Hemispheric asymmetries in recognition memory for negative and neutral words

Federmeier and Benjamin (2005) have suggested that semantic encoding for verbal information in the right hemisphere can be more effective when memory demands are higher. However, other studies (Kanske & Kotz, 2007) also suggest that visual word recognition differ in function of emotional valence. In this context, the present study was designed to evaluate the effects of retention level upon recognition memory processes for negative and neutral words. Sample consisted of 15 right-handed undergraduate portuguese students with normal or corrected to normal vision. Portuguese concrete negative and neutral words were selected in accordance to known linguistic capabilities of the right hemisphere. The participants were submitted to a visual half-field word presentation using a continuous recognition memory paradigm. Eye movements were continuously monitored with a Tobii T60 eye-tracker that showed no significant differences in fixations to negative and neutral words. Reaction times in word recognition suggest an overall advantage of negative words in comparison to the neutral words. Further analysis showed faster responses for negative words than for neutral words when were recognised at longer retention intervals for left-hemisphere encoding. Electrophysiological data through event related potentials revealed larger P2 amplitude over centro-posterior electrode sites for words studied in the left hemifield suggesting a priming effect for right-hemisphere encoding. Overall data suggest different hemispheric memory strategies for the semantic encoding of negative and neutral words.

Implantación de un sistema para la medida del posicionamiento angular de un manipulador paralelo

[ES]El objetivo del presente proyecto es la programación, mediante la herramienta Labview, de un software para la lectura y almacenamiento de los datos recogidos por un inclinómetro analógico de la marca STW Technic. Una vez el programa esté listo, se procederá a realizar una serie de pruebas mediante vibraciones a distintas frecuencias y con distinta amplitud de ángulo para determinar los límites de medida del sensor.

Laurentide ice streaming on the Canadian Shield: A conflict with the soft-bedded ice stream paradigm?

Elucidating the controls on the location and vigor of ice streams is crucial to understanding the processes that lead to fast disintegration of ice flows and ice sheets. In the former North American Laurentide ice sheet, ice stream occurrence appears to have been governed by topographic troughs or areas of soft-sediment geology. This paper reports robust evidence of a major paleo-ice stream over the northwestern Canadian Shield, an area previously assumed to be incompatible with fast ice flow because of the low relief and relatively hard bedrock. A coherent pattern of subglacial bedforms (drumlins and megascalle glacial lineations) demarcates the ice stream flow set, which exhibits a convergent onset zone, a narrow main trunk with abrupt lateral margins, and a lobate terminus. Variations in bedform elongation ratio within the flow set match theoretical expectations of ice velocity. In the center of the ice stream, extremely parallel megascalle glacial lineations tens of kilometers long with elongation ratios in excess of 40:1 attest to a single episode of rapid ice flow. We conclude that while bed properties are likely to be influential in determining the occurrence and vigor of ice streams, contrary to established views, widespread soft-bed geology is not an essential requirement for those ice streams without topographic control. We speculate that the ice stream acted as a release valve on ice-sheet mass balance and was initiated by the presence of a proglacial lake that destabilized the ice-sheet margin and propagated fast ice flow through a series of thermomechanical feedbacks involving ice flow and temperature.

The Bureau International des Poids et Mesures: establishing standards in the physical sciences

In a vault on the outskirts of Paris, a cylinder of platinum-iridium sits in a safe under three layers of glass. It is the kilogram, kept by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM), which is the international home of metrology. Metrology is the science of measurement, and it is of fundamental importance to us all. It is essential for trade, commerce, navigation, transport, communication, surveying, engineering, and construction. It is essential for medical diagnosis and treatment, health and safety, food and consumer protection, and for preserving the environment—e.g., measuring ozone in the atmosphere. Many of these applications are of particular relevance to chemistry and thus to IUPAC. In all these activities we need to make measurements reliably—to an appropriate and known level of uncertainty. The financial implications of metrology are enormous. In the United States, for example, some 15% of the gross domestic product is spent on healthcare, involving reliable quantitative measurements for both diagnosis and treatment.

