PUTTING CRAVING INTO CONTEXT: EFFECTS OF PERCEIVED SMOKING OPPORTUNITY ON THE NEURAL RESPONSE TO CIGARETTE CUE EXPOSURE

Recent years have seen the emergence of research applying functional neuroimaging to the study of cue-elicited drug craving. This research has begun to identify a distributed system of brain activity during drug craving. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to examine the effects of smoking expectancy on the neural response to neutral (e.g., roll of tape) and smoking-related (holding a cigarette) stimuli in male cigarette smokers deprived of nicotine for 8 hours. As predicted, several brain regions exhibited differential activation during cigarette versus neutral cue exposure. Moreover, instructions about smoking opportunity affected cue-elicited activation in several regions. These results highlight the importance of perceived drug availability in the neurobiological response to drug cues

Behaviour of ground cupola furnace slag blended concrete at elevated temperature

Fires adversely affect the performance of concrete when expose to extreme temperatures. However, it is important to study the effects of elevated temperature on the concrete properties. Concrete often contains other cementitious materials such as ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) and this has been successfully used to improve its properties. Hence, little or no study has been carried out on the use of ground cupola furnace slag (GCFS) in concreting. Therefore, this paper investigates the behavior of concrete blended with GCFS at elevated temperatures. A total of 300 samples were prepared with four different GCFS contents. The test specimens were cured for 28-d and 56-d and subjected to elevated temperatures ranging from 200oC to 800oC up to 24 h. The slump, residual compressive and tensile strength tests were carried out on fresh and hardened concrete. The results showed that the compressive strength and splitting tensile strengths of concrete generally increased with increasing % GCFS content but decreased as temperature increases. At 28-d and 56-d, the strengths were observed to be maximum at 10% replacement when the temperature is 200oC compared to other mixes. It can be concluded that the strength drastically decreased at temperature above 200oC. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was also carried out to determine the effect of the elevated temperature and percentage replacement of cement with GCFS on the 28-d and 56-d compressive strength of concrete. The results showed that temperature and % GCFS content had a statistically significant effect on the concrete performance. Based on Tukey’s honestly significant difference (HSD), the effect of GCFS was found to be statistically non-significant for 4% and 6% GCFS content at 28-d; and 2% and 4% GCFS content at 56-d. The effect of temperature was also found to be statistically non-significant for 600oC and 800oC at 28-d; and 27oC and 600oC; 200oC and 400oC at 56-d

Transport property analysis method for thermoelectric materials: material quality factor and the effective mass model

Thermoelectric semiconducting materials are often evaluated by their figure-of-merit, zT. However, by using zT as the metric for showing improvements, it is not immediately clear whether the improvement is from an enhancement of the inherent material property or from optimization of the carrier concentration. Here, we review the quality factor approach which allows one to separate these two contributions even without Hall measurements. We introduce practical methods that can be used without numerical integration. We discuss the underlying effective mass model behind this method and show how it can be further advanced to study complex band structures using the Seebeck effective mass. We thereby dispel the common misconception that the usefulness of effective band models is limited to single parabolic band materials.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Brain Learning and Recognition: The Large and the Small of It in Inferotemporal Cortex

Anterior inferotemporal cortex (ITa) plays a key role in visual object recognition. Recognition is tolerant to object position, size, and view changes, yet recent neurophysiological data show ITa cells with high object selectivity often have low position tolerance, and vice versa. A neural model learns to simulate both this tradeoff and ITa responses to image morphs using large-scale and small-scale IT cells whose population properties may support invariant recognition.CELEST, an NSF Science of Learning Center (SBE-0354378); SyNAPSE program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (HR0011-09-3-0001, HR0011-09-C-0011

THE ROLE OF EXPECTATIONS AND HETEROGENEOUS PREFERENCES FOR CONGESTION IN THE VALUATION OF RECREATION BENEFITS

Studies of recreation congestion generally utilize nonmarket valuation techniques to determine the use level and entrance price that maximize aggregate recreation benefits for a specific recreation area. This paper improves upon these previous studies by relaxing the assumption of homogeneous preferences among visitors of the same recreation area and accounting for visitor expectations of congestion. The results indicate that failing to account for heterogeneous preferences for congestion by time of visit leads to overestimates of the benefits of relieving peak-time congestion, while accounting for expectations raises questions about the validity of the standard optimal use model.Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Formal Contexts, Formal Concept Analysis, and Galois Connections

Formal concept analysis (FCA) is built on a special type of Galois connections called polarities. We present new results in formal concept analysis and in Galois connections by presenting new Galois connection results and then applying these to formal concept analysis. We also approach FCA from the perspective of collections of formal contexts. Usually, when doing FCA, a formal context is fixed. We are interested in comparing formal contexts and asking what criteria should be used when determining when one formal context is better than another formal context. Interestingly, we address this issue by studying sets of polarities.Comment: In Proceedings Festschrift for Dave Schmidt, arXiv:1309.455