Creativity of undergraduates with and without family history of alcohol and other drug problems

BACKGROUND: Colonoscopic surveillance is a standard procedure in many patients with long standing, extensive ulcerative colitis (UC), in order to avoid death from colorectal cancer. No conclusive proof of its benefits has been presented however. AIMS: To evaluate the association between colonoscopic surveillance and colorectal cancer mortality in patients with UC. PATIENTS: A population based, nested case control study comprising 142 patients with a definite UC diagnosis, derived from a study population of 4664 patients with UC, was conducted. METHODS: Colonoscopic surveillance in all patients with UC who had died from colorectal cancer after 1975 was compared with that in controls matched for age, sex, extent, and duration of the disease. Information on colonoscopic surveillance was obtained from the medical records. RESULTS: Two of 40 patients with UC and 18 of 102 controls had undergone at least one surveillance colonoscopy (relative risk (RR) 0.29, 95% confidence interval 0.06 to 1.31). Twelve controls but only one patient with UC had undergone two or more surveillance colonoscopies (RR 0.22, 95% confidence interval 0.03 to 1.74), indicating a protective dose response relation. CONCLUSION: Colonoscopic surveillance may be associated with a decreased risk of death from colorectal cancer in patients with long standing UC.     

Age differences in trust and reliance of a medication management system

The present study examined age differences in trust and reliance of an automated decision aid. In Experiment 1, older and younger participants performed a simple mathematical task concurrent with a simulated medication management task. The decision aid was designed to facilitate medication management, but with varying reliability. Trust, self-confidence and usage of the aid were measured. The results indicated that older adults had greater trust in the aid and were less confident in their performance, but they did not calibrate trust differently than younger adults. In Experiment 2, a variant of the same task was used to investigate whether older adults are subject to over-reliance on the automation. Differences in omission and commission errors were examined. The results indicated that older adults were more reliant on the decision aid and committed more automation-related errors. A signal detection analyses indicated that older adults were less sensitive to automation failures. Results are discussed with respect to the perceptual and cognitive factors that influence age differences in the use of fallible automation.     

Status and cockpit dynamics: A review and empirical study.

One of the most troublesome dynamics evident in the airplane cockpit is related to patterns of authority relations between the captain and the first officer. Too often, captains fail to listen and first officers fail to speak. The authors propose that many instances of superordinate and subordinate behavior in the cockpit—the captain's tendency to reject input from other team members and the first officer's hesitancy to question the captain—represent cases of status generalization. First, the authors describe the theory of status generalization and show support for the operation of the theory by presenting examples of flightcrew behavior that the theory predicts. Second, an initial empirical test was conducted to instantiate the claim that captain–first officer differences can be seen as status differences. Finally, the significance and implications of this perspective are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Enhanced discriminated bar-press avoidance in the rat through appetitive preconditioning.

In 2 experiments with 57 male albino rats, an appetitive preconditioning procedure produced superior performance on a discriminated bar-press avoidance task. The technique was designed to minimize the number of shocks received early in training and consisted primarily of rewarding Ss with food pellets for an avoidance response in addition to terminating the warning stimulus. Ss so preconditioned were found to achieve sustained, high levels of avoidance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Anticipatory anxiety in women receiving chemotherapy for breast cancer.

Examined (1) the prevalence and course of anxiety before the 1st 6 infusions of cancer chemotherapy and (2) the contribution of trait anxiety, side effect expectations, and prior occurrence of posttreatment side effects to anxiety before infusions. 53 women receiving adjuvant chemotherapy for breast cancer participated. Anxiety was most prevalent and intense before the 1st infusion. Trait anxiety predicted anxiety before the 1st and subsequent infusions. Prior occurrence of posttreatment nervousness also predicted anxiety before subsequent infusions, even after accounting for trait anxiety and other posttreatment side effects. Results are discussed in terms of the role that anxiety proneness, response expectancy, and classical conditioning may play in the development of anxiety before repeated chemotherapy infusions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Is industrial psychology none of Marxism's business?

Responds to criticisms by H. Toch, R. Stagner, H. M. Parsons, J. Feldman, and E. A. Locke (see PA, Vol 69:6878, 6877, 6874, 6864, and 6870, respectively) regarding the authors' reexamination, within a Marxist framework, of the Hawthorne studies of industrial workers. The authors stand by their claim that abundant evidence of worker resistance at Hawthorne was suppressed in influential accounts of the research. The controversy aroused by the Marxist viewpoint is considered in terms of class bias in psychology. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning From Noisy Examples

Machine Learning - The basic question addressed in this paper is: how can a learning algorithm cope with incorrect training examples? Specifically, how can algorithms that produce an...     

PREPARATION OF HYDROTHERMALLY TREATED LRC/WATER FUEL SLURRIES

The hot-water coal drying process is a means of thermally beneficiating and dewatering lignite and subbituminous coal for the purpose of preparing dense low-rank coal/water fuel. In hot-water coal drying, which is a form of hydrothermal treatment, low-rank coal in a water slurry is treated at elevated temperatures of 513 to 623  K and at pressures in excess of the equivalent saturated steam pressures lo minimize vaporization of the water. This produces a coal product which contains less than one-third the inherent moisture of the raw coal and which is resistant to moisture reabsorption. The hydrothermally treated coal/water slurry resulting from the process can be concentrated by mechanical means (centrifuge, pressure filter)to form a pumpable coal/water fuel with greater than 60 weight percent bone-dry solids content and with an energy content greater than 15·4 MJ/Kg (6600 Btu/lb). Hydrothermal treatment also beneficiates the coal by reducing oxygen and minerals. Over 94 percent of the energy content of the raw coal remains in the product. Low-rank coal/water fuel is typically a pseudoplastic fluid, and for some low-rank coals, the slurry is stable towards settling, without the use of additives.     

Spontaneous and traumatic vitreous hemorrhage

PURPOSE: The authors sought to provide relevant data regarding the demographic and clinical aspects of spontaneous and traumatic vitreous hemorrhages to guide clinicians in better delineating the expected etiologic patterns of these hemorrhages in an urban environment. METHODS: The records of 253 consecutive patients with newly diagnosed vitreous hemorrhage seen in a general eye clinic were selected for retrospective analysis. To minimize selection bias of a tertiary care center, patients who were referred to the clinic by outside ophthalmologists for vitreoretinal consultation or those with a history of recent intraocular surgery, postoperative complications, or loss to follow-up were excluded from study. Demographic, ocular, and general medical variables were tabulated for the 200 patients (230 eyes) who met our inclusion criteria. RESULTS: Fifty percent of the patients were black, 26% were white, 23% were Hispanic, and 1% was Oriental. The causes of vitreous hemorrhage were proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) (35.2%), trauma (18.3%), retinal vein occlusion (7.4%), retinal tear without a detachment (7.0%), posterior vitreous detachment (6.5%), proliferative sickle retinopathy (5.7%), retinal tear with a detachment (4.8%), subretinal neovascularization from macular degeneration (2.2%), hypertensive retinopathy (1.7%), unknown (2.5%), and other causes (8.7%). Among black patients with spontaneous vitreous hemorrhage, sickle cell retinopathy and retinal vein occlusion were major causes, each accounting for more than 15% of the cases. Systemic hypertension was associated with vitreous hemorrhage from retinal vein occlusion. CONCLUSION: The authors propose that despite the wide array of causative factors of vitreous hemorrhage, the evaluation of demographic, ocular, and medical variables can significantly aid clinicians in identifying its etiologic patterns.