Public health approaches to family maltreatment prevention: Resetting family psychology's sights from the home to the community.

The authors review recent trends within the family maltreatment research field toward a public health approach, discuss the rationale for community-level interventions for family maltreatment, and sketch the history and development of community-level prevention approaches. Next, to illustrate the both the logistic and the scientific challenges of such work, the authors discuss the development and testing of an empirically guided, research-community partnership for the prevention of family maltreatment, the United States Air Force's NORTH STAR initiative (New Orientation to Reduce Threats to Health From Secretive Problems That Affect Readiness). Finally, recommendations are made for effective and disseminable family maltreatment prevention interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Properties of CNTs-modified lead-free BCTS ceramic–Portland fly ash cement composites

Fly ash (FA) is widely used as a supplementary cementitious material in the production of Portland cement concrete. The effect of addition of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and FA on the properties of barium calcium stannate titanate (BCTS) ceramic–Portland FA cement composites was investigated. These composites have potential for use as sensors and transducers in the monitoring of structural health in concrete structures containing FA. CNTs were found to have filled the pores of the composites. All composites showed good compatibility with the concrete mix. The dielectric constant and electrical conductivity of composites were in the range 200–257 and 1.04 × 10^–6 to 1.66 × 10⁻⁶ S/m, respectively. The presence of FA in composites increased the piezoelectric voltage coefficient (g₃₃). Adding CNTs increased the piezoelectric charge coefficient (d₃₃), thickness electromechanical coupling coefficient (K_t), and also g₃₃ but decreased mechanical quality factor (Q_m), which is related to good for the receiving sensor and transducer application. CNTs can improve the properties of these composites and composite with FA content at 10 vol.%, and CNTs at 1 vol.% exhibited the highest compressive strength and piezoelectric values (d₃₃ = 44 pC/N, g₃₃ = 20.21×10^–3 V m/N, and K_t = 18.9%), along with higher g₃₃ values, than pure BCTS ceramic.     

Influence of heat treatment temperature on the properties of the lithium disilicate-fluorcanasite glass-ceramics

This study aims to investigate the influence of heat treatment temperatures on the mechanical properties and chemical solubility (CS) of lithium disilicate-fluorcanasite glass-ceramics and to develop new dental materials. The glasses and glass-ceramics were prepared using CaF₂-SiO₂-CaO-K₂O-Na₂O-Li₂O-Al₂O₃-P₂O₅-based glass system using a conventional melt quenching method followed by a two-stage crystallization process. This two-stage method involves two heating temperature steps: first at a constant temperature (T_S1) of 600°C and second step at varying temperatures (T_S2) of 650, 700, 750, and 800°C. The crystallization behavior, phase formation, microstructure, translucency characteristic, density, hardness, fracture strength, and CS were investigated. It was found that the lithium disilicate crystal acted as the main crystalline phase, and the crystalline phase of fluorcanasite occurred at the heat treatment temperatures of 750 and 800°C. In addition, it was found that density, hardness, fracture strength, and CS increased while the translucency values decreased with increasing heat treatment temperatures. Furthermore, the CS increased dramatically when the fluorcanasite phases occurred in the glass-ceramic samples. The maximum density values, Vickers hardness, fracture toughness, and flexural strength are 2.56 g/cm³, 6.73 GPa, 3.38 MPa.m^1/2, and 259 MPa, respectively. These results may offer a possibility to design a new material for dental applications based on lithium disilicate-fluorcanasite glass-ceramics.     

Optimization of the Abencor system to extract olive oil from irrigated orchards

Studying the composition of olive oil requires cold‐press olive oil extraction. One of the most common laboratorial mills is the Abencor system. However, its operation protocol was formulated decades ago for Spanish olive varieties from traditionally rain‐fed orchards. We modified this protocol for use with “Barnea” and “Picual” olives from irrigated orchards that are characterized by high water content. Independent effects of malaxation time, temperature, water addition and talc addition on extraction efficiency, and major quality indices of virgin olive oil were studied. Overall, addition of talc to the fruit paste was the most significant treatment in terms of yield and quality of the oil although its effect was cultivar dependent. Improved oil yield was particularly significant for “Picual.” Extended malaxation time was also effective in improving oil extractability. Addition of talc generally improved oil‐quality parameters, while water addition had the opposite effect. Yet, quality parameters remained within the extra virgin level. Temperature increments reduced oil quality. The need to adapt a modified protocol for use with fruits from irrigated orchards that will facilitate critical comparison of results obtained from different agronomic theses and different laboratories is highlighted. It is recommended that each laboratory develops an appropriate protocol for the operation of the Abencor system in accordance to the characteristics of the olive fruit they are working with. Practical applications: Abencor system serves as the major laboratorial mill world‐wide. Those mills allow the researchers to characterize olive oil in accordance to the treatments received by the trees. This cannot be done in commercial mills. The system operation protocol was established decades ago for fruits from rain‐fed orchards. In the past decade there was a rapid increase in the use of irrigation in olive orchards and therefore it is crucial to optimize the operation protocol for fruit with relatively high water content. In the current work we have evaluated the influence of a series of technological parameters (i.e., talc and water addition, malaxation time, and temperature) on the extraction efficiency and quality indices of olive oil. This allowed us to present a modified protocol for the Abencor system operation suitable for olive fruit of irrigated orchards that will facilitate a reliable representation of the influence of different treatments on the yield and characteristics of the olive oil.     

