Collaborative versus directive interventions in the treatment of eating disorders: Implications for care providers.

Given that individuals with eating disorders, are typically ambivalent about changing their eating patterns, what approach is most helpful in working with this challenging group? This research compared the responses of clients with eating disorders and those of care providers to written clinical vignettes. All participants rated collaborative interventions as more acceptable and more likely to produce positive clinical outcomes than directive interventions. In addition, clients who were least ready for change rated directive interventions as less acceptable and less likely to produce adherence than did clients who were more ready. Despite participants' clear preference for collaborative interventions, directive interventions were rated as equally likely to occur. The implications of participant preferences and reasons that these preferences may not be reflected in actual clinical practice are addressed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Birds of a Feather or Strange Birds? Ties Among Personality Dimensions, Similarity, and Marital Quality.

The authors examined the relationship between 6 personality dimensions (Big Five personality factors and positive expressivity) and marital satisfaction in 132 distressed, treatment-seeking couples and 48 nondistressed couples. This study's focus on personality similarity in distressed couples, a population of interest to researchers and clinicians, is unique. Results suggest that higher neuroticism, lower agreeableness, lower conscientiousness, and less positive expressivity are tied to marital dissatisfaction. However, low overall levels of partner similarity were found on these variables. Furthermore, partner similarity on these variables did not independently predict relationship satisfaction. This suggests that nonpathological variations in these personality dimensions do not contribute to satisfaction, and that similarity between partners' personalities may not be closely tied to marital happiness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Protective Behavioral Strategies When Drinking Alcohol and Their Relationship to Negative Alcohol-Related Consequences in College Students.

Prior research has examined a number of individual characteristics (e.g., gender, family connectedness) that protect individuals from engaging in heavy drinking and experiencing negative alcohol-related consequences, but less is known about specific behavioral strategies that might also serve as protective factors. In this study, 556 undergraduate students completed the National College Health Assessment (American College Health Association, 2000) and answered questions regarding the use of specific protective behavioral strategies (PBS), alcohol consumption, and alcohol-related consequences. Results indicated that less frequent use of PBS was related to a greater likelihood of experiencing negative alcohol-related consequences, even after accounting for the effects of gender and alcohol consumption. These results suggest that PBS may be an important component of both prevention and treatment programs for college students. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selective harvesting over networks

Active search on graphs focuses on collecting certain labeled nodes (targets) given global knowledge of the network topology and its edge weights (encoding pairwise similarities) under a query budget constraint. However, in most current networks, nodes, network topology, network size, and edge weights are all initially unknown. In this work we introduce selective harvesting, a variant of active search where the next node to be queried must be chosen among the neighbors of the current queried node set; the available training data for deciding which node to query is restricted to the subgraph induced by the queried set (and their node attributes) and their neighbors (without any node or edge attributes). Therefore, selective harvesting is a sequential decision problem, where we must decide which node to query at each step. A classifier trained in this scenario can suffer from what we call a tunnel vision effect: without any recourse to independent sampling, the urge to only query promising nodes forces classifiers to gather increasingly biased training data, which we show significantly hurts the performance of active search methods and standard classifiers. We demonstrate that it is possible to collect a much larger set of targets by using multiple classifiers, not by combining their predictions as a weighted ensemble, but switching between classifiers used at each step, as a way to ease the tunnel vision effect. We discover that switching classifiers collects more targets by (a) diversifying the training data and (b) broadening the choices of nodes that can be queried in the future. This highlights an exploration, exploitation, and diversification trade-off in our problem that goes beyond the exploration and exploitation duality found in classic sequential decision problems. Based on these observations we propose D\(^3\)TS, a method based on multi-armed bandits for non-stationary stochastic processes that enforces classifier diversity, which outperforms all competing methods on five real network datasets in our evaluation and exhibits comparable performance on the other two.     

