Choice With Initial and Terminal Link Reinforcement: An Alternative Self-Control Paradigm.

Self-control is demonstrated when a less desirable immediate outcome is chosen to ensure a substantially better future. In a novel animal analogue of this situation, primary reinforcement was delivered in both the initial and terminal links of a concurrent chain schedule. Rats made initial link choices between equal amounts of ethanol-free or ethanol-containing milk. Choosing the ethanol-free reinforcer resulted in delivery of the larger terminal link reinforcer and was thus analogous to self-control. Self-control decreased as the delay between initial and terminal links increased. The results have implications for human choice situations where decisions are made between two immediately available reinforcement alternatives each associated with a different delayed outcome. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Post-Event Rumination and Negative Self-Appraisal in Social Phobia Before and After Treatment.

This study investigated the relationship between self-appraisals of performance, symptom severity and post-event rumination in social phobia, and evaluated the effect of treatment on these variables. A socially phobic group and a nonanxious control group performed an impromptu speech and were told that their performance would be evaluated. Participants appraised their performance immediately after the speech and 1 week later, and the frequency of post-event rumination during the week following the speech was assessed. The socially phobic group maintained the negative appraisals of their speech over the week, whereas the nonclinical group showed increased positivity about their performance The socially phobic group also engaged in more negative rumination than controls. Treatment improved perceptions of performance and reduced negative rumination. These results are discussed in the light of cognitive models of social phobia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Regeneration of barium carbonate from barium sulphide in a pilot-scale bubbling column reactor and utilization for acid mine drainage

Batch regeneration of barium carbonate (BaCO(3)) from barium sulphide (BaS) slurries by passing CO(2) gas into a pilot-scale bubbling column reactor under ambient conditions was used to assess the technical feasibility of BaCO(3) recovery in the Alkali Barium Calcium (ABC) desalination process and its use for sulphate removal from high sulphate Acid Mine Drainage (AMD). The effect of key process parameters, such as BaS slurry concentration and CO(2) flow rate on the carbonation, as well as the extent of sulphate removal from AMD using the recovered BaCO(3) were investigated. It was observed that the carbonation reaction rate for BaCO(3) regeneration in a bubbling column reactor significantly increased with increase in carbon dioxide (CO(2)) flow rate whereas the BaS slurry content within the range 5-10% slurry content did not significantly affect the carbonation rate. The CO(2) flow rate also had an impact on the BaCO(3) morphology. The BaCO(3) recovered from the pilot-scale bubbling column reactor demonstrated effective sulphate removal ability during AMD treatment compared with commercial BaCO(3).     

Place-making or place-masking? The everyday political economy of “making place”

As redevelopment and gentrification strategies globally continue to be aimed at attracting wealthier residents and consumers in an effort to drive economic growth, concerns for and interventions in the interests of social equity appear decreasingly relevant. Government, private sector and community organisations have of course worked together in different times and places to implement programs that are more rather than less inclusive – the variations always depending on the spatial politics of the context. This paper examines contemporary discourses and practices of place-making in Melbourne, and asks whether ways of thinking about urban redevelopment as place-making in this time and place are likely to enable the inclusion of social equity in these urban “improvements”.     

The Social Media Use Integration Scale: Toward Reliability and Validity

The growing importance of social media and research interest in the field makes it imperative to consider the measures used to assess social networking site (SNS) use. The Facebook Intensity Scale has seen prolific use since its development; however, it has been criticized by some scholars. Jenkins-Guarnieri, Wright, and Johnson (2013) suggested another scale, the Social Media Use Integration Scale (SMUIS), which was developed to be suitable for use across different SNS platforms. They advised further research to confirm its psychometric properties, testing it on a more diverse sample than US college students and on social media other than Facebook. In this study, EFAs and a CFA were conducted to examine the validity of the SMUIS on Facebook and LinkedIn in the African context. The results provide preliminary evidence of the reliability and validity of the SMUIS for diverse age ranges. Further testing of the scale on LinkedIn is recommended.     

