Contemporary perspectives and future directions of personality and social psychology.

Conducted an empirically based study in which the judgments of experts were used to identify the theoretical/methodological structure of the field of personality and social psychology, as well as the core "interest communities" extant in these disciplines. The similarities of figures prominent in the history of the field were judged by 16 of the American Psychological Association's Division 8 (Society of Personality and Social Psychology) Fellows. Multidimensional scaling of these similarity judgments revealed 3 general dimensions along which the figures varied: synthetic vs analytic, internal vs external determinants of behavior, and prominence. An alternate view of the field was provided by a taxonomic scheme in which the figures were grouped along major ideological, substantive, and methodological lines. The following 5 contemporary interest communities were identified from the self-characterizations of the Fellows: (a) psychoanalysis and psychiatry, (b) modern personality theory, (c) measurement and individual differences, (d) sociology, and (e) social psychology. Statements of implications for future directions in the field were also obtained from Ss. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sudden incapacitation: USAF experience, 1970-80

During the period 1970-80, there were reported 146 cases of in-flight sudden incapacitation in the USAF. Of these, 62 involved pilots, 14 were navigators, and 70 were student pilots. The etiologies of sudden incapacitation included illness without loss of consciousness, loss of consciousness, spatial disorientation, and improper M-1 maneuver. Each of these categories is analyzed with emphasis upon prevention, for example, not flying with symptomatic preexisting disease, continued emphasis upon spatial disorientation training, and correct performance of the M-1 maneuver. Based upon the data, conclusions and recommendations are suggested to minimize the risk of episodes of in-flight sudden incapacitation.     

Programming Internet telephony services

The Internet offers an opportunity to enhance traditional telephony services, such as call forwarding, through interaction with e-mail, the Web, and directory services, as well as traditional media types. How do you effectively program these services? The authors propose a CGI (common gateway interface) solution for trusted user/developers (such as administrators) and the Call Processing Language (CPL)-a simple, robust, safe, call processing language-for untrusted user/developers     

Advances in IC-Scheduling Theory: Scheduling Expansive and Reductive Dags and Scheduling Dags via Duality

Earlier work has developed the underpinnings of the IC-scheduling theory, a framework for scheduling computations having intertask dependencies - modeled via directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) - for Internet-based computing. The goal of the schedules produced is to render tasks eligible for execution at the maximum possible rate, with the dual aim of 1) utilizing remote clients' computational resources well by always having work to allocate to an available client and 2) lessening the likelihood of a computation's stalling for lack of eligible tasks. The DAGs handled by the theory thus far are those that can be decomposed into a given collection of bipartite building block DAGs via the operation of DAG decomposition. A basic tool in constructing schedules is a relation >, which allows one to "prioritize" the scheduling of a complex DAG's building blocks. The current paper extends the IC-scheduling theory in two ways: by expanding significantly the repertoire of DAGs that the theory can schedule optimally and by allowing one sometimes to shortcut the algorithmic process required to find optimal schedules. The expanded repertoire now allows the theory to schedule optimally, among other DAGs, a large range of DAGs that are either "expansive", in the sense that they grow outward from their sources, or "reductive", in the sense that they grow inward toward their sinks. The algorithmic shortcuts allow one to "read off" an optimal schedule for a DAG from a given optimal schedule for the DAG's dual, which is obtained by reversing all arcs (thereby exchanging the roles of sources and sinks).     

Exploring a national cybersecurity exercise for universities

In cybersecurity competitions, participants either create new or protect preconfigured information systems and then defend these systems against attack in a real-world setting. Institutions should consider important structural and resource-related issues before establishing such a competition. Critical infrastructures increasingly rely on information systems and on the Internet to provide connectivity between systems. Maintaining and protecting these systems requires an education in information warfare that doesn't merely theorize and describe such concepts. A hands-on, active learning experience lets students apply theoretical concepts in a physical environment. Craig Kaucher and John Saunders found that even for management-oriented graduate courses in information assurance, such an experience enhances the students' understanding of theoretical concepts. Cybersecurity exercises aim to provide this experience in a challenging and competitive environment. Many educational institutions use and implement these exercises as part of their computer science curriculum, and some are organizing competitions with commercial partners as capstone exercises, ad hoc hack-a-thons, and scenario-driven, multiday, defense-only competitions. Participants have exhibited much enthusiasm for these exercises, from the DEFCON capture-the-flag exercise to the US Military Academy's Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX). In February 2004, the US National Science Foundation sponsored the Cyber Security Exercise Workshop aimed at harnessing this enthusiasm and interest. The educators, students, and government and industry representatives attending the workshop discussed the feasibility and desirability of establishing regular cybersecurity exercises for postsecondary-level students. This article summarizes the workshop report.     

Constraint programming and graph algorithms

Aconstraint system includes a set of variables and a set of relations among these variables, calledconstraints. The solution of a constraint system is an assignment of values to variables so that all, or many, of the relations are made true. A simple and efficient method for constraint resolution has been proposed in the work of B.N. Freeman-Benson, J. Maloney, and A. Borning. We show how their method is related to the classical problem of graph matching, and from this connection we derive new resolution algorithms.     

Utilizing endoscopic technology to reveal real-time proteomic alterations in response to chemoprevention

Cancer chemoprevention approaches use either pharmacological or dietary agents to impede, arrest or reverse the carcinogenic process. Although several agents have shown effectiveness against colon cancer, present intervention strategies provide only partial reduction. In this study, we utilized high-resolution endoscopy to obtain colon tumor biopsy specimens from Apc mutant mice before and after 2-wk sulindac intervention. To acquire information beyond genomics, proteome analysis using the ProteomeLab PF2D platform was implemented to generate 2-D protein expression maps from biopsies. Chromatograms produced common signature profiles between sulindac and nonsulindac treated samples, and contrasting profiles termed "fingerprints". We selected a double peak that appeared in tumor biopsies from sulindac-treated mice. Further analyses using MS sequencing identified this protein as histone H2B. The location of H2B in the 1(st) dimension strongly suggested PTM, consistent with identification of two oxidized methionines. While further studies on sulindac proteomic fingerprints are underway, this study demonstrates the feasibility and advantages of "real-time" proteomic analysis for obtaining information on biomarker discovery and drug activity that would not be revealed by a genetic assay. This approach should be broadly applicable for assessing lesion responsiveness in a wide range of translational and human clinical studies.