Relationship with the mother modulates the response of yearling Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) to the birth of a sibling.

The authors investigated the changes induced by the birth of a sibling in the relationship of 1-year-old Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) with their mothers and group companions. After the birth of a sibling, mother-yearling contact, proximity, and grooming decreased dramatically. Yearlings responded to such a reduction in maternal care in either of 2 radically different ways. Yearlings either sought attention from group companions and showed no sign of depression or did not compensate for the mother's reduced availability and became depressed. The modality of response was predicted by the quality of the relationship with the mother before the sibling birth. Yearlings that had spent a larger amount of time in contact with their mothers were less likely to become depressed. Security of the attachment relationship with the mother may be the factor mediating the link between the time in contact and the yearling's response to the birth of a sibling. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Construction features and environmental factors influencingcorrosion on a self-contained fluid-filled submarine cable circuit inLong Island Sound

A 345 kV self-contained fluid-filled cable circuit was installed in an environment where corrosion of the armor may occur. To better understand the conditions that may result in corrosion, stray currents in the cable end zones and in the middle (submarine) of the circuit were measured, and cable samples were analyzed to determine the electrochemical activity of the cable's outer layers. The results of the project revealed that electrolytic corrosion would affect the semiconductive polyethylene if sufficient stray current density (greater than 0.15 A/m²) was induced by stray currents which were present in Long Island Sound where the cables are installed. Measurements revealed stray current densities in excess of this level towards one end of the cable route. Various other considerations for corrosion are also discussed     

Real-Time Receiver Clock Jump Detection for Code Absolute Positioning with Kalman Filter

In global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) navigation the receiver and satellite clocks play a key role. The receivers are usually equipped with inaccurate quartz clocks, which experiment large drift relative to system time and consequently offset growing very fast; receiver manufactures bound the magnitude of the receiver clock offset to prevent it becomes too large and the actual bounding procedures vary from one manufacturer to another. The most common approach consists of introducing discrete jumps when the offset exceeds a threshold (usually 1 ms). This method is common in low-cost GNSS receivers and influences several applications as differential positioning, cycle-slip detection, precise point positioning technique, absolute positioning with Kalman filter. In this work some techniques to detect and account for millisecond clock jump, suitable for code positioning of a single receiver with Kalman filter, are proposed. Two deterministic algorithms to detect receiver clock jumps are shown: in measurement and parameter domain. The technique in measurement domain uses current pseudorange measurements compared with pseudorange and Doppler measurements at previous epoch; the technique in parameter domain compares current and previous least squares estimations of receiver clock bias, considering the clock drift. Two different approaches are described to account for the clock jumps, once detected, a deterministic one, consisting of fixing the pseudorange discontinuities, and a statistic one, consisting of suitably varying the Kalman filter settings. A static GNSS data set is processed with and without the proposed algorithms to demonstrate their efficiency.     

Three primitive reflexes in HIV-1-infected individuals: a possible clinical marker of early central nervous system involvement

We studied one hundred and six neurologically asymptomatic HIV-1-seropositive patients, mostly drug abusers, in various stages of HIV-1 infection to evaluate the frequency of three primitive reflexes: snout, palmomental, and glabellar. We also examined one hundred HIV-1-seronegative drug abusers and one hundred healthy heterosexual individuals. We observed the presence of one or more primitive reflexes in 41% of HIV-1-seropositive subjects, in 8% of HIV-1-seronegative drug abusers and in 3% of healthy individuals. We elicited more than one primitive reflex in 22% of patients, but never among the subjects of the two control groups. The associations of multiple reflexes were significantly more frequent in the most severe CDC stages. Our observations suggest that including evaluation of primitive reflexes in a standard neurologic examination may be useful in screening for early non specific cerebral dysfunction in neurologically asymptomatic HIV-1-seropositive subjects.