission coefficients that are compared with those obtained by the staircase approximation method. Graded mirrors are then analyzed in detail and it is shown that, with an optimized design, higher reflectivity than in the abrupt scheme can be achieved     

Studies on electrodeposition and corrosion behaviour of a Ni–W–Co amorphous alloy

A ternary alloy Ni–W–Co was electrodeposited and operational parameters in relation to its corrosion resistance and deposition efficiency were optimized. A 2² full factorial design was successfully employed for experimental design analysis of the results. By means of response surface analysis, the statistical model identified the following operating conditions for obtaining corrosion resistant alloy: 60 mA/cm² current density, 70 °C temperature, 20 rpm cathode rotation and 8.0 pH. The alloy was deposited at 36% current efficiency, with an average composition of 70% Ni, 8% Co, 22% W and traces of boron and with E _corr −0.508 V and R _p 4.56 × 10⁴ Ohm. The deposit obtained under these conditions had an amorphous character and showed good adherence, high corrosion resistance and presence of nodules on its surface. Electrochemical corrosion tests verified that the Ni–W–Co alloy had better corrosion resistance than similarly electrodeposited Co–W amorphous alloy.     

Synthesis by the solution combustion process and magnetic properties of iron oxide (Fe<Subscript>3</Subscript>O<Subscript>4</Subscript> and α-Fe<Subscript>2</Subscript>O<Subscript>3</Subscript>) particles

This article describes the solution combustion synthesis technique as applicable to iron oxide powder production using urea as fuel and ferric nitrate as an oxidizer. It focuses on the thermodynamic modeling of the combustion reaction under different fuel-to-oxidant ratios. X-ray diffraction showed magnetite (Fe₃O₄) and hematite (α-Fe₂O₃) phase formations for the as-synthesized powders. The smallest crystallite size was obtained by stoichiometric chemical reaction. The magnetic properties of the samples are also carefully discussed as superparamagnetic behavior.     

A self-adaptive fe system based on recursive spatial decomposition and multigrid analysis

This paper introduces an automatic self-adaptive finite element system for 3-D stress analysis of homogeneous elastic solids described in a Solid Modelling System (SMS). This system reduces the role of the analyst into two basic tasks: defining the problem (i.e. geometry, material properties and boundary conditions) and specifying the desired accuracy in the analysis. The approach followed in this work is based on Recursive Spatial Decomposition (RSD) of solids defined in a SMS. The system includes procedures for meshing, analysis, error estimation, and adaptive remeshing and reanalysis. The various procedures share the same hierarchical data structure built on the RSD.     

Photosynthetic membranes, 21. Immobilization of catalase by photochemically grafted ultrafiltration membranes

Catalase has been immobilized in membranes prepared by photoinduced grafting onto microporous polymeric supports and its catalytic activity on hydrogen peroxide decomposition has been studied under ultrafiltration conditions by means of a recirculation apparatus. The membranes showed a very good catalytic performance and the enzyme reaction took place exclusively within the membrane structure. Initial reaction rates measured in the temperature range 5 – 35°C as a function of both substrate concentration and enzyme amount immobilized per unit membrane surface indicate that the mechanism of action of catalase is not altered after immobilization.     

Sequential Decision Strategies for Machine Interpretation of Speech

Recognition errors made by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems may not prevent the development of useful dialogue applications if the interpretation strategy has an introspection capability for evaluating the reliability of the results. This paper proposes an interpretation strategy which is particularly effective when applications are developed with a training corpus of moderate size. From the lattice of word hypotheses generated by an ASR system, a short list of conceptual structures is obtained with a set of finite state machines (FSM). Interpretation or a rejection decision is then performed by a tree-based strategy. The nodes of the tree correspond to elaboration-decision units containing a redundant set of classifiers. A decision tree based and two large margin classifiers are trained with a development set to become interpretation knowledge sources. Discriminative training of the classifiers selects linguistic and confidence-based features for contributing to a cooperative assessment of the reliability of an interpretation. Such an assessment leads to the definition of a limited number of reliability states. The probability that a proposed interpretation is correct is provided by its reliability state and transmitted to the dialogue manager. Experimental results are presented for a telephone service application