Family-Responsive Interventions, Perceived Organizational and Supervisor Support, Work-Family Conflict, and Psychological Strain.

This study examined organizational family-responsive policies, perceptions of the organization as family supportive, and supervisor support as issues that may be salient to the experience of conflict between paid employment (work) and family roles. Data were collected from 355 managerial personnel in New Zealand. Although work-family conflict and psychological strain were strongly linked, the availability of organizational policies had no significant association with levels of conflict or strain, whereas policy usage was related only to work-to-family interference and not to family-to-work interference. On the other hand, perceptions of the organization as family supportive and supervisor support for work-family balance displayed significant relationships with key variables, highlighting the importance of these variables for interventions designed to ameliorate the negative impact of work-family conflict on managerial well-being. Implications for the effective implementation of family-responsive interventions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conditioned facilitation of brain reward function after repeated cocaine administration.

Cocaine lowers brain reward thresholds, reflecting increased brain reward function. The authors investigated whether, similar to acute cocaine administration, cocaine-predictive conditioned stimuli would lower intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS) thresholds. Rats received a saline injection for 5 days, a cocaine injection (10 mg/kg) for 20 consecutive days, then saline for 5 additional days. Thresholds were measured immediately before and 10 min after each injection. The initial 5 saline injections had no effect on thresholds, whereas cocaine significantly lowered thresholds for 20 days. There was no tolerance or sensitization to this effect of cocaine over days. During the last 5 days when cocaine administration was substituted with saline, rats demonstrated a conditioned lowering of thresholds during the 2nd daily ICSS session. These data demonstrate that cocaine-predictive conditioned stimuli induce a conditioned facilitation of brain reward function. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Work-hardening and recovery mechanisms in gamma-based titanium aluminides

The work-hardening mechanisms in two-phase γ-titanium aluminide alloys were characterized in terms of the glide obstacles determining the velocity and slip path of dislocations, utilizing transmission electron microscopy (TEM) observations and thermodynamic-glide parameters. There was clear evidence that short-range obstacles in the form of dislocation debris and dipoles were produced during plastic deformation at room temperature. These dislocation obstacles contributed significantly to work hardening. The observed strong strain hardening arose from long-range elastic dislocation interactions and the production of dipole and debris defects. The thermal stability of these deformation-induced defects was assessed by isothermal and isochronal annealing. The results indicated that the dipole and debris defects were relatively unstable upon annealing at moderately high temperatures, which led to significant recovery of work hardening. This article is based on a presentation made in the symposium entitled “Fundamentals of Structural Intermetallics,” presented at the 2002 TMS Annual Meeting, February 21–27, 2002, in Seattle, Washington, under the auspices of the ASM and TMS Joint Committee on Mechanical Behavior of Materials.     

Assessing Human Impact of Organizational Crises: Reliability and Validity of the Triage Assessment Scale for Organizations (TAS:O)

The present study evaluated the reliability and validity of the Triage Assessment Survey: Organizations (TAS:O), a 27-item, 5-point, Likert summated rating scale. One hundred and seventeen participants responded to the TAS:O after reading mild, moderate, marked and severe organizational crisis scenarios. The overall Cronbach's alpha and split-half reliability were both .93. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed three factors, supporting the hypothesis that the TAS:O is comprised of three distinct factors (i.e., Affect, Behavior, and Cognition). An analysis of variance provided evidence that the TAS:O has the capacity to distinguish among mild, moderate, marked, and severe crises. Because this research is the first to evaluate the TAS:O, further studies are needed to strengthen confidence in the psychometric properties of this scale.     

High Throughput Primer Walking of cDNA Clones

Primer walking of cloned DNA is a standard research tool. It has been used in the past to determine the sequence of individual clones of interest. With the expansion of DNA sequencing capacity the need to be able to walk larger numbers of clones has become necessary. Our laboratory is a mid-sized genomics facility. In conjunction with the Advanced Biomedical Computing Center (ABCC) we have developed methods for automating the primer selection, DNA sequencing, contig assembly and sequence analysis for clones arrayed in microtiter format. This approach has allowed us to walk 475 clones (five microtiter plates) selected from a cDNA library.     

Localization of Function Within the Dorsal Hippocampus: The Role of the CA3 Subregion in Paired-Associate Learning.

Computational models and electrophysiological data suggest that the CA3 subregion of the hippocampus supports the formation of arbitrary associations; however, no behavioral studies have been conducted to test this hypothesis. Rats with neurotoxin-induced lesions of dorsal dentate gyrus (DG), CA3, or CA1 were tested on object-place and odor-place paired-associate tasks to test whether the mechanism that supports paired-associate learning is localized to the CA3 subregion of the dorsal hippocampus or whether all hippocampal subregions contribute to paired-associate learning. The data indicate that rats with DG or CA1 lesions learned the tasks as well as controls; however, CA3-lesioned rats were impaired in learning the tasks. Thus, the CA3 subregion of the dorsal hippocampus contains a mechanism to support paired-associate learning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

PAC-learnability of probabilistic deterministic finite state automata in terms of variation distance

We consider the problem of PAC-learning distributions over strings, represented by probabilistic deterministic finite automata (PDFAs). PDFAs are a probabilistic model for the generation of strings of symbols, that have been used in the context of speech and handwriting recognition, and bioinformatics. Recent work on learning PDFAs from random examples has used the KL-divergence as the error measure; here we use the variation distance. We build on recent work by Clark and Thollard, and show that the use of the variation distance allows simplifications to be made to the algorithms, and also a strengthening of the results; in particular that using the variation distance, we obtain polynomial sample size bounds that are independent of the expected length of strings.     

2 cm long monolithic multisection laser for active modelocking at 2.2 GHz

A 2 cm long three-contact multisection laser has been fabricated for modelocking at very low repetition rates. Active modelocking yields 8.0-12.3 ps pulses at 2.2, 4.3 and 6.5 GHz corresponding to the fundamental, first, and second harmonics of the cavity resonance frequency. This device demonstrates the feasibility of fabricating monolithic pulse sources operating at rates as low as the OC-48 Sonet transmission rate (2.488 Gbit/s).<>     

Professional integrity in clinical research

In response to public concern over abuses in human medical experimentation, the dominant approach to the ethics of clinical research during the past 30 years has been regulation, particularly via institutional review board review and approval of scientific protocols and written consent forms. However, the effectiveness of regulatory mechanisms in ensuring the ethical conduct of clinical research is limited. Little attention has been devoted to the nature and role of professional integrity of physician investigators, a conscientious framework for guiding investigators in the socially important but morally complex activity of clinical research. Professional integrity is vital in forging an ethically sound relationship between investigators and patient volunteers, a relationship that differs in important ways from the patient-physician relationship in standard clinical practice. We examine critically 2 models of the moral identity of physician investigators, the investigator as clinician and the investigator as scientist; in neither of these 2 models can the physician investigator eliminate completely the moral conflicts posed by clinical research. The professional integrity of physician investigators depends on a coherent moral identity that is proper to the enterprise of clinical research. The roles of clinician and scientist must be integrated to manage conscientiously the ethical complexity, ambiguity, and tensions between the potentially competing loyalties of science and care of volunteer patients.