Normality and impairment following profound early institutional deprivation: A longitudinal follow-up into early adolescence.

Longitudinal analyses on normal versus impaired functioning across 7 domains were conducted in children who had experienced profound institutional deprivation up to the age of 42 months and were adopted from Romania into U.K. families. Comparisons were made with noninstitutionalized children adopted from Romania and with nondeprived within-U.K. adoptees placed before the age of 6 months. Specifically, the validity of the assessment, the degree of continuity and change in levels of functioning from 6 to 11 years, and the factors in the pre- and postadoption environment accounting for heterogeneity in outcome were examined. Pervasive impairment was significantly raised in children experiencing institutional deprivation for ≥6 months of life, with a minority within this group showing no impairment. There was no additional significant effect of duration of deprivation beyond the 6-month cutoff, and few other predictors explained outcome. The pattern of normality/impairment was mainly established by 6 years of age, with considerable continuity at the individual level between 6 and 11 years. The findings are discussed in terms of the possibility of a sensitive period for development. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Family-Responsive Interventions, Perceived Organizational and Supervisor Support, Work-Family Conflict, and Psychological Strain.

This study examined organizational family-responsive policies, perceptions of the organization as family supportive, and supervisor support as issues that may be salient to the experience of conflict between paid employment (work) and family roles. Data were collected from 355 managerial personnel in New Zealand. Although work-family conflict and psychological strain were strongly linked, the availability of organizational policies had no significant association with levels of conflict or strain, whereas policy usage was related only to work-to-family interference and not to family-to-work interference. On the other hand, perceptions of the organization as family supportive and supervisor support for work-family balance displayed significant relationships with key variables, highlighting the importance of these variables for interventions designed to ameliorate the negative impact of work-family conflict on managerial well-being. Implications for the effective implementation of family-responsive interventions are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gaming the Regulator: A Survey

Many regulators use benchmarking as part of the incentive-based regulation of natural monopolies so as to reduce the possibilities for gaming. However, the use of benchmarking can lead firms to pursue virtual rather than true performance improvements by gaming the regulator’s benchmarking in a number of ways that are contrary to the intentions of the scheme.     

The time course of spoken word learning and recognition: Studies with artificial lexicons.

The time course of spoken word recognition depends largely on the frequencies of a word and its competitors, or neighbors (similar-sounding words). However, variability in natural lexicons makes systematic analysis of frequency and neighbor similarity difficult. Artificial lexicons were used to achieve precise control over word frequency and phonological similarity. Eye tracking provided time course measures of lexical activation and competition (during spoken instructions to perform visually guided tasks) both during and after word learning, as a function of word frequency, neighbor type, and neighbor frequency. Apparent shifts from holistic to incremental competitor effects were observed in adults and neural network simulations, suggesting such shifts reflect general properties of learning rather than changes in the nature of lexical representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fodor and Pylyshyn on connectionism

Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988) have argued that the cognitive architecture is not Connectionist. Their argument takes the following form: (1) the cognitive architecture is Classical; (2) Classicalism and Connectionism are incompatible; (3) therefore the cognitive architecture is not Connectionist. In this essay I argue that Fodor and Pylyshyn's defenses of (1) and (2) are inadequate. Their argument for (1), based on their claim that Classicalism best explains the systematicity of cognitive capacities, is an invalid instance of inference to the best explanation. And their argument for (2) turns out to be question-begging. The upshot is that, while Fodor and Pylyshyn have presented Connectionists with the important empirical challenge of explaining systematicity, they have failed to provide sufficient reason for inferring that the cognitive architecture is Classical and not Connectionist.     

Parallelization of WHILE loops on pipelined architectures

Modulo scheduling theory can be applied successfully to overlap Fortran DO loops on pipelined computers issuing multiple operations per cycle both with and without special loop architectural support. This paper shows that a broader class of loops—REPEAT-UNTIL, WHILE, and loops with more than one exit, in which the trip count is not known beforehand—can also be overlapped efficiently on multiple-issue pipelined machines. The approach is described with respect to a specific machine model, but it can be extended to other models. Special features in the architecture, as well as compiler representations for accelerating these loop constructs, are discussed. Performance results are presented for a few select examples.An earlier version of this paper was presented at Supercomputing '90.     

Multivariate polynomials, standard tableaux, and representations of symmetric groups

This paper is concerned with structural and algorithmic aspects of certain R-bases in polynomial rings R[X_ij] over a commutative ring R with 1. These bases are related to standard tableaux. We shall examine the main tools in full detail: (symmetrized) bideterminants, Capelli operators, hyperdominance, and generalized Laplace's expansions. These tools are then applied to the representation theory of symmetric groups. In particular, we present an algorithm which efficiently computes for every skew module of a symmetric group an R-basis which is adapted to a Specht series. This result is a constructive, characteristic-free analogue of the celebrated Littlewood-Richardson rule. This paper will serve as the basis for a possible generalization of that rule to more general shapes.