Metal Fabrication by Additive Manufacturing Using Laser and Electron Beam Melting Technologies

Selective laser melting (SLM) and electron beam melting (EBM) are relatively new rapid, additive manufac- turing technologies which can allow for the fabrication of complex, multi-functional metal or alloy monoliths by CAD-directed, selective melting of precursor powder beds. By altering the beam parameters and scan strategies, new and unusual, even non-equilibrium microstructures can be produced; including controlled microstructural architectures which ideally extend the contemporary materials science and engineering paradigm relating structure-properties-processing-performance. In this study, comparative examples for SLM and EBM fabricated components from pre-alloyed, atomized precursor powders are presented. These include Cu, Ti–6Al–4V, alloy 625 (a Ni-base superalloy), a Co-base superalloy, and 17-4 PH stainless steel. These systems are characterized by optical metallography, scanning and transmission electron microscopy, and X-ray diffraction.     

What about the kids? Parenting and child adjustment in the context of couple therapy.

Little research examines parenting and children's adjustment when couples engage in therapy. We examined how couples with and without children improve with couple therapy and whether they also report improvements in parenting and child adjustment. With up to twenty six sessions of couple therapy, 134 couples, 68 of whom had children, showed improved marital satisfaction during treatment, which was ultimately maintained over the 2-year follow-up, regardless of whether they had children. Couples married relatively longer, both with and without children, evidenced greater improvement. Couples with children reported less conflict over child rearing and better child adjustment during treatment, but only improvements in the former were maintained. Conflict over child rearing mediated the relationship between marital distress and child adjustment over therapy and the 2-year follow-up. These preliminary results suggest that couples in therapy may decrease their conflict over child rearing during treatment and they may be able to maintain these gains for at least two years following treatment; moreover, over the course of treatment, this decreased conflict is tied to improved child adjustment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Surface hydrology of low-relief landscapes: Assessing surface water flow impedance using LIDAR-derived digital elevation models

Conventional hydrologic analyses of digital elevation models (DEMs) perform well in areas of high topographic relief, where surface water flow is typically unidirectional, convergent, spatially static, and directed toward a single discharge point at the edge of a catchment. Such analyses do not perform well on landscapes with low topographic relief (e.g., floodplains, river deltas, coastal wetlands, and estuaries) where surface water flow is influenced by subtle topographic depressions and may be bidirectional, divergent, and spatially dynamic in response to hydrologic forcing such as tides or variation in river discharge. We developed a framework for hydrologic analysis of low-relief landscapes using a high-resolution (1 m) DEM derived from light detection and ranging (LIDAR) data collected over a ~ 8.8 km² section of the Umatilla River Floodplain, Oregon, USA. Our approach assessed the pattern and characteristics of “hydrologic facets” (landscape patches that have high internal surface water connectivity and therefore function as a single hydrologic unit), where facet boundaries were defined by subtle topographic divides across the floodplain. We initially identified nearly 6000 small (fine-scale) hydrologic facets using standard GIS processing algorithms. We located the divide between each pair of adjacent facets, and determined “hydrologic impedance” (i.e., the maximum change in river stage necessary to inundate the divide) for each divide (n = ~ 17,000). Using hydrologic impedance values, we analyzed patterns of surface water connectivity among the fine-scale facets and aggregated groups of adjacent facets that had high connectivity. This process yielded a reduced number of larger facets useful for hydrologic analysis at coarser spatial scales. We compared results derived using several alternate rule sets for aggregating facets. With appropriate aggregation rules, the results are useful for generating optimal link-and-node flow networks to support hydrologic modeling of surface water flux across low-relief landscapes.     

The central position of education in knowledge mobilization: insights from network analyses of spatial reasoning research across disciplines

Scientometrics - Knowledge mobilization is becoming increasingly important for research collaborations, but few methodologies support increased knowledge sharing. This study provides insights,...     

Understanding soil nitrogen processes in diversified vegetable systems through agroecosystem modelling

Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems - Vegetable production systems are typically tillage- and input-intensive, though they may vary widely in production practices utilized. Improved understanding of...     

Talking Through It: Using Student to Student Interviews and Brainstorming Activities for Facilitating Critical Inquiry

Facilitating student engagement, critical thinking, and strategic research approaches are key goals for many teaching librarians in academia. Librarians generally develop different tools to address these goals, depending on the class, the students, and the research in which students are participating. This paper outlines a peer-to-peer interview method developed as part of a workshop for an advanced chemistry class. The goal of this activity is to improve engagement, collaboration, and critical thinking before upper-level students delve into research literature. The activity iterations as well as outcomes, observations, and overall success are described in detail.