Regional cerebral volume loss associated with verbal learning and memory in dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Twenty-seven research participants with dementia of the Alzheimer type were studied with the California Verbal Learning Test (D. C. Delis, J. H. Kramer, E. Kaplan, & B. A. Ober, 1987) and standardized volume measures of the mesial temporal cortical gray matter, neocortical gray matter, thalamus, and caudate nuclei, from magnetic resonance imaging. A pattern of atrophic brain changes in the mesial temporal lobes (MTL) and the thalamus, with relatively less severe atrophy in the neocortical gray matter, was associated with poorer learning of the word list. Similar patterns of brain atrophy were observed for measures of delayed recall and recognition hits. However, for delayed recall, neither contribution was statistically significant, and for recognition hits, MTL was only at the trend level for significance. These results provide evidence that the verbal memory deficit of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated not only with the mesial temporal limbic cortex, thought to be the site of earliest and most severe pathology in AD, but also with damage in the thalamus. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Legal responsibility of internet service providers: Part 2

Over the past 10 years, the Internet has grown from being a series of networks used to communicate information by a small number of organizations to a data superhighway capable of linking users together in sufficient places in the world to rival the leading international telecommunication carriers and distributing sufficient information to rival the leading publishing houses. Such changes have brought with them enormous benefits. Information can now be shared more quickly amongst a greater number of people than would have ever have been thought possible as late as 1991 when the World Wide Web was first created. This technological change has in turn, brought sociological change. People are now starting to buy books, pay for tickets, give instructions to their banks over the Internet. In time to come, it is reasonable to think that all our day to day tasks, going shopping, speaking to our friends, listening to music etc. will all take place via the Internet.     

Marriage and the spiritual realm: The role of proximal and distal religious constructs in marital functioning.

Ninety-seven couples completed questionnaires about their involvement in joint religious activities and their perceptions regarding the sanctification of marriage, including perceived sacred qualities of marriage and beliefs about the manifestation of God in marriage. In contrast to individual religiousness and religious homogamy (distal religious constructs), these proximal religious variables directly reflect an integration of religion and marriage, and they were associated with greater global marital adjustment, more perceived benefits from marriage, less marital conflict, more verbal collaboration, and less use of verbal aggression and stalemate to discuss disagreements for both wives and husbands. The proximal measures also added substantial unique variance (adjusted R2 change ranged from .06 to .48) to specific aspects of marital functioning after controlling demographic factors and distal religious variables in hierarchical regression analyses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A constrained optimization approach to preserving prior knowledge during incremental training

In this paper, a supervised neural network training technique based on constrained optimization is developed for preserving prior knowledge of an input-output mapping during repeated incremental training sessions. The prior knowledge, referred to as long-term memory (LTM), is expressed in the form of equality constraints obtained by means of an algebraic training technique. Incremental training, which may be used to learn new short-term memories (STMs) online, is then formulated as an error minimization problem subject to equality constraints. The solution of this problem is simplified by implementing an adjoined error gradient that circumvents direct substitution and exploits classical backpropagation. A target application is neural network function approximation in adaptive critic designs. For illustrative purposes, constrained training is implemented to update an adaptive critic flight controller, while preserving prior knowledge of an established performance baseline that consists of classical gain-scheduled controllers. It is shown both analytically and numerically that the LTM is accurately preserved while the controller is repeatedly trained over time to assimilate new STMs.     

Self-monitoring: Appraisal and reappraisal.

Theory and research on self-monitoring have accumulated into a sizable literature on the impact of variation in the extent to which people cultivate public appearances in diverse domains of social functioning. Yet self-monitoring and its measure, the Self-Monitoring Scale, are surrounded by controversy generated by conflicting answers to the critical question, Is self-monitoring a unitary phenomenon? A primary source of answers to this question has been largely neglected—the Self-Monitoring Scale's relations with external criteria. The authors propose a quantitative method to examine the self-monitoring literature and thereby address major issues of the controversy. Application of this method reveals that, with important exceptions, a wide range of external criteria tap a dimension directly measured by the Self-Monitoring Scale. The authors discuss what this appraisal reveals about what self-monitoring is and is not. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual goals in evolving organizations.

Comments on S. M. Colarelli's (see record 1998-10886-003) discussion of the social-evolutionary perspective of psychological interventions in organizations. The authors clarify and elaborate on Colarelli's argument that the nature of organizational goals makes the relationships between interventions and organizational outcomes problematic and that what may work on one level of hierarchy may not be functional at others. The authors argue that this is true, but it fails to specify a social-evolutionary insight that has profound consequences: Inventions intended to promote organizational goals will be successful only when these interventions also promote the goals of the individuals working within the organization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Creation of graphene allotropes using patterned defects

Monolithic structures can be built into graphene by the addition and subsequent re-arrangement of carbon atoms. To this end, ad-dimers of carbon are a particularly attractive building block because a number of emerging technologies offer the promise of precisely placing them on carbon surfaces. In concert with the more common Stone-Thrower-Wales defect, repeating patterns can be introduced to create as yet unrealized materials. The idea of building such allotropes out of defects is new, and we demonstrate the technique by constructing two-dimensional carbon allotropes known as haeckelite. We then extend the idea to create a new class of membranic carbon allotropes that we call dimerite, composed exclusively of ad-dimer defects.