Hydrogen adsorption in a copper ZSM5 zeolite: an inelastic neutron scattering study

Currently microporous oxidic materials including zeolites are attracting interest as potential hydrogen storage materials. Understanding how molecular hydrogen interacts with these materials is important in the rational development of hydrogen storage materials and is also challenging theoretically. In this paper, we present an incoherent inelastic neutron scattering (INS) study of the adsorption of molecular hydrogen and hydrogen deuteride (HD) in a copper substituted ZSM5 zeolite varying the hydrogen dosage and temperature. We have demonstrated how inelastic neutron scattering can help us understand the interaction of H-2 molecules with a binding site in a particular microporous material, Cu ZSM5, and by implication of other similar materials. The H-2 molecule is bound as a single species lying parallel with the surface. As H-2 dosing increases, lateral interactions between the adsorbed H-2 molecules become apparent. With rising temperature of measurement up to 70 K (the limit of our experiments), H-2 molecules remain bound to the surface equivalent to a liquid or solid H-2 phase. The implication is that hydrogen is bound rather strongly in Cu ZSM5. Using the simple model for the anisotropic interaction to calculate the energy levels splitting, we found that the measured rotational constant of the hydrogen molecule is reduced as a consequence of adsorption by the Cu ZSM5. From the decrease in total signal intensity with increasing temperature, we were able to observe the conversion of para-hydrogen into ortho-hydrogen at paramagnetic centres and so determine the fraction of paramagnetic sites occupied by hydrogen molecules, ca. 60%. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Change in construction: a critical perspective

Change within the construction sector has been a central concern of governments and a select few private-sector clients for a considerable time. The discourse of change emanating from organizations concerned with reform in the construction sector reflects these ongoing concerns for change in the sector. The underlying assumptions of the content of change and appropriate change mechanisms in the UK are critically examined and challenged. In particular, the limitations of measurement and best practice are explored. The allegiance to approaches based on measurement and best practice is acontextual, unreflective and insufficient in providing wholly reliable explanations for the relationship between practice and performance. Claims for the use of measurement and best practice by the reform movement must therefore be understood to have limitations and their use approached with caution. The emphasis on best practice is also understood to direct attention away from understanding the legitimacy of current practice and change within the UK construction sector. An agenda for change in the UK construction sector will need to engage with and be more reflective of current managerial practice and past change initiatives. Contextual approaches such as structuration theory offer a way in which to underpin a research framework that could support the reform movement in setting such an agenda.

Relationship between deadbeat and pole-placement discrete-time PID controllers

This paper considers PID control in terms of its implementation by means of an ARMA plant model. Two controller actions are considered, namely pole placement and deadbeat, both being applied via a PID structure for the adaptive real-time control of an industrial level system. As well as looking at two controller types separately, a comparison is made between the forms and it is shown how, under certain circumstances, the two forms can be seen to be identical. It is shown how the pole-placement PID form does not in fact realise an action which is equivalent to the deadbeat controller, when all closed-loop poles are chosen to be at the origin of the z-plane.

Self-centred memories: the reminiscence bump and the self

The self-memory relationship is thought to be bidirectional, in such a way that memories provide context for the self, and equally, the self exercises control over retrieval (Conway, 2005). Autobiographical memories are not distributed equally across the life span; instead, memories peak between ages 10 and 30. This reminiscence bump has been suggested to support the emergence of a stable and enduring self. In the present study, the relationship between memory accessibility and self was explored with a novel methodology that used generation of self images in the form of I am statements. Memories generated from I am cues clustered around the time of emergence for that particular self image. We argue that, when a new self-image is formed, it is associated with the encoding of memories that are relevant to that self and that remain highly accessible to the rememberer later in life. This study offers a new methodology for academics and clinicians interested in the relationship between memory and identity.

On-demand hd video using Jini based grid

This research establishes the feasibility of using a network centric technology, Jini, to provide a grid framework on which to perform parallel video encoding. A solution was implemented using Jini and obtained real-time on demand encoding of a 480 HD video stream. Further, a projection is made concerning the encoding of 1080 HD video in real-time, as the current grid was not powerful enough to achieve this above 15fps. The research found that Jini is able to provide a number of tools and services highly applicable in a grid environment. It is also suitable in terms of performance and responds well to a varying number of grid nodes. The main performance limiter was found to be the network bandwidth allocation, which when loaded with a large number of grid nodes was unable to handle the traffic.