Removal of sulphate from mine water with barium sulphide

The Barium Sulphide Process removes sulphates from mine water by precipitating BaSO₄ with BaS. Barium sulphide is regenerated thermally by reducing the BaSO₄ with coal at 1000–1100°C for about 15 minutes. The process produces elemental sulphur and CaCO₃ as by-products. Laboratory studies achieve typical sulphate reductions of about 95%. Metals such as Fe, Ni, Co and Mn are also removed and pH can be increased from 1,4 to 8,3. The process has a water recovery of about 70%. For a 25 Ml/d plant (2g/l SO₄ ^2?), the capital cost is estimated at US$ 0,48m/Ml/d, while the detailed running costs amount to a net value of 27 c/m³. This compares well with that of other processes for desalination and is less than the fresh water price for new mines in South Africa, viz. 30c/m³.     

Maternal Fructose Intake Causes Developmental Reprogramming of Hepatic Mitochondrial Catalytic Activity and Lipid Metabolism in Weanling and Young Adult Offspring

Excess dietary fructose is a major public health concern, yet little is known about its influence on offspring development and later-life disease when consumed in excess during pregnancy. To determine whether increased maternal fructose intake could have long-term consequences on offspring health, we investigated the effects of 10% w/v fructose water intake during preconception and pregnancy in guinea pigs. Female Dunkin Hartley guinea pigs were fed a control diet (CD) or fructose diet (FD; providing 16% of total daily caloric intake) ad libitum 60 days prior to mating and throughout gestation. Dietary interventions ceased at day of delivery. Offspring were culled at day 21 (D21) (weaning) and at 4 months (4 M) (young adult). Fetal exposure to excess maternal fructose intake significantly increased male and female triglycerides at D21 and 4 M and circulating palmitoleic acid and total omega-7 through day 0 (D0) to 4 M. Proteomic and functional analysis of significantly differentially expressed proteins revealed that FD offspring (D21 and 4 M) had significantly increased mitochondrial metabolic activities of β-oxidation, electron transport chain (ETC) and oxidative phosphorylation and reactive oxygen species production compared to the CD offspring. Western blotting analysis of both FD offspring validated the increased protein abundances of mitochondrial ETC complex II and IV, SREBP-1c and FAS, whereas VDAC1 expression was higher at D21 but lower at 4 M. We provide evidence demonstrating offspring programmed hepatic mitochondrial metabolism and de novo lipogenesis following excess maternal fructose exposure. These underlying asymptomatic programmed pathways may lead to a predisposition to metabolic dysfunction later in life.     

Coupling semantic and statistical techniques for dynamically enriching web ontologies

With the development of the Semantic Web technology, the use of ontologies to store and retrieve information covering several domains has increased. However, very few ontologies are able to cope with the ever-growing need of frequently updated semantic information or specific user requirements in specialized domains. As a result, a critical issue is related to the unavailability of relational information between concepts, also coined missing background knowledge. One solution to address this issue relies on the manual enrichment of ontologies by domain experts which is however a time consuming and costly process, hence the need for dynamic ontology enrichment. In this paper we present an automatic coupled statistical/semantic framework for dynamically enriching large-scale generic ontologies from the World Wide Web. Using the massive amount of information encoded in texts on the Web as a corpus, missing background knowledge can therefore be discovered through a combination of semantic relatedness measures and pattern acquisition techniques and subsequently exploited. The benefits of our approach are: (i) proposing the dynamic enrichment of large-scale generic ontologies with missing background knowledge, and thus, enabling the reuse of such knowledge, (ii) dealing with the issue of costly ontological manual enrichment by domain experts. Experimental results in a precision-based evaluation setting demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.     

Limestone Neutralisation of Arsenic-Rich Effluent from a Gold Mine

Traditionally acid mine water is neutralised with lime. Limestone is a cheaper alternative for such applications. A case study showed that limestone can be used effectively to replace lime for the neutralization of arsenic rich acid water. The cost of limestone treatment is 45.8% less than that of lime. The acidity can be removed from 33.5 to 0.06 g/L (as CaCO₃). The study also showed no significant differences in the TCLP characteristics of the resultant sludge when water is treated with lime or with limestone. Sludge from the limestone treatment process can be disposed of on a non-hazardous landfill site. An erratum to this article can be found at     

Biological sulphate removal in an upflow packed bed reactor

Mine waters and industrial effluents with high sulphate concentrations create a disposal problem in terms of excess mineralization of surface waters. Removal of sulphate can be achieved by various processes including biological techniques, all of which involve appreciable costs. The purpose of this investigation was to improve on known biological methods for the removal of sulphate. Good sulphate removal was obtained by providing anaerobic conditions on a solid medium and maintaining a low hydrogen sulphide concentration by recirculating the water through a photosynthetic reactor for sulphur production.