Personality subtypes among driving-while-intoxicated offenders: Follow-up of subsequent driving records.

Investigated the predictive utility of subtypes among males arrested for driving while intoxicated (DWI) with respect to subsequent driving record. Five subtypes had been empirically derived from measures of driving-related attitudes, personality functioning, and hostility. The driving records of 16 Ss (previously described by the 1st author and G. A. Marlatt; see record 1982-21361-001) were evaluated over a 3-yr period beginning with initial assessment. Subtype membership did not predict DWI recidivism or accidents. However, differences were found across clusters with respect to other violations and driving risks. The results are discussed in terms of the clinical utility of differential assessment of non-alcohol-related characteristics in the evaluation and treatment of DWI offenders. (7 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Controlled social drinking: An alternative to abstinence as a treatment goal for some alcohol abusers.

Examines the evidence for the "craving" hypothesis and for the notion that abstinence training is necessary in the treatment of alcohol abuse. The data are found not to be empirically or experimentally substantiated. The viability of an alternative treatment model involving the training of alcohol abusers in controlled social drinking is explored. Several recently developed techniques for teaching controlled social drinking are critically reviewed. Most of these programs are firmly based on behavior modification principles. Preliminary outcome data seems promising. A comprehensive treatment program using a combination of these techniques is suggested for the future along with several suggestions for future research in this area. (4 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Work supervisors' ratings of social behaviors related to employment success.

Conducted a survey with 60 front-line supervisors of employees in nonskilled jobs to investigate employment requirements for persons with handicaps. Ss rated 37 social behaviors on 4 dimensions: (1) frequency of occurrence; (2) importance to successful job performance; (3) satisfaction with entering employees; and (4) behaviors of most concern in deciding to hire, retain, and promote new employees. Results show that most items were rated as being at least moderately important. There was a greater spread in ratings of frequency and satisfaction. Behaviors rated relatively high in importance and low in satisfaction were of most concern. Social skills were reportedly given consideration in employment decisions, and social skills directly related to the performance of work tasks were rated high in importance. Implications for the development of employment training curriculum for persons with developmental disabilities are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A Weighted Nearest Neighbor Algorithm for Learning with Symbolic Features

In the past, nearest neighbor algorithms for learning from examples have worked best in domains in which all features had numeric values. In such domains, the examples can be treated as points and distance metrics can use standard definitions. In symbolic domains, a more sophisticated treatment of the feature space is required. We introduce a nearest neighbor algorithm for learning in domains with symbolic features. Our algorithm calculates distance tables that allow it to produce real-valued distances between instances, and attaches weights to the instances to further modify the structure of feature space. We show that this technique produces excellent classification accuracy on three problems that have been studied by machine learning researchers: predicting protein secondary structure, identifying DNA promoter sequences, and pronouncing English text. Direct experimental comparisons with the other learning algorithms show that our nearest neighbor algorithm is comparable or superior in all three domains. In addition, our algorithm has advantages in training speed, simplicity, and perspicuity. We conclude that experimental evidence favors the use and continued development of nearest neighbor algorithms for domains such as the ones studied here.     

Concurrency and recovery for index trees

Although many suggestions have been made for concurrency in B-trees, few of these have considered recovery as well. We describe an approach which provides high concurrency while preserving well-formed trees across system crashes. Our approach works for a class of index trees that is a generalization of the B-tree. This class includes some multi-attribute indexes and temporal indexes. Structural changes in an index tree are decomposed into a sequence of atomic actions, each one leaving the tree well-formed and each working on a separate level of the tree. All atomic actions on levels of the tree above the leaf level are independent of database transactions, and so are of short duration. Incomplete structural changes are detected in normal operations and trigger completion. Edited by A. Reuter. Received August 1995 / accepted July 1996     

Recurrence of initial pressure ulcer in persons with spinal cord injuries

Whether treated with surgery or by conservative, nonsurgical measures, pressure ulcers recur in 5% to 91% of spinal cord injured (SCI) patients. Factors other than the surgical technique used or the standard conservative management provided may be responsible. A retrospective study of 176 SCI patients with a history of one or more pressure ulcers was conducted at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center at Castle Point, N.Y. Approximately 35% of patients who received either surgical or nonsurgical treatment had a recurrence. Patients who smoked and patients with diabetes or cardiovascular disease had higher recurrence rates.     

Optical recording of neuronal activity in an invertebrate central nervous system: simultaneous monitoring of several neurons

1. Using an optical method for measuring membrane potential, we have been able to monitor action-potential activity simultaneously in 14 neurons of the supraesophageal ganglion of the barnacle. 2. Under favorable conditions, 4-mV synaptic potentials could also be detected optically.     

A Modification of Fletcher's Checksum

We modify J. G. Fletcher's checksum algorithm (easily implemented by software) to place two check octets in an arbitrary place in a data unit, rather than at the end. This is useful if one wants the checksum information in the header of a data unit.     

Merging sorted runs using large main memory

Summary External sorting is usually accomplished by first creating sorted runs, then merging the runs. In the merge phase, writing and calculating can be overlapped by reading if two input buffers are used for each sorted run. If the memory is very large, the input buffers will be large and using two input buffers per sorted run will be more efficient than using only one input buffer per run and risking reduced overlap of reading and writing. In many cases, merging time can be cut in half. We derive a formula for estimating the total time for merging for a given memory size, file size, number of merging passes and for a given disk drive. We present an extreme example where in spite of having two buffers per run, significant non-overlap occurs. However, in realistic problems, we show that making one merge pass with two input buffers per run is near optimal. This contradicts earlier results on merging which do not take large memory into account.     

The hB^\Pi-tree: a multi-attribute index supporting concurrency, recovery and node consolidation

We propose a new multi-attribute index. Our approach combines the hB-tree, a multi-attribute index, and the -tree, an abstract index which offers efficient concurrency and recovery methods. We call the resulting method the hB-tree. We describe several versions of the hB-tree, each using a different node-splitting and index-term-posting algorithm. We also describe a new node deletion algorithm. We have implemented all the versions of the hB-tree. Our performance results show that even the version that offers no performance guarantees, actually performs very well in terms of storage utilization, index size (fan-out), exact-match and range searching, under various data types and distributions. We have also shown that our index is fairly insensitive to increases in dimension. Thus, it is suitable for indexing high-dimensional applications. This property and the fact that all our versions of the hB-tree can use the -tree concurrency and recovery algorithms make the hB-tree a promising candidate for inclusion in a general-purpose DBMS. Edited by R. Sacks-Davis. Received 27 June 1994 / Accepted 26 September 1995