Effects of simulated employment and recreation on drug taking: A behavioral economic analysis.

With a within-subject design, this study examined the effects of varying response requirement (price) to obtain puffs on a cigarette in the presence and the absence of an opportunity (a) to make money in Experiment 1 (a simulation of employment) and (b) to engage in recreational activities (a simulation of recreation) in Experiment 2. The results indicated that cigarette smoking (number of puffs) decreased and response output increased as price increased. Also, cigarette smoking and response output decreased with the introduction of competing reinforcers at all prices. Lastly, the greatest reduction in cigarette smoking resulted from the combined effects of these two factors. Overall, these data suggest that drug use can be reduced by increasing price or enriching the environment and that maximal reductions result from the simultaneous application of both factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Optimal expansion of a hydrodesulfurization process

The problem solved is: Given deterministic sales forecasts and production requirements over a future time horizon, and a finite set of possible plant expansions to an existing process, when and how should the chemical plant be expanded in order to satisfy the production requirements and maximize the present worth of net profit? A branch and bound procedure combined with nonlinear programming was developed, and applied to a hydrodesulfurization plant to illustrate the technique, its advantages, and its limitations.     

Regularization in statistics

This paper is a selective review of the regularization methods scattered in statistics literature. We introduce a general conceptual approach to regularization and fit most existing methods into it. We have tried to focus on the importance of regularization when dealing with today's high-dimensional objects: data and models. A wide range of examples are discussed, including nonparametric regression, boosting, covariance matrix estimation, principal component estimation, subsampling.     

Angular distribution of fluorescence from dye-filled capillaries

We studied the angular distribution of fluorescence from a small, lossy capillary filled with a laser-dye solution. We found that the fluorescence is isotropic for the liquid core and that, far from the liquid-solid phase transition, this isotropy shows no temperature dependence. This result, an extension of studies with solid cylinders, is at variance with theoretical expectations for solids as well as with previous reports by other investigators but is explained by the motion of the molecules in the liquid. Therefore the optimal viewing angle for capillary zone electrophoresis experiments is near 90° because the elastic scattering of the incident laser light is at or near a minimum for these small capillaries. This reduces contamination of the fluorescence signal as a result of stray laser light in the optical system.     

Recent Advances in Facial Appearance Capture

Facial appearance capture is now firmly established within academic research and used extensively across various application domains, perhaps most prominently in the entertainment industry through the design of virtual characters in video games and films. While significant progress has occurred over the last two decades, no single survey currently exists that discusses the similarities, differences, and practical considerations of the available appearance capture techniques as applied to human faces. A central difficulty of facial appearance capture is the way light interacts with skin—which has a complex multi‐layered structure—and the interactions that occur below the skin surface can, by definition, only be observed indirectly. In this report, we distinguish between two broad strategies for dealing with this complexity. “Image‐based methods” try to exhaustively capture the exact face appearance under different lighting and viewing conditions, and then render the face through weighted image combinations. “Parametric methods” instead fit the captured reflectance data to some parametric appearance model used during rendering, allowing for a more lightweight and flexible representation but at the cost of potentially increased rendering complexity or inexact reproduction. The goal of this report is to provide an overview that can guide practitioners and researchers in assessing the tradeoffs between current approaches and identifying directions for future advances in facial appearance capture.