Providing information to clients about psychological tests: A survey of attorneys' and law students' attitudes.

Surveyed 70 practicing attorneys and 150 law students to determine the extent to which they felt it was their responsibility to inform clients they referred for psychological testing about the testing process and about the validity scales on tests. Results showed that almost 50% of the attorneys and over 33% of the students believe that clients referred for testing always or usually should be informed of validity scales on tests. These results suggest that many test takers, particularly in forensic settings, may have information about validity scales that facilitates their giving biased responses without detection. Psychologists doing forensic evaluations should be alert to this possibility and should consider using more than one approach to detect response distortions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Half-bridge inverter using 4H-SiC gate turn-off thyristors

This paper reports on the first demonstration of a half-bridge power inverter constructed from silicon carbide gate turn-off thyristors (GTOs) operated in the conventional GTO mode. This circuit was characterized with input bus voltages of up to 600 VDC and 2 A (peak current density of 540 A/cm²) with resistive loads using a pulse-width modulated switching frequency of 2 kHz. We discuss the implications of the thyristor's electrical characteristics and the circuit topology on the overall operation of the half-bridge circuit. This work has determined the conservative critical rate of rise value of the off-state voltage to be 200 V/μs in these devices     

Mapping nonnative plants using hyperspectral imagery

Nonnative plant species are causing enormous ecological and environmental impacts from local to global scale. Remote sensing images have had mixed success in providing spatial information on land cover characteristics to land managers that increase effective management of invasions into native habitats. However, there has been limited evaluation of the use of hyperspectral data and processing techniques for mapping specific invasive species based on their spectral characteristics. This research evaluated three different methods of processing hyperspectral imagery: minimum noise fraction (MNF), continuum removal, and band ratio indices for mapping iceplant (Carpobrotus edulis) and jubata grass (Cortaderia jubata) in California's coastal habitat. Validation with field sampling data showed high mapping accuracies for all methods for identifying presence or absence of iceplant (97%), with the MNF procedure producing the highest accuracy (55%) when the classes were divided into four different densities of iceplant.     

Eye movements of young and older adults during reading.

The eye movements of young and older adults were tracked as they read sentences varying in syntactic complexity. In Experiment 1, cleft object and object relative clause sentences were more difficult to process than cleft subject and subject relative clause sentences; however, older adults made many more regressions, resulting in increased regression path fixation times and total fixation times, than young adults while processing cleft object and object relative clause sentences. In Experiment 2, older adults experienced more difficulty than young adults while reading cleft and relative clause sentences with temporary syntactic ambiguities created by deleting the that complementizers. Regression analyses indicated that readers with smaller working memories need more regressions and longer fixation times to process cleft object and object relative clause sentences. These results suggest that age-associated declines in working memory do affect syntactic processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

HiSQL: A Front-end Query System for Historical Relational Databases

The paper describes a prototype system called HiSQL (Historical SQL) which extends the functionality of SQL in manipulating historical data, by providing functions for spatial and temporal processing. Conceptually the paper is divided into three parts: the first part deals with the design and architecture of the system; the second part introduces a case study (the defters); and the third part describes specific functions for spatial and temporal processing of serial documents. The paper concludes with a comparison between HiSQL and SQL and suggestions for further work. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Conventional drug therapy in inflammatory bowel disease

The conventional treatment of inflammatory bowel disease should center around the liberal use of one of the many available forms of 5-ASA. Sulfasalazine should be used initially with the newer mesalamine-only containing drugs being reserved for sulfasalazine-intolerant patients or for those patients who require larger doses of medication. The choice of the delivery method should be made with the knowledge of the extent of disease and the potential coverage areas of the individual delivery methods. Systemic and topical glucocorticoids are an invaluable adjunct to 5-ASA therapy, but their use must be directed with the goal of remission induction. The tapering of glucocorticoids should be as prompt as the maintenance of remission allows, with a useful general guideline of decreasing the dose by 1 mg per day. Immunosuppressive therapy, including azathioprine and 6-mercaptopurine, holds promise for refractory cases of inflammatory bowel disease and for their potential steroid sparing properties; antibiotic therapy with metronidazole and ciprofloxacin in the absence of documented infectious disease offers additional routes to control disease. The majority of patients require a combination of drugs to attain remission. Only further study will reveal the ideal regimen for each of the different subsets of inflammatory bowel disease.     

Detecting delaminations in a composite beam using anti-optimization

The present study proposes a detection technique for delaminations in a laminated beam. The proposed technique optimizes the spatial distribution of harmonic excitation so as to magnify the difference in response between the delaminated and intact beam. The technique is evaluated by numerical simulation of two-layered aluminum beams. Effects of measurement and geometric noise are included in the analysis. A finite element model for a delaminated composite, based on a layer-wise laminated plate theory is used in conjunction with a step function to simulate delaminations     

Multigigabit/s demultiplexing in optical domain using coherence properties of pulse trains from multiple, asynchronous mode-locked lasers

It is shown that the unique coherence properties of mode-locked lasers can be exploited to provide new opportunities for high-speed data transmission. Using passive Mach-Zehnder optical delay stages, very high bit rate optical data streams constructed from asynchronously combined transmitters can be demultiplexed directly in the optical domain, without imposing restrictions on the source wavelength. Potential implementation and performance of the technique are discussed.<>