Varieties of "disordered" thinking on the Rorschach: Findings in schizophrenic and nonschizophrenic patients.

Assessed 71 schizophrenic and nonschizophrenic hospitalized patients on 3 scales for aspects indicative of a thinking disorder on the Rorschach: disruption of logical thought, irrelevant or personalized associations, and elaboration in affective terms. Each scale could be reliably scored according to the criteria described. The scales correlated significantly with other Rorschach scores suggestive of thought disorder. All 3 scales were significantly higher in schizophrenic Ss than in depressed Ss (p     

Machine Learning With AIBO Robots in the Four-Legged League of RoboCup

Robot learning is a growing area of research at the intersection of robotics and machine learning. The main contributions of this paper include a review of how machine learning has been used on Sony AIBO robots and at RoboCup, with a focus on the four-legged league during the years 1998-2004. The review shows that the application-oriented use of machine learning in the four-legged league was still conservative and restricted to a few well-known and easy-to-use methods such as standard decision trees, evolutionary hill climbing, and support vector machines. Method-oriented spin-off studies emerged more frequently and increasingly addressed new and advanced machine learning techniques. Further, the paper presents some details about the growing impact of machine learning in the software system developed by the authors' robot soccer team-the NUbots     

Applying semantic Web technologies to drug safety determination

Ensuring drug safety is of paramount importance to the life sciences industry. It's critical that drugs are able not only to achieve the desired result but also to do so without harmful side effects. By identifying problems as early as possible in the drug discovery and development process, life sciences companies can avoid drug safety sagas, such as a recent example that concerned COX-2 inhibitors. Unfortunately, drug safety problems are often revealed only during clinical trials or occasionally after marketing. These challenges are becoming more acute as medicines are targeted to defined patient populations. The life sciences industry can use semantic Web technologies to integrate data more effectively across all drug discovery and development business units, thereby providing a more supportive environment for the early detection of safety-related issues. Effective integration would enable genomic data and patient profiles to be more easily related to safety, thus providing: 1) a simpler framework for determining risk-benefit for individual patients in particular treatment regimens, 2) a better mechanism to distribute new data relating to safety throughout the organization, and 3) a better decision-making environment to determine which drugs to pursue. Furthermore, semantic Web inferencing capabilities enable an intelligent decision support system or autonomous agent to reason about combined domain-specific and industry-specific knowledge and act on the conclusions drawn from this inferencing process.     

Prediction of the optimum pH for ammonia-n oxidation by nitrosomonas Europaea in well-aerated natural and domestic-waste waters

Three assumptions were needed to model whole-cell and cell-extract data showing how pH affects the rate and optimum pH of the first step of nitrification: (1) un-ionized ammonia-N is the substrate; (2) substrate ionization occurs; and (3) ampholytic ionization of only the rate-limiting enzyme-substrate complex, and not the free enzyme, controls the rate of ammonia-N oxidation. The rate was shown to obey a Michaelis-Menten rate law where the apparent maximum-velocity coefficient and the apparent half-saturation coefficient with V_m and K_m being the Michaelis-Menten maximum-velocity and half-saturation coefficients, respectively; K₁ and K₂, the acid dissociation coefficients for the enzyme; K₃, the acid dissociation coefficient for aqueous ammonium. The optimum pH (pH₀) was shown to decrease almost linearly with the logarithm of total ammonia-N concentration over the concentration range found in natural and domestic-waste waters: for N < ppm total ammonia-N.     

Retail food safety risks for populations of different races, ethnicities, and income levels

Research has found that populations with low socioeconomic status (SES) and minority populations have greater access to small corner markets and less access to supermarkets than high-SES and Caucasian populations. This represents a significant difference in the farm-to-fork continuum that these populations experience. This research examined whether differential retail access to foods results in different food safety risks at the retail level for consumers with different demographics. U.S. Census Bureau census tracts with high African American, Asian, Hispanic, Caucasian, low-SES, and high-SES populations were identified in Philadelphia, PA. Approximately 60 retail food establishments were sampled in each census tract category from June 2008 to June 2010. Food samples collected at stores included milk, eggs, lunchmeat, sandwiches, and ready-to-eat (RTE) fresh fruit, greens, and herbs, when available. With the exception of milk and eggs, only food that had been handled and/or prepared at the retail level was sampled. Food samples were tested for temperature, aerobic plate count, coliforms, fecal coliforms, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Listeria monocytogenes. The results indicated that internal egg temperatures were higher in samples from low-SES census tracts than in eggs from Caucasian census tracts, and eggs were more often found unrefrigerated in markets in low-SES and Asian census tracts. Milk samples from markets in Hispanic and low-SES census tracts had higher aerobic plate counts than high-SES census tract samples. Sandwiches from markets in high-SES census tracts had higher coliform counts than sandwiches from markets in all other census tract categories. Markets in Asian census tracts had a higher incidence of fecal coliform contamination on sandwiches than markets in Caucasian census tracts. Fecal coliforms were present in a percentage of RTE greens from markets in all census tracts except African American, with the highest percentages of RTE greens positive for fecal coliforms in low-SES (100%), Asian (71.4%), and Caucasian (45.5%) markets.     

Programmed cell death (apoptosis): molecular mechanisms and the role in biology and medicine

Over the recent years studies of the cell death (CD) were progressing with an outstanding speed. CD is found to play a key role in proliferation, differentiation, embryogenesis, morphogenesis and homeostatic processes. CD abnormalities significantly contribute into numerous human diseases as cancer, AIDS, degenerative pathologies of nervous system and developmental abnormalities. The elucidation of CD mechanisms may promote our understanding of pathogenesis of various diseases and facilitate search for their treatment.