Role of maternal functioning and parenting skills in adolescent functioning following parental divorce.

While divorce has been associated with impaired child functioning, the mechanisms within the divorce process leading to such an outcome have rarely been examined. The following hypothesis was examined: Divorce is associated with poor parental adjustment or disrupts parenting behavior, or both, which leads to poor adolescent functioning. Subjects were 121 and 93 young adolescents from intact and recently divorced families, respectively, and their mothers and teachers. Mothers completed measures assessing parental conflict and depression, observers coded parenting skills during a mother–adolescent interaction, and teachers completed measures assessing adolescent functioning. Although the magnitude of differences was not large, analyses of variance indicated that the divorced sample was functioning poorer than the married sample on all measures except interparental conflict. Path analysis suggested that parental functioning and parenting skills play a role in adolescent functioning following divorce. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ceramic Foams with Controlled Geometries Through 3D-Printed Sacrificial Templates

Powder-based 3D printing was combined with sacrificial templating to realize highly porous yttria-stabilized ZrO₂ (YSZ) ceramic foam objects with well-defined geometries. The porous sacrificial template is 3D printed using poly(methyl methacrylate) powder. Various methods are evaluated to optimize ceramic slurry infiltration into the 3D-printed template and subsequent burn-out. The optimized method yields ceramic foam objects with an open porosity of >66% and replicates the geometry of the 3D-printed template with high fidelity.     

Physiologically-Based Kinetic Modeling of Intravenously Administered Gold (Au) Nanoparticles

Physiologically-based kinetic (PBK) modeling is a valuable tool to understand the kinetics of nanoparticles (NPs) in vivo. However, estimating PBK parameters remains challenging and commonly requires animal studies. To develop predictive models to estimate PBK parameter values based on NP characteristics, a database containing PBK parameter values and corresponding NP characteristics is needed. As a first step toward this objective, this study estimates PBK parameters for gold NPs (AuNPs) and provides a comparison of two different NPs. Two animal experiments are conducted in which varying doses of AuNPs attached with polyethylene glycol (PEG) are administered intravenously to rats. The resulting Au concentrations are used to estimate PBK model parameters. The parameters are compared with PBK parameters previously estimated for poly(alkyl cyanoacrylate) NPs loaded with cabazitaxel and for LipImage 815. This study shows that a small initial database of PBK parameters collected for three NPs is already sufficient to formulate new hypotheses on NP characteristics that may be predictive of PBK parameter values. Further research should focus on developing a larger database and on developing quantitative models to predict PBK parameter values.     

A case study of Web server benchmarking using parallel WAN emulation

This paper describes the use of a parallel discrete-event network emulator called the Internet Protocol Traffic and Network Emulator (IP-TNE) for Web server benchmarking. The experiments in this paper demonstrate the feasibility of high-performance wide area network (WAN) emulation using parallel discrete-event simulation (PDES) techniques on a single shared-memory multiprocessor. Our experiments with an Apache Web server achieve up to 8000 HTTP/1.1 transactions/s for static document retrieval across emulated WAN topologies with up to 4096 concurrent Web/TCP clients. The results show that WAN characteristics, including round-trip delays, packet losses, and bandwidth asymmetry, all have significant impacts on Web server performance, as do client protocol behaviors. WAN emulation using the IP-TNE enables stress testing and benchmarking of Web servers in ways that may not be possible in simple local area network (LAN) test scenarios.     

Making a Case in Medical Work: Implications for the Electronic Medical Record

The introduction of theelectronic medical record (EMR) is widely seenby healthcare policy makers and servicemanagers alike as a key step in the achievementof more efficient and integrated healthcareservices. However, our study of inter-servicework practices reveals important discrepanciesbetween the presumptions of the role of the EMRin achieving service integration and the waysin which medical workers actually use andcommunicate patient information. These lead usto doubt that technologies like the EMR candeliver their promised benefits unless there isa better understanding of the work they areintended to support and the processes used inits development and deployment becomesignificantly more user-led.     

