Do High-Achieving Female Students Underperform in Private? The Implications of Threatening Environments on Intellectual Processing.

Stereotype threat research has demonstrated that stereotypes can harm student performance in the face of public evaluation by peers or an experimenter. The current study examined whether stereotypes can also threaten in private settings. Female students completed a math test in 3-person groups, which consisted of either 2 other women (same gender) or 2 men (minority). In addition, students either believed their performance would be broadcasted to their peers (public) or not (private). Results revealed that minority students performed worse than same-gender students in both public and private environments. This finding supports the concept of threatening intellectual environments and shows how far reaching the effects of stereotypes can be. The authors discuss these findings in relation to research on tokenism and to stereotype threat and its educational implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Advanced methods for displays and remote control of robots

An in-depth evaluation of the usability and situation awareness performance of different displays and destination controls of robots are presented. In two experiments we evaluate the way information is presented to the operator and assess different means for controlling the robot. Our study compares three types of displays: a “blocks” display, a HUD (head-up display), and a radar display, and two types of controls: touch screen and hand gestures. The HUD demonstrated better performance when compared to the blocks display and was perceived to have greater usability compared to the radar display. The HUD was also found to be more useful when the operation of the robot was more difficult, i.e., when using the hand-gesture method. The experiments also pointed to the importance of using a wide viewing angle to minimize distortion and for easier coping with the difficulties of locating objects in the field of view margins. The touch screen was found to be superior in terms of both objective performance and its perceived usability. No differences were found between the displays and the controllers in terms of situation awareness. This research sheds light on the preferred display type and controlling method for operating robots from a distance, making it easier to cope with the challenges of operating such systems.     

Cellular processing tools for high-performance simulation

Cellular automata offer a powerful modeling approach for complex systems in which global behavior arises from the collective effect of many locally interacting, simple components. Several tools based on CA are providing meaningful results for real-world applications. Cellular automata represent an efficient paradigm for the computer solution of important problems in science and engineering. Moreover, the CA model lets researchers effectively use parallel computers to achieve scalable performance. As researchers use parallel computers to solve scientific problems, they will need problem representations (paradigms) for this class of computers. Abstract mathematical models that offer an implicitly parallel representation of problems better match those architectures, but could benefit from new high-level languages, environments, and techniques. The three should support all the development steps of computational science applications while hiding architectural details from users. Computational science is also an interdisciplinary field in which many areas converge, and developing applications in this field requires the cooperation of people from different domains. Modeling and simulation using parallel cellular methods helps researchers cooperate by offering both a way to code an algorithm and an integrated environment for developing software     

Distributed data mining on grids: services, tools, and applications

Data mining algorithms are widely used today for the analysis of large corporate and scientific datasets stored in databases and data archives. Industry, science, and commerce fields often need to analyze very large datasets maintained over geographically distributed sites by using the computational power of distributed and parallel systems. The grid can play a significant role in providing an effective computational support for distributed knowledge discovery applications. For the development of data mining applications on grids we designed a system called Knowledge Grid. This paper describes the Knowledge Grid framework and presents the toolset provided by the Knowledge Grid for implementing distributed knowledge discovery. The paper discusses how to design and implement data mining applications by using the Knowledge Grid tools starting from searching grid resources, composing software and data components, and executing the resulting data mining process on a grid. Some performance results are also discussed.     

A super-peer model for resource discovery services in large-scale Grids

As deployed Grids increase from tens to thousands of nodes, peer-to-peer (P2P) techniques and protocols can be used to implement scalable services and applications. The super-peer model is a novel approach that helps the convergence of P2P models and Grid environments and can be used to deploy a P2P information service in Grids. A super-peer serves a single physical organization in a Grid, and manages metadata associated to the resources provided by the nodes of that organization. Super-peers connect to each other to form a peer network at a higher level. This paper examines how the super-peer model can handle membership management and resource discovery services in a multi-organizational Grid. A simulation analysis evaluates the performance of a resource discovery protocol; simulation results can be used to tune protocol parameters in order to increase search efficiency.     

Randomised trial comparing hysterectomy with endometrial ablation for dysfunctional uterine bleeding: psychiatric and psychosocial aspects

OBJECTIVE: To compare in psychiatric and psychosocial terms the outcome of hysterectomy and endometrial ablation for the treatment of dysfunctional uterine bleeding. DESIGN: Prospective randomised controlled trial. SETTING--Obstetrics and gynaecology department of a large teaching hospital. SUBJECTS: 204 women with dysfunctional bleeding for whom hysterectomy would have been the preferred treatment were recruited over 24 months and randomly allocated to hysterectomy (99 women) or to hysteroscopic surgery (transcervical resection (52 women) or laser ablation (53 women). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Mental state, martial relationship, psychosocial and sexual adjustment in assessments conducted before the operation and one month, six months, and 12 months later. RESULTS: Both treatments significantly reduced the anxiety and depression present before the operation, and there were no differences in mental health between the groups at 12 months. Hysterectomy did not lead to postoperative psychiatric illness. Sexual interest after the operation did not vary with treatment. Overall, 46 out of 185 (25%) women reported a loss sexual interest and 50 out of 185 (27%) reported increased sexual interest. Marital relationships were unaffected by surgery. Personality and duration of dysfunctional uterine bleeding played no significant part in determining outcome. CONCLUSIONS: Hysteroscopic surgery and hysterectomy have a similar effect on psychiatric and psychosocial outcomes. There is no evidence that hysterectomy leads to postoperative psychiatric illness.     

Densification kinetics of coatings being sinter-bonded in a model of viscous flow of a porous solid

Conclusions A theory of sinter-bonding of a powder layer in a model of a linear viscous porous medium is proposed in which the structural transformation of the layer during sinter-bonding is allowed for by introducing two kinetic parameters characterizing sinter-bonding in its initial and final stages; it is shown that there is good agreement between theoretical and experimental data for the isothermal sinter-bonding of PG-SR4 powder in the temperature range 1023–1173°K and the pressure range 10–50 MPa. A study was made of the effect of temperature on the kinetic parameters and of the kinetics of densification of PG-SR4 powder during heating at a constant rate in the range 1100–1250°K; satisfactory agreement is noted between theory and experiment, and the conclusion is arrived at that there exists a lower temperature limit of active sintering.Translated from Poroshkovaya Metallurgiya, No. 8(284), pp. 25–29, August, 1986.