The influence of dispositions and Internet motivation on online communication satisfaction and relationship closeness

Guided by the Uses and Gratifications (U&G) perspective, this study examined the influence of unwillingness to communicate, loneliness, Internet-use motives, and Internet (CMC) use and interaction (amount and types of use and self-disclosure) in online communication satisfaction and online relationship closeness. There were 261 participants in this study. Overall, participants who perceived their face-to-face communication to be rewarding, used CMC for self-fulfillment, and disclosed their personal feelings to others tended to feel close to their online partners. Moreover, those who used the Internet for purposes of self-fulfillment and affection and intended to disclose their feelings to others felt satisfied with their online communication. The associations among the constructs extend our knowledge of the U&G theoretical model, how and why people communicate interpersonally in CMC settings, and the influence of individual differences on CMC for relational communication.     

多个神经振子群网络的相位动力学编码

利用随机相变动力学理论研究运动认知的神经网络动力学模型．给出了感觉神经元集群、中间神经元集群和运动皮层神经元集群在耦合条件下相互作用、相位编码和数密度随时间的演化．探讨了神经网络在自发运动条件下以及在刺激条件下的神经网络动力学响应．通过数值模拟证实了（1）Walter J．Freeman提出的皮层动力学响应不能够编码外刺激信息的猜想;（2）串行的神经网络系统的神经编码具有节律编码的性质;（3）在中枢神经系统的调控中,神经抑制有其重要的作用．     

神经元膜电位噪声取值范围的评估

大脑神经元的活动是在复杂的生理学环境下工作的，而生理学环境中的噪声来源于多个方面．如何定量地正确评估神经系统中的噪声环境是神经信息处理的基本问题．本文通过神经能量的计算给出了噪声对神经元膜电位及对应的能量波形产生显著影响的临界值的估计范围，从而定义了神经元赖以活动的生理学意义上的噪声环境．     

Localization of atrial natriuretic peptide receptors in the rat tongue and hard palate

The effect of a naturally occurring plant phenolic constituent (the acylphloroglucinol derivative, jensenone, derived from Eucalyptus jensenii) on the food intake of two folivorous marsupials, the common ringtail (Pseudocheirus peregrinus) and the common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) was studied. When fed diets containing varying concentrations of jensenone, both species regulated their intake of jensenone so as not to exceed a ceiling intake. This ceiling was about twice as high for common ringtails as for common brushtails from northern Australia. Southern populations of common ringtails showed greatly reduced capacities to tolerate jensenone. When common brushtails were injected (0.5 mg.kg-0.75 body mass) with ondansetron (a selective antagonist of serotonin 5HT3 receptors), they ate significantly more jensenone than animals injected with physiological saline. The same pattern was observed when common ringtails were fed diets containing both jensenone and ondansetron (0.0035 mg.g-1 wet mass of diet). Ondansetron injection had no effect on food intake when the food did not contain jensenone while the addition of higher doses of ondansetron to diets of common ringtails very slightly reduced food intakes of a non-jensenone diet. When common brushtails were given 50 mg of jensenone by gastric lavage, their average subsequent intake of dietary jensenone matched the difference between the daily threshold and the dose given, although the response of individuals was highly variable. Lavage with water alone had no effect on subsequent jensenone intake compared with the pre-dose period. We interpret these results as evidence that the antifeedant effects of jensenone and related compounds are partly mediated by serotonin action on 5HT3 receptors most likely via "nausea" to condition a food aversion.     

Ellipsometry on sputter-deposited tin oxide films: optical constants versus stoichiometry, hydrogen content, and amount of electrochemically intercalated lithium

Tin oxide thin films were deposited by reactive radio-frequency magnetron sputtering onto In(2)O(3):Sn-coated and bare glass substrates. Optical constants in the 3002500-nm wavelength range were determined by a combination of variable-angle spectroscopic ellipsometry and spectrophotometric transmittance measurements. Surface roughness was modeled from optical measurements and compared with atomic-force microscopy. The two techniques gave consistent results. The fit between experimental optical data and model results could be significantly improved when it was assumed that the refractive index of the Sn oxide varied across the film thickness. Varying the oxygen partial pressure during deposition made it possible to obtain films whose complex refractive index changed at the transition from SnO to SnO(2). An addition of hydrogen gas during sputtering led to lower optical constants in the full spectral range in connection with a blueshift of the bandgap. Electrochemical intercalation of lithium ions into the Sn oxide films raised their refractive index and enhanced their refractive-index gradient.     

