Kymberlee M. O’bRien

M. D. Stamm, K. M. O'Brien, K. M. Armitage, F. P. Baxendale; EFFICACY OF GRANDEVO AND VENERATE FOR CONTROL OF BLUEGRASS BILLBUGS, 2013, Arthropod Management Te

Hair cortisol (CORT) is a biomarker of chronic stress via long‐term alterations in hypothalamus–pituitary–adrenal axis activity. Relationships to perceived stress measures, however, have rarely been specifically investigated. A diverse sample of 135 adults participated in a study assessing relationships between chronic stress indicator CORT to perceived stress and health indicators. CORT was not correlated to single perceived domain indices but with a global stress composite. Differences in objective and subjective measures were found for sociodemographics: racial/ethnic identity, sex and socioeconomic status (SES). Race by SES interactions predicted both CORT and perceived stress, but produced a complex and partially unanticipated pattern of results. For minorities, low and high SES showed the highest CORT, with mid‐SES showing the lowest CORT; there was little change in perceived stress at all levels of SES. For non‐minorities, mid‐SES showed the highest CORT, with decreases in both CORT and perceived stress in high SES. The unanticipated findings of deleterious outcomes for high SES minorities highlight the importance of investigating potential stressors and moderators, including perceived discrimination and social identity. Moreover, these results suggest that CORT may not always correlate with single stress indices but may provide a global assessment of chronic stress, with implications for the allostatic load literature. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The present research investigated psychosocial factors: control beliefs; social relations moderating the SES–health gradient. Participants included 3775 respondents from a national probability sample, Midlife in United States (t¹: Age, M = 46.40, SD = 13.00, t²: Age, M = 55.47, SD = 12.43), who provided reports on control beliefs, social relations, and health at two assessment occasions (1994/1995 and 2002/2003). Hierarchical regression demonstrated that control beliefs, social support, and strain uniquely moderated relationships between SES and longitudinal health. The present study highlights the importance of psychosocial factors as protective mechanisms of socioeconomic disadvantages and associated long-term deleterious health outcomes.

The continuing importance of game applications and other numerically intensive workloads has generated an upsurge in novel computer architectures tailored for such functionality. Game applications feature highly parallel code for functions such as game physics, which have high computation and memory requirements, and scalar code for functions such as game artificial intelligence, for which fast response times and a full-featured programming environment are critical. The Cell Broadband EngineTM architecture targets such applications, providing both flexibility and high performance by utilizing a 64-bit multithreaded PowerPC® processor element (PPE) with two levels of globally coherent cache and eight synergistic processor elements (SPEs), each consisting of a processor designed for streaming workloads, a local memory, and a globally coherent DMA (direct memory access) engine. Growth in processor complexity is driving a parallel need for sophisticated compiler technology. In this paper, we present a variety of compiler techniques designed to exploit the performance potential of the SPEs and to enable the multilevel heterogeneous parallelism found in the Cell Broadband Engine architecture. Our goal in developing this compiler has been to enhance programmability while continuing to provide high performance. We review the Cell Broadband Engine architecture and present the results of our compiler techniques, including SPE optimization, automatic code generation, single source parallelization, and partitioning.

Automated DNA sequencing requires the intensive use of computers to handle the large amount of data taken. When a computer failure occurs and the data are no longer accessible, all the expense and ...