Self-disclosure of HIV infection: preliminary results from a sample of Hispanic men.

We examined self-disclosure of HIV infection among 101 seropositive Hispanic men residing in Los Angeles. Results indicated that disclosure was highly selective and presumably influenced by the social, psychological, and material consequences of informing others about one's medical condition. Subjects tended to inform significant others such as parents, friends, and lovers than less significant others such as employers, landlords, and religious leaders. There was a relatively high rate of disclosure (75%) to doctors/dentists who were not treating subjects for HIV infection. Gay and bisexual subjects (89% of the sample) were more inclined to disclose their HIV serostatus to homosexual or bisexual others than to heterosexuals and to inform those who were aware of their sexual orientation. Disclosure increased with severity of disease independently of length of time since testing seropositive. Self-rated negative changes in appearance correlated with disclosure to less significant others. The role of cultural attitudes and values in self-disclosure of HIV infection is discussed.     

A Study on Late Closure in Spanish: Principle-grounded vs. Frequency-based Accounts of Attachment Preferences

A much-debated issue in current research on sentence parsing concerns the resolution of attachment ambiguities. Parsing theories differ on the procedures used to guide on-line attachment decisions: principle-grounded theories (e.g. garden-path/ construal) propose universal principles that minimize processing load; frequency-based accounts (such as linguistic tuning) claim that attachment decisions are shaped by readers' previous experience with their particular language; lexically based models, in turn, assert that attachment choices are determined by the properties of individual lexical items in the sentence. This paper reports six studies on late closure in the resolution of attachment ambiguities in Spanish: a questionnaire study on attachment preferences and three self-paced reading experiments where ambiguous PPs could be attached as arguments of two VP-hosts in NP-VP1-NPVP2-PP structures. The results show a clear preference towards low attachment (late closure), thus supporting principle-grounded theories. In addition, two corpus studies were carried out to obtain records of relative frequencies of the attachment choices involved in the experiments. A coarse-grained measure revealed that, in accordance with linguistic tuning, low-attachment structures are more common in Spanish NP-VP1-NP-VP2-PP sentences. However, a fine-grained count showed that low-attachment preferences cannot be explained by arguing that the specific verbs positioned lower on the tree (VP2) are more likely to take an extra argument than those located at a higher position (VP1), as lexical models would assume.     

Eye movements and processing stages in reading: relative contribution of visual,lexical, and contextual factors

The independent and the combined influence of word length, word frequency, and contextual predictability on eye movements in reading was examined across processing stages under two priming-context conditions. Length, frequency, and predictability were used as predictors in multiple regression analyses, with parafoveal, early, late, and spillover eye movement measures as the dependent variables. There were specific effects of: (a) length, both on where to look (how likely a word was fixated and in which location) and how long to fixate, across all processing stages; (b) frequency, on how long to fixate a word, but not on where to look, at an early processing stage; and (c) predictability, both on how likely a word was fixated and for how long, in late processing stages. The source of influence for predictability was related to global rather than to local contextual priming. The contribution of word length was independent of contextual source. These results are relevant to determine both the time course of the influence of visual, lexical, and contextual factors on eye movements in reading, and which main component of eye movements, that is, location or duration, is affected.     

On the Ethics of Facial Transplantation Research

Transplantation continues to push the frontiers of medicine into domains that summon forth troublesome ethical questions. Looming on the frontier today is human facial transplantation. We develop criteria that, we maintain, must be satisfied in order to ethically undertake this as-yet-untried transplant procedure. We draw on the criteria advanced by Dr. Francis Moore in the late 1980s for introducing innovative procedures in transplant surgery. In addition to these we also insist that human face transplantation must meet all the ethical requirements usually applied to health care research. We summarize the achievements of transplant surgery to date, focusing in particular on the safety and efficacy of immunosuppressive medications. We also emphasize the importance of risk/benefit assessments that take into account the physical, aesthetic, psychological, and social dimensions of facial disfiguration, reconstruction, and transplantation. Finally, we maintain that the time has come to move facial transplantation research into the clinical phase.     

Assessing the impact of dispositional resistance to change on organizational attraction

In recent years there has been an increasing interest among researchers and practitioners to analyze what makes a firm attractive in the eyes of university students, and if individual differences such as personality traits have an impact on this general affect towards a particular organization. The main goal of the present research is to demonstrate that a recently conceptualized narrow trait of personality named dispositional resistance to change (RTC), that is, the inherent tendency of individuals to avoid and oppose changes (Oreg, 2003), can predict organizational attraction of university students to firms that are perceived as innovative or conservative. Three complementary studies were carried out using a total sample of 443 college students from Mexico. In addition to validating the hypotheses, our findings suggest that as the formation of the images of organizations in students' minds is done through social cognitions, simple stimuli such as physical artifacts, when used in an isolated manner, do not have a significant impact on organizational attraction.     

Philosophy,mathematics, science and computation

Attempts to lay a foundation for the sciences based on modern mathematics are questioned. In particular, it is not clear that computer science should be based on set-theoretic mathematics. Set-theoretic mathematics has difficulties with its own foundations, making it reasonable to explore alternative foundations for the sciences. The role of computation within an alternative framework may prove to be of great potential in establishing a direction for the new field of computer science.Whitehead's theory of reality is re-examined as a foundation for the sciences. His theory does not simply attempt to add formal rigor to the sciences, but instead relies on the methods of the biological and social sciences to construct his world-view. Whitehead's theory is a rich source of notions that are intended to explain every element of experience. It is a product of Whitehead's earlier attempt to provide a mathematical foundation for the physical sciences and is still consistent with modern physics.A computer simulation language is, in fact, a theory of reality; one that is often based on extremely simplistic notions. Simulation languages have evolved from the various programming languages and not from the development of their underlying world-view. The use of an established theory of reality, such as Whitehead's, as the basis of a simulation language is proposed as a way of extending the usefulness of computer simulation as an experimental tool for the theory.The simulation language is a first step in this direction. Based on Whitehead's notion of concrescence and a formalization in the typed -calculus, provides a notation and method for the construction and simulation of real-world phenomena. Both philosophy and computer science stand to benefit from such an attempt. Whitehead's theory gains a testing tool, while computer science gains a significantly more advanced simulation language. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to the finality of statement is an exhibition of folly. A. N. Whitehead,Process and Reality.     

Variation in suicide occurrence by time of day, day of the week, month, and lunar phase

Previous studies suggest that suicide occurrence varies by month and day of the week, but not by lunar phase. Variation by time of day has never before been adequately examined; to our knowledge, all previous studies have failed to obtain time-of-death information for a large percentage of cases. We examined suicide occurrence among residents of Sacramento County, CA, during the period from 1925 to 1983. Data were abstracted from coroner's autopsy and investigative reports. In contrast to previous studies, data on time of death were available for a large percentage of cases. 4,190 suicide deaths were identified during the study period. Suicide occurrence varied substantially by time of day; for both sexes and for ages under 65 years, the fewest suicide deaths occurred during the early morning hours, from 0401 to 0800. For recent years of the study, suicides occurred most frequently on Monday for both males and females and for most age groups. Variation by month followed no consistent pattern by gender, age, years of the study, or combinations of these factors. Contrary to popular belief, suicide occurrence did not vary by lunar phase.