Two maternal representations: A study of Israeli adopted children.

Using an object relations perspective, the representations of birth and adopted mothers in a sample of 52 nonreferred adoptees were studied. To better understand the specific effects of adoption or, the construction of 2 maternal representations, birth and adoptive maternal representation of adopted children was compared with that of nonadopted children. In addition, the effect of incongruous representations of birth and adoptive mothers on adoptees' exteralizing and internalizing behaviors was explored. Compared with nonadopted children, adoptees' representations of the mothers appear as more concrete and less benign. Among adopted children, representations of the birth mothers were found to contain split negative aspects of the adoptive mothers. Moreover, the differences between birth and adoptive mother representations were found to associate with adoptees'externalizing behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dietary Lipid Intake only Partially Influences Variance in Serum Phospholipid Fatty Acid Composition in Adolescents: Impact of Other Dietary Factors

The present study aimed to assess the correlation between food and fatty acid (FA) intake and the serum phospholipid (PL) FA status in European adolescents and explored the percentage of variation in serum PL FA that could be attributed to dietary habits. Participants included 528 adolescents recruited in the HELENA Study. Dietary intake was assessed by two, self-administered, non-consecutive 24-h recalls. PL FA concentrations were measured in fasting venous serum samples. Reduced rank regressions were applied to examine the combined effect of food intakes. Results indicated that the variance in serum PL FA in adolescents, that could be explained by diet varied from 7.0 % for MUFA to 14.2 % for n-3FA. The variance in the long-chain n-3FA was mainly explained by fish intake but also by coffee and tea consumption. In conclusion this study indicated that dietary intake influences the serum PL FA status to a limited amount but that also other factors interfere. However, dietary intake is important as it is among those factors that could be modified. Furthermore, the results suggest that the overall dietary habits should be considered instead of only the consumption of single foods or nutrients, as the medium of the food or concomitant intake of foods and nutrients might interact and as such influence absorption or metabolism.     

The overlapping contributions of attachment orientation and social support in predicting life-events distress.

Attachment anxiety, attachment avoidance, and perceived social support are examined as predictors of life-events distress. Clients at initial intake to an addiction treatment centre and university students in their graduating year were administered measures of attachment orientation, social support, and the experience of distressing life events. Hypotheses were tested across different categories of distressing life events (overall distress, bereavement, relationship dissolution, crime victimization, and severe accidents). We found that attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance have varying predictive utility for distress, depending on the type of event. Social support did not account for variance beyond attachment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attachment, motivations, and alcohol: Testing a dual-path model of high-risk drinking and adverse consequences in transitional clinical and student samples.

The purpose of this study was to replicate and extend a motivational model of high-risk drinking and alcohol-related consequences (Cooper, Frone, Russell, & Mudar, 1995; Read, Wood, Kahler, Maddock, & Palfai, 2003), testing the notion that attachment is a common antecedent for both the affective and social paths to problem drinking, defined in terms of 2 dimensions; high-risk drinking and alcohol-related consequences. First-year university students (N = 696), and first-time clients at an addiction treatment facility (N = 213) completed questionnaires assessing alcohol use, alcohol-related consequences, drinking motives, and attachment style. Results underscored the importance of the affective path to drinking patterns and to vulnerability to problems. Results also found that those with higher levels of attachment anxiety were more vulnerable to experiencing adverse consequences related to their drinking. These findings emphasise the importance of attachment styles as a risk factor for high-risk drinking and experiencing alcohol-related consequences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Association of coronary artery calcium score and vascular dysfunction in long‐term hemodialysis patients

Long‐term hemodialysis patients are prone to an exceptionally high burden of cardiovascular disease and mortality. The novel temperature‐based technology of digital thermal monitoring (DTM) of vascular reactivity appears associated with the severity of coronary artery disease in asymptomatic population. We hypothesized that in hemodialysis patients, the DTM and coronary artery calcium (CAC) score have a gradient association that follows that of subjects without kidney disease. We examined the cross‐sectional DTM‐CAC associations in a group of long‐term hemodialysis patients, and their 1:1 matched normal counterpart. Area under the curve for temperature (TMP‐AUC), the surrogate of the DTM index of vascular function, was assessed after a 5‐minute arm‐cuff reactive hyperemia test. Coronary calcium score was measured via electron beam computed tomography or multidetector computed tomography scan. We studied 105 randomly recruited hemodialysis patients (age: 58 ± 13 years, 47% men) and 105 age‐ and gender‐matched controls. In hemodialysis patients vs. controls, TMP‐AUC was significantly worse (114 ± 72 vs. 143 ± 80, P = 0.001) and CAC score was higher (525 ± 425 vs. 240 ± 332, P < 0.001). Hemodialysis patients were 14 times more likely to have CAC score >1000 as compared with controls. After adjustment for known confounders, the relative risk for case vs. control for each standard deviation decrease in TMP‐AUC was 1.46 (95% confidence interval: 1.12–1.93, P = 0.007). Vascular reactivity measured via the novel DTM technology is incrementally worse across CAC scores in hemodialysis patients, in whom both measures are even worse than their age‐ and gender‐matched controls. The DTM technology may offer a convenient and radiation‐free approach to risk‐stratify hemodialysis patients.     

