Preventing and managing board complaints: The downside risk of custody evaluation.

Data compiled by the American Psychological Association (APA) revealed that 7%–10% of ethics complaints filed were against custody evaluators. Comparative data from various state and provincial psychology boards remain too sketchy to permit an accurate appraisal of this problem at the local level. Nevertheless, vulnerability to ethics complaints remains an occupational hazard for the private practitioner who engages in custody assessment. This article offers practitioners who conduct custody evaluations suggestions for reducing their risk of incurring an ethics complaint and discusses variables to consider when responding to a review board inquiry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Flame temperature, fuel structure, and fuel concentration effects on soot formation in inverse diffusion flames

Insights into soot formation processes are gained from chemical sampling and thermocouple probing of co-flowing inverse diffusion flames (IDFs), with the oxidizer in the center. The transition from near-to slightly sooting flames and the effects of flame temperature, fuel concentration, and fuel structure (using methane, ethene, propene and 1-butene) are investigated. The aromatic content of IDFS scales with the fuel's sooting tendency, and suggests that the formation of the aromatic ring is a controlling step in soot formation. In addition to the relatively well-established reactions involving C4 and C2 species, benzene may form directly from two C3 species for fuels that readily produce C3 species during pyrolysis and/or oxidative pyrolysis. The total concentration of growth species increases almost linearly with fuel concentration, but depends more weakly on flame temperature than would be expected if pure pyrolysis governed the intermediate hydrocarbon behavior.     

Superheating and boiling of water in hydrocarbons at high pressures

The boiling of water drops superheated in some nonvolatile liquid n-alkanes was experimentally investigated at ambient pressures up to 4 MPa. It was found that boiling appeared to be initiated at the water-hydrocarbon interface by either growth of a single bubble or by streams of bubbles being released from the interface. The temperature at which boiling was first observed was found to be relatively insensitive to pressure, increasing only about 40 K over a 4 MPa change in pressure.A qualitative theory based on the homogeneous nucleation of bubbles within superheated liquids is used to explain the effect of boiling pressure on temperature. The two observed boiling modes are justified in terms of consideration of the surface and interfacial free energies of the water and hydrocarbon, and qualitative agreement between the measured and predicted variation of nucleation pressures with temperature is demonstrated. The information obtained was used to provide insight into the mechanism by which the disruptive combustion or ‘microexplosion’ of burning water-in-fuel emulsified droplets would be initiated in high pressure combustion applications.     

The logic of wikis: The possibilities of the Web 2.0 classroom

The emergence of Web 2.0 and some of its ascendant tools such as blogs and wikis have the potential to dramatically change education, both in how we conceptualize and operationalize processes and strategies. We argue in this paper that it is a change that has been over a century in coming. The promise of the Web 2.0 is similar to ideas proposed by Pragmatists such as Charles Peirce and John Dewey. Peirce proposed the logic of abduction as critical for the types of unique/progressive thinking that leads to creative problem solving and/or discovery. While logic based in deduction offers outcomes with certainty, logic based in abduction offers potentially valuable insights. Dewey tried to implement progressive education in the classrooms. Dewey’s ideas, while influential, were often misunderstood, or considered too idealistic and/or unworkable in the traditional classrooms. Logics based in abduction required that different major premises and hypotheses for problem solving be held simultaneously and over time. This type of scenario is often times difficult if not impossible in education based on direct interactions. Hypertext, especially as capture through emerging tools of Web 2.0, may offer the technologies that enable the type of information based networks within the education process that promote abduction and the democratic classroom as Dewey envisioned.     

Transference in social perception: the role of chronic accessibility in significant-other representations

Research has shown that the activation and application of a significant-other representation to a new person, or transference, occurs in everyday social perception (S. M. Andersen & A. Baum, 1994; S. M. Andersen & S. W. Cole, 1990). Using a combined idiographic and nomothetic experimental paradigm, two studies examined the role of chronic accessibility of significant-other representations in transference. After learning about 4 fictional people, 1 of whom resembled a significant other, participants' recognition memory was assessed. Both studies showed greater false-positive memory in the significant-other condition, relative to control, even in the absence of priming. Study 2 showed that although the effect was greater when the significant-other representation was concretely applicable to the target information, it occurred even when no such applicability was present. Results implicate the chronic accessibility of significant-other representations in transference.     