Leaf area index for biomes of the Eastern Arc Mountains: Landsat and SPOT observations along precipitation and altitude gradients

Understanding of mechanisms underlying carbon flux dynamics in the Eastern Arc Mountains and their catchment areas is lacking, due to data shortage (e.g. biome specific canopy structure) and spatial heterogeneity of tropical ecosystems. This study focuses on documenting leaf area index (LAI) for the main biomes in the Eastern Arc Mountains and their surroundings. In situ optical instruments, i.e. hemispherical photography and a SunScan device, were used to acquire ground LAI measurements. Spectral vegetation indices (VIs) extracted from Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM +) and Système Probatoire d'Observation de la Terre (SPOT) reflectance data were used, along with mean annual precipitation (MAP), as explanatory variables of LAI variation. The results indicate that LAI significantly increases with increasing MAP for woody biomes. Implementing long-term MAP as a second predictor variable into the VI–LAI models significantly improved LAI predictions by up to 10% using the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), modified soil adjusted vegetation index (MSAVI 2) and 2-band enhanced vegetation index (EVI 2). Varying forest disturbances and agricultural management practises may have contributed to observed discrepancies of LAI with MAP across biomes. The importance of altitudinal gradients is yet to be explained fully with more study required. However, LAI appears to be higher in low-altitude forests compared to forests at higher altitudes. Our results indicate that SPOT and Landsat-derived VIs, in combination with long-term MAP, may be a suitable tool to develop landscape maps of LAI in Eastern Africa. This study also presents the in situ LAI measurements for further validation of global products for areas that are currently under-represented in Earth Observation (EO) global validation networks.     

A Belgian Transect: Field Broadcast in the expanded field of ecology

Abstract

This article sets out the notion of a Field Broadcast from the dual perspective of Rebecca Birch, one of the developers of a bespoke version of Flash Media Live Encoder and Bram Thomas Arnold, an artist who uses a case study from Sideways Festival, Belgium, 2012. Field Broadcast enables an artist to be in a field, suitably equipped, and stream live footage to an audience. It is an experiment in place, site and the notion of a field. It is a new method of making work in the space between site-specific performance and the digital realm: a way of working that enables artists to generate new artworks within the non-place of the Internet. Birch introduces the technology from a number of perspectives before it is fleshed out with evidence and experience from a live project that took place in Belgium in 2012. Sideways was a festival that traversed Belgium over four weeks and 400?km, with artists walking and generating work en route. The possibilities offered by Field Broadcast are explored in relation to the expanded field of ecology amidst Bourriaud's The Radicant (2009), Guatarri's The Three Ecologies (2005) and Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2007 Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]).     

Open and Reconfigurable Hypermedia Systems: A Filter-Based Model

The need for open hypermedia systems has been well-argued by various authors. In this paper we discuss the Microcosm model for open hypermedia and show how filters have been used to extend this model both for greater efficiency and to make it totally reconfigurable. This enables users to tailor the functionality of the system to meet their own requirements, for example to select different sets of links, or to add navigation tools. The implementation of a management system for filters is described, and examples of how it has been used to extend the functionality of the model are presented, in particular the use of filters to design and implement a set of navigation tools for Microcosm. This latter case study demonstrates the power and flexibility of the filter-based model since all navigation tools for the system can be implemented as filters. The filter technology is discussed in the context of Microcosm but can be generalised to other hypermedia systems.     

Optimal resource allocation for time-reservation systems

This paper studies the optimal resource allocation in time-reservation systems. Customers arrive at a service facility and receive service in two steps; in the first step information is gathered from the customer, which is then sent to a pool of computing resources, and in the second step the information is processed after which the customer leaves the system. A central decision maker has to decide when to reserve computing power from the pool of resources, such that the customer does not have to wait for the start of the second service step and that the processing capacity is not wasted due to the customer still being serviced at the first step. The decision maker simultaneously has to decide on how many processors to allocate for the second processing step such that reservation and holding costs are minimized. Since an exact analysis of the system is difficult, we decompose the system into two parts which are solved sequentially leading to nearly optimal solutions. We show via dynamic programming that the near-optimal number of processors follows a step function with as an extreme policy the bang-bang control. Moreover, we provide new fundamental insights in the dependence of the near-optimal policy on the distribution of the information gathering times. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the near-optimal policy closely matches the performance of the optimal policy of the original problem.     

An intelligent forecasting model based on robust wavelet ν-support vector machine

Aiming at the problem of small samples, season character, nonlinearity, randomicity and fuzziness in product demand series, the existing support vector kernel does not approach the random curve of the demands time series in the L²(Rⁿ) space (quadratic continuous integral space). The robust loss function is also proposed to solve the shortcoming of ε-insensitive loss function during handling hybrid noises. A novel robust wavelet support vector machine (RW ν-SVM) is proposed based on wavelet theory and the modified support vector machine. Particle swarm optimization algorithm is designed to select the optimal parameters of RW ν-SVM model in the scope of constraint permission. The results of application in car demand forecasts show that the forecasting approach based on the RW ν-SVM model is effective and feasible, the comparison between the method proposed in this paper and other ones is also given which proves this method is better than RW ν-SVM and other traditional methods.