School readiness and later achievement.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 44(1) of Developmental Psychology (see record 2007-19851-023). The DOI for the supplemental materials was printed incorrectly. The correct DOI is as follows: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.43.6.1428.supp.] Using 6 longitudinal data sets, the authors estimate links between three key elements of school readiness--school-entry academic, attention, and socioemotional skills--and later school reading and math achievement. In an effort to isolate the effects of these school-entry skills, the authors ensured that most of their regression models control for cognitive, attention, and socioemotional skills measured prior to school entry, as well as a host of family background measures. Across all 6 studies, the strongest predictors of later achievement are school-entry math, reading, and attention skills. A meta-analysis of the results shows that early math skills have the greatest predictive power, followed by reading and then attention skills. By contrast, measures of socioemotional behaviors, including internalizing and externalizing problems and social skills, were generally insignificant predictors of later academic performance, even among children with relatively high levels of problem behavior. Patterns of association were similar for boys and girls and for children from high and low socioeconomic backgrounds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A cross-cultural examination of the relation of marital communication behavior to marital satisfaction.

Numerous studies have examined the communication behaviors of Western, primarily North American, couples and have demonstrated a robust and reliable association between marital satisfaction and couple communication. However, there has been relatively less attention given to the generalizability of these findings to non-Western couples. To address this issue, the authors conducted an observational study of marital communication among couples from 3 different cultural groups: 50 White American couples, 52 Pakistani couples in Pakistan, and 48 immigrant Pakistani couples in America. The results show that positive and negative communication behaviors were associated with marital satisfaction within each of the 3 cultural groups. However, the American group's marital satisfaction was more strongly related to marital communication behaviors than was that of the Pakistani group and, to a lesser extent, the immigrant group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Calibration of Soil Constitutive Models with Spatially Varying Parameters

Soil constitutive models are frequently calibrated from laboratory tests that utilize global boundary measurements, which necessarily relegate soil response to that of a homogenized equivalent medium. This paper demonstrates the applicability of advanced experimental technologies to enhance the state of model-based predictions in soil mechanics by taking into account the possibility of material heterogeneity during model calibration. By utilizing the full-field displacement measurement technique of three-dimensional digital image correlation, displacements of the surfaces of deforming triaxial sand specimens are measured throughout deformation. These displacements are assimilated into finite-element (FE) models of the test specimen through solution of an inverse problem. During optimization, in which the difference between measured and predicted displacements across the specimen surface form the basis for the objective function, model parameters are allowed to vary spatially throughout the specimen volume. FE models allowing three different levels of spatial variability are tested. Results indicate that accommodating consideration of material heterogeneity during calibration leads to more accurate predictions of global stress-strain behavior that are more faithful to observed full-field response.     

Interactive Effects of Personality and Perceptions of the Work Situation on Workplace Deviance.

Previous research on workplace deviance has examined the relationship of either personality or employees' situational perceptions with deviant behavior. In this study, the authors focused on the joint relationship of personality and perceptions of the work situation with deviant behavior. Using 4 samples of employees and multiple operationalizations of the core constructs, the authors found support for the hypothesis that positive perceptions of the work situation are negatively related to workplace deviance. In addition, consistent with hypotheses, the personality traits of conscientiousness, emotional stability, and agreeableness moderated this relationship. Specifically, the relationship between perceptions of the developmental environment and organizational deviance was stronger for employees low in conscientiousness or emotional stability, and the relationship between perceived organizational support and interpersonal deviance was stronger for employees low in agreeableness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Family socialization of emotional expression and nonverbal communication styles and skills.

Describes the development of the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire, which measures family styles of emotional expression and discusses its use in a study assessing the effects of family socialization of emotional expression on the Ss' own expression, nonverbal behavior, and skill. Questionnaire development indicated accuracy in tapping emotional expression levels in the home. In the study, 64 college students and confederates filled out several questionnaires, were videotaped while discussing topics of emotional significance and while encoding scenes of affective content, and participated in a nonverbal judging task. The socialization hypothesis, that family expressiveness has a differential effect on individuals' nonverbal behavior and skill, was supported and refined. It is concluded that style of expression and skill in communication are influenced by the emotional expressiveness of the family environment. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A study of guidelines for the conduct and analysis of simultaneous clinical replications.

Examined the development, implementation, and evaluation of guidelines for the simultaneous application of clinical replications. The 15 authors served as Ss. Success of the guidelines was evaluated by their ability to yield (1) information concerning the probability of the treatment's success, and (2) hypotheses concerning uncontrolled variables that may limit generalization of the treatment. Results support the validity of the guidelines in accomplishing these purposes. The use of such guidelines may serve as a vehicle for the integration of the roles of researcher and practitioner. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An interface for mutual disambiguation of recognition errors in a multimodal navigational assistant

Users often have tasks that can be accomplished with the aid of multiple media – for example with text, sound and pictures. For example, communicating an urban navigation route can be expressed with pictures and text. Today’s mobile devices have multimedia capabilities; cell phones have cameras, displays, sound output, and (soon) speech recognition. Potentially, these multimedia capabilities can be used for multimedia-intensive tasks, but two things stand in the way. First, recognition of visual input and speech recognition still remain unreliable. Second, the mechanics of integrating multiple media and recognition systems remains daunting for users. We address both these issues in a system, MARCO, multimodal agent for route construction. MARCO collects route information by taking pictures of landmarks, accompanied by verbal directions. We combine results from off-the-shelf speech recognition and optical character recognition to achieve better recognition of route landmarks than either recognition system alone. MARCO automatically produces an illustrated, step-by-step guide to the route.     

The implementation of neural network for semiconductor PECVD process

In semiconductor manufacturing, the monitoring system has been developed very excellently and can be used for comprehensively collecting the historical data of process information and quality characteristics of equipment. However, due to the high turnover rate of personnel and the great variance in manufacturing process, the previous control technique by using intuition and experience of engineers for manufacturing process parameter settings to achieve good product quality is no longer appropriate. Therefore, this research establishes a quality predictor for analyzing the relationship between manufacturing process parameter setting and final product quality in the plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) of semiconductor manufacturing by applying the back-propagation neural network (BPNN) algorithm and Taguchi method. The experimental data are categorized into 500 pieces of training data and 150 pieces of verifying data. The proposed analysis method for using in the PECVD process of semiconductor manufacturing is verified by comparing the predicted film thickness of SiO₂ and the predicted refractive index of silicon dioxide films with the measured data. According to the comparison result, the proposed model has an excellent prediction capability of final product quality and can be applied in process control for related manufacturing fields.     

Instrumentation and calibration protocol for imaging dynamic features in dense-scattering media by optical tomography

Instrumentation is described that is suitable for acquiring multisource, multidetector, time-series optical data at high sampling rates (up to 150 Hz) from tissues having arbitrary geometries. The design rationale, calibration protocol, and measured performance features are given for both a currently used, CCD-camera-based instrument and a new silicon-photodiode-based system under construction. Also shown are representative images that we reconstructed from data acquired in laboratory studies using the described CCD-based instrument.