Sooting behavior in temperature-controlled laminar diffusion flames

The sooting tendency of gaseous and liquid hydrocarbon fuels has been determined systematically in an axisymmetric laminar diffusion flame whose temperature was controlled by nitrogen dilution. Sooting tendency was measured by the minimum mass flow rate of fuel (FFM) at the smoke height. Result, plotted as log 1/FFM versus $\text{1}\text{T}$, where T is a calculated adiabatic flame temperature, show that fuel structure plays a significant role in diffusion flames. Comparison of these flame results with basic pyrolysis studies in the literature supports the concept that pyrolysis of the fuel molecule is a controlling factor in determining the overall tendency to soot, even though such tendency results from the competition of pyrolysis of the fuel and heterogeneous oxidation of the soot particles. The pyrolysis characteristics affecting the sooting process are rate, sequence and nature of products, and pyrolysis mode (pure or oxidative). The aromatics show a temperature sensitivity with respect to sooting tendency significantly lower than the other fuels. Conjugation of the initial fuel molecule and pyrolysis intermediates enhances sooting propensity.     

Cytogenetics, in situ hybridization and molecular approaches in the diagnosis of cancer

BACKGROUND: Dysmotility in the gastrointestinal tract increases with age. Colonic endocrine cells play an important role in regulating intestinal secretion and motility. The objective was to study possible age-related changes in the colonic endocrine cells of an animal model. METHODS: The colonic endocrine cells in four different age groups of mice were investigated by immunocytochemistry and quantified by computerized image analysis. The ages of these groups were 1, 3, 12 and 24 months old. RESULTS: The numbers of peptide YY (PYY), enteroglucagon and serotonin immunoreactive (IR) cells in 1-month-old mice were significantly increased compared with those of 3-month-old mice. Similarly, the numbers of these cells were significantly greater in 12- and 24-month-old mice than in 3-month-old mice. The cell secretory index (CSI) of enteroglucagon and serotonin IR cells was higher in 1-, 12- and 24-month-old mice than in 3-month-old mice. There was no significant difference between the different age groups regarding the CSI of PYY IR cells, nor was there any statistical difference between females and males in all endocrine cell types regarding numbers and CSI. CONCLUSION: It is suggested that the increase in colonic endocrine cells prior to puberty might reflect the role of gut hormones in the development of the gastrointestinal tract. It is speculated further that the increase in colonic endocrine cells with ageing may compensate for increased receptor resistance and/or weakened response of effector organs. It is suggested that the increase in numbers and unchanged CSI of PYY cells with advancing age may be responsible for the slow colonic transit and constipation, both of which increase with age.     

Philadelphia chromosome-positive myeloid cells in the peripheral blood of chronic myelogenous leukemia patients: comparison with the frequency detected in cycling cells of the bone marrow

Monitoring the frequency of the Philadelphia (Ph) chromosome in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) is important in determining the effectiveness of treatment for patients during therapy. This can be done with high resolution by subjecting short-term bone marrow cultures (48 h) to 24 h of mitotic arrest before harvest and detecting Ph-positive (Ph+) metaphases by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) in a procedure termed hypermetaphase FISH or HMF. Here, we compared procedures for detecting Ph+ interphase cells (interphase FISH or I-FISH) in peripheral blood polymorphonucleocytes (PMNs) with HMF results on the bone marrow of the same 26 CML patients in different stages of remission. The probes for I-FISH in these experiments were relatively large (200-300 kb) and sufficiently resolved in PMNs so that 97.5% of the cells were scorable. The correlation between the frequencies of Ph+ cells from the two different cell sources was excellent (r = 0.983, P < 0.0001); however, there was a consistently higher level of Ph+ cells observed in the cycling marrow cells than in the peripheral blood PMNs. This was discussed in terms of current theories of apoptosis in CML cells. The large number of PMNs analyzable by I-FISH (approximately 500/patient in this study) provided sufficiently narrow 99% confidence intervals to suggest the procedure as an effective and efficient method for monitoring the frequency of Ph+ cells in CML patients undergoing therapy. However, for detection and quantification of minimal residual disease, HMF is preferable to I-FISH because of the much lower frequency of false-positive readings with the former procedure.