No description available.

No description available.

The recent finding of memory enhancement using either cognitive mnemonic or standard hypnotic interviews (Geiselman et al., 1985) suggests the possibility of additive forensic utility when these methods are combined. The present crime-analogue study compared waking and hypnotic cognitive mnemonics to investigate this and potential problems previously unaddressed. Recall and recognition accuracy and confidence were measured for low and high density stimuli in a videotaped murder, including central, peripheral, and facial detail. The effect of misleading information given after stimulus presentation was also examined.

Michal Stránecký - Human Enhancement: Vision of a better Humankind? Thesis in Philosophy SUMMARY: Human Enhancement: Vision of a better Humankind? This thesis deals with the problems of Human Enhancement, i.e. a possibility of making human better by biotechnologies. Chapter 2 shows the position of John Harris, the main Human Enhancement defender. Chapter 3 describes objections raised by Michael J. Sandel, one of the opponents of John Harris. Chapter 4 shows risks of genetic manipulations. Chapter 5 discusses the unacceptable risks of Human Enhancement for the whole society. Chapter 6 deals with the problem of freedom and human rights that would be these procedures jeopardized. This thesis ends with a reflection on which human properties and qualities are really worth enhancement. Conclusion is that Human Enhancement would cause more harm than good.

The quality and intelligibility of single channel speech degraded by additive noise remains a challenging problem when only the noisy speech is available. An accurate estimation of the noise spectrum is important for the effective performance of speech enhancement algorithms, especially in nonstationary noise environments. This thesis addresses both two issues. First, a speech enhancement algorithm using harmonic features is introduced. A spectral weighting function is derived by constrained optimization to suppress noise in the frequency domain. Two design parameters are included in the suppression gain, namely the frequency-dependent noise-flooring parameter (FDNFP) and the gain factor. The FDNFP controls the level of admissible residual noise in the enhanced speech, while further enhancement is achieved by adaptive comb filtering using the gain factor with a peak-picking algorithm. Second, a noise estimation algorithm is proposed for nonstationary noise conditions. The speech presence probability is updated by introducing a time-frequency dependent threshold. The frequency dependent smoothing factor for noise estimation is computed based on the estimated speech presence probability in each frequency bin. This algorithm adapts quickly to nonstationary noise environments and preserves more information on weak speech phoneme. The performance of the proposed speech enhancement algorithm is evaluated in terms of Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (ITU-PESQ) scores and Modified Bark Spectral Distortion (MBSD) measures, composite objective measures and listening tests. Our listening tests indicate that 16 listeners on average preferred our harmonic enhanced speech over any of three other approaches about 73% of the time. The performance of the proposed noise estimation algorithm combined with the proposed speech enhancement method in nonstionary noise environments is also tested in terms of ITU-PESQ scores and MBSD measures. Experimental results indicate that the proposed noise estimation algorithm when integrated with the harmonic enhancement method outperforms spectral subtraction, signal subspace method, a perceptually-based enhancement method with a constant noise-flooring parameter, and our original harmonic speech enhancement method in highly nonstationary noise environments.

The Transtheoretical Model of Change is intended to be a general model of change that can be applied to many populations and domains of change. However, most of the studies that have investigated this model have focused on addiction-related topics or on individual psychotherapy. The current study explored whether this model's predictions applied to couples and their readiness to change their relationship. Data from two samples were collected. The first sample consisted of 65 volunteer couples recruited from the community. The second sample consisted of 55 couples that participated in a 9-week relationship enhancement seminar. Factor analyses of questionnaires designed to measure the stages of change and processes of change predicted by the Transtheoretical Model of Change did not produce the hypothesized factors. In general, use of change processes did not predict change in relationship satisfaction. However, there was some evidence that wives' use of change processes had more impact on relationship satisfaction than did husbands' use of change processes. Couples at higher stages of change tended to experience greater improvements in marital satisfaction than did couples at lower stages of change. Couples with partners at similar levels of readiness to change did not experience greater improvements in marital satisfaction than did couples at dissimilar levels of readiness to change. In general, couples using the processes of change that matched their stage of change did not experience greater changes in marital satisfaction. However, as predicted by the Transtheoretical Model of Change, use of consciousness raising processes was less helpful for couples at higher stages of change than for couples at lower stages of change. Reasons for the failure to support many of the claims of the Transtheoretical Model of Change are explored and suggestions for future research are provided.

In this work, we have numerically studied the effect of the vorticity on the enhancement of heat transfer in a channel flow. In the first part of the work, we focus on the investigation of a channel flow with a vortex street as the incoming flow. We propose a model to simulate the fluid dynamics. We find that the flow exhibits different properties depending on the value of four dimensionless parameters. In particularly, we can classify the flows into two types, active and passive vibration, based on the sign of the incoming vortices. In the second part of the work, we discuss the heat transfer process due to the flows just described and investigate how the vorticity in the flow improves the efficiency of the heat transfer. The temperature shows different characteristics corresponding to the active and passive vibration cases. In active vibration cases, the vortex blob improves the heat transfer by disrupting the thermal boundary layer and preventing the decay of the wall temperature gradient throughout the channel, and by enhancing the forced convection to cool down the wall temperature. The heat transxfer performance is directly related to the strength of the vortex blobs and the background flow. In passive vibration cases, the corresponding heat transfer process is complicated and varies dramatically as the flow changes its properties. We also studied the effect of thermal parameters on heat transfer performance. Finally, we propose a more realistic optimization problem which is to minimize the maximum temperature of the solids with a given input energy. We find that the best heat transfer performance is obtained in the active vibration case with zero background flow.

The Transtheoretical Model of Change is intended to be a general model of change that can be applied to many populations and domains of change. However, most of the studies that have investigated this model have focused on addiction-related topics or on individual psychotherapy. The current study explored whether this model's predictions applied to couples and their readiness to change their relationship. Data from two samples were collected. The first sample consisted of 65 volunteer couples recruited from the community. The second sample consisted of 55 couples that participated in a 9-week relationship enhancement seminar. Factor analyses of questionnaires designed to measure the stages of change and processes of change predicted by the Transtheoretical Model of Change did not produce the hypothesized factors. In general, use of change processes did not predict change in relationship satisfaction. However, there was some evidence that wives' use of change processes had more impact on relationship satisfaction than did husbands' use of change processes. Couples at higher stages of change tended to experience greater improvements in marital satisfaction than did couples at lower stages of change. Couples with partners at similar levels of readiness to change did not experience greater improvements in marital satisfaction than did couples at dissimilar levels of readiness to change. In general, couples using the processes of change that matched their stage of change did not experience greater changes in marital satisfaction. However, as predicted by the Transtheoretical Model of Change, use of consciousness raising processes was less helpful for couples at higher stages of change than for couples at lower stages of change. Reasons for the failure to support many of the claims of the Transtheoretical Model of Change are explored and suggestions for future research are provided.

No description available.

No description available.