1996 editorial: 50th Anniversary Issue of the American Psychologist.

Presents an editorial on the 50th Anniversary Issue of The American Psychologist by the CEO and Executive Vice President of the American Psychological Association. An overview of changes to the journal and the developments in electronic communications pare presented, and the implications for international exchange in scholarly publishing are discussed. (0 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Proteomics in chronic kidney disease: The issues clinical nephrologists need an answer for

A growing number of patients are recognised to have chronic kidney disease (CKD). However, only a minority will progress to end-stage renal disease requiring dialysis or transplantation. Currently available diagnostic and staging tools frequently fail to identify those at higher risk of progression or death. Furthermore within specific disease entities there are shortcomings in the prediction of the need for therapeutic interventions or the response to different forms of therapy. Kidney and urine proteomic biomarkers are considered as promising diagnostic tools to predict CKD progression early in diabetic nephropathy, facilitating timely and selective intervention that may reduce the related health-care expenditures. However, independent groups have not validated these findings and the technique is not currently available for routine clinical care. Furthermore, there are gaps in our understanding of predictors of progression or need for therapy in non-diabetic CKD. Presumably, a combination of tissue and urine biomarkers will be more informative than individual markers. This review identifies clinical questions in need of an answer, summarises current information on proteomic biomarkers and CKD, and describes the European Kidney and Urine Proteomics initiative that has been launched to carry out a clinical study aimed at identifying urinary proteomic biomarkers distinguishing between fast and slow progressors among patients with biopsy-proven primary glomerulopathies.     

Examining knowledge contribution from the perspective of an online identity in blogging communities

Knowledge contribution is one of the essential factors behind the success of blogging communities (BCs). This research studies knowledge contribution behavior in a BC from the perspective of knowledge contributors and their characteristics using the lens of social identity theory. Social identity theory asserts that individuals are fundamentally motivated to present or communicate their identities in everyday social life through behavior. A similar line of reasoning can be used to argue that members of a BC would also be motivated to communicate their online identities through their behavior, that is, through knowledge contribution in the BC. Specifically, this study conceptualized the online identity and examined the effects of its personal (online kindness, online social skills, and online creativity) and social aspects (BC involvement) on knowledge contribution. The data was collected using an online survey from the members of Cyworld, a popular BC in South Korea and a few other countries (members from South Korea were included in this study). The results indicate that both the personal and social aspects of online identity and their interactions significantly influenced knowledge contribution. Based on the findings, this study offers suggestions to organizers of BCs to enhance the knowledge contribution from their members.     

Direction coding using a tactile chair

This laboratory study examined the possibility of using a car seat instrumented with a tactile display to communicate directional information to a driver. A car seat fitted with an 8 × 8 matrix of vibrators embedded in the seat pan was used to code eight different directions. Localization response time and angular accuracy were examined as a function of stimulus direction, presence of a tactile attention cue, temporal pattern, stimulus layout, age, and gender. The mean absolute angular error was 23°, and both localization accuracy and response times were superior for the back left, backward, and back right directions. Of the various temporal pattern/attention cue combinations examined, results favored the relatively fast patterns consisting of vibration bursts of 125 or 250 ms without a centrally located attention cue over 500 ms bursts that were preceded by an attention cue. Observed age and gender effects were relatively modest, suggesting that using tactile cueing to communicate direction is effective across a wide range of users. In addition, the tactile stimulus was detected by more than 90% of the participants under surprise trial conditions. Overall, these results indicate that the tactile chair provides a promising and robust method of providing directional information.     

Spacecraft relative rotation tracking without angular velocity measurements

We present a solution to the problem of tracking relative rotation in a leader-follower spacecraft formation using feedback from relative attitude only. The controller incorporates an approximate-differentiation filter to account for the unmeasured angular velocity. We show uniform practical asymptotic stability (UPAS) of the closed-loop system. For simplicity, we assume that the leader is controlled and that we know orbital perturbations; however, this assumption can be easily relaxed to boundedness without degrading the stability property. We also assume that angular velocities of spacecraft relative to an inertial frame are bounded. Simulation results of a leader-follower spacecraft formation using the proposed controller structure are also presented.     

An alternative Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov lemma and some extensions

This paper introduces an alternative formulation of the Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov (KYP) Lemma, relating an infinite dimensional Frequency Domain Inequality (FDI) to a pair of finite dimensional Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMI). It is shown that this new formulation encompasses previous generalizations of the KYP Lemma which hold in the case the coefficient matrix of the FDI does not depend on frequency. In addition, it allows the coefficient matrix of the frequency domain inequality to vary affinely with the frequency parameter. One application of this results is illustrated in an example of computing upper bounds to the structured singular value with frequency-dependent scalings.     

