The Organized/Disorganized Typology of Serial Murder: Myth or Model?

Despite weaknesses in the organized/disorganized classification of serial killers, it is drawn on for "offender profiles," theories of offending, and in murder trials. This dichotomy was therefore tested by the multidimensional scaling of the co-occurrence of 39 aspects of serial killings derived 100 murders committed by 100 U.S. serial killers. Results revealed no distinct subsets of offense characteristics reflecting the dichotomy. They showed a subset of organized features typical of most serial killings. Disorganized features are much rarer and do not form a distinct type. These results have implications for testing typologies supporting expert opinion or to help understand variations in criminal acts, as well as the development of a science of investigative psychology that goes beyond offender profiling. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Constructing knowledge: The role of graphs and tables in hard and soft psychology.

Because graphs provide a compact, rhetorically powerful way of representing research findings, recent theories of science have postulated their use as a distinguishing feature of science. Studies have shown that the use of graphs in journal articles correlates highly with the hardness of scientific fields, both across disciplines and across subfields of psychology. In contrast, the use of tables and inferential statistics in psychology is inversely related to subfield hardness, suggesting that the relationship between hardness and graph use is not attributable to differences in the use of quantitative data in subfields or their commitment to empiricism. Enhanced "graphicacy" among psychologists could contribute to the progress of psychological science by providing alternatives to significance testing and by facilitating communication across subfields. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Functional properties of caseinate glycoconjugates prepared by controlled heating in the ‘dry’ state

Glucose, ribose, fructose, lactose, fructo‐oligosaccharide (inulin) and a mixture of inulin and fructose were conjugated with caseinate via the Maillard reaction using controlled heating and low water activity conditions in order to improve the functional properties of caseinate for food purposes. Conjugation with ribose and glucose increased the viscosity of caseinate 28‐fold over that of the unmodified caseinate control but also produced the most browning. Glycoconjugates of caseinate–fructose reacted at a substrate ratio of 1:0.2 w/w and 60 °C at 67% relative humidity for 48 h increased the viscosity of caseinate 24‐fold with less browning. At 80% relative humidity the reaction occurred so rapidly that, within 24 h gels containing darkly coloured particulate matter were produced. Incorporation of inulin at 1:1:0.2 w/w/w caseinate/inulin/fructose prevented formation of gels and produced glycoconjugates having 15‐fold the viscosity of unmodified caseinate with minimal browning. Copyright © 2005 Society of Chemical Industry     

A case‐based reasoning approach to support story summarization

The automatic generation of summaries using cases (GARUCAS) environment was designed as an intelligent system to help one learn to summarize narrative texts by means of examples within a case‐based reasoning (CBR) approach. Each example, modeled as a case, contains a conceptual representation of the initial textual state, the different steps of the summarization method, and the representation of the final textual state obtained. The CBR approach allows the environment to summarize new texts in order to produce new text summarization examples with respect to some predefined educational objectives. Within GARUCAS, this approach is used at two levels: an event level (EL) in order to identify essential elements of a story, and the clause level (CL) to make the summary more readable. The purpose of this article is to describe the GARUCAS environment and the model used to build story summarization examples and summarize new texts. This model is based on important psycholinguistic work concerning event and narrative structures and text revision rules. An experiment was conducted with 12 short stories. The GARUCAS environment can classify the stories according to their structure analogy and reuse the summarization method of the most similar text. Such an approach can be reused for any kind of texts or summary types. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Assessment of the contribution of irrigation to poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods

Irrigation in developing countries tends to be stereotyped as equity reducing, in competition with other uses for scarce water resources, and often resulting in negative impacts for women and other disadvantaged groups. Agricultural intensification through the practice of irrigation as a strategy for poverty reduction is examined. There are four inter‐related mechanisms through which irrigated agriculture can reduce poverty. These are: improvements in the levels and security of productivity, employment and incomes for irrigating farm households and farm labour; the linkage and multiplier effects of agricultural intensification for the wider economy; provision of opportunities for diversification of rural livelihoods; and multiple uses of irrigation supply. There are also significant risks that badly designed and managed irrigation can negatively impact on poverty. It is concluded that irrigated farming varies widely in its form and impacts, and has diverse local attributes. Water resource management decisions must recognize this and be based on an holistic and livelihood‐centred assessment of irrigation benefits and costs that goes beyond food production objectives.     

Considerations for experts in assessing the credibility of recovered memories of child sexual abuse: The importance of maintaining a case-specific focus.

In this article, the authors argue that a variety of psychological factors stand in the way of providing expert advice to the courts in terms of assessing the credibility of a complainant's account of sexual abuse when there is a significant delay in reporting. These include difficulties in assessing (a) the complainant's account of how he or she claims to have remembered or forgotten the abuse, (b) whether (and how) the claim of abuse originated within a therapeutic setting, and (c) the difficulty of generalizing from empirical evidence. It is argued that all of these issues can be more easily avoided if experts maintain a case-specific focus. In this article, the authors review both the psychological and legal controversies surrounding the false-recovered memory debate, discuss how courts approach the admissibility and use of recovered memory testimony, and conclude that expert witnesses should carefully consider the above points before drawing general conclusions from the literature and applying them to individual cases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Autobiographical memory, autonoetic consciousness, and self-perspective in aging.

In this study, the authors examined the effects of aging on autobiographical memory in 180 participants by means of a new method designed to assess across 5 lifetime periods the nature of memories-that is, specificity and spontaneity--and the phenomenal experience of remembering--that is, self-perspective and autonoetic consciousness--via the field/observer and remember/know paradigms respectively. Age-related differences were found for the specificity and spontaneity of memories and the phenomenal experience of remembering. There was an increase in observer and know responses with age, but a decrease in field and remember responses and in the ability to justify them by recalling sensory-perceptive, affective, or spatiotemporal specific details. This pattern confirms the existence of a semantic-episodic dissociation in autobiographical memory in aging. Moreover, the data support the view that older participants can subjectively "travel back in time" to relive personal events in the most distant past better than those in the recent past. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

TRILOGUE系统的技术与应用

本文简要叙述Ｃｏｍｖｅｒｓｅ技术公司ＴＲＩＬＯＧＵＥ系统提供的增值业务技术及功能，主要有话音信箱、改号通知、信息服务、传真邮件、呼叫卡、远程接入及计费等。     

Polymer nanocomposites for microactuation and magneto-electric transduction

In the last decade, electroactive polymers have attracted much attention especially because of their very actuating capabilities. Large strain is experimentally observed, but under quite high electrical field, which can be a severe drawback for actuating applications. First part of the present paper is concerned with the reduction of applied field onto electroactive polymer films to get a given strain level. Polyurethane (PU) films filled with carbon black (CB) nanoparticles exhibit relatively high strain level under a field of only 12.5 kV/mm. The simple easy-tomake method solution cast method was applied. Even though the generated stress level is still quite low, the present work shows high strain level under quite low field appliance by easy manufacturing, lightweight, and flexible polymer film. Besides, another interest of the present paper is in magneto-elasto-electric effect of a polymer film filled with some magnetic nano particles. Films filled with nonpiezoelectric but with magnetite particles has still short history. With the use of magneto materials, a large magnetic DC bias field is generally required, and it causes big problem on application. The films filled with some magnetite nanoparticles (Fe3O4 and Nickel) are fabricated then examined. It is clearly demonstrated that our films do not require any DC bias. Although linear polarization value is relatively small, the first step of the studies on magnetite nano-filled film is presented.