Personal Publication Assistant: Abstract recommendations by a cognitive model

This paper discusses an analysis of how scientists select relevant publications, and an application that can assist scientists in this information selection task. The application, called the Personal Publication Assistant, is based on the assumption that successful information selection is driven by recognizing familiar terms. To adapt itself to a researcher’s interests, the system takes into account what words have been used in a particular researcher’s abstracts, and when these words have been used. The user model underlying the Personal Publication Assistant is based on a rational analysis of memory, and takes the form of a model of declarative memory as developed for the cognitive architecture ACT-R. We discuss an experiment testing the assumptions of this model and present a user study that validates the implementation of the Personal Publication Assistant. The user study shows that the Personal Publication Assistant can successfully make an initial selection of relevant papers from a large collection of scientific literature.     

Understanding Children with War-Zone Traumatic Stress Exposed to the World's Violent Environments

This article discusses the common and unique configurations of stress responses of children to traumatizing experience in the world's warzones like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Rwanda, Liberia, Mozambique, El Salvador, the Middle East, and other nations caught up in the throes of declared and undeclared wars. Children are the most vulnerable, and suffer the greatest. The new concepts of warzone traumatic stress (WZTrS) and warzone traumatherapy (WZTrT) are presented to expand the discussion of the treatment of warzone children beyond today's exclusive focus either on intrapsychic factors alone or on material-resource replenishing alone. These terms are an alternative to current approaches to treatment in which a discrete stressor has been identified as the responsible toxic agent that produced the child's symptoms. Most warzone children have experienced a multiplicity of stressors—a virtual matrix of violent war stressors. The WZTrT model recognizes that the mental, social, and cultural needs of traumatized children change over time—from the time they are exposed to raging toxic war stressors to the time when war hostilities end. Thus warzone traumatherapy attempts to address the child's needs on a continuum based upon a time-referenced intervention model. The model presented here acknowledges the child's adaptational strengths, and the multitheoretical employing of psychodynamic, cognitive, and behavioral techniques grounded in cultural/racial sensitivity and indigenous folk medicine as indispensable tools in warzone therapy for children. Additionally, the model takes into account the special features of relevant international policies of the United Nations (UN) and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) geared to assist in the recovery and integration of warzone traumatized children. WZTrT embraces Western models of interventions integratively and flexibly employed with the personal, cultural, social, spiritual, and economic factors existing in the world of the traumatized child. Hopefully, the article will contribute to creating innovative ways of conceptualizing the mental, physical, social, cultural, and economic needs of warzone children in order to advance conceptual, technical, scientific, and practical aspects of child-relevant warzone interventions.     

Confinement in the production of human neuroses: The barber's chair syndrome

This paper attempts to indicate that confinement as a result of physical restriction of motor activity or prior conditioning experiences is usually necessary but not sufficient for the production of human neurotic behaviour. Support for this assertion comes from experiments producing neurotic behaviour in lower animals which at the same time lend further importance to the relationship between induced disordered animal behaviour and pathological behavioural states in humans.

Evidence is presented to indicate that one of the important reasons why conditioned anxiety responses develop in neurotic male patients to the barber's chair (and in the opposite sex to the beauty parlour chair) is because of the physical and conditioned confinement characterizing such a situation in addition to whatever individual noxious stimuli may be impinging upon the individual organism.     

A Review of Epigenetic Markers of Tobacco and Alcohol Consumption

Over the past two decades, advances in genetic technologies have posed unexpected challenges to the ethical and legal framework guiding the application of the most recent advances in healthcare technologies. By and large, these challenges have been successfully met by the introduction by statutes such as the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). However, over the past several years, these advances in the ability to measure genetic (or heritable) contributions to medical illness have been joined by advances in epigenetic (or acquired) contributions to common medical illnesses. Unfortunately, the moral and legal framework for the use of these epigenetic technologies, which can objectively determine the presence of medical illnesses such as diabetes or the consumption of substances of abuse, is not as well developed. This communication provides an introduction to the fundamentals of epigenetics and then reviews how some of the latest advances in this technology can now be used to assess the consumption of alcohol and tobacco. Next, the possible mechanisms through which these tools could be employed clinically are discussed. Finally, the authors outline the potential for misuse of this technology and suggest that well-informed policy could play a critical role in shaping the optimal implementation of epigenetic technologies. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.