Parental and offspring assessment of driving capability under the influence of drugs or alcohol: Gender and inter-generational differences

The current study set to examine whether there are inter-generational and gender-based differences between family members self-assessing their ability to drive under normal conditions and while under the influence of either alcohol or drugs. Participants were 135 young-adults and both their parents, consisting 45 family triads, who received self-assessment questionnaires relating to their driving skills in various road scenarios. Each family triad was randomly assigned to one of three groups: either requested to base the assessments on normal driving conditions, or under the influence of either drugs or alcohol, thus forming a control group, and two experimental groups (alcohol and drugs), respectively.The findings indicate the assessments of both the alcohol and drugs groups were more severe than those of the control group. The alcohol group assessments were less strict than the drug group assessment (non-significantly). Inter-generational differences indicated that the parents’ driving-skills assessments were lower than those of their offspring, corresponding with previous findings (Elkind, 1967, Finn and Bragg, 1986).A significant within-subject interaction has been found between the respondent's gender and familial relations regarding the self-assessment of driving skills: male respondents assessed better driving skills compared to the self estimates of both parents (which did not significantly differ). In contrast, female respondents’ estimates did not differ from their fathers’ and both fathers’ and daughters’ estimates were significantly higher than that of the mothers in each family.     

The complexities and pitfalls of working with the countertransference

Left unilateral spatial neglect (USN) and spatial agraphia are both caused by right hemisphere damage. However, effects of USN on spatial agraphia have not been fully investigated. This study examined performances of patients with or without neglect and normals on single letter writing, using Japanese unique writing systems, kana (phonogram) and kanji (ideogram). Our patients exhibited agraphia of kanji, but not of kana. However, accuracy of writing was not associated to neglect severity, and errors for writing to dictation occurred either on the left or right side of kanji. Right frontal damage seemed to be related to the genesis of duplication or omission errors of repeated elements. Effect of USN was limited to spatial arrangement of letters and copying performance.     

Compact Labeling Scheme for XML Ancestor Queries

XML documents are often viewed as trees (basically the parse tree of the document), and queries over such documents typically test for ancestor relationships among tree nodes. Search engines process such queries using an index structure summarizing the ancestor relations. In the index, each document item (tree node) is identified using some logical id (node label), such that, given two labels, the engine can determine the ancestor relationship between the corresponding nodes. The length of the labels is a main factor of the index size. Therefore, reducing this length, even by a constant factor, is a critical issue. In this work we consider the following problem. Given a rooted XML tree T, label the nodes of T in the most compact way such that given the labels of two nodes, one can determine in constant time, by looking at the labels only, whether one node is an ancestor of the other. Labelings currently being used are all variants of the following interval scheme. Number the leaves say from left to right and label each node with a pair consisting of the numbers of its smallest and largest leaf descendants. An ancestor query then amounts to an interval containment test on the labels. The maximum label length using this scheme is 2 log n, where n is the number of nodes in the tree. (All logarithms in this paper are to base 2.) The focus of this work is finding a scheme that works best in practice on real XML data. We suggest an orthogonal prefix-based approach, where the labeling is such that an ancestor query roughly amounts to testing whether one label is a prefix of the other. We present several new labeling schemes based on this approach and analyze their performance both theoretically and empirically.     

Analysis of elastin gene expression in the developing chick aorta using cloned elastin cDNA

A segment of chick elastin cDNA cloned in the plasmid pBR322 was sequenced by the method of Maxam and Gilbert ((1977) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 74, 560-564) and the 192-base pair insert was found to be derived from the nontranslated region of the 3' end of the mRNA. The nick-translated cDNA was used to identify and to estimate the relative amounts of elastin mRNA in the developing chick embryo aorta by blot hybridization. A single species of 3.5 kilobases hybridized to the cDNA probe and this species increased greatly between day 7 and day 14 of embryonic development. This increase was paralleled by an increase in translatable aortic elastin mRNA and by the in vivo rate of elastin synthesis, demonstrating that the change in synthesis during development is largely controlled by the elastin mRNA content of the aorta.