Backing up behaviors in teams: The role of personality and legitimacy of need.

In this article, the authors developed several hypotheses regarding both the main and interactive effects of 2 types of team inputs on backing up behaviors in teams: (a) team composition characteristics in terms of the personality of the members of the team and (b) team task characteristics in terms of the extent to which the nature of the task is one that legitimately calls for some members of the team to back up other members of the team. Results from a study of 71 4-person teams performing a computerized tactical decision-making task suggest that the legitimacy of the need for back up has an important main effect on the extent to which team members provide assistance to and receive assistance from each other. In addition, the legitimacy of the need for back up also has important interactive effects with both the personality of the back up recipient and the personality of the back up providers on backing up behaviors in teams. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Computer-assisted communication and team decision-making performance: The moderating effect of openness to experience.

This study examined the effects of computer-assisted communication on team decision-making performance as a function of the team's openness to experience. 79 teams performing a multiple-cue probability learning task were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 experimental conditions: (a) verbal communication or (b) computer-assisted communication (which combined verbal and computerized communication). The results indicated that access to computer-assisted communication improved the decision-making performance of teams, but only when the teams were high in openness to experience. This effect was observed using both global openness and more specific openness facets, as well as a variety of team-level aggregation strategies. Moreover, the beneficial effects of openness in computer-assisted conditions were mediated by the efficiency with which teams integrated verbal and computerized forms of communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influence of weathering on the engineering properties of Harsit granitic rocks (NE Turkey)

Weathering and hydrothermal alteration of the granitic rocks in the Eastern Black Sea Region (NE Turkey) are important phenomena affecting the engineering projects in the region. The study investigated the probable paths of rock-forming mineral transformations due to weathering in the Harsit granitoid rocks, the changes of the major oxides as a consequence of weathering and the effects of weathering on the engineering properties. To identify the changes in the major oxides, the volume concentrations were considered in relation to the dry density. Chemical leaching during weathering was shown to be significant in changing the minerals. It was concluded that the engineering properties of the weathered granitic rocks can be most reliably predicted by P-wave velocity.      

Hydrolysis of hexose pentaacetate esters in rat pancreatic islets

The pentaacetate esters of selected hexoses were recently found to stimulate insulin release. The kinetics of their hydrolysis was now investigated in both rat pancreatic islet homogenates and intact islets. In islet homogenates, the hydrolysis of alpha-d-glucose pentaacetate, as judged from the measurement of acetate production, displayed a pH optimum of 7.4 and a Km for the ester of 0.95 mM. At pH 7.4, the reaction velocity was about 5 times higher than the rate of alpha-d-glucose pentaacetate hydrolysis by intact islets, as judged from the ester-induced increase in the acetate content of both the islet and surrounding incubation medium. Comparable results were obtained in intact islets exposed to either beta-l-glucose pentaacetate or beta-d-galactose pentaacetate. The ester content of the islets after 120 min incubation was close to 0.1 nmol/islet, yielding an apparent intracellular concentration at least one order of magnitude higher than the extracellular concentration (1.7 mM). These findings indicate that hexose esters that either stimulate insulin release or fail to do so are equally well taken up and hydrolyzed by islet cells. They are compatible, therefore, with the view that the insulinotropic action of some of these esters may be favored by the catabolism of their hexose moiety, although some other mechanisms for stimulation of insulin release must be operative in the case of beta-l-glucose pentaacetate.     

Decision risk in dynamic two-stage contexts: Beyond the status quo.

Developed and tested a dynamic model of decision risk that integrates the economic literature on the "house money effect" with the psychological literature on image theory. 135 participants made 35 decisions during the course of a longitudinal, randomized experiment. These decisions were made by high and low past performers under 1 of 4 different conditions resulting from crossing the decision frame (gain vs loss) with goal specificity (specific vs do your best). The results imply that the effect of decision frames on risk that have been well documented in static contexts do not generalize to dynamic decision contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of individual differences on the performance of hierarchical decision-making teams: Much more than g.

The authors propose (a) that team members' general cognitive ability ( g) and conscientiousness are key resources for hierarchical decision-making teams with distributed expertise; (b) that a conjunctive model is most appropriate for capturing staff members' standing on these attributes; and (c) that in addition to main effects, staff attributes interact with those of the leader to determine team performance. Results from a study of 51 four-person teams performing a computerized decision-making task show that decision accuracy was highest when both the leader and staff (defined conjunctively) were high on g and conscientiousness. Post hoc analyses suggest reactions to the weakest member differed depending on whether the member was low in g or conscientiousness. Low- g members were helped, whereas low-conscientiousness members were ignored. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sturge-Weber syndrome: a patient with a cervical port-wine nevus

An unusual case with Sturge-Weber syndrome is reported. A computed tomography study revealed the presence of gyriform calcifications in the occipital lobe, and discovered a hidden occipital subcutaneous port-wine nevus, instead of the usually expected nevus in the distribution of the first division of the trigeminal nerve. Existence of an occipital port-wine nevus, which was in the distribution of the greater occipital nerve, suggested a variation with respect to the embryogenesis of the Sturge-Weber syndrome.     

Learning a Generative Model for Multi‐Step Human‐Object Interactions from Videos

Creating dynamic virtual environments consisting of humans interacting with objects is a fundamental problem in computer graphics. While it is well‐accepted that agent interactions play an essential role in synthesizing such scenes, most extant techniques exclusively focus on static scenes, leaving the dynamic component out. In this paper, we present a generative model to synthesize plausible multi‐step dynamic human‐object interactions. Generating multi‐step interactions is challenging since the space of such interactions is exponential in the number of objects, activities, and time steps. We propose to handle this combinatorial complexity by learning a lower dimensional space of plausible human‐object interactions. We use action plots to represent interactions as a sequence of discrete actions along with the participating objects and their states. To build action plots, we present an automatic method that uses state‐of‐the‐art computer vision techniques on RGB videos in order to detect individual objects and their states, extract the involved hands, and recognize the actions performed. The action plots are built from observing videos of everyday activities and are used to train a generative model based on a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). The network learns the causal dependencies and constraints between individual actions and can be used to generate novel and diverse multi‐step human‐object interactions. Our representation and generative model allows new capabilities in a variety of applications such as interaction prediction, animation synthesis, and motion planning for a real robotic agent.