Contributing to the sustainable use of stormwater: the role of pervious pavements.

The city of Melbourne, Australia is experiencing a water crisis with potable water storage reservoirs at an all time low. With increasing urbanisation there is an ever increasing need to research and explore sustainable water management initiatives. There is potential to minimise the negative impacts of stormwater runoff and augment dwindling supplies of potable water through adoption of pervious paving technology. The traditional approach to stormwater management has focused on constructing drainage networks to carry stormwater away from developed areas as quickly as possible to avoid the risk of flooding. The main aim of this research project was to establish relationships between rainfall intensity, infiltration rate and pervious pavement runoff and to examine the improvement to stormwater quality after infiltrating through pervious pavements. This paper describes the laboratory experiment set-up to determine the infiltration patterns and stormwater quality improvement for simulated storms precipitating on pervious pavements. Next, the scaling-up of the experimental rig to a field-based trial is explained. Preliminary results from this work are presented to demonstrate the potential benefits of pervious pavements in the Australian landscape.     

Victor Tango车队“Odin”战车杀手锏：应用NI LabVIEW助威DARPA无人驾驶汽车城市挑战赛

"Odin是仅有的一辆全面应用LabVIEW的赛车,并且取得了第三名的成绩,仅比领先者慢了几分钟。"DARPA城市挑战赛要求路上车辆在城市环境中无人驾驶行驶。在整个赛程中,全自主的无人车要在不到6小时中行驶60英里,并在道路、十字路口、停车场等交通环境里行驶。比赛开始时,一份任务文档规定了比赛道路     

Graduate admissions criteria of leading psychology departments.

As a follow-up to a previous comment by J. E. Purdy et al (see record 1988-02765-001), the authors present the responses of 78% of the directors of top graduate programs to a questionnaire assessing the importance of information in applications for admission to graduate study, of the Graduate Record Examination scores, grade point average (GPA), letters of recommendation, research and clinical experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fee assessment and outpatient psychotherapy.

To test the widely held belief that fee assessment policy affects the psychotherapeutic process, data were gathered from the records of 434 clients who had received individual outpatient psychotherapy at a mental health center in 1972. The 3 predictor variables were fee (no payment, welfare, insurance, scaled payment, and full payment), diagnosis (psychosis, neurosis, personality disorder, transient situational disturbance, and other), and socioeconomic status (5 levels). A least-squares multivariate analysis of variance found only diagnosis to be significantly related to the outcome, number of appointments, and attendance of individual outpatient psychotherapy. Failure to find significant effects of fee assessment categories on therapeutic process suggests the invalidity of therapeutic purposes as a rationale to charge fees for psychotherapy. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Single- Versus Dual-Drug Target: Effects in a Brief Abstinence Incentive Procedure.

The number of drugs targeted may have an important influence on the ability of drug abusers to abstain during motivational incentive procedures. The authors investigated outcomes in methadone maintenance patients (n = 58), who had evidence of both opiate and cocaine use, when continuous abstinence from cocaine only (single target) or from both cocaine and heroin (dual target) was required to earn $200 in voucher incentives over a 4-day period. Study patients were equally likely to initiate and sustain abstinence from cocaine under the single- versus the dual-drug target. They were more likely to initiate opiate abstinence under the dual-target condition, demonstrating sensitivity to reinforcer effects. Results suggest that adding a second drug target does not impede short-term cocaine abstinence initiation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A science of the South Pacific: Analysis of the character structure of the Peace Corps volunteer.

Analyzed criteria of performance and adaptation of Peace Corps volunteers in Tonga (N = 52) who had received high overall evaluation, moderate to marginal overall evaluation, or who had terminated early. Ss were rated independently by 3 present or past staff members on a 24-item field-rating form derived from interviews. The items were found to meet criteria of internal consistency, interjudge agreement, and discrimination of the 3 subgroups. Both discriminant and factor analyses revealed that basic character traits were the single most important class of variables, followed by 3 factors labeled General Technical Competence, Cultural Interaction, and Interpersonal Relations. The necessity for pooled judgments by competent people and for basic research to justify professional psychological services in the field is discussed, and implications for the systematic evaluation of selection and training in governmental agencies are examined. (21 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Using Absolute Metric Maps to Close Cycles in a Topological Map

In simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) the correspondence problem, specifically detecting cycles, is one of the most difficult challenges for an autonomous mobile robot. In this paper we show how significant cycles in a topological map can be identified with a companion absolute global metric map. A tight coupling of the basic unit of representation in the two maps is the key to the method. Each local space visited is represented, with its own frame of reference, as a node in the topological map. In the global absolute metric map these local space representations from the topological map are described within a single global frame of reference. The method exploits the overlap which occurs when duplicate representations are computed from different vantage points for the same local space. The representations need not be exactly aligned and can thus tolerate a limited amount of accumulated error. We show how false positive overlaps which are the result of a misaligned map, can be discounted.