Photographs from Auschwitz

Abstract

Photographs, albums, families. Many psychotherapists ask their patients to bring in their family albums to discover a new, sharper point of view of the family, its structure and dependencies. Many times we ask friends to show us their family photo album to get to know them better. Sometimes we ourselves look at our own family photo album and all of a sudden we see details we have not yet noticed: a smile, a look, a sign.     

Green Reconfigurable Radio Systems

The wireless standards scene and its evolution strengthens the need for functional flexibility in future radios. Multimode terminals supporting an increasingly large variety of standards (cellular, WLANs, WMANs, WPANs) are subject to a cost increase that is addressed by more flexible radio interfaces. Energy efficiency, however, is the main obstacle to successfully deploying such reconfigurable radios. To address this, it is essential to design energy-scalable SDRs, both for the radio front-end and the digital baseband platform. Complementing this, an essential ingredient is an intelligent controller that optimally exploits this scalability and the run-time dynamics to translate potential energy scalability to actual low-power operation. To realize this goal, an energy-aware cross-layer radio management framework is introduced. It was instantiated in different case studies, showing the applicability of this approach in realistic setups. Results have shown that substantial gains can be achieved through effective cross-layer optimization and problem partitioning. Next, it was shown that SDRs will play a crucial role in enabling CRs, which will enable saving on both the scarce radio spectrum and battery lifetime. A key building block for the design of such CRs, i.e., the appropriate control intelligence to make the SDR platform cognitive, can be derived by incrementally building on the proposed framework. As a result, green (or environment friendly) reconfigurable radio systems will emerge, which offer a wide variety and ubiquitous availability of wireless services, while overcoming energy and spectrum scarcity     

Reciprocal interactions between intralaminar and lateral thalamic nuclei in rats

The effect of the nootropic drug piracetam (100 mg/kg) on kindled seizures, kindling-induced learning deficits, and histological alterations due to changes in central excitability was investigated in Wistar rats. The animals were kindled by repeated i.p. injections of an initially subconvulsive dose of pentylenetetrazol (PTZ). As a control, piracetam or physiological saline was given 60 minutes before PTZ. Twenty-four hours after completion of kindling the rats were tested in a shuttle-box paradigm. Seven days after the final kindling injection, the animals received a challenge dose of PTZ. Finally, the brains of the rats were processed for histological investigation. Pentylenetetrazol-kindled animals showed increasing seizure scores, and a learning deficit in the shuttle-box. Piracetam had no effect either on kindling development or on the reaction to a challenge dose of PTZ, but it protected the animals against the kindling-induced reduction of learning performance. The substance had no effect on learning performance in control animals. In distinct hippocampal structures, a neuronal cell loss was found in kindled rats. Interestingly, piracetam counteracted this damage efficaciously. The effects of piracetam are discussed in terms of its cytoprotective action. It is suggested that a coadministration of piracetam with clinically used antiepileptic drugs might be useful in antiepileptic therapy.     

Performance Analysis of Slotted Carrier Sense IEEE 802.15.4 Medium Access Layer

Advances in low-power and low-cost sensor networks have led to solutions mature enough for use in a broad range of applications varying from health monitoring to building surveillance. The development of those applications has been stimulated by the finalization of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which defines the medium access control (MAC) and physical layer for sensor networks. One of the MAC schemes proposed is slotted Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA), and this paper analyzes whether this scheme meets the design constraints of those low-power and low-cost sensor networks. The paper provides a detailed analytical evaluation of its performance in a star topology network, for uplink and acknowledged uplink traffic. Both saturated and unsaturated periodic traffic scenarios are considered. The form of the analysis is similar to that of Bianchi for IEEE 802.11 DCF only in the use of a per user Markov model to capture the state of each user at each moment in time. The key assumptions to enable this important simplification and the coupling of the per user Markov models are however different, as a result of the very different designs of the 802.15.4 and 802.11 carrier sensing mechanisms. The performance predicted by the analytical model is very close to that obtained by simulation. Throughput and energy consumption analysis is then performed by using the model for a range of scenarios. Some design guidelines are derived to set the 802.15.4 parameters as function of the network requirements.     

Integrated health delivery systems: Psychology's potential role.