Feasibility of estimating leaf water content using spectral indices from WorldView-3’s near-infrared and shortwave infrared bands

A recently-launched high-resolution commercial satellite, DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3, has 8 bands in the shortwave infrared (SWIR) wavelength region, which may be capable of estimating canopy water content at 3.7-m spatial resolution. WorldView-3 also has 8 multispectral bands at 1.24-m resolution with two bands in the near-infrared (NIR). The relative spectral response functions for WorldView-3 were provided by DigitalGlobe, Inc., and band reflectances were determined for reflectance spectra of PROSPECT model simulations and leaf data from maize, trees, grasses, and broadleaf herbaceous eudicots. For laboratory measurements, the range of leaf water contents was extended by including drying leaves and leaf stacks of corn, soybean, oaks, and maples. Correlations between leaf water content and spectral indices from model simulations suggested that indices using SWIR band 1 (center wavelength 1210 nm) had low variability with respect to leaf water content, but also low sensitivity. Other indices using SWIR band 5 (2165 nm) had the highest sensitivity, but also had high variability caused by different values of the leaf structure parameter in PROSPECT. Indices using SWIR bands 2, 3 and 4 (1570, 1660, and 1730 nm, respectively) had high correlations and intermediate variability from the leaf structure parameter. Spectral indices calculated from the leaf data had the same overall patterns as the simulations for variation and sensitivity; however, indices using SWIR band 1 had low correlations, and the best correlations were from indices that used SWIR bands 2, 3 and 4. Spectral indices for maize, grasses, and herbaceous crops and weeds had similar responses to leaf water content; tree leaves had higher index values and saturated at lower leaf water contents. The specified width of NIR band 2 (860–1040 nm) overlaps the water absorption feature at 970 nm wavelength; however, the normalized difference of NIR band 1 and 2 was insensitive to water content because NIR band 2’s spectral response was most heavily weighted to wavelengths less than 930 nm. The high spatial resolution of the WorldView-3 SWIR data will help analyze how variation among plant species and functional groups affects spectral responses to differences in canopy water content.     

Forensic taxonomy of android productivity apps

Android productivity apps have provided the facility of having a constantly accessible and productive workforce to the information and work capabilities needed by the users. With hundreds of productivity apps available in the Android app market, it is necessary to develop a taxonomy for the forensic investigators and the end users to allow them to know what personal data remnants are available from the productivity apps. In this paper, 30 popular Android productivity apps were examined. A logical extraction of the Android phone was collected by using a well-known mobile forensic tool- XRY to extract various information of forensic interest such as user email ID and list of tasks. Based on the findings, a two-dimensional taxonomy of the forensic artefacts of the productivity apps is proposed with the app categories in one dimension and the classes of artefacts in the other dimension. The artefacts identified in the study of the apps are summarised using the taxonomy. In addition, a comparison with the existing forensic taxonomies of different categories of Android apps is provided to facilitate timely collection and analysis of evidentiary materials from mobile devices.     

Tamper detection and image recovery for BTC-compressed images

To ensure the integrity of images compressed using block truncation coding (BTC), a tamper detection and image recovery scheme is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, the size of the authentication data can be adaptively selected according to the user’s requirement. The authentication data is embedded in the value differences of the quantization levels in each BTC-compressed image block. Multiple copies of the recovery data are embedded into the bit maps of the smooth blocks. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme performs well in terms of detection precision and the embedded image quality. Meanwhile, the tampered areas can be roughly recovered by using the proposed scheme.     

A password based authentication scheme for wireless multimedia systems

In this digital era, where Internet of Things (IoT) is increasing day by day, use of resource constrained devices is also increasing. Indeed, the features such as low cost, less maintenance, more adaptive to hostile environment, etc. make the wireless multimedia devices to be the best choice as the resource constrained devices. For the security, the end user device requires to establish the session key with the server before transferring the data. Mobile is one of the device having more and more usage as wireless multimedia device in recent years. In 2013, Li et al. proposed an efficient scheme for the wireless mobile communications and claimed it to be secure against various attacks. Recently, Shen et al. claimed that the scheme of Li et al. is still vulnerable to the privileged insider attack, the stolen verifier attack and finally proposed a scheme to withstand the mentioned and other attacks. However, in this paper we claim that the scheme of Shen et al. is still susceptible to the user anonymity, the session specific temporary information attack and the replay attack. In addition, Shen et al.’s scheme requires more time due to many operations. Further, we propose an efficient scheme that is secure against various known attacks and due to reduced time complexity our scheme is a preferred choice for the wireless mobile networks and hence for wireless multimedia systems.