Real estate portfolio construction and estimation risk

The use of MPT in the construction real estate portfolios has two serious limitations when used in an ex-ante framework: (1) the intertemporal instability of the portfolio weights and (2) the sharp deterioration in performance of the optimal portfolios outside the sample period used to estimate asset mean returns. Both problems can be traced to wide fluctuations in sample means Jorion (1985). Thus the use of a procedure that ignores the estimation risk due to the uncertain in mean returns is likely to produce sub-optimal results in subsequent periods. This suggests that the consideration of the issue of estimation risk is crucial in the use of MPT in developing a successful real estate portfolio strategy. Therefore, following Eun & Resnick (1988), this study extends previous ex-ante based studies by evaluating optimal portfolio allocations in subsequent test periods by using methods that have been proposed to reduce the effect of measurement error on optimal portfolio allocations.

Rental depreciation and capital expenditure in the UK commercial real estate market, 1993–2009

This paper identifies the long-term rental depreciation rates for UK commercial properties and rates of capital expenditure incurred to offset depreciation over the same period. It starts by reviewing the economic depreciation literature and the rationale for adopting a longitudinal method of measurement, before discussing the data used and results. Data from 1993 to 2009 were sourced from Investment Property Databank and CB Richard Ellis real estate consultants. This is used to compare the change in values of new buildings in different locations with the change in values of individual properties in those locations. The analysis is conducted using observations on 742 assets drawn from all major segments of the commercial real estate market. Overall rental depreciation and capital expenditure rates are similar to those in other recent UK studies. Depreciation rates are 0.8% pa for offices, 0.5% pa for industrial properties and 0.3% pa for standard retail properties. These results hide interesting variations at a segment level, notably in retail where location often dominates value rather than the building. The majority of properties had little (if any) money spent on them over the last 16 years, but those subject to higher rates of expenditure were found to have lower depreciation rates.

On discrimination algorithms for ill-posed problems with an application to magnetic tomography

In this paper we explore classification techniques for ill-posed problems. Two classes are linearly separable in some Hilbert space X if they can be separated by a hyperplane. We investigate stable separability, i.e. the case where we have a positive distance between two separating hyperplanes. When the data in the space Y is generated by a compact operator A applied to the system states ∈ X, we will show that in general we do not obtain stable separability in Y even if the problem in X is stably separable. In particular, we show this for the case where a nonlinear classification is generated from a non-convergent family of linear classes in X. We apply our results to the problem of quality control of fuel cells where we classify fuel cells according to their efficiency. We can potentially classify a fuel cell using either some external measured magnetic field or some internal current. However we cannot measure the current directly since we cannot access the fuel cell in operation. The first possibility is to apply discrimination techniques directly to the measured magnetic fields. The second approach first reconstructs currents and then carries out the classification on the current distributions. We show that both approaches need regularization and that the regularized classifications are not equivalent in general. Finally, we investigate a widely used linear classification algorithm Fisher's linear discriminant with respect to its ill-posedness when applied to data generated via a compact integral operator. We show that the method cannot stay stable when the number of measurement points becomes large.

Nuclear fuel cycles: interfaces with the environment

The waste materials generated in the nuclear fuel cycle are very varied,ranging from the tailings arising from mining and processing uranium ore, depleted uranium in a range of chemical forms, to a range of process wastes of differing activities and properties. Indeed, the wastes generated are intimately linked to the options selected in operating the nuclear fuel cycle, most obviously to the management of spent fuel. An open fuel cycle implies the disposal of highly radioactive spent fuel, whereas a closed fuel cycle generates a complex array of waste streams. On the other hand, a closed fuel cycle offers options for waste management, for example reduction in highly active waste volume, decreased radiotoxicity, and removal of fissile material. Many technological options have been proposed or explored, and each brings its own particular mix of wastes and environmental challenges.