Ecological problems of the Amu Darya delta

Translated from Gidrotekhnicheskoe Stroitel'stvo, No. 3, pp. 6–8, March, 1992.     

Aging, expertise, and narrative processing.

In a study of how aviation expertise influences age differences in narrative processing, young and older pilots and nonpilots read and recalled aviation and general narratives. They chose referents for sentences referring to a protagonist or minor character mentioned 1 sentence (recent character) or 3 sentences (distant character) before this target sentence. All groups chose referents less accurately for sentences about distant and minor characters than about recent and protagonist characters, perhaps because these referents were less likely to be in working memory. Young readers and pilots were more accurate for distant and minor character target sentences in aviation narratives and recalled aviation narratives more accurately. Expertise did not reduce age differences. Expertise differences may reflect decreased demands on working memory capacity, and age declines may reflect reduced capacity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

放射性核素迁移的实验室研究——Ⅱ.用混合裂变产物溶液研究核素在地质材料上的吸附

应用裂变产物混合物做为示踪剂研究了~(137)Cs,~(141,144)Ce,~(103,106)Ru,~(103,106)Ru,~(95)Zr,~(95)Nb,~(89,90)Sr在花岗岩、凝灰岩、页岩上的吸附行为。应用批式技术测定了吸附比。核素的γ放射性是用连有SCORPIO-3000多道计算机系统的Ce(Li)探测器测量的。β放射性~(89,90)Sr是放化分离后在G-M计数器上测量的。结果表明:凝灰岩、页岩能强烈吸附Ce,Nb,Zr;吸附Cs居中;吸附Sr,Ru较差;花岗岩的吸附性能都差。     

Determining hearing threshold from brain stem evoked potentials.Optimizing a neural network to improve classification performance

Feed-forward neural networks in conjunction with back-propagation are an effective tool to automate the classification of biomedical signals. Most of the neural network research to date has been done with a view to accelerate learning speed. In the medical context, however, generalisation may be more important than learning speed. With the brain stem auditory evoked potential classification task described in this study, the authors found that parameter values that gave fastest learning could result in poor generalisation. In order to achieve maximum generalisation, it was necessary to fine tune the neural net for gain, momentum, batch size, and hidden layer size. Although this maximization could be time consuming, especially with larger training sets, the authors' results suggest that fine tuning parameters can have important clinical consequences, which justifies the time involved. In the authors' case, fine tuning parameters for high generalisation had the additional effect of reducing false negative classifications, with only a small sacrifice in learning speed     

Alternative fatty food simulants for migration testing of polymeric food contact materials.

The amounts of substances migrating from plastics into foodstuffs with high fat contents are in most cases higher than in foodstuffs with water contents. This increase in migration commonly is due to the higher solubility of the migrating organic compounds in fat compared to water. The increase in migration is not necessarily due to an increase in the substance's diffusion coefficient due to interactions between the fat and the plastic as is often assumed. Ethanol is a good simulant for fatty foods because it has little interaction with many plastics, e.g. polyolefins, migrants are readily soluble in it, and because it is easy to work with analytically. The utilizable limits of ethanol and ethanol/water mixtures as food simulants are developed from the physical background of diffusion. The use of ethanol and ethanol/water mixtures is supported by published experimental migration results.