Depressive attributional style.

143 undergraduates completed an attributional style scale designed by the authors, the short form of the Beck Depression Inventory, and the Multiple Affect Adjective Check List. Results show that depressed Ss, compared to nondepressed Ss, attributed bad outcomes to internal, stable, and global causes, as measured by the attributional style scale. This attributional style was predicted by the reformulated helplessness model of depression. In addition, relative to nondepressed Ss, depressed Ss attributed good outcomes to external, unstable causes. (8 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributional styles and life events in the classroom: Vulnerability and invulnerability to depressive mood reactions.

A core prediction of the reformulated model of learned helplessness and depression states that when confronted with the same negative life event, people who display a tendency to attribute negative outcomes to internal, stable, or global factors should be more likely to experience a depressive reaction than people who typically attribute negative outcomes to external, unstable, or specific factors. The present study tested that prediction with 227 undergraduates by determining whether the content of Ss' attributional styles at 1 point in time predicted the severity of their depressive response (Multiple Affect Adjective Check List) to receiving a low grade on an exam at a subsequent time. Consistent with the prediction, Ss with an internal or global attributional style for negative outcomes at Time 1 experienced a depressive response when confronted with a low grade; Ss with an external or specific attributional style were invulnerable to this response. In contrast to results for the internality and globality dimensions, Ss' scores along the stability attribution dimension were not correlated with the severity of their depressive response to the low grade. In the absence of a negative life event, Ss' generalized tendencies to make internal or global attributions for negative outcomes at Time 1 were not significantly correlated with their subsequent changes in depressive mood, although there was a nonsignificant positive correlation between severity of depressive response and the tendency to make global attributions for negative outcomes at Time l. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Space Shuttle ground processing with monitoring agents

To ensure that all shuttle systems are ready for launch, KSC engineers monitor tens of thousands of telemetry measurements. This intense data monitoring occurs constantly during ground processing, peaking in the weeks leading up to launch. KSC engineers developed and deployed a software agent $the NASA Engineering Shuttle Telemetry Agent - to assist in this around-the-clock monitoring. NESTA acts as a software agent for the NASA engineer. For this discussion, we define an agent as rule - based, autonomous software that reacts to its environment and communicates results to a human $the NASA engineer.     

Software reengineering for complex systems

Reengineering complex software is a difficult task that requires the expenditure of significant resources. To reduce associated costs and improve resultant systems, automated techniques have been developed that can be used throughout all phases of the reengineering process. Three systems are described that have been used successfully for reengineering at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The first system automatically transforms software written in CMS-2 to software written in Ada. The second system supports database design and automated query formulation, and employs conceptual-level intermediate representations for reverse and forward engineering as well as reengineering. The final system utilizes automated techniques to reengineer critical functions for performance enhancement. The systems described are evolving, and will provide a basis for future reengineering efforts.     

Correlates of social status among mainstreamed mentally retarded children.

Explored the relative contributions of misbehavior, academic incompetence, and exposure to nonretarded children to the explanation of retarded children's sociometric status. Teachers and peers rated retarded children on the dimensions of misbehavior and academic performance. The results indicate that perceived academic incompetence was associated with educable mentally retarded children's level of social acceptance, whereas perceived misbehavior was associated with retarded children's social rejection by peers. Amount of exposure to nonretarded children did not relate significantly to retarded children's social status. The data are discussed in terms of the assumptions underlying the mainstreaming of retarded children into regular classes. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automated Query Formulation Using an Entity–Relationship Conceptual Schema

Significant effort is expended in developing a high-level conceptual schema for a relational database. However, criticalknowledge is often discarded when the conceptual schema is mapped to aset of relation schemas. As a result, designers and users must employsparser logical-level knowledge to access data. Unfortunately, naiveusers do not possess the detailed logical-level knowledge required toformulate queries corresponding to ad hoc requests. Auniversal relation interface can shield users from underlyingdesign details. However, most universal relation systems have beenbased on abstractions not typically used by database designers.Consequently, the usefulness of these interfaces has been limited.This article demonstrates how an Entity-Relationship (ER) conceptualschema can be used by a high-level interface to formulate queriesautomatically. The notion of contextsis introduced to describethe segmentation of an ER conceptual schema into overlapping subgraphsthat correspond to sets of relations that can be joined in a losslessmanner. Given a set of contexts, natural join query formulation isstraightforward. As demonstrated with a case study using theprototype QUICK system, the techniques presented facilitate theconstruction of high-level, intelligent interfaces.