Cell-free protein synthesis and assembly on a biochip

Biologically active complexes such as ribosomes and bacteriophages are formed through the self-assembly of proteins and nucleic acids. Recapitulating these biological self-assembly processes in a cell-free environment offers a way to develop synthetic biodevices. To visualize and understand the assembly process, a platform is required that enables simultaneous synthesis, assembly and imaging at the nanoscale. Here, we show that a silicon dioxide grid, used to support samples in transmission electron microscopy, can be modified into a biochip to combine in situ protein synthesis, assembly and imaging. Light is used to pattern the biochip surface with genes that encode specific proteins, and antibody traps that bind and assemble the nascent proteins. Using transmission electron microscopy imaging we show that protein nanotubes synthesized on the biochip surface in the presence of antibody traps efficiently assembled on these traps, but pre-assembled nanotubes were not effectively captured. Moreover, synthesis of green fluorescent protein from its immobilized gene generated a gradient of captured proteins decreasing in concentration away from the gene source. This biochip could be used to create spatial patterns of proteins assembled on surfaces.     

Local spectral analysis of short-pulse excited scattering fromweakly inhomogeneous media. II. Inverse scattering

For Pt.I see ibid., vol.47, no.7, p.1208-17 (July 1999). This paper is concerned with the reconstruction of a weakly inhomogeneous scattering profile from data generated by a short-pulse incident plane wave, which is postprocessed so as to localize the interrogated region to a space-time resolved scattering cell, The phase-space localization due to postprocessing is brought about by applying local (i.e., windowed) slant-stack transforms to the time-dependent scattered fields. In the domain of the scatterer, this processing corresponds to applying windowed Radon transforms to the induced field distribution, which, in turn, generates pulsed-beam (PB) wave packets traveling toward the observer. The forward analysis parameterizing this new form of time-domain (TD) diffraction tomography has been performed in a companion paper and furnishes the framework for the investigation here. Via the forward parameterization, the three-dimensional (3-D) global scattering phenomenology has been reduced to scattering from an equivalent one-dimensional (1-D) scattering cell oriented along the bisector between the direction of the incident plane pulse and the direction of the scattered pulsed beam (PB) to the observer. For the inverse problem, this process is reversed by windowing the scattered field and backpropagating the resulting PBs so as to form local images of any selected region in the scattering domain. The phase-space signature of the scattering cell is related to the Radon transform of the medium in the cell so that the local profile function can be recovered by Radon inversion. An illustrative numerical example is included. Also discussed is the ultimate localization achieved by incident PB excitation and PB postprocessing of the scattered field     

A Model-Theoretic Approach for Recovering Consistent Data from Inconsistent Knowledge Bases

One of the most significant drawbacks of classical logic is its being useless in the presence of an inconsistency. Nevertheless, the classical calculus is a very convenient framework to work with. In this work we propose means for drawing conclusions from systems that are based on classical logic, although the information might be inconsistent. The idea is to detect those parts of the knowledge base that cause the inconsistency, and isolate the parts that are recoverable. We do this by temporarily switching into Ginsberg/Fitting multivalued framework of bilattices (which is a common framework for logic programming and nonmonotonic reasoning). Our method is conservative in the sense that it considers the contradictory data as useless and regards all the remaining information unaffected. The resulting logic is nonmonotonic, paraconsistent, and a plausibility logic in the sense of Lehmann.     

Some issues in performance modeling of data teletraffic

Data teletraffic is characterized by bursty arrival processes. Performance models are characterized by a desire to know under what circumstances is the probability that an arrival finds a full input buffer very small. In this paper I examine how four models proposed in the literature perform on two data sets of local area network traffic. Among my conclusion are (1) the protocol governing the data transmission may have a substantial effect on the statistical propoerties on the packet stream, (2) approximating the probability that a finit buffer of size b overflows may not be adequately approximated by the probability that an infinite buffer has at least b packets in it, and (3) a data-based estimate of large-deviation rate-function does the best job of estimating packet loss on these data sets. This method may overestimate the loss rate by several orders of magnitude, so there is room for further refinements.