Incorporating If...Then...Personality Signatures in Person Perception: Beyond the Person-Situation Dichotomy.

Three studies investigated conditions in which perceivers view dispositions and situations as interactive, rather than independent, causal forces when making judgments about another's personality. Study 1 showed that perceivers associated 5 common trait terms (e.g., friendly and shy) with characteristic if...then... (if situation a, then the person does x, but if situation b, then the person does y) personality signatures. Study 2 demonstrated that perceivers used information about a target's stable if...then... signature to infer the target's motives and traits; dispositional judgments were mediated by inferences about the target's motivations. Study 3 tested whether perceivers draw on if...then... signatures when making judgments about Big Five trait dimensions. Together, the findings indicate that perceivers take account of person-situation interactions (reflected in if...then... signatures) in everyday explanations of social behavior and personality dispositions. Boundary conditions are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Selectors Make Set-Based Analysis Too Hard

A set-based program analysis establishes constraints between sets of abstract values for all expressions in a program. Solving the system of constraints produces a conservative approximation to the program's runtime flow of values. Some practical set-based analyses use explicit selectors to extract the relevant values from an approximation set. For example, if the analysis needs to determine the possible return values of a procedure, it uses the appropriate selector to extract the relevant component from the abstract representation of the procedure. In this paper, we show that this selector-based approach complicates the constraint solving phase of the analysis too much and thus fails to scale up to realistic programming languages. We demonstrate this claim with a full-fledged value flow analysis for case-lambda, a multi-branched version of lambda. We show how both the theoretical underpinnings and the practical implementation become too complex. In response, we present a variant of set-based closure analysis that computes equivalent results in a much more efficient manner.     

Poststress effects of danger and safety signals on gastric ulceration in rats.

Gastric ulceration of rats stressed by restraint in 19°C water for 75 min was markedly increased by allowing a 75-min postrestraint room-temperature rest period during which the rat was exposed to cues that had previously been associated with the delivery of 80 5-s uncontrollable electric shocks distributed over four sessions. This effect obtained equally without regard to whether "danger cues" were punctate signals or constant contextual cues or whether contextual ones were interrupted by punctate safety signals. The experimental treatments used were unusual in that they equated the groups on their total conditioning history and thus allowed a more pure look at the poststress effect than heretofore. Other groups provided controls for prior shocks, rest, and their interaction as well as handling. Analyses of corticosterone after the stress or stress-rest cycle revealed only a general decline in corticosterone levels with rest undifferentiated across groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A sensitivity analysis of the linear complementarity programming model: Appalachian steam coal and the natural gas market

There have been extensive attempts in recent years to perform spatial equilibrium analysis of commodity markets, particularly that of energy. Most of these attempts have been based on linear programming transportation models, and more recently quadratic programming models. Unfortunately, neither of these modelling approaches can deal with the case of multi-commodity analysis with non-symmetric regression coefficients. In this paper, we overcome this problem by employing the linear complementarity programming model. In addition, we show how the model can be applied to coal and gas energy flows within a single region. Future potential applications of the model are also implied.     

Are asthmatic children educationally handicapped?

Discusses the impact of asthma on children's educational experiences. Respiratory arrest or hypoxia may lead to neuropsychological changes in a few cases, and some medications may produce mild, temporary changes, affecting learning and classroom performance. For most asthmatic children, their illness does not result in permanent brain function changes that compromise their educational adaptation and performance. Increased school absence, stress of chronic illness, isolation from peers, diminished physical activities, reduced adult expectations and self esteem, and depression can compromise children's academic adaptation and progress. Co-occurrence of factors like severe illness, poverty, and family dysfunction may increase the risk for educational and psychosocial impairment. Systematic and comprehensive education of asthmatic patients, their parents, and school personnel is crucial to improving the control of asthma and activity level. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

HDL3-mediated inhibition of thrombin-induced platelet aggregation and fibrinogen binding occurs via decreased production of phosphoinositide-derived second messengers 1,2-diacylglycerol and inositol 1,4,5-tris-phosphate

We demonstrate that physiological concentrations of HDL3 inhibit the thrombin-induced platelet fibrinogen binding and aggregation in a time- and concentration-dependent fashion. The underlying mechanism includes HDL3-mediated inhibition of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bis-phosphate turnover, 1,2-diacylglycerol and inositol 1,4,5-tris-phosphate formation, and intracellular calcium mobilization. The inhibitory effects of HDL3 on inositol 1,4,5-tris-phosphate formation and intracellular calcium mobilization were abolished after covalent modification of HDL3 with dimethylsuberimidate. Furthermore, they could be blocked by calphostin C and bis-indolylmaleimide, 2 highly selective and structurally unrelated protein kinase C inhibitors. However, the inhibitory effects of HDL3 were not blocked by H89, a protein kinase A inhibitor. In addition, HDL3 failed to induce cAMP formation but stimulated the phosphorylation of the protein kinase C 40- to 47-kD major protein substrate. We observed a close temporal relationship between the HDL3-mediated inhibition of thrombin-induced inositol 1,4,5-tris-phosphate formation, intracellular calcium mobilization, and fibrinogen binding and the phosphorylation of the protein kinase C 40- to 47-kD major protein substrate. Taken together, these findings indicate that the HDL3-mediated inhibition of thrombin-induced fibrinogen binding and aggregation occurs via inhibition of phosphatidylinositol 4,5-bis-phosphate turnover and formation of 1,2-diacylglycerol and inositol 1,4,5-tris-phosphate. Protein kinase C may be involved in this process.     

