Effectiveness of abstinence-based incentives: Interaction with intake stimulant test results.

Intake urinalysis test result (drug positive vs. negative) has been previously identified as a strong predictor of drug abuse treatment outcome, but there is little information about how this prognostic factor may interact with the type of treatment delivered. The authors used data from a multisite study of abstinence incentives for stimulant abusers enrolled in outpatient counseling treatment (N. M. Petry, J. M. Peirce, et al., 2005) to examine this question. The first study urine was used to stratify participants into stimulant negative (n = 306) versus positive (n = 108) subgroups. Abstinence incentives significantly improved retention in those testing negative but not in those testing positive. Findings suggest that stimulant abusers presenting to treatment with a stimulant-negative urine benefit from abstinence incentives, but alternative treatment approaches are needed for those who test stimulant positive at intake. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Kinetics of o-Xylene oxidation over sintered vanadium pentoxide in a spinning catalyst basket reactor

Kinetics of vapor phase oxidation of o-xylene has been studied over sintered and compacted vanadium pentoxide in a continuous stirred tank catalytic reactor in the temperature range of 450–517°C at atmospheric pressure. The major product obtained is phthalic anhydride. The other products are maleic anhydride and carbon dioxide. The reaction rate data are well represented (with average absolute deviation less than 6%) by the following expression derived by applying the steady-state oxidation-reduction model of Mars and van Krevelen to a parallel reaction scheme and assuming first order with respect to both o-xylene and oxygen: Significantly, the activation energies for all three postulated reactions with rate constants k₁, k₂, and k₃ turn out to be identical having a value of 14.8 kcal/mole, which may be taken to imply that there is only one rate-influencing reaction step for all the products and not three as assumed in deriving this equation.     

Relationship between infrared photoluminescence and resistivity in semi-insulating 6H-SiC

A combination of room-temperature photoluminescence (PL) mapping, low-temperature PL spectroscopy, and resistivity mapping was applied to establish the origin of resistivity variations in different types of semi-insulating (SI) 6H-SiC substrates. Direct correlation between the native-defect PL and resistivity was found in undoped (V-free) SI samples. The regions with high PL intensity also showed high resistivity, indicating that native point defects are associated with the compensation mechanism in those substrates and its nonhomogeneity. A more complex correlation was established for the vanadium-doped samples. In these samples, V-related PL and native point defect-related PL were both present at room temperature. While there was no clear correlation between the resistivity maps and the maps of PL intensity measured at either of the two peaks separately, the resistivity was in good correlation with the total PL signal consisting of both vanadium and intrinsic defect contributions. The resistivity of those wafers was apparently due to the contribution of both V-related and native point defect-related deep levels.     

Extraction and recognition of geographical features from paper maps

With the emergence of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), map acquisition and recognition have become hotly pursued topics, both by the industry and the academia. The paper presents a novel methodology for the extraction and recognition of symbol features from topographic maps. The method proceeds by separating the map into its constituent layers and then attempting to recognize the features in different layers on the basis of symbol-specific geometrical and morphological attributes. Text strings have also been separated. The output is obtained in the form of an ‘e-map’ that is vectorized and hence is suitable for GIS. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed system a simple database along with a query processing facility is constructed integrating the information obtained from the e-map and ‘some’ user inputs. The methodology has been observed to perform quite satisfactorily.     

A simple and effective table detection system from document images

The requirement of detection and identification of tables from document images is crucial to any document image analysis and digital library system. In this paper we report a very simple but extremely powerful approach to detect tables present in document pages. The algorithm relies on the observation that the tables have distinct columns which implies that gaps between the fields are substantially larger than the gaps between the words in text lines. This deceptively simple observation has led to the design of a simple but powerful table detection system with low computation cost. Moreover, mathematical foundation of the approach is also established including formation of a regular expression for ease of implementation.     

Mixed state thermoelectric power of vanadium substituted 2223 (Bi, Pb) superconducting polycrystalline cuprates

Measurement of the mixed state thermoelectric power of pure and vanadium substituted 2223 pellets of the type (Bi_0.6Pb_0.2–y V _y )₂Sr₂Ca₂Cu₃O _x are presented for temperatures between 77 and 120 K. Mixed state Seebeck voltages for both pure and vanadium substituted samples show almost similar features. Our data forT>0.8T _c could be explained, attributing the observed dissipation to the normal quasiparticle excitations. For temperatures below 0.8T _c , we argue that the dominant contribution to the mixed state Seebeck voltage may originate from the dissipation induced by the fluctuations of the order parameter across the internal weak links.     

Supraannular aortic root enlargement in patients with small aortic annulus: efficacy and safety

In response to several women who presented with postpartum depression in 1 year, a group of nurses developed a task force made up of hospital nurses, obstetricians, psychiatrists, pediatricians, family practitioners, lactation specialists, home care nurses, and mental health counselors. The purposes of this task force were to educate health care professionals about postpartum depression, to help identify women who might be affected, and to develop interventions for adjusting to parenthood. This article details the evolution of that task force, and how it has assisted not only the women but also the health care providers involved.     

Kinetics of resinification of furfuryl alcohol in aqueous solution

Kinetic information on the resinification of furfuryl alcohol has been derived from the rate of increase of color intensity measured with a photoelectric colorimeter, the resinification being carried out isothermally in Clark-Lubs aqueous buffer solutions in the pH range of 1.0–2.2. The activation energy for polymerization is found to increase exponentially with pH. The time required for emulsification (which is quickly followed by separation of resin layer) to occur in an aqueous solution of furfuryl alcohol also increases exponentially with pH, but it decreases exponentially with temperature. This is described quantitatively by a single expression.     

An attack invariant scheme for content-based video copy detection

Due to the advancement in the field of multimedia technology and communication, it has become easier to access, store, and edit video data. Easy manipulation of video data and its rapid distribution have made content-based video copy detection (CBVCD) an active area of research. In a CBVCD system, reference video sequence and query sequence are compared to detect whether the query video sequence is a copy of reference video sequence. Thus, the generation of fingerprint of a video sequence and sequence matching technique are the core tasks of such system. In order to evade such detection process, a copied version may undergo different kinds of transformations like photometric and post-production attack. So the detection system must be robust enough against such attacks. In this work, fingerprint is generated from the sub-bands of wavelet decomposed intensity image and localized intensity gradient histograms of low sub-band. The fingerprint thus obtained reflects considerable discriminating capability and robustness against the attacks. Furthermore, to cope up with the attacks, we have adopted simple pre-processing technique, which enhances the robustness of the system further. A robust sequence matching technique based on multivariate Wald–Wolfowitz test is proposed here. An experiment has been carried out with a database consisting of distinct 642 shots and 1,485 query sequences representing different attacks. Proposed methodology achieves high copy detection rate (99.39 %) and very low false alarm rate (0.14 %) and performs better than other spatio-temporal measure based systems.