POP, A Broad-Spectrum Programming Language, 1967–2002

This paper discusses the POP-2 language and Multipop time-sharing system developed during the second half of the 1960s. POP-2's expressiveness spanned numeric and symbolic programming and supported experiments in logic of programming languages (by Boyer and Moore) and programming language concepts (for example, Michie's memoisation). The paper also discusses how the goals of POP-2 might be achieved in a successor language. Received October 2000 / Accepted in revised form January 2002     

Prolegomenon to the study of apparatus in early psychological laboratories circa 1875-1915.

Although the initial phase of experimental psychology is often referred to as the era of "brass instrument psychology," historians have generally ignored the equipment that was used in favor of the contributions of individuals and "schools." the present paper urges historians to explore the ways in which the linkage between mechanical facilities and concepts interacted and to trace the effects of technological as well as theoretical difficulties. Although attrition of relevant data has occurred, some existent sources are identified including stock lists of manufacturers, laboratory manuals and university inventories, photographs, journal articles, and reminiscences of psychologists. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Solomon Diamond (1906–1998).

Presents an obituary for Solomon Diamond. Diamond was born in New York City in 1906, and his education and early career were in New York. His PhD was in social psychology. As a historian, he was deeply involved in the somewhat rarified world of very early scientific psychology, and prescientific psychology, and was also committed to counseling psychology (a field of application) and to personality (the empirical-theoretical basis for the application). At California State University, Los Angeles, he was active in university governance and the American Association of University Professors, activities that were part of a lifetime commitment to progressive causes. In 1965 he was a charter member of the APA Division of the History of Psychology (26) and a charter member of the board of advisors of the Archives of the History of American Psychology. The APA Division of the History of Psychology elected him president-elect in 1971-1972. Diamond passed away in 1998. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferring the positions of bodies from specified spatial relationships

A program has been developed which takes a specification of a set of bodies and of spatial relations that are to hold between them in some goal state, and produces expressions denoting the positions of the bodies in the goal state together with residual equations linking the variables in these expressions.     

Virginia Staudt Sexton (1916–1997).

Presents an obituary for Virginia Staudt Sexton. Sexton was born on August 30, 1916, in New York City, where she spent her life and career. She graduated cum laude from Hunter College with a major in classics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She first taught elementary school and then completed a PhD in experimental psychology at Fordham University. Her first academic appointment was at Notre Dame College of Staten Island. In 1953 she moved, as Instructor, to Hunter College in the Bronx (later renamed Herbert H. Lehman College), from which she retired in 1979 as Professor Emerita. She immediately resumed her career, however, as Distinguished Professor of Psychology at St. John's University in Jamaica, New York, a position from which she retired in 1990. Sexton was a Fellow of eight divisions of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a member of six more. She began to list history as her major field of interest in APA directories as early as 1957, and it retained its importance in her entries from then on. Sexton died in 1997. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Three-dimensional model acquisition for medical robotics-assisted burn debridement system

This paper discusses the principles for the acquisition of a three-dimensional (3-D) computational model of the treatment area of a burn victim for a vision-servo-guided robot which ablates the victim's burned skin tissue by delivering a high-energy laser light to the burned tissue. The medical robotics assistant system consists of: a robot whose end effector is equipped with a laser head, whence the laser beam emanates, and a vision system which is used to acquire the 3-D coordinates of some points on the body surface; 3-D surface modeling routines for generating the surface model of the treatment area; and control and interface hardware and software for control and integration of all the system components. Discussion of the vision and surface modeling component of the medical robotics assistant system is the focus of this paper. The robot-assisted treatment process has two phases: an initial survey phase during which a model of the treatment area on the skin is built and used to plan an appropriate trajectory for the robot in the subsequent phase—the treatment phase, during which the laser surgery is performed. During the survey phase, the vision system employs a camera to acquire points on the surface of the patient's body by using the camera to capture the contour traced by a plane of light generated by a low power laser, distinct from the treatment laser. The camera's image is then processed. Selected points on the camera's two-dimensional image frame are used as input to a process that generates 3-D body surface points as the intersection point of the plane of light and the line of sight between the camera's image point and the body surface point. The acquired body surface points are then used to generate a computational model of the treatment area using the non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) surface modeling technique. The constructed NURBS surface model is used to generate a treatment plan for the execution of the treatment phase. The robot plan for treatment is discussed in another paper. The prototype of the entire burn treatment system is at an advanced stage of development and tests of the engineering principles on inanimate objects, discussed herein, are being conducted.