Describes the ways in which psychologists are defining their role within integrated health delivery systems (IHDSs). The integration of psychological services with primary medical care is discussed. Examples of medical crisis counselling services as part of a medical practice and PhD student preparation for professional work in IHDSs are provided. Recent collaboration between the military and the APA Committee for the Advancement of Professional Practice's Task Force on Primary Care is mentioned. For psychology, the key will be legislatively broadening psychologists' defined role within the generic health delivery system to match their existing everyday clinical role in health care. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

MEERA: Cross-Layer Methodology for Energy Efficient Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks

In many portable devices, wireless network interfaces consume upwards of 30% of scarce system energy. Reducing the transceiver's power consumption to extend the system lifetime has therefore become a design goal. Our work is targeted at this goal and is based on the following two observations. First, conventional energy management approaches have focused independently on minimizing the fixed energy cost (by shutdown) and on scalable energy costs (by leveraging, for example, the modulation, code-rate and transmission power). These two energy management approaches present a tradeoff. For example, lower modulation rates and transmission power minimize the variable energy component, but this shortens the sleep duration thereby increasing fixed energy consumption. Second, in order to meet the quality of service (QoS) timeliness requirements for multiple users, we need to determine to what extent each system in the network may sleep and scale. Therefore, we propose a two-phase methodology that resolves the sleep-scaling tradeoff across the physical, communications and link layers at design time and schedules nodes at runtime with near optimal energy-efficient configurations in the solution space. As a result, we are able to achieve very low run-time overheads. Our methodology is applied to a case study on delivering a guaranteed QoS for multiple users with MPEG-4 video over a slow-fading channel. By exploiting runtime controllable parameters of actual RF components and a modified 802.11 medium access controller, system lifetime is increased by a factor of 3-to-10 in comparison with conventional techniques.     

DIFFS: A Low Power,Multi-Mode,Multi-Standard Flexible Digital Front-End for Sensing in Future Cognitive Radios

Cognitive Radios provide communication devices with the flexibility to adjust to varying network and channel conditions. For this to be fully realizable spectrum sensing and signal reception have to happen simultaneously and have to require as little power as necessary to function in handheld devices. This work argues for the need of flexible digital-front ends as indispensable building block, able to perform control operations over the analog front-end and to perform sensing and synchronization procedures without the need of power consuming baseband processors. A low power, reconfigurable digital front-end that supports concurrent synchronization and sensing of high-throughput wireless standards is presented. Multiple operating modes, useful for various communication standards, such as LTE, WLAN and DVB-T are introduced and analyzed. The digital front-end has been implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology resulting in a chip area of 6.4 mm2. Fine grain clock gating allows synchronization at 4 mW and sensing at 7 mW power consumption. Experiments in combination with a reconfigurable analog front-end show that a 1.7 GHz wide frequency band can be scanned based on energy detection in an exceptionally low time window of 10 ms while consuming 13 mW power and that coarse energy detection can speed-up the sensing process. Furthermore, advanced feature detection for DVB-T and LTE signals is implemented and measured. Low power sensing of DVB-T signals shows that a target false alarm rate of 10 % and a detection probability of 90 % at an input power level of?106 dBm while consuming 7 mW power are possible. Synchronization-aided FFT-based LTE sensing with leakage cancellation was experimentally validated for various bandwidths showing a power consumption of maximum 20 mW.     

Gamma Radiolysis of Starches Derived from Different Foodstuffs. Part IV. Study of Radiodepolymerization

The foodstuffs from which the investigated starches (maize, waxymaize, amylomaize, manioc, bread-wheat, potatoe, rice and haricot bean) derive has only little influence upon their radiodepolymerization, as previously stated by theory.     

Medical crisis counseling in a health maintenance organization: Preventive intervention.

Mental health clinicians can play a cost-effective role in reducing distressing psychological symptoms accompanying diagnosis of chronic illness. Medical crisis counseling (MCC) is a focal short-term intervention directly addressing illness-related psychosocial problems. A randomized clinical trial tested the effectiveness of MCC. Counseling was offered to patients who had cancer that was newly diagnosed, 1st heart attacks, or adult-onset diabetes and was contrasted with a control group receiving an HMO's standard mental health care. Significant reductions in distress attributable to MCC were noted in some patient groups. No increases in overall medical costs and some decreased mental health utilization and costs were noted with MCC use. Practitioners can easily apply MCC to improving patients' quality of life and mental health, without adding to health care costs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thematic Apperception Test method for the differentiation of families of schizophrenics, delinquents, and "normals."

Assessed the dimension of Parent * Child interactional behavior from 240 TAT stories told by parents of 10 schizophrenics, 10 delinquents, and 10 "normals." A modified content analysis was applied to stories dealing with parent-child plots. Common underlying factors contributing to similar story qualities were abstracted into higher order classes of story behavior. 3 modal behavior categories were defined: personally involved, child-centered, flexible interactions (A), impersonally involved, superficial interactions (B), and overinvolved, parent-centered interactions (C). Blind rating of the stories by Categories A, B, and C significantly and reliably differentiated the 3 parental groups. Blind rating of a separate series of TAT stories told by 20 mothers of schizophrenic children and 20 mothers of normal children using the National Institute of Mental Health method significantly differentiated the 2 parental groups. Processes that may have determined the different patterns of narrated Parent-Child interactions are considered. (22 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)