Manipulation Instructions Research Articles

Champ or Chump?: Challenge and Threat States During Pressurized Competition

The present research examined the immediate impact of challenge and threat states on golf performance in both real competition and a laboratory-based task. In Study 1, 199 experienced golfers reported their evaluations of competition demands and personal coping resources before a golf competition. Evaluating the competition as a challenge (i.e., sufficient resources to cope with demands) was associated with superior performance. In Study 2, 60 experienced golfers randomly received challenge or threat manipulation instructions and then performed a competitive golf-putting task. Challenge and threat states were successfully manipulated and the challenge group outperformed the threat group. Furthermore, the challenge group reported less anxiety, more facilitative interpretations of anxiety, less conscious processing, and displayed longer quiet eye durations. However, these variables failed to mediate the group-performance relationship. These studies demonstrate the importance of considering preperformance psychophysiological states when examining the influence of competitive pressure on motor performance.

Social Anxiety and Gaze Avoidance: Averting Gaze but not Anxiety

Despite preliminary evidence that individuals with higher social anxiety tend to avoid eye contact during at least some social encounters, the function of this behavior remains unknown. Cognitive theories of social anxiety suggest that gaze avoidance may function as an attempt to avoid signs of social threat. However, it is unclear whether this behavior is effective for reducing anxiety and, if it is effective, whether this benefit is only present in the short-term. The goal of the current study was to test whether gaze avoidance is effective in reducing anxiety for individuals with higher social anxiety during short social conversations among peers. Participants completed a short social interaction with another undergraduate participant in which eye contact was manipulated halfway through the interaction. Recordings of the interactions were later coded for amount of eye contact; this allowed us to obtain an objective measure of adherence to the manipulation instructions. Participants were instructed to make either more or less eye contact, or continue as before. Being asked to make less eye contact was the most anxiety-provoking condition for participants with higher social anxiety. We propose, in line with previous research on safety behaviors, that avoiding eye contact in an effort to regulate state anxiety is an ineffective strategy over time for individuals with higher social anxiety. Therefore gaze avoidance may be a particularly important safety behavior to target in treatment for social anxiety disorder.

Monitoring of a protocol for the adequacy of the pharmaceutical form of the oral medication to the degree of dysphagia in patients hospitalized in an internal medicine service

The oral route is the most convenient way of administering medication, although it may not be safe. Dysphagia is one of the factors rendering difficult a proper feeding and administration of medication. to improve the administration of oral medication in patients with dysphagia by changing the pharmaceutical formulation of the principles prescribed to tolerable textures. Pilot project for the application of a dysphagia protocol that included the patients admitted to the Internal Medicine Unit at Los Montalvos Center for 4 months. After detecting the suspicion of dysphagia, a dysphagia-viscosity test was applied to know the tolerated textures. Then, the pharmaceutical formulations were adapted and the manipulation instructions for the drugs were indicated for their proper administration. 23 out of 627 admitted patients were included, with a mean age of 85 years (σ±7.4). The pathologies implicated in dysphagia were: dementia (65.2%); cerebrovascular disease (30.4%), and Parkinson's disease (4.4%). The best texture for drug intake was a "pudding" in 48.0%. 43 active ingredients were reviewed and 134 interventions were performed: in 41% of the cases, swallowing was made easier by mixing the drug with the food and in 59% water and a thickener were used. 94% of the recommendations were considered to be appropriate. the adaptation of the pharmaceutical formulations to the degree of dysphagia impacts on the improvement of healthcare quality by implementing safety in drug prescription and administration processes.

Emotion suppression affects cardiovascular responses to initial and subsequent laboratory stressors

The study of anger suppression and risk for cardiovascular disease has relied predominately on inspection of correlations between trait anger-in and cardiovascular risk factors and disease. This approach tells us little about whether inhibitory processes have anything to do with outcomes, and cannot speak to whether suppression of anger per se affects cardiovascular parameters. Drawing on the broader emotion regulation literature, we examined the effects of experimentally induced anger and general negative emotion in the context of expressive and experiential suppression on cardiovascular responses to initial and subsequent laboratory stressors. Of all participants, 201 healthy participants were randomly assigned to one of six conditions formed by crossing emotion (anxiety, anger) and suppression (experiential, expressive, control) conditions. Participants completed a mental arithmetic task with anxiety or anger induction under their respective suppression manipulation instructions, and subsequently were exposed to a cold pressor task. Systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure, and heart rate values were obtained for each experimental epoch. More robust SBP responses to the initial stressor were evidenced for those in the expressive versus the control condition. In response to the subsequent stressor, those in the experiential suppression condition showed the most pronounced SBP responses, suggesting pronounced delayed effects of this type of suppression. Effects of suppression on SBP reactivity were indistinguishable across anxiety and anger conditions. Effortful suppression of negative emotion has immediate and delayed consequences for stress-induced cardiovascular reactivity. Theoretical and clinical significance of these findings are discussed.

