Household bottled water consumption in Phoenix: a lifestyle choice

The demand for bottled water has grown tremendously in recent years, together with concern about its environmental impacts. The authors surveyed individuals in Phoenix, Arizona about their water consumption behaviour, socio-demographic characteristics, perception of water quality and trust in the government's willingness to respond to water quality issues. Using a logit model, the authors then tested the relationship between the respondents' characteristics and bottled water consumption for cooking and drinking in the home. Our results indicate that bottled water consumption reflects lifestyle choice not environmental concerns.     

Division of Rehabilitation Psychology: Roots, guiding principle, and a persistent concern.

What is now known as the Division of Rehabilitation Psychology was formally recognized as the 22nd Division of the American Psychological Association in September 1958. It took 10 years of persistent effort by its founders to bring that about. The first formal arrangement with APA took place in 1949 when "The National Council on Psychological Aspects of Physical Disability" became a special interest group. Now, on the occasion of the centennial celebration of the American Psychological Association, the Division of Rehabilitation Psychology honors more than 40 years of its commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding of disability problems as applied to real-life issues. The author profiles the development and professional history of Division 22 of the American Psychological Association. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differential effects of neurokinin-1 receptor activation in subregions of the periaqueductal gray matter on conditional and unconditional fear behaviors in rats.

Central neurokinin-1 (NK-1) receptors are thought to modulate aversion, whereas the periaqueductal gray matter (PAG) is a common pathway for the integration of fear behaviors. The authors determined whether injection of an NK-1 agonist (GR73632) into subregions of the PAG would alter fear-related behaviors in rats. Behavioral inactivity was increased by GR73632 injected into the caudodorsal PAG or the dorsal raphe. Flight behavior induced by stimulation of the dorsal PAG or by a footshock was decreased after injection of GR73632 into the dorsal PAG. Rats that had 6 pairings of a tone with a footshock after injection of GR73632 into the dorsal PAG displayed more freezing behavior than controls at the beginning of the session. However, there was no change in the shock- or the tone-induced freezing because some GR73632-treated rats, but no controls, froze during the baseline period. It is concluded that NK-1 receptors in the dorsal PAG modulate the unconditional but not the mnemonic aspects of fear behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Pareto-based multi-objective evolutionary approach to the identification of Mamdani fuzzy systems

In the last years, the numerous successful applications of fuzzy rule-based systems (FRBSs) to several different domains have produced a considerable interest in methods to generate FRBSs from data. Most of the methods proposed in the literature, however, focus on performance maximization and omit to consider FRBS comprehensibility. Only recently, the problem of finding the right trade-off between performance and comprehensibility, in spite of the original nature of fuzzy logic, has arisen a growing interest in methods which take both the aspects into account. In this paper, we propose a Pareto-based multi-objective evolutionary approach to generate a set of Mamdani fuzzy systems from numerical data. We adopt a variant of the well-known (2+2) Pareto Archived Evolutionary Strategy ((2+2)PAES), which adopts the one-point crossover and two appropriately defined mutation operators. (2+2)PAES determines an approximation of the optimal Pareto front by concurrently minimizing the root mean squared error and the complexity. Complexity is measured as sum of the conditions which compose the antecedents of the rules included in the FRBS. Thus, low values of complexity correspond to Mamdani fuzzy systems characterized by a low number of rules and a low number of input variables really used in each rule. This ensures a high comprehensibility of the systems. We tested our version of (2+2)PAES on three well-known regression benchmarks, namely the Box and Jenkins Gas Furnace, the Mackey-Glass chaotic time series and Lorenz attractor time series datasets. To show the good characteristics of our approach, we compare the Pareto fronts produced by the (2+2)PAES with the ones obtained by applying a heuristic approach based on SVD-QR decomposition and four different multi-objective evolutionary algorithms.     

