Factors affecting children's reading of rimes: Reading ability, word frequency, and rime-neighborhood size.

Beginning readers were studied in 2 experiments to examine the influence of reading ability, word frequency, and rime-neighborhood size (the number of single syllable words with the same rime) on word and nonword recognition. Forty 1st and 2nd graders read 53 words and 27 nonwords containing rimes from different-size neighborhoods. Children reading at or below a 2nd-grade level were less affected by rime-neighborhoods than children reading at or above a 3rd-grade level. Rimes from large neighborhoods were read correctly more often in lists and stories than rimes from moderate or small neighborhoods, particularly in low-frequency words. As children learn to read, they become increasingly sensitive to rime-neighborhood size. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Final frontiers? globalisation, pedagogy and (dis)location

In recent times, spatial metaphors such as border crossing, border pedagogy, speaking from the margins, spanning the abyss, occupying in-between spaces and diaspora space have emerged to characterise educational and other cultural practices. This is particularly the case in critical, feminist and postcolonial pedagogy influenced by poststructuralist and postmodern theory. This article argues that the increased emphasis given to spatial metaphors can itself be located in contemporary globalising trends where forms of location also and inevitably entail forms of dislocation - of disidentifying and being positioned as other. We suggest that the term '(dis)location' provides a useful, non-essentialising metaphorical resource through which to analyse, understand and develop changes in pedagogy in conditions of globalisation. A pedagogy of (dis)location signifies an ambivalent pedagogy or a pedagogy of ambivalence in the uncertain reconfigurations taking place under contemporary conditions.     

Semantic facilitation of lexical access during sentence processing.

In three experiments we investigated the effect of a sentence context on naming time for a target word. Contexts were presented by using a rapid serial visual presentation; subjects named the last word of the sentence. In the first two experiments, facilitation was observed for a fully congruent context containing a subject and verb that were weakly related to the target word. No facilitation was observed when either the subject or verb was replaced with a more neutral word. In the third experiment, the fully congruent contexts were modified either to preserve or to disrupt the original relation between the subject and verb. Facilitation was observed in both conditions. The full pattern of results suggests that a combination of lexical items can prime a target word in the absence of priming by any of the lexical items individually. This combination priming is not dependent upon the overall meaning of the sentence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Doors and People: Visual and verbal memory after unilateral temporal lobectomy.

The study investigated the ability of the A. D. Baddeley et al (1994) Doors and People Memory Battery to discriminate between patients with left and right unilateral temporal lobectomy (TL). Patients, 47 of whom had undergone en bloc resection (23 left TL and 24 right TL), were tested on the memory battery. The results showed that verbal memory functioning was significantly more impaired in the left TL group, whereas visual memory was more impaired in the right TL group. Recall memory was slightly more impaired than recognition memory overall in the 2 patient groups. It is concluded that the test provides a neuropsychologically valid and sensitive measure of visual and verbal memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age and schooling effects in story recall and story production.

The relative influences of age- and schooling-related experiences on story memory and storytelling were examined. 40 kindergarten and 39 Grade 1 children whose birth dates clustered around the cutoff date for school entrance listened to and recalled short, 1-episode stories (story recall task) and completed other stories (story production task) for which they were given beginning information. Children were tested in fall (at 5.6 years) and spring (at 6.3 years) of the school year and in spring of the following school year (at 7.3 years). For the story recall task, significant age-related effects were obtained for overall amount of recall, whereas schooling-related effects in kindergarten were obtained for patterns of recall as a function of causal relations. For the story production task, age-related as well as schooling-related effects of kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 were obtained for structural complexity. Age-related effects are attributed to general development in memory capacity and deployment of cognitive resources, whereas schooling-related effects are attributed to restructuring of the story representation in memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Misunderstanding of multiculturalism: Shouting fire in crowded theaters.

Comments on B. J. Fowers and F. C. Richardson's (see record 83-30335) article on the psychological construct of multiculturalism. It is stressed that the multicultural agenda is to stop imposing any one group's cultural values on all others, whether Eurocentric or not. The existence of separatist movements within multiculturalism should not be surprising, given a cultural context that has often been hostile to persons of color. The intercultural dialog that Fowers and Richardson advocate may be difficult to accomplish if are assumed to not desire a dialog. The interactions between the majority culture and multiculturalism have been primarily a majority monolog. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hydrogen water chemistry for BWRs: a status report on the EPRI development program

Many boiling water reactors (BWRs) have experienced extensive intergranular stress corrosion cracking (IGSCC) in their austenitic stainless steel reactor coolant system piping, resulting in serious adverse impacts on plant capacity factors, O&M costs, and personnel radiation exposures. A major research program to provide remedies for BWR pipe cracking was co-funded by EPRI, GE, and the BWR Owners Group for IGSCC Research between 1979 and 1988. Results from this program show that the likelihood of IGSCC depends on reactor water chemistry (particularly on the concentrations of ionic impurities and oxidizing radiolysis products) as well as on material condition and the level of tensile stress. Tests have demonstrated that the concentration of oxidizing radiolysis products in the recirculating reactor water of a BWR can be reduced substantially by injecting hydrogen into the feedwater. Recent plant data show that the use of hydrogen injection can reduce the rate of IGSCC to insignificant levels if the concentration of ionic impurities in the reactor water is kept sufficiently low. This approach to the control of BWR pipe cracking is called hydrogen water chemistry (HWC). This paper presents a review of the results of EPRI's HWC development program from 1980 to the present. In addition, plans for additional work to investigate the feasibility of adapting HWC to protect the BWR vessel and major internal components from potential stress corrosion cracking problems are summarized.     

A Price-Directed Approach to Real-Time Scheduling of Production Operations

Most past approaches to job shop scheduling are either highly myopic, or they are unable to adapt effectively to the stream of unforeseen disruptions that characterizes almost all manufacturing systems. We propose a two-module scheduling system that is both robust and non-myopic. Periodically a Planning Module develops a global view of what is likely to happen in die facility over the next one to four weeks. It then passes information down to the Dispatching Module. The Dispatching Module is based on microprocessors that are located on the factory floor. Whenever a machine is about to become idle, a fast optimization algorithm is run on the closest microprocessor to decide which job should be done next. The data provided by the Planning Module allows this decision to be made in a non-myopic manner.     

Thermodynamic Brazing Alloy Design for Joining Silicon Carbide

Using solution thermodynamic theory, a Ni-Cr Si alloy, based on the Ni/Cr ratio of AWS BNi-5 (Ni-18Cr-19Si (atom%)), was designed for brazing SiC ceramics. The optimum thermodynamic composition was computed to be Ni-14.3Cr-36Si (atom%). Brazing experiments were conducted to assess the effect of changing the Si content away from this composition on the joint microstructures. For alloys containing less than 36 atom% Si, an excessively vigorous joining reaction occurred, resulting in the formation of a porous reaction zone at the brazing alloy/SiC interface, the amount of porosity decreasing as the brazing alloy composition approached the thermodynamically predicted optimum. It was found that the most likely mechanism for the formation of the porous zone was CO evolution during the SiC decomposition reaction. The best microstructures were attained for 40 atom% Si alloy joints, closely agreeing with the thermodynamic model, whereas higher Si content alloys exhibited localized debonding of the brazing alloy from the SiC.     

Structural soundness of workflow nets is decidable

The problem of deciding whether a given workflow net is k-sound for some k?1 is known as structural soundness. We prove that structural soundness of workflow nets is decidable.