A New Basis for Shifters in General-Purpose Processors for Existing and Advanced Bit Manipulations

This paper describes a new basis for the implementation of the shifter functional unit in microprocessors that can implement new advanced bit manipulations as well as standard shifter operations. Our design is based on the inverse butterfly and butterfly data path circuits, rather than the barrel shifter or log-shifter designs currently used. We show how this new shifter can implement the standard shift and rotate operations, as well as more advanced extract, deposit, and mix operations found in some processors. Furthermore, it can perform important new classes of even more advanced bit manipulation instructions like arbitrary bit permutations, bit gather (or parallel extract), and bit scatter (or parallel deposit) instructions. Thus, our new functional unit performs the functionality of three functional units-the basic shifter, the multimedia-mix unit, and the advanced bit manipulation functional unit, while having a latency only slightly longer than that of the log-shifter. For performing only the existing functions of a shifter, it has significantly smaller area.

Instruction-Based Online Periodic Self-Testing of Microprocessors with Floating-Point Units

Online periodic testing of microprocessors is a valuable means to increase the reliability of a low-cost system, when neither hardware nor time redundant protection schemes can be applied. This is particularly valid for floating-point (FP) units, which are becoming more common in embedded systems and are usually protected from operational faults through costly hardware redundant approaches. In this paper, we present scalable instruction-based self-test program development for both single and double precision FP units considering different instruction sets (MIPS, PowerPC, and Alpha), different microprocessor architectures (32/64-bit architectures) and different memory configurations. Moreover, we introduce bit-level manipulation instruction sequences that are essential for the development of FP unit's self-test programs. We developed self-test programs for single and double precision FP units on 32-bit and 64-bit microprocessor architectures and evaluated them with respect to the requirements of low-cost online periodic self-testing: fault coverage, memory footprint, execution time, and power consumption, assuming different memory hierarchy configurations. Our comprehensive experimental evaluations reveal that the instruction set architecture plays a significant role in the development of self-test programs. Additionally, we suggest the most suitable self-test program development approach when memory footprint or low power consumption is of paramount importance.

On the (un-)controllability of affective priming: Strategic manipulation is feasible but can possibly be prevented

Three studies are presented that explored if and to what extent affective priming effects in a standard affective priming paradigm are susceptible to voluntary control. Specifically, it was tested was whether participants were able to eliminate or amplify affective priming effects when instructed to do so. In Experiment 1, it was shown that participants were successful in implementing manipulation instructions to decrease or eliminate the effect. Experiment 2 showed that such manipulation attempts succeeded in the opposite direction too, with participants voluntarily enhancing priming effects. Furthermore, it was shown that such manipulation effects could only partly be prevented by shortening duration of prime presentation and stimulus onset asynchrony between prime and target. The first two studies thus proved the susceptibility of the affective priming paradigm to spontaneous and strategic manipulation intentions of participants. However, when a moderate time pressure was induced by implementing a response deadline in Experiment 3, manipulation efforts failed. Implications of these results for the application of the affective priming paradigm in attitude research, specifically in socially sensitive domains, are discussed.

A New Multithreaded Architecture Supporting Direct Execution of Esterel

We propose a fully pipelined, multithreaded, reactive processor called STARPro for direct execution of Esterel. STARPro provides native support for Esterel threads and their scheduling. In addition, it also natively supports Esterel's preemption constructs, instructions for signal manipulation, and a notion of logical ticks for synchronous execution. In addition to the reactive processors, we propose a new intermediate format called unrolled concurrent control-flow graph with surface and depth (UCCFGsd) that closely resembles the Esterel source. A compiler, based on UCCFGsd, has been developed for code generation. We have synthesized STARPro and have carried out a range of benchmarking experiments. Experimental results reveal substantial improvement in performance and code size compared to software compilers. We also excel in comparison to recent reactive architectures, by achieving an average speed-up of 37% in worst-case reaction times and a speed-up of 38% in average-case reaction times. This has been achieved by utilizing fewer hardware resources, while incurring an average code size increase of 40%.