Measuring the Hysteresis Loop of Permanent Magnets With the Pulsed Field Magnetometer

We discuss a comprehensive approach to the characterization of permanent magnets with the pulsed field magnetometer. The approach is based on a systematic comparison of the results obtained by this method with those from the conventional closed-circuit and open-sample methods and on the assessment of the dynamic phenomena engendered by the application of the fast exciting field pulse. Such phenomena derive from the thermal fluctuation after effect and the eddy currents, whose contributions to hysteresis loop swelling are brought to light and separately evaluated. We show that the quasi-static hysteresis loop can be retrieved from the dynamically obtained one by compensating for the magnetic viscosity field, found to be proportional to the coercive field, and the eddy-current counterfield. A simple analytical formulation accounts for and predicts the effect of the counterfield.     

Comparison of performance on manual and electric typewriters.

"The possibility of developing conversion tables which would enable prediction of performance on an electric typewriter from performance on a manual typewriter was investigated. The sample consisted of 575 experienced electric typewriter operators from 7 states. They were tested initially on an electric typewriter and then retested on a manual typewriter. The tests used were equivalent forms of the United States Employment Service Typing Test. The results showed that there was a substantial relationship (r = .76) between words-per-minute scores on manual and electric typewriters but only a moderate relationship (r = .62) between error scores on the 2 typewriters." From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4LF68D. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

GATB in foreign countries.

83 individuals and organizations in 28 foreign countries using the USES General Aptitude Test Battery are listed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Characterization of whole fibril-forming collagen proteins of types I, III, and V from fetal calf skin by infrared matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry

Fibril-forming collagen proteins of the types I, III, and V were extracted from fetal calf skin, purified by differential salt precipitation, and analyzed by infrared matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (IR-MALDI-TOF-MS). Glycerol was used as liquid IR-MALDI matrix. Noncovalently bound triple helices of the types I and V were detected from the NaCl precipitate. After heating at 43 degrees C for 10 min, resulting in the dissociation of the triple helix, the single alpha-chain subunits were detected. For type I, mass spectra acquired from molecular sieve chromatography fractions revealed the presence of further substructures of dimeric type and of supramolecular complexes up to the tetramer. Triple helices of type III, stabilized by covalent disulfide bonds, were detected from the total protein precipitate also after heat treatment. For type III, even hexamer and nonamer structures with molecular weights close to 600 and 900 kDa were recorded. For comparison, ultraviolet (UV-)MALDI-MS measurements with 2,5-dihydroxybenzoic acid as matrix were carried out with some of the samples. Here, only the single alpha-chains were detected with significantly reduced sensitivity.     

Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithms for Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Time windows (VRPTW) is an extension of the capacity constrained Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). The VRPTW is NP-Complete and instances with 100 customers or more are very hard to solve optimally. We represent the VRPTW as a multi-objective problem and present a genetic algorithm solution using the Pareto ranking technique. We use a direct interpretation of the VRPTW as a multi-objective problem, in which the two objective dimensions are number of vehicles and total cost (distance). An advantage of this approach is that it is unnecessary to derive weights for a weighted sum scoring formula. This prevents the introduction of solution bias towards either of the problem dimensions. We argue that the VRPTW is most naturally viewed as a multi-objective problem, in which both vehicles and cost are of equal value, depending on the needs of the user. A result of our research is that the multi-objective optimization genetic algorithm returns a set of solutions that fairly consider both of these dimensions. Our approach is quite effective, as it provides solutions competitive with the best known in the literature, as well as new solutions that are not biased toward the number of vehicles. A set of well-known benchmark data are used to compare the effectiveness of the proposed method for solving the VRPTW.     

Mystery of the Missing Women Engineers: A Solution

Despite intensive recruiting efforts by engineering schools and professional societies, the number of women employed as engineers in the United States has never reached 10%. This failure is generally attributed to the fact that girls tend to shy away from math and science in high school. Recruiting efforts are therefore directed toward encouraging girls to study math and science, but these efforts are focused on the wrong problem. Some reasons for the scarcity of female engineers are: the general public's lack of understanding of what engineers do; a misguided emphasis on math and science, rather than problem solving, that makes girls think that engineering is not for them; and the poor image of the engineering profession. Efforts to recruit bright young people, male and female, into the engineering profession will be fruitful when they are focused on engineering, rather than its tools. This can be done by educating the public about what engineering really is and by making schoolchildren aware that being an engineer goes way beyond “doing math and science.”