Retrospective document conversion: application to the library domain

This paper describes a framework for retrospective document conversion in the library domain. Drawing on the experience and insight gained from projects launched over the present decade by the European Commission, it outlines the requirements for solving the problem of retroconversion and traces the main phases of associated processing. To highlight the main problems encountered in this area, the paper also outlines studies conducted by our group in the more project for the retroconversion of old catalogues belonging to two different libraries: National French Library and Royal Belgian Library. For the French Library, the idea was to study the feasibility of a recognition approach avoiding the use of ocr and basing the strategy mainly on visual features. The challenge was to recognize a logical structure from its physical aspects. The modest results obtained from experiments for this first study led us, in the second study, to base the structural recognition methodology more on the logical aspects by focusing the analysis on the content. Furthermore, for the Belgian references, the aim was to convert reference catalogues into a more conventional unimarc format while respecting the industrial constraints. Without manual intervention, 75% rate of correct recognition was obtained on 11 catalogues containing about 4548 references. Received March 10, 1998 / Revised August 12, 1998     

Distributed and hardware accelerated computing for clinical medical imaging using proton computed tomography (pCT)

Proton computed tomography (pCT) is an imaging modality that has been in development to support targeted dose delivery in proton therapy. It aims to accurately map the distribution of relative stopping power. Because protons traverse material media in non-linear paths, pCT requires individual proton processing. Image reconstruction then becomes a time-consuming process. Clinical-use scenarios that require images from billions of protons in less than ten or fifteen minutes have motivated us to use distributed and hardware-accelerated computing methods to achieve fast image reconstruction. Combined use of MPI and GPUs demonstrates that clinically viable image reconstruction is possible. On a 60-node CPU/GPU computer cluster, we achieved efficient strong and weak scaling when reconstructing images from two billion histories in under seven minutes. This represents a significant improvement over the previous state-of-the-art in pCT, which took almost seventy minutes to reconstruct an image from 131 million histories on a single-CPU, single-GPU computer.     

Exploring factors influencing multitasking interaction with multiple smart devices

The intention of this study is to investigate multitasking interaction with multiple smart devices and to unveil factors that play important roles in multitasking scenarios. A survey was carried out and 240 respondents participated whose scores ultimately demonstrated the degree of influence of various items on multitasking interaction with multiple smart devices. Then an exploratory factor analysis was conducted and a seven-factor model named MINDCOS was derived, including Motivation, Input, Navigation and control, Display screen, Cognitive workload, Output, Spatial distribution. The model was utilized to describe the scenario of multitasking interaction with multiple smart devices and the top three factors which illustrated the total variance the most were used to analyze related applications. Then the relationship between the factors and perceived behavior intention of multitasking interaction was tested by regression analysis. This study also found whether users had multitasking experience had a significant impact on their perceived influence of two factors which are Navigation and control and Output.     

Recognition of table of contents for electronic library consulting

A labelling approach for the automatic recognition of tables of contents (ToC) is described in this paper. A prototype is used for the electronic consulting of scientific papers in a digital library system named Calliope. This method operates on a roughly structured ASCII file, produced by OCR. The recognition approach operates by text labelling without using any a priori model. Labelling is based on part-of-speech tagging (PoS) which is initiated by a primary labelling of text components using some specific dictionaries. Significant tags are first grouped into homogeneous classes according to their grammar categories and then reduced in canonical forms corresponding to article fields: “title” and “authors”. Non-labelled tokens are integrated in one or another field by either applying PoS correction rules or using a structure model generated from well-detected articles. The designed prototype operates very well on different ToC layouts and character recognition qualities. Without manual intervention, a 96.3% rate of correct segmentation was obtained on 38 journals, including 2,020 articles, accompanied by a 93.0% rate of correct field extraction. Received April 5, 2000 / Revised February 19, 2001     

Labelling logical structures of document images using a dynamic perceptive neural network

This paper proposes a new method for labelling the logical structures of document images. The system starts with digitised images of paper documents, performs a physical layout analysis, runs an OCR and finally exploits the OCR’s outputs to find the meaning of each block of text (i.e. assigns labels like “Title”, “Author”, etc.). The method is an extension of our previous work where a classifier, the perceptive neural network, has been developed to be an analogy of the human perception. We introduce in this connectionist model a temporal dimension by the use of a time-delay neural network with local representation. During the recognition stage, the system performs several recognition cycles and corrections, while keeping track and reusing the previous outputs. This dynamic classifier allows then a better handling of noise and segmentation errors. The experiments have been carried out on two datasets: the public MARG containing more than 1,500 front pages of scientific papers with four zones of interest and another one composed of documents from the Siggraph 2003 conference, where 21 logical structures have been identified. The error rate on MARG is less than 2.5% and 7.3% on the Siggraph dataset.