Janus: An FPGA-Based System for High-Performance Scientific Computing

This paper describes JANUS, a modular massively parallel and reconfigurable FPGA-based computing system. Each JANUS module has a computational core and a host. The computational core is a 4x4 array of FPGA-based processing elements with nearest-neighbor data links. Processors are also directly connected to an I/O node attached to the JANUS host, a conventional PC. JANUS is tailored for, but not limited to, the requirements of a class of hard scientific applications characterized by regular code structure, unconventional data manipulation instructions and not too large data-base size. We discuss the architecture of this configurable machine, and focus on its use on Monte Carlo simulations of statistical mechanics. On this class of application JANUS achieves impressive performances: in some cases one JANUS processing element outperfoms high-end PCs by a factor ~ 1000. We also discuss the role of JANUS on other classes of scientific applications.

Repurposing Turing's "Human Brake"

1945, Alan Turing theorized one of major stumbling blocks to computing technology's potential, coining term the human brake. The human brake slowed computing processes by delegating actions to human operators that should ideally reside within capabilities of a machine and its programming. Turing went on to outline a stored program computer that aimed to revolutionize current state of art. Holding programmatic instructions for data manipulation within machine would vastly increase rate of speed at which input and output could be run through central processor. Eliminating all that is done by normal human operator and transferring these functions to machine, not only increased speed but also would, it was hoped, reduce level of error.1 In strictest sense, Turing's human brake as then articulated is barely recognizable today as an impediment to computing speed and efficacy. But in a broader sense, human brake has never left field of electronic computing. It has become transformed over course of its historical trajectory, becoming increasingly abstract rather than being outright eliminated. This essay aims to provide a brief historical discussion of incarnations of human brake throughout 20th century. My hope is that by slightly stretching and reorienting concept functionally, while trying to remain true to its theoretical roots, we can create a useful tool for rethinking aspects computing's future as well as its past, as Turing did in 1945.

Dielectrophoresis of Microparticles with Planar Microelectrode Systems

In this paper, the behavior of microparticles subjected to the AC electric fields generated by planar microelectrode systems is studied. Microelectrodes including interdigitated array, castellated array, and jagged array are constructed using microfabrication techniques. Micron-sized latex beads are used to study their movements. Positive and negative dielectrophoresis (DEP) are studied. In the interdigitated electrodes, particles experiencing n-DEP are levitated stably to certain heights where the vertical DEP force is balanced by the gravitational force. The levitation heights of the particles are measured using the consecutively focusing method. The results provide significant instructions for the dielectrophoretic manipulation and separation of bioparticles.

Flowpaths: Compiling stack-based IR to hardware

The performance of software executed on a microprocessor is adversely affected by the basic fetch–execute cycle. A further performance penalty results from the load–execute–store paradigm associated with the use of local variables in most high-level languages. Implementing the software algorithm directly in hardware such as on an FPGA can alleviate these performance penalties. Such implementations are normally developed in a hardware description language such as VHDL or Verilog. More recently, several methods for using C as a hardware description language and for compiling C programs to hardware have been researched. Several software-programming languages compile to an intermediate representation (IR) that is stack based such as Java to Java bytecodes. Forth is a programming language that minimizes the use of local variables by exchanging the load–execute–store paradigm for stack manipulation instructions. This paper introduces a new systems architecture for FPGAs, called flowpaths, which can implement Java bytecodes or software programs written in Forth directly in an FPGA without the need for a microprocessor core. In the flowpath implementation of Forth programs all stack manipulation instructions are represented as simple wire connections that take zero time to execute. In the flowpath implementation of Java bytecodes the normal load–execute–store paradigm is represented as a single sequential operation and stack-manipulation operations become combinational thus executing faster. This paper compares the use of flowpaths in an FPGA generated from Java bytecodes and a high-level Forth program for the Sieve of Eratosthenes with C, Java, and Forth executed on microprocessors and microprocessor cores on FPGAs. The results show that flowpaths perform within a factor of two of a minimal hand-crafted direct hardware implementation of the Sieve and orders of magnitude better than compiling the program to a microprocessor.

The Manipulation Education Manual: Support for Evidence-Based Education

The Manipulation Education Manual (MEM) is an American Physical Therapy Association (APTA) document developed last year by the Manipulation Education Committee of the APTA Manipulation Task Force. The purpose of the MEM is to support and enhance manipulation instruction in physical therapist education programs. In fact, it was the realization that patterns in physical therapist education related to manipulation were not always consistent with the evidence regarding the safety, effectiveness, and legality of high-velocity thrust joint manipulation that led our committee to examine the resources available to faculty responsible for orthopaedic manual therapy instruction. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther 2005; 35(7):407–408. doi:10.2519/jospt.2005.0107

Test bench for software development of object-oriented processor

HISC (High-level Instruction Set Computer) is proposed to provide hardware support for OOP. It applies the concept of object-orientation in the architecture and provides special instructions for object manipulation. An operating system is under developing for HISC. It divided into several modules by using the object-oriented paradigm. It includes some special modules for object-manipulation such as object management and garbage collection which traditional operating system do not support.In order to do the functional verification of each module, a test bench is needed. Its aims are to ease the effort to written the testing program and to simulate the working environment. It can make it easier to evaluate if an algorithm is suitable for HISC or not. In this paper, we discuss the design of the test bench. The architecture of the system will be described, together with the implementation of the modules and the pluggable modules architecture.

