Shared book reading: When and how questions affect young children's word learning.

Shared book reading, and the conversation that accompanies it, can facilitate young children's vocabulary growth. To identify the features of extratextual questions that help 3-year-olds learn unfamiliar words during shared book reading, two experiments explored the impact of cognitive demand level, placement, and an approximation to scaffolding. Asking questions about target words improved children's comprehension and production of word–referent associations, and children with larger vocabularies learned more than children with smaller vocabularies. Neither the demand level nor placement of questions differentially affected word learning. However, an approximation to scaffolding, in which adults asked low demand questions when words first appeared and high demand questions later, did facilitate children's deeper understanding of word meanings as assessed with a definition task. These results are unique in experimentally demonstrating the value for word learning of shifting from less to more challenging input over time. Discussion focuses on why a scaffolding-like procedure improves children's acquisition of elaborated word meanings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal psychotherapy for co-occurring depression and chronic pain.

Up to 37% of individuals experience chronic pain during their lifetimes. Approximately one fourth of primary care patients with chronic pain also meet criteria for major depression. Many of these individuals fail to receive psychotherapy or other treatment for their depression; moreover, when they do, physical pain is often not addressed directly. Women, socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals, African Americans, and Latinos all report higher rates of pain and depression compared with other groups. This article describes a version of interpersonal psychotherapy tailored for patients with comorbid depression and chronic pain, interpersonal psychotherapy for depression and pain (IPT-P). IPT-P potentially could be delivered to many patient populations in a range of clinical settings, but this article focuses on its delivery within primary care settings for socioeconomically disadvantaged women. Adaptations include a brief 8-session protocol that incorporates strategies for anticipating barriers to psychotherapy, accepting patients' conceptualization of their difficulties, encouraging patients to consider the impact of their pain on their roles and relationships, emphasizing self-care, incorporating pain management techniques, and flexible scheduling. In addition, IPT-P is designed as an adjunct to usual medical pain treatment, and seeks to engage non–treatment-seeking patients in psychotherapy by focusing on accessibility and relevance of the intervention to concerns common among patients with pain. Identifying patients with comorbid depression and chronic pain and offering IPT-P as a treatment option have the potential to improve clinical outcomes for individuals with depression and chronic pain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Competing for consciousness: Prolonged mask exposure reduces object substitution masking.

In object substitution masking (OSM) a sparse, temporally trailing 4-dot mask impairs target identification, even though it has different contours from, and does not spatially overlap with the target. Here, we demonstrate a previously unknown characteristic of OSM: Observers show reduced masking at prolonged (e.g., 640 ms) relative to intermediate mask durations (e.g., 240 ms). We propose that with prolonged exposure, the mask's visual representation is consolidated, which allows processing of the lingering target icon to be reinitiated, thereby improving performance. Our findings suggest that when the visual system is confronted with 2 temporally contiguous stimuli, although one may initially gain access to consciousness above the other, the “losing” stimulus is not irreversibly lost to awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Storm-Water Management Using Street Sweeping

Although street sweeping is commonly regarded as a cost-effective storm-water best management practice, there is little quantitative evidence that street sweeping directly improves runoff water quality. In this paper, several previous street sweeping studies were reevaluated using statistical power analysis. Two-group, independent-sample one-sided t-test power analyses were performed using log-transformed event mean concentrations (EMCs) of total suspended solids, suspended sediment concentration or chemical oxygen demand. The effect size between the two groups was estimated using the sweepers’ pickup efficiency, which showed that the failure to detect the difference between mean EMCs of the two sample groups (i.e., unswept and swept groups) is likely due to limited sample numbers. Too few samples, which also resulted in a high coefficient of variation, were analyzed to detect the likely difference between swept and unswept observations. In addition, the temporal gap between street sweeping and subsequent storm events was not controlled to improve statistical power.     

Slow Architecture: Production in Postwar Italian Housing

At a moment when standardization dominated housing design discussions, Italians engaged in a different kind of experiment in housing production. Under the Ina-Casa plan (1949–63), Italian architects developed a slow approach to architecture. Like its contemporaries, the plan grew out of a desire to provide affordable homes for the working class in the postwar period. But the primary goal of the Ina-Casa plan was creating jobs. The brainchild of the Minister of Labor and Social Security, Amintore Fanfani, the Ina-Casa plan was designed to put thousands of unemployed Italians back to work in the wake of the social upheaval and physical devastation wrought by World War II. The success of the plan was measured in terms of workdays created as well as in numbers of homes. Consequently, traditional methods and materials of construction—often rejected for being labor intensive—were embraced under the Ina-Casa plan as an effective way to create more jobs.     

Triplet-state photoexcitation dipole-jump relaxation method to observe adsorption/desorption kinetics at a reversed-phase silica/solution interface

Electronic excitation of a probe chromophore can lead to a change in dipole moment that influences its activity or solubility in solution and changes its relative affinity for partitioning between two phases. Photoexcitation of a probe molecule can, therefore, perturb a sorption equilibrium, and the relaxation kinetics of the probe to the new equilibrium conditions can be monitored in a time-resolved luminescence experiment. The adsorption/desorption kinetics of rose bengal, distributed between a C-18 derivatized porous-silica surface and a liquid mobile-phase solution, were investigated. These kinetics were determined by observing their effect on the phosphorescence decay of the triplet state of rose bengal and its quenching by ferricyanide. The methanol/water solvent compositions were varied to alter the fraction of adsorbed rose bengal. The adsorption rate constant for the triplet state was determined from the dependence of the phosphorescence relaxation rate on dye concentration in solution. The results indicate that the adsorption kinetics are diffusion controlled and that the relaxation is influenced by efficient triplet-energy transfer between excited- and ground-state rose bengal at the C-18 silica/solution interface.     

The SARS Crisis: Was Anybody Responsible?

As scholars in fields such as media studies, crisis studies and public policy studies have argued, there exists a fundamental link between crises and the media. Once an event has been interpreted as a crisis, questions of accountability inevitably appear on the media agenda, and the struggle to attribute blame and responsibility to a specific entity or entities—the blame game—thus becomes an inexorable part of the crisis process. Focusing on three liberal Western newspapers with an international, primarily Western elite readership and a reputation for in‐depth analysis of global events, The Economist, the Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune, this article employs Iyengar's and Valkenburg's notions of responsibility frames to examine whether initial coverage of the 2003 SARS crisis in these accounts held any particular entity accountable for the crisis, looks at three key themes used to communicate to the reader a particular way of thinking about responsibility for SARS and examines some of the consequences of the kind of responsibility frame constructed around the SARS crisis in these accounts. As our findings show, there is an entity that the early news accounts studied consistently held responsible for the 2003 SARS crisis, the Chinese system, and the corresponding responsibility frame at operation in these accounts is thematic rather than episodic in nature, since it consistently places the SARS crisis within a broader context (a product of “China” itself and/or of societal‐governmental forces in China) rather than in relation to a specific episode or as the result of the particular actions of individuals. The SARS crisis narrative therefore presented in these accounts tells the story of an anachronistic Chinese system faced with a contemporary health threat that, by its very nature, it is incapable of assessing accurately or managing responsibly. By way of conclusion, we argue that, while the use of such a thematic frame to explain China's role in the 2003 SARS crisis may be accurate in certain respects, this frame falls short in other respects and proves particularly inadequate to the challenge of capturing the economic complexities of China's role during the crisis.