Alcohol's Effect on Triggered Displaced Aggression.

The authors examined alcohol's effect on triggered displaced aggression, the hostile reaction to a second provoking person after provocation from a first. Participants consumed an alcoholic or a nonalcoholic beverage. Subsequently, one individual provoked all of them with moderate intensity. Then, 2 groups were studied: those who received or who failed to receive a second provocation of minimal intensity. Consistent with prior research, participants who received a second, minimal provocation displayed more aggression than those who did not. After participants drank alcohol, the magnitude of this difference was significantly greater, indicating that alcohol increases triggered displaced aggression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Genes, Race, and Psychology in the Genome Era: An Introduction.

The mapping of the human genome has reawakened interest in the topic of race and genetics, especially the use of genetic technology to examine racial differences in complex outcomes such as health and intelligence. Advances in genomic research challenge psychology to address the myriad conceptual, methodological, and analytical issues associated with research on genetics and race. In addition, the field needs to understand the numerous social, ethical, legal, clinical, and policy implications of research in this arena. Addressing these issues should not only benefit psychology but could also serve to guide such thought in other fields, including molecular biology. The purpose of this special issue is to begin a discussion of this issue of race and genetics within the field of psychology. Several scholars who work in the fields of genetics, race, or related areas were invited to write (or had previously submitted) articles sharing their perspectives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic web technologies to reconcile privacy and context awareness

Increasingly, application developers are looking for ways to provide users with higher levels of personalization that capture different elements of a user’s operating context, such as her location, the task that she is currently engaged in, who her colleagues are, etc. While there are many sources of contextual information, they tend to vary from one user to another and also over time. Different users may rely on different location tracking functionality provided by different cell phone operators; they may use different calendar systems, etc. In this article, we describe work on a Semantic e-Wallet aimed at supporting automated identification and access of personal resources, each represented as a Semantic Web Service. A key objective is to provide a Semantic Web environment for open access to a user’s contextual resources, thereby reducing the costs associated with the development and maintenance of context-aware applications. A second objective is, through Semantic Web technologies, to empower users to selectively control who has access to their contextual information and under which conditions. This work has been carried out in the context of myCampus, a context-aware environment aimed at enhancing everyday campus life. Empirical results obtained on Carnegie Mellon’s campus are discussed.     

A continuous approach to considering uncertainty in facility design

This paper presents a formulation of the facilities block layout problem which explicitly considers uncertainty in material handling costs on a continuous scale by use of expected values and standard deviations of product forecasts. This formulation is solved using a genetic algorithm meta-heuristic with a flexible bay construct of the departments and total facility area. It is shown that depending on the attitude of the decision-maker towards uncertainty, the optimal design can change significantly. Furthermore, designs can be optimized directly for robustness over a range of uncertainty that is pre-specified by the user. This formulation offers a computationally tractable and intuitively appealing alternative to previous stochastic layout formulations that are based on discrete scenario probabilities.     

Amygdala Inactivation Blocks Expression of Conditioned Memory Modulation and the Promotion of Avoidance and Freezing.

Rats were exposed to shock-paired cues immediately after training on an appetitive preference task. Elevated levels of freezing in and active avoidance of the shock-paired compartment were observed, and memory for the appetitive task was improved when tested 24 hr later. Intra-amygdala muscimol injected before the posttraining exposure eliminated freezing, avoidance, and memory modulation. The blockade of both freezing and active avoidance, which involve competing behavioral tendencies, makes it unlikely that the amygdala itself generates either behavior. The elimination of conditioned memory modulation suggests that conditioned neurohormonal responses were blocked. These conditioned internal responses may comprise the intervening variable of "conditioned fear" and may promote observable behaviors, the form of which is determined by the environment in which they occur. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Structure of Anxiety and Depression in Urban Youth: An Examination of the Tripartite Model.

In this study, the authors examined the validity of the tripartite model of anxiety and depression (L. A. Clark & D. Watson, 1991) in a community epidemiological sample of 467 urban African American youth. Participants completed the Baltimore How I Feel (N. S. Ialongo, S. G. Kellam, & J. Poduska, 1999), a measure of anxiety and depressive symptoms, in Grades 6 and 9. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that a 3-factor model representing the tripartite model fit the data well and better than competing models. Longitudinal confirmatory factor analysis revealed configural invariance of the tripartite factor structure. However, a predicted divergence among dimensions over time was not evidenced. High correlations among the tripartite dimensions suggest that anxiety and mood symptoms may not differentiate in urban youth. Results are discussed in terms of the ethnicity and urban context of this community sample. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the Computational Complexity of Consumer Decision Rules

A consumer entering a new bookstore can face more than 250,000alternatives. The efficiency of compensatory and noncompensatory decisionrulesfor finding a preferred item depends on the efficiency of their associatedinformation operators. At best, item-by-item information operators lead tolinear computational complexity; set information operators, on the other hand,can lead to constant complexity. We perform an experiment demonstrating thatsubjects are approximately rational in selecting between sublinear and linearrules. Many markets are organized by attributes that enable consumers toemploya set-selection-by-aspect rule using set information operations. In cyberspacedecision rules are encoded as decision aids.     

Visual Notes and the Acquisition of Architectural Knowledge

This article discusses the value and purpose of drawing in its relationship to the design process and understanding architecture. The authors base much of their discussion on their own experiences in teaching both drawing and architectural design to undergraduates. These experiences however are informed and supported both by architectural history and theory and theories of perception and art. The authors discuss the importance of visual notes to architects of the past, note both the decline of the usage of visual notes in the twentieth century as well as their continued use by important architects of our time. This article stresses the analytical and critical value of such drawing as opposed to its pictorial purposes.     

Dichotomous feedback: a signal sequestration-based feedback mechanism for biocontroller design

We introduce a new design framework for implementing negative feedback regulation in synthetic biology, which we term ‘dichotomous feedback’. Our approach is different from current methods, in that it sequesters existing fluxes in the process to be controlled, and in this way takes advantage of the process’s architecture to design the control law. This signal sequestration mechanism appears in many natural biological systems and can potentially be easier to realize than ‘molecular sequestration’ and other comparison motifs that are nowadays common in biomolecular feedback control design. The loop is closed by linking the strength of signal sequestration to the process output. Our feedback regulation mechanism is motivated by two-component signalling systems, where a second response regulator could be competing with the natural response regulator thus sequestering kinase activity. Here, dichotomous feedback is established by increasing the concentration of the second response regulator as the level of the output of the natural process increases. Extensive analysis demonstrates how this type of feedback shapes the signal response, attenuates intrinsic noise while increasing robustness and reducing crosstalk.