Treating intimate partner violence among substance-abusing dyads: The effect of couples therapy.

This study examined whether participation in couples therapy, compared with individual therapy, had a differential effect on the day-to-day relationship between substance use and occurrences of intimate partner violence (IPV) among married or cohabiting substance-abusing men. Patients (N = 207) were randomly assigned to either partner-involved behavioral couples therapy (BCT; included non-substance-abusing female partners in conjoint sessions) or individual-based treatment (IBT; male partners only). Couples in BCT reported lower levels of IPV and substance use at a 12-month posttreatment follow-up compared with couples with male partners in IBT. Moreover, treatment assignment was a significant moderator of the day-to-day relationship between substance use and IPV. Likelihood of nonsevere and severe male-to-female partner violence on days of male partners’ substance use was lower among couples who received BCT compared with IBT. These findings indicate couples therapy may play an important role in the treatment of IPV among substance-abusing couples. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Comprendre et soigner la crise suicidaire.

Reviews the book, Comprendre et soigner la crise suicidaire by Laurent Morasz et Fran?ois Danet (2008).This work examines a psychodynamic theoretical approach focused on the suicide crisis clinic and the “caregiver/cared for” relationship by illustrating different clinical examples representing individuals at various stages of the suicide process. The value and strength of this book lie in the rich and interesting clinical experience it brings forward; there is no attempt to distinguish between “objective” and “more subjective psychodynamic” approaches. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Assessment of bottom-up sectoral and regional mitigation potentials

The greenhouse gas mitigation potential of different economic sectors in three world regions are estimated using a bottom-up approach. These estimates provide updates of the numbers reported in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR4). This study is part of a larger project aimed at comparing greenhouse gas mitigation potentials from bottom-up and top-down approaches. The sectors included in the analysis are energy supply, transport, industry and the residential and service sector. The mitigation potentials range from 11 to 15 GtCO₂eq. This is 26–38% of the baseline in 2030 and 47–68% relative to the year 2000. Potential savings are estimated for different cost levels. The total potential at negative costs is estimated at 5–8% relative to the baseline, with the largest share in the residential and service sector and the highest reduction percentage for the transport and industry sectors. These (negative) costs include investment, operation and maintenance and fuel costs and revenues at moderate discount rates of 3–10%. At costs below 100 US$/tCO₂, the largest potential reductions in absolute terms are estimated in the energy supply sector, while the transport sector has the lowest reduction potential.     

Evaluation of ergonomic adjustments of catering carts to reduce external pushing forces

An existing standard catering cart was compared with two prototypes for pushbar and castor design. The first objective of this study was to find out which cart was accompanied with the lowest manually exerted external forces in pushing in a straight way and in pushing a 90 turn. The second objective was to explore effects of the pushbar and castor design of the carts. In the initial and ending phase, the prototypes were accompanied with higher exerted forces compared with the standard catering cart. In pushing straight. the reversed start position of the bigger castors of the prototypes hampered a fluent acceleration and caused higher initial forces. In decelerating, the lower rolling friction of the bigger castors required higher forces to stop the prototypes compared to the standard cart. During the sustained phase, the prototype carts were more favourable. Effects of pushbar and castor design were studied during a turn. The vertical pushbars of the prototypes resulted in lower time-integrated pushing forces. Providing an axis of rotation for turning activities by means of a fixed wheel was proven to be advantageous.     

Domain Modelling and the Co-Design of Business Rules in the Telecommunication Business Area

This paper discusses the development of an enterprise domain model in an environment where part of the domain knowledge is vague and not yet formalised in company-wide business rules. The domain model was developed for a young company starting in the telecommunications sector. The company relied on a number of stand-alone business support systems and sought for a manner to integrate them. There was opted for the development of an enterprise-wide domain model that had to serve as an integration layer to coordinate the stand-alone applications. A specific feature of the company was that it could build up its information infrastructure form scratch, so that many aspects of its business were still in the process of being defined. The paper will highlight parts of the Enterprise Model where there was a need for co-designing business rules together with the domain model. A result of this whole effort was that the company got more insight into important domain knowledge and developed a common understanding across functional areas of the way of doing business.     

Flexible active-matrix displays and shift registers based on solution-processed organic transistors

At present, flexible displays are an important focus of research. Further development of large, flexible displays requires a cost-effective manufacturing process for the active-matrix backplane, which contains one transistor per pixel. One way to further reduce costs is to integrate (part of) the display drive circuitry, such as row shift registers, directly on the display substrate. Here, we demonstrate flexible active-matrix monochrome electrophoretic displays based on solution-processed organic transistors on 25-microm-thick polyimide substrates. The displays can be bent to a radius of 1 cm without significant loss in performance. Using the same process flow we prepared row shift registers. With 1,888 transistors, these are the largest organic integrated circuits reported to date. More importantly, the operating frequency of 5 kHz is sufficiently high to allow integration with the display operating at video speed. This work therefore represents a major step towards 'system-on-plastic'.     

Semantic priming between spoken words in adults and children.

Used an auditory lexical decision paradigm to determine occurrence of semantic priming between spoken words and to investigate the organization of the mental lexicon in preliterate children. 30 undergraduates and 24 1st-grade children (aged 6 yrs 2 mo to 7 yrs) were tested on a lexical decision task in which Ss had to decide whether pairs of spoken items were words. In both groups, significant facilitation was found for semantically related words compared with unrelated ones. Results indicate that semantic priming occurred in the auditory modality. The fact that children benefited at least as much from and often more than adults from an appropriate semantic context suggests that the lexicon of the child is organized in the same way as the adult's as early as 6 to 7 yrs of age. (French abstract) (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)