Extraversion and neuroticism as predictors of objective life events: A longitudinal analysis.

Used data from a 4-yr longitudinal study of young adults to examine the causal pathways between personality and life events. To reduce measurement artifacts, analyses were conducted using reports of more objective life events. It was found that extraversion predisposed participants to experience more positive objective life events, whereas neuroticism predisposed people to experience more negative objective events. In contrast, personality was somewhat stable, and life events were found not to have a prospective influence on it. Objective positive and negative life events covaried, suggesting that people who experience more of 1 type of event are also likely to experience more events of the opposite valence as well. The findings indicate that life events cannot be viewed as a source of influence independent of personality. Although factors that are independent of the person undoubtedly influence life events to some degree, the personality of the individual also appears to do so. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Screening for toxoplasmosis in pregnancy: what is the evidence of reducing a health problem?

OBJECTIVES: Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite which may give rise to congenital infection. Screening pregnant women for antibodies against toxoplasmosis is being debated in many countries. The preventive impact of toxoplasmosis screening of pregnant women depends on the magnitude of disease caused by congenital toxoplasmosis (incidence x transmission rate to fetus x diseased proportion of infected children), on the one hand, and the preventable proportion of disease (sensitivity of the screening test x efficacy of the treatment x compliance), on the other. In this study the preventive impact of screening pregnant women for toxoplasmosis antibodies is assessed by letting the value for these variables change within reasonable limits. METHODS: To obtain information on these variables, relevant publications were reviewed in the Medline database from 1983 to February 1996 and the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Database. References in review articles on congenital toxoplasmosis were also studied. RESULTS: The literature review showed that no population based prospective studies of the natural history of toxoplasmosis infection during pregnancy, nor any randomised controlled trials of the efficacy of antiparasitic treatment, had been carried out. In the empirical studies which have been performed the values of most variables show considerable differences. According to these values, the estimates in this study of the impact of toxoplasmosis screening in pregnancy may range from 0 to 40 children in whom disease is preventable per 100,000 pregnant women susceptible to toxoplasmosis infection. CONCLUSION: Sufficient scientific evidence is not yet available to propose screening for toxoplasmosis in pregnant women, and efforts should be made to provide such knowledge. Also, the magnitude of the negative impact of screening, such as induced abortion of healthy fetuses, anxiety in women with false positive screening tests, and side effects of treatment, has not been sufficiently examined.     

A Thermodynamic analysis of the Fe-Cr-N system

New experimental information on the phase relations in the Fe-Cr-N system at 1273 K is presented. Together with previous information it is used in a thermodynamic analysis of the system in the temperature range from 1273 to 1473 K. A set of parameter values is derived which defines the Gibbs energy of the individual phases and allows the phase diagram to be calculated. Satisfactory agreement with experimental information is obtained. Formerly with Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.     

Spectral volume rendering using GPU-based raycasting

Traditional volume rendering does not incorporate a number of optical properties that are typically observed for semi-transparent materials, such as glass or water, in the real world. Therefore, we have extended GPU-based raycasting to spectral volume rendering based on the Kubelka–Munk theory for light propagation in parallel colorant layers of a turbid medium. This allows us to demonstrate the effects of selective absorption and dispersion in refractive materials, by generating volume renderings using real physical optical properties. We show that this extended volume rendering technique can be easily incorporated into a flexible framework for GPU-based volume raycasting. Our implementation shows a promising performance for a number of real data sets. In particular, we obtain up to 100 times the performance of a comparable CPU implementation. Electronic supplementary material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at and is accessible for authorized users.