Shape "break-and-repair" strategy and its application to automated medical image segmentation

In three-dimensional medical imaging, segmentation of specific anatomy structure is often a preprocessing step for computer-aided detection/diagnosis (CAD) purposes, and its performance has a significant impact on diagnosis of diseases as well as objective quantitative assessment of therapeutic efficacy. However, the existence of various diseases, image noise or artifacts, and individual anatomical variety generally impose a challenge for accurate segmentation of specific structures. To address these problems, a shape analysis strategy termed "break-and-repair" is presented in this study to facilitate automated medical image segmentation. Similar to surface approximation using a limited number of control points, the basic idea is to remove problematic regions and then estimate a smooth and complete surface shape by representing the remaining regions with high fidelity as an implicit function. The innovation of this shape analysis strategy is the capability of solving challenging medical image segmentation problems in a unified framework, regardless of the variability of anatomical structures in question. In our implementation, principal curvature analysis is used to identify and remove the problematic regions and radial basis function (RBF) based implicit surface fitting is used to achieve a closed (or complete) surface boundary. The feasibility and performance of this strategy are demonstrated by applying it to automated segmentation of two completely different anatomical structures depicted on CT examinations, namely human lungs and pulmonary nodules. Our quantitative experiments on a large number of clinical CT examinations collected from different sources demonstrate the accuracy, robustness, and generality of the shape "break-and-repair" strategy in medical image segmentation.     

An Architecture for Human‐Guided Autonomy: Team TROOPER at the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals

Recent robotics efforts have automated simple, repetitive tasks to increase execution speed and lessen an operator's cognitive load, allowing them to focus on higher‐level objectives. However, an autonomous system will eventually encounter something unexpected, and if this exceeds the tolerance of automated solutions, there must be a way to fall back to teleoperation. Our solution is a largely autonomous system with the ability to determine when it is necessary to ask a human operator for guidance. We call this approach human‐guided autonomy. Our design emphasizes human‐on‐the‐loop control where an operator expresses a desired high‐level goal for which the reasoning component assembles an appropriate chain of subtasks. We introduce our work in the context of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Finals. We describe the software architecture Team TROOPER developed and used to control an Atlas humanoid robot. We employ perception, planning, and control automation for execution of subtasks. If subtasks fail, or if changing environmental conditions invalidate the planned subtasks, the system automatically generates a new task chain. The operator is able to intervene at any stage of execution, to provide input and adjustment to any control layer, enabling operator involvement to increase as confidence in automation decreases. We present our performance at the DRC Finals and a discussion about lessons learned.     

An Introduction to Using XML for the Management of Laboratory Data

Extensible Markup Language (XML) and the XML Path Language (XPath) are introduced with software examples demonstrating how one can use them to write laboratory data management programs. Topics explored include XML document creation, manipulation, and searching. Programming examples make use of the Microsoft® XML Parser library and the Visual Basic programming language. The problem of managing microplate screening data is used as an illustration. Source code for all examples can be downloaded from http://www.labprogrammer.net.     

New Research Results for Electronic Voting

Voting systems have become controversial in the years following the multiple election disasters that occurred in the United States during and after 2000. Of particular note were the electronic voting (e-voting) systems that were widely deployed to replace the pre-scored punch-card systems, systems that had have been frequently judged to be central to the problem in the 2000 Florida general election. The (premature) deployment of e-voting machines stimulated a new field of security and privacy research around the subject of elections, a subject that has turned out to be more complex and deeper than anyone would have predicted a decade ago. Here we present a sample of some of the finest recent work on election technology from authors on three continents.