Potential of cognitive plasticity as a diagnostic instrument: A cross-validation and extension.

Examination of the range and limits of cognitive developmental reserve capacity (plasticity) by means of cognitive training has been proffered as a promising diagnostic strategy for the early identification of Alzheimer's disease. Previous findings of differential gains after cognitive training for healthy older persons and older persons at risk for dementia were supported, rendering cognitive plasticity a criterion by which the overlap in performance distributions between healthy older persons and older persons at risk can be reduced. Stepwise hierarchical regression analyses demonstrated that posttraining scores, which represented developmental reserve capacity, explained significantly more variance in mental health status than pretest or baseline performance. Older persons at risk profited significantly less from training in 2 components of fluid intelligence, figural relations, and inductive reasoning. The authors discuss the possibilities of turning this testing-the-limits procedure into an instrument for screening purposes in clinical practice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality subtypes of young moped drivers, their relationship to risk-taking behavior and involvement in road crashes in an Austrian sample

Objective

This study aimed to identify subtypes of young moped drivers and analyze how these subtypes are involved in risk preferences and road crashes.

Design

A group of Austrian teenage moped drivers (213, 28% girls) completed an online questionnaire about moped usage, injuries, driving style, inattention, impulsivity, and personality according to the Five-Factor Model of Personality and Cloninger's model of personality.

Results

A cluster analysis yielded four types of moped drivers. One type was characterized by a high level of neuroticism, the second type was characterized by a risky personality and a risky driving style, the third type had a more cautious driving style, and the fourth type was characterized by a risky personality and high levels on inattention and impulsivity.

Conclusions

Our conclusions suggest that young moped drivers should not be perceived as a homogenous group, according to measures of injury prevention and intervention.     

Etiology of dependence in older nursing home residents during morning care: The role of staff behavior.

In an observational-operant design study with 17 staff members and 36 elderly nursing home residents, sequential observations of resident–staff interactions were recorded daily during morning care over a 23-day period. Results suggest that independent behavior in self-maintenance care is not maintained by staff behavior but perhaps by intrinsic reinforcers or reinforcing agents other than staff, whereas dependent behavior is directly maintained by staff reinforcement. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fiber Bragg Gratings in Small-Core Ge-Doped Photonic Crystal Fibers

This paper reports fiber Bragg gratings （FBGs） inscribed in a small-core Ge-doped photonic crystal fibers with a UV laser and a Talbot interferometer. The responses of such FBGs to temper- ature, strain, bending, and transverse-loading were systematically investigated. The Bragg wavelength of the FBGs shifts toward longer wavelengths with increasing temperature, tensile strain, and transverse-loading. The bending and transverse- loading properties of the FBGs are sensitive to the fiber orientations.     

QoS-Based Concurrent User-Service Grouping for Web Service Recommendation

Recently, tremendous growth of web services to share the program, data and resources requires the optimal recommendation strategy. The major issues observed in existing recommendation strategies are scalability, sparsity and the cold start. The employment of matrix factorization (MF) models addressed all the issues effectively. But, they increase the scalability of the system. This paper proposes the new framework that contains web service grouping, distance estimation, service utilization level estimation and the item-to-item comparison (Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC)) to improve the recommendation performance. The grouping of users according to the Haversine distance formulation to reduce the complexity in the relevant web service recommendation against the complex queries. The locations and the fields in the services utilization in proposed work provide the effective recommendation performance. The comparative analysis between the proposed novel recommendation framework with the existing techniques assures the effectiveness of proposed approach in web service recommendation.     

Specific blockade of slowly activating I(sK) channels by chromanols -- impact on the role of I(sK) channels in epithelia

Chromanols, which were recently shown to inhibit cAMP-mediated Cl- secretion in colon crypts via a blockade of a cAMP-activated K+ conductance, were analyzed for their effects on distinct cloned K+ channels expressed in Xenopus oocytes. The lead chromanol 293B specifically inhibited I(sK) channels with an IC50 of 7 micromol/l without affecting the delayed rectifier Kv1.1 or the inward rectifier Kir2.1. Moreover, several other chromanols displayed the same rank order of potency for I(sK) inhibition as demonstrated in colon crypts. Finally, we tested the effects of the previously described I(sK) blocker azimilide on cAMP mediated Cl- secretion in rat colon crypts. Similar to 293B azimilide inhibited the forskolin induced Cl- secretion. These data suggest that I(sK) protein induced K+ conductances are the targets for the chromanol 293B and its analogues, and azimilide.