Retail yield and fabrication times for veal as influenced by purchasing options and merchandising styles

Twenty-nine selected styles of subprimals or sections of veal were obtained from a commercial facility to assist in the development of a support program for retailers. They were fabricated into bone-in or boneless retail cuts and associated components by trained meat cutters. Each style selected (n = 6) was used to generate mean retail yields and labor requirements, which were calculated from wholesale and retail weights and processing times. Means and standard errors for veal ribs consisting of five different styles (n = 30) concluded that style #2, 7-rib 4 (10 cm) x 4 (10 cm), had the lowest percentage of total retail yield (P < .05) owing to the greatest percentage of bone. Furthermore, rib style #2 required the longest total processing time (P < .05). Rib styles #3, 7-rib chop-ready, and #5, 6-rib chop ready, yielded the greatest percentage of total retail yield and also had the shortest total processing time (P < .05). Within veal loins, style #2, 4 (10 cm) x 4 (10 cm) loin kidney fat in, had the greatest percentage fat (P < .05). Loin styles #2 and #3, 4 (10 cm) x 4 (10 cm) loin special trimmed, generated more lean and fat trimmings and bone, resulting in lower percentage of total retail yields than loin style #1, 0 (0 cm) x 1 (2.5 cm) loin special trimmed (P < .05). Results indicated that bone-in subprimals and sections required more processing time if fabricated into a boneless end point. In addition, as the number of different retail cuts increased, processing times also increased.     

A Maximum Likelihood Stereo Algorithm

A stereo algorithm is presented that optimizes a maximum likelihood cost function. The maximum likelihood cost function assumes that corresponding features in the left and right images are normally distributed about a common true value and consists of a weighted squared error term if two features are matched or a (fixed) cost if a feature is determined to be occluded. The stereo algorithm finds the set of correspondences that maximize the cost function subject to ordering and uniqueness constraints. The stereo algorithm is independent of the matching primitives. However, for the experiments described in this paper, matching is performed on the $cf4$individual pixel intensities.$cf3$ Contrary to popular belief, the pixel-based stereo appears to be robust for a variety of images. It also has the advantages of (i) providing adensedisparity map, (ii) requiringnofeature extraction, and (iii)avoidingthe adaptive windowing problem of area-based correlation methods. Because feature extraction and windowing are unnecessary, a very fast implementation is possible. Experimental results reveal that good stereo correspondences can be found using only ordering and uniqueness constraints, i.e., withoutlocalsmoothness constraints. However, it is shown that the original maximum likelihood stereo algorithm exhibits multiple global minima. The dynamic programming algorithm is guaranteed to find one, but not necessarily the same one for each epipolar scanline, causing erroneous correspondences which are visible as small local differences between neighboring scanlines. Traditionally, regularization, which modifies the original cost function, has been applied to the problem of multiple global minima. We developed several variants of the algorithm that avoid classical regularization while imposing several global cohesiveness constraints. We believe this is a novel approach that has the advantage of guaranteeing that solutions minimize the original cost function and preserve discontinuities. The constraints are based on minimizing the total number of horizontal and/or vertical discontinuities along and/or between adjacent epipolar lines, and local smoothing is avoided. Experiments reveal that minimizing the sum of the horizontal and vertical discontinuities provides the most accurate results. A high percentage of correct matches and very little smearing of depth discontinuities are obtained. An alternative to imposing cohesiveness constraints to reduce the correspondence ambiguities is to use more than two cameras. We therefore extend the two camera maximum likelihood toNcameras. TheN-camera stereo algorithm determines the “best” set of correspondences between a given pair of cameras, referred to as the principal cameras. Knowledge of the relative positions of the cameras allows the 3D point hypothesized by an assumed correspondence of two features in the principal pair to be projected onto the image plane of the remainingN− 2 cameras. TheseN− 2 points are then used to verify proposed matches. Not only does the algorithm explicitly model occlusion between features of the principal pair, but the possibility of occlusions in theN− 2 additional views is also modeled. Previous work did not model this occlusion process, the benefits and importance of which are experimentally verified. Like other multiframe stereo algorithms, the computational and memory costs of this approach increase linearly with each additional view. Experimental results are shown for two outdoor scenes. It is clearly demonstrated that the number of correspondence errors is significantly reduced as the number of views/cameras is increased.     

Runtime analysis of an evolutionary algorithm for stochastic multi-objective combinatorial optimization

For stochastic multi-objective combinatorial optimization (SMOCO) problems, the adaptive Pareto sampling (APS) framework has been proposed, which is based on sampling and on the solution of deterministic multi-objective subproblems. We show that when plugging in the well-known simple evolutionary multi-objective optimizer (SEMO) as a subprocedure into APS, ε-dominance has to be used to achieve fast convergence to the Pareto front. Two general theorems are presented indicating how runtime complexity results for APS can be derived from corresponding results for SEMO. This may be a starting point for the runtime analysis of evolutionary SMOCO algorithms.