Need for social approval as a predictor of the strategic and outcome aspects of bargaining behaviour in asymmetric power situations: An interactionist approach.

Investigated the effects of need for social approval (NAP) on the outcome (Exp. I) and strategic (Exp. II) aspects of bargaining in 2 mixed-motive nonconstant sum games. An interactionist approach was adopted in that (a) the possible attenuating effects of a contextual variable (differential bargaining power) were examined; and (b) face-to-face open communication was permitted. Exp. I, with 64 male and female undergraduates, shows that low-NAP Ss obtained higher final outcomes than high-NAP Ss only when the former were in the low-power position. Results of Exp. II, with 32 male Ss, support the following conclusions: (a) in the high power position, high-NAP Ss (as opposed to low-NAP Ss) adopt a softer initial bid strategy, exhibit a higher overall level of offers, and reach agreements that yielded them a smaller dyadic profit difference; and (b) in the low-power position, personality differences in NAP do not, as predicted, have a significant effect on strategies employed or final outcomes attained. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An FEL-based microwave system for fusion

This paper describes designs for 280-GHz and 560-GHz microwave sources based on free electron lasers (FELs). These 10-MW units are based on technology developed over the last 5 years. A first demonstration of high-average-power microwave production with an FEL system is expected in the Microwave Tokamak Experiment (MTX) facility. This paper gives details on the design and construction of that 250-GHz, 2-MW system and discusses specific applications for the Compact Ignition Tokamak (CIT).     

Alternative methods of phenol wastewater control

Methods for removal of phenol from large volume flow effluents by biological and chemical oxidation and adsorption are described. pH and temperature control and nutrient addition are necessary in biological systems, which may utilise trickling filters, aerated lagoons or activated sludge treatment. Adsorption by activated carbon produces the lowest level of phenol in the final effluent of all methods examined, but is the most expensive. Oxidation by chlorine is effective but needs careful control; chlorine dioxide may be an alternative. Hydrogen peroxide, potassium permanganate and ozone as oxidising agents have been examined. For very large effluent flows ozonation appears the least costly, use of hydrogen peroxide and potassium permanganate being competitive with ozone for smaller flows.     

OpenMP: shared-memory parallelism from the ashes

The paper discusses OpenMP, an emerging standard for shared-memory parallelism that has considerable industry support. Large corporations such as IBM, Intel, and Silicon Graphics are building products to support the standard and also participating in its development     

A PLANNING APPROACH TO DECLARER PLAY IN CONTRACT BRIDGE

Although game-tree search works well in perfect-information games, it is less suitable for imperfect-information games such as contract bridge. The lack of knowledge about the opponents' possible moves gives the game tree a very large branching factor, making it impossible to search a significant portion of this tree in a reasonable amount of time.
This paper describes our approach for overcoming this problem. We represent information about bridge in a task network extended to represent multi-agency and uncertainty. Our game-playing procedure uses this task network to generate game trees in which the set of alternative choices is determined not by the set of possible actions, but by the set of available tactical and strategic schemes.
We have tested this approach on declarer play in the game of bridge, in an implementation called Tignum 2. On 5000 randomly generated notrump deals, Tignum 2 beat the strongest commercially available program by 1394 to 1302, with 2304 ties. These results are statistically significant at the α= 0.05 level. Tignum 2 searched an average of only 8745.6 moves per deal in an average time of only 27.5 seconds per deal on a Sun SPARCstation 10. Further enhancements to Tignum 2 are currently underway.     

Absolute calibration of image plates for electrons at energy between 100 keV and 4 MeV

We measured the absolute response of image plate (Fuji BAS SR2040) for electrons at energies between 100 keV and 4 MeV using an electron spectrometer. The electron source was produced from a short pulse laser irradiated on solid density targets. This paper presents the calibration results of image plate photon stimulated luminescence per electron at this energy range. The Monte Carlo radiation transport code MCNPX results are also presented for three representative incident angles onto the image plates and corresponding electron energy depositions at these angles. These provide a complete set of tools that allows extraction of our absolute calibration to other spectrometer setting at this electron energy range.