Religiosity and the Socioemotional Adjustment of Adolescent Mothers and Their Children.

This study assessed the impact of religiosity on the socioemotional and behavioral outcomes of 91 adolescent mothers and their offspring over 10 years. Religiosity was defined as involvement in church and contact with and dependence on church officials and members. Mothers classified as high in religious involvement had significantly higher self-esteem and lower depression scores, exhibited less child abuse potential, and had higher occupational and educational attainment than mothers classified as low in religious involvement; differences remained when multiple factors, such as stress and grandmother support, were held constant. Children with more religious mothers had fewer internalizing and externalizing problems at 10 years of age, with maternal adjustment mediating this relationship. Religiosity, through increased social support, served as a protective factor for teenaged mothers and their children. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A global-state-triggered fault injector for distributed system evaluation

Validation of the dependability of distributed systems via fault injection is gaining importance because distributed systems are being increasingly used in environments with high dependability requirements. The fact that distributed systems can fail in subtle ways that depend on the state of multiple parts of the system suggests that a global-state-based fault injection mechanism should be used to validate them. However, global-state-based fault injection is challenging since it is very difficult in practice to maintain the global state of a distributed system at runtime with minimal intrusion into the system execution. We present Loki, a global-state-based fault injector, which has been designed with the goals of low intrusion, high precision, and high flexibility. Loki achieves these goals by utilizing the ideas of partial view of global state, optimistic synchronization, and offline analysis. In Loki, faults are injected based on a partial, view of the global state of the system, and a post-runtime analysis is performed to place events and injections into a single global timeline and to discard experiments with incorrect fault injections. Finally, the experiments with correct fault injections are used to estimate user-specified performance and dependability measures. A flexible measure language has been designed that facilitates the specification of a wide range of measures.     

Survival of Bacillus cereus vegetative cells and spores during in vitro simulation of gastric passage

The enteric pathogen Bacillus cereus must survive gastric passage in order to cause diarrhea by enterotoxin production in the small intestine. The acid resistance and the survival after gastric passage were assessed by in vitro experiments with acidified growth medium and gastric simulation medium with B. cereus NVH 1230-88 vegetative cells and spores. First, batch incubations at constant pH values for 4 h, which represented different physiological states of the stomach, showed that spores were resistant to any gastric condition in the pH range of 2.0 to 5.0, while vegetative cells were rapidly inactivated at pH values of ≤4.0. Second, a dynamic in vitro gastric experiment was conducted that simulated the continuously changing in vivo conditions due to digestion dynamics by gradually decreasing the pH from 5.0 to 2.0 and fractional emptying of the stomach 30 to 180 min from the start of the experiment. All of the B. cereus spores and 14% (± 9%) of the vegetative cells survived the dynamic simulation of gastric passage.     

AUTOMATED REPORTING ON THE QUALITY OF HOPS AND HOP PRODUCTS

The quality of a hop variety or a hop product can readily be assessed by a fully automated sequence of selective extraction, fractionation and quantitative analysis. To illustrate the elegance of the method, nine hop varieties and three hop extracts were compared with respect to the content of important marker compounds in the hop oils and of the hop acids. Supercritical fluid extraction at different densities of carbon dioxide was applied to extract selectively, the hop oils and the hop acids, respectively. The hop oils were further fractionated into an apolar and a polar fraction by solid phase extraction and consecutive elution with n-hexane and ethyl acetate. Separation and identification were achieved by capillary gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometry. Myrcene, β;-caryophyllene, α;-humulene and β;-farnesene in the apolar fraction, linalool, undecan-2-one, tridecan-2-one and humuladienone in the polar fraction were selected for quantitative evaluation of the respective hop oils. Sulphur-containing compounds were revealed by capillary gas chromatography using sulphur-selective atomic emission detection. Complete separation and quantification of all hop α;-acids and β;-acids was effected by microemulsion electrokinetic chromatography coupled to diode array detection .     

Using top-down CAD tools for mixed analog/digital ASICs: a practical design case

A mixed analog/digital ASIC from a real satellite application (a radiation detector front-end) has been designed, simulated and processed according to a hierarchical top-down design methodology. CAD tools (commercial and academic) have been used as much as possible. The top-down methodology is discussed and illustrated by going through the different steps of the ASIC design. At each level the differnt choices and tradeoffs are briefly discussed and practical difficulties of top-down design are pointed out. One of the most important problems in top-down mixed-signal ASIC design—modeling and verification—is highlighted and discussed in detail.research associate of the BeIgian National Fund of Scientific Research     

Orientation,twinning and orientation-dependent reflectance in InSb-GaSb alloys

InSb-GaSb solid solution ingots prepared by directional solidification aboard Skylab and on earth consist primarily of twins with (111) twin planes parallel to the direction of solidification and growth directions that lie along 〈211〉, 〈110〉, or 〈321〉 crystallographic directions.The optical bireflectance exhibited by polished samples when observed by reflected plane-polarized white light is symmetrical with respect to twin boundaries, regardless of twin orientation relative to solidification direction, and displays a two-fold rotational symmetry rather than the four-fold symmetry normally associated with uniaxial strain birefringence.     

How does water information flow? Intersectionality in water information networks in a rural Ugandan community

This article presents evidence of a Ugandan community’s information network related to water services and argues that an intersectional perspective is key to understanding information exclusion processes. Using questionnaire data and social network analysis, the article compares access to water information channels by gender and education level. While men primarily share information with other men, women mainly exchange water information along educational lines. Less-educated women are least likely to receive information from other gender-education groups. Women are also underrepresented in the network of local government officials and consequently lack bridging ties, remaining more dependent on informal information channels.     

Non-digestible oligosaccharides with prebiotic properties

The search for functional foods or functional food ingredients, i.e. foods or food ingredients that can enhance health, is beyond any doubt one of the leading trends in today's food industry. In this context, probiotics, i.e. living microbial food supplements, and prebiotics, i.e. non-digestible food ingredients, receive much attention. Both popular concepts target the gastrointestinal microbiota. While in the Western world, intake of probiotics has been recommended for long, prebiotics in general, and non-digestible oligosaccharides in particular, have only recently received attention. This review deals with production and characterization of non-digestible oligosaccharides and focuses on their role in promoting health and treating diseases. Attention is paid to the effects of non-digestible oligosaccharides on constipation, mineral absorption, lipid metabolism, cancer prevention, hepatic encephalopathy, glycemia/insulinemia, and immunomodulation.