Ethnopsychologies: Reply to Wellman (1998) and Gauvain (1998).

Four main issues are considered in response to H. M. Wellman (see record 1997-42548-002) and M. Gauvain (see record 1997-42548-003): the relevance of adult data, the source of evidence for theories of mind, explaining development, and the proper focus of theory of mind research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A study on new benzotriazole derivatives as inhibitors on copper corrosion in ground water

The corrosion inhibition properties of newly synthesized 1-(2-pyrrole carbonyl)-benzotriazole (PCBT) and 1-(2-thienyl carbonyl)-benzotriazole (TCBT) in combination with the non-ionic surfactant Triton X-100 (TX-100) on metallic copper were studied in ground water environment and the results were compared with benzotriazole (BTA). Various electrochemical studies such as open circuit potential (OCP), potentiodynamic polarization, ac impedance and cyclic voltammetric (CV) were made. Surface analytical techniques like FT-IR and XRD were also performed. The results indicated that PCBT is a better corrosion inhibitor for copper and the formulation consisting of PCBT and TX-100 offered improved inhibition efficiency (IE) in a synergistic manner.     

Does your coworker know what you're doing? Convergence of self- and peer-reports of counterproductive work behavior.

Most studies of counterproductive work behavior (CWB) are criticized for overreliance on self-report methodology. This study tested the convergence of 136 matched self-reports and coworker-reports of work stressors and CWB. For each participant dyad, the focal employee ("incumbent") completed a self-report survey and gave a coworker form to a peer familiar with the incumbent's work situation and behavior. Correlations and t tests demonstrated significant convergence between incumbent and coworker reports of key study variables, except organization-targeted CWB. Separately, both incumbent and coworker reports supported the Stressor-Emotion CWB model. In mixed-source analyses, only interpersonal relationships were significant--conflict and CWB targeting persons. Weaknesses in each report source are discussed, and multisourced triangulation to cover perceptual, experiential, and behavioral domains is recommended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inductive reasoning and bounded rationality reconsidered

Complex adaptive systems have historically been studied using simplifications that mandate deterministic interactions between agents or instead treat their interactions only with regard to their statistical expectation. This has led to an anticipation, even in the case of agents employing inductive reasoning in light of limited information, that such systems may have equilibria that can be predicted a priori. This hypothesis is tested here using a simulation of a simple market economy in which each agent's behavior is based on the result of an iterative evolutionary process of variation and selection applied to competing internal models of its environment. The results indicate no tendency for convergence to stability or a long-term equilibrium and highlight fundamental differences between deterministic and stochastic models of complex adaptive systems     

Young children's understanding of different mental states.

There is considerable evidence in the recent literature on children's understanding of the mind that young children have difficulty understanding false beliefs. Even when presented very strong evidence that a person's belief conflicts with the reality to which it refers, they tend to assume that it coincides with reality. Two studies tested the extent to which 3-yr-olds make this same mistake with other mental states. Results show that children of this age understand that desires can differ from reality before they understand that beliefs can, even when the exact same tasks are used to assess each understanding. Findings also indicate that young children understand pretense in this regard somewhat later than desire but earlier than belief and dream, particularly when the pretense is supported by actions. Three explanations for the results are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mothers' Behavior Modifications During Pretense and Their Possible Signal Value for Toddlers.

An important issue for understanding early cognition is why very young children's real-world representations do not get confused by pretense events. One possible source of information for children is the pretender's behaviors. Pretender behaviors may vary systematically across real and pretend scenarios, perhaps signaling to toddlers to interpret certain events as not real. Pretender behaviors were examined in 2 experiments in which mothers were asked both to pretend to have a snack and really to have a snack with their 18-month-olds. Episodes were analyzed for condition differences in verbal and nonverbal behaviors, including smiling, looking, laughter, and functional movements. Reliable differences were found across conditions for several variables. In a 3rd experiment, children's apparent understanding of pretense in relation to their mothers' behaviors was examined, and significant associations were found with some of the mothers' behavioral changes but not others. This work provides a first inroad into the issue of how children learn to interpret pretense acts as pretense. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

High speed wide fan‐in designs using clock controlled dual keeper domino logic circuits

Clock Controlled Dual keeper Domino logic structures (CCDD_1 and CCDD_2) for achieving a high‐speed performance with low power consumption and a good noise margin are proposed in this paper. The keeper control circuit comprises an additional PMOS keeper transistor controlled by the clock and foot node voltage. This control mechanism offers abrupt conditional control of the keeper circuit and reduces the contention current, leading to high‐speed performance. The keeper transistor arrangement also reduces the loop gain associated with the feedback circuitry. Hence, the circuits offer less delay variability. The design and simulation of various wide fan‐in designs using 180 nm CMOS technology validates the proposed CCDD_1 and CCDD_2 designs, offering an increased speed performance of 7.2% and 8.5%, respectively, over a conventional domino logic structure. The noise gain margin analysis proves good robustness of the CCDD structures when compared with a conventional domino logic circuit configuration. A Monte Carlo simulation for 2,000 runs under statistical process variations demonstrates that the proposed CCDD circuits offer a significantly reduced delay variability factor.     

Minimalist Antibodies and Mimetics: An Update and Recent Applications

The immune system utilizes antibodies to recognize foreign or disease‐relevant receptors, initiating an immune response to destroy unwelcomed guests. Because researchers can evolve antibodies to bind virtually any target, it is perhaps unsurprising that these reagents, and their small‐molecule conjugates, are used extensively in clinical and basic research environments. However, virtues of antibodies are countered by significant challenges. Foremost among these is the need for expression in mammalian cells (largely due to often necessary post‐translational modifications). In response to these challenges, researchers have developed an array of minimalist antibodies and mimetics, which are smaller, more stable, simpler to express in Escherichia coli, and amendable to laboratory evolution and protein engineering. Here we describe these scaffolds and discuss recent applications of minimalist antibodies and mimetics.     

Effects of maternal negativity and of early and recent recurrent depressive disorder on children's false belief understanding.

Research has shown that children of depressed mothers are at risk for problems in a variety of developmental domains; however, little is known about the effects of maternal depression on children's emerging understanding of false beliefs. In this study, 3 false belief tasks were administered to 5-year-old children whose mothers had either met criteria for major depressive disorder within the first 20 months of the child's life (n = 91) or had never been depressed (n = 50). Significant difficulties in performance were found among the children of depressed mothers, especially those whose mothers had experienced early and recent recurrent depressive disorder. Regardless of diagnostic status, children whose mothers exhibited negativity during problem-solving tasks administered at an earlier developmental period also were less likely to demonstrate false belief understanding. These effects remained even after child verbal ability was controlled. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fast estimation of fractal dimension and correlation integral on stream data

In this paper we give a very space-efficient, yet fast method for estimating the fractal dimensionality of the points in a data stream. Algorithms to estimate the fractal dimension exist, such as the straightforward quadratic algorithm and the faster O(NlogN) or even O(N) box-counting algorithms. However, the sub-quadratic algorithms require Ω(N) space. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that computes the fractal dimension in a single pass, using a constant amount of memory relative to data cardinality. Experimental results on synthetic and real world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.