Effect of social and psychological pressures on siblings of mentally retarded individuals

The researcher surveyed fifty families within the Shawano County, Wisconsin, area who have a mentally retarded member and at least one sibling whose age is between 7 years and 20 years or 30 years and 45 years. The purpose of this project was to ascertain what stress, both sociological and psychological, was felt by the siblings of a mentally retarded individual. The second purpose of the project was to ascertain what inference mainstreaming may have had on the generational age groups. The researcher attempted to identify the problems the sibling of a mentally retarded person felt in regard to social pressures, misconceptions, understanding the disability, and other ramifications which may have affected the sibling\u27s attitude toward the mentally retarded individual. The researcher also surveyed and interviewed area professionals to determine what problems were encountered when dealing with the siblings of the mentally retarded. The researcher found, through surveys and selected interviews, that there are, indeed, pressures felt by the sibling

Vibrational excitation of diatomic molecular ions in strong-field ionization of diatomic molecules

A model based on the strong-field and Born-Oppenheimer approximations qualitatively describes the distribution over vibrational states formed in a diatomic molecular ion following ionization of the neutral molecule by intense laser pulses. Good agreement is found with a recent experiment [X. Urbain et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 163004 (2004)]. In particular, the observed deviation from a Franck-Condon-like distribution is reproduced. Additionally, we demonstrate control of the vibrational distribution by a variation of the peak intensity or a change of frequency of the laser pulse.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Melting transitions in biomembranes

We investigated melting transitions in biological membranes in their native state that include their membrane proteins. These membranes originated from \textit{E. coli}, \textit{B. subtilis}, lung surfactant and nerve tissue from the spinal cord of several mammals. For some preparations, we studied the pressure, pH and ionic strength dependence of the transition. For porcine spine, we compared the transition of the native membrane to that of the extracted lipids. All preparations displayed melting transitions of 10-20 degrees below physiological or growth temperature, independent of the organism of origin and the respective cell type. The position of transitions in \textit{E. coli} membranes depends on the growth temperature. We discuss these findings in the context of the thermodynamic theory of membrane fluctuations that leads to largely altered elastic constants, an increase in fluctuation lifetime and in membrane permeability associated with the transitions. We also discuss how to distinguish lipid transitions from protein unfolding transitions. Since the feature of a transition slightly below physiological temperature is conserved even when growth conditions change, we conclude that the transitions are likely to be of major biological importance for the survival and the function of the cell.Comment: 12 pages, 6 Figures, 1 supplement with 1 figur

Visual SLAM and Moving-object Detection for a Small-size Humanoid Robot

100學年度研究獎補助論文[[abstract]]In the paper, a novel moving object detection (MOD) algorithm is developed and integrated with robot visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM). The moving object is assumed to be a rigid body and its coordinate system in space is represented by a position vector and a rotation matrix. The MOD algorithm is composed of detection of image features, initialization of image features, and calculation of object coordinates. Experimentation is implemented on a small-size humanoid robot and the results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is efficient for robot visual SLAM and moving object detection.[[incitationindex]]SCI[[incitationindex]]EI[[booktype]]電子版[[booktype]]紙