정보 안내형 ICT 활용 수업과 구체적 조작 활동 수업이 수학과 분수 학습에 미치는 효과

본 연구는 초등학교 수학과 영역 중에서 ``분수`` 영역을 학습하기 위한 정보 안내형 ICT 활용 수업과 구체적 조작활동 수업 계획안을 개발, 적용하는 실험 연구를 실시하고, 이러한 두 가지 교수 방법이 남녀 아동들의 학업 성취도와 흥미도에 미치는 효과를 고찰하고자 하였다. 실험 연구 대상은 충북 소재 초등학교에 재학 중인 4학년 2개반 학생으로 총 40명이 본 연구를 위한 최종 통계 분석에 사용되었다.정보 안내형 ICT 활용 수업과 조작 활동 수업이 학업성취도에 미치는 영향 정도를 분석한 결과, 두 교수 방법 모두 학생들의 학업 성취도 향상에 긍정적인 효과를 갖고 있으며, 수업 종결 후 일정 시간이 경과한 후까지 지속 효과를 갖는 것으로 나타났다. 반면, 정보 안내형 ICT 활용 수업과 조작 활동 수업은 학생들의 학업 성취도에 있어 통계적으로 유의미한 차이가 있다는 증거를 발견할 수 없었고, 성별과의 뚜렷한 상호 작용 효과도 확인할 수 없었다. 두 교수 방법이 수업흥미도에 미치는 영향을 분석한 결과, 정보 안내형 ICT 활용 수업 보다 조작 활동 수업에서 높은 수업 흥미도를 나타냈고, 성별 효과나 성별과 교수 방법의 상호 작용 효과는 확인하지 못했다.

Effects of Manipulative Instruction on Solving Area and Perimeter Problems by Students with Learning Disabilities

A multiple baseline design was employed to test the effect of manipulative instruction on the perimeter and area problem–solving performance of middle and high school students who had been diagnosed with LD in the area of mathematics. Modeling, prompting/guided practice, and independent practice in conjunction with manipulative training were employed to teach both perimeter and area problem–solving skills. Analysis of data revealed that the students rapidly acquired the problem–solving–skills, maintained these skills over a two–month period, and transferred these skills to a paper and pencil problem–solving format. This research extends previous findings by revealing that use of concrete manipulatives promotes the long–term maintenance of skills.

Stack caching for interpreters

An interpreter can spend a significant part of its execution time on accessing arguments of virtual machine instructions. This paper explores two methods to reduce this overhead for virtual stack machines by caching top-of-stack values in (real machine) registers. The dynamic method is based on having, for every possible state of the cache, one specialized version of the whole interpreter; the execution of an instruction usually changes the state of the cache and the next instruction is executed in the version corresponding to the new state. In the static method a state machine that keeps track of the cache state is added to the compiler. Common instructions exist in specialized versions for several states, but it is not necessary to have a version of every instruction for every cache state. Stack manipulation instructions are optimized away.

The Relationship between Experimental Manipulations and Tests of Theory in an Advertising Message Involvement Context

Abstract Advertising message involvement (AMI) has been identified as an important individual/situational factor influencing advertising processing. In order to isolate and examine various theoretical relationships, researchers often experimentally manipulate AMI. In this study, several manipulations of the construct were tested for their ability to place individuals into high- and low-involvement groups. The results of the analyses indicated that modifications in manipulation instructions may alter the pattern of results obtained on manipulation-and confounding-check measures. The findings also suggest that relationships between theoretical constructs may be dependent upon the involvement manipulation utilized. The study is intended to demonstrate the delicate balance/relationship between methodological rigor and theoretical development/advancement.

NOTIS: an operating theatre information system

Solutions to straightforward resource management problems need not always involve the use of complex, specialised and expensive software solutions. Commercially available 'off the shelf' packages have increased in flexibility and ease of use, and are usually an order of magnitude cheaper than their custom designed counterparts. In response to a request for a low cost database suitable to be used on a stand-alone microcomputer system, the widely available integrated software package Smart was used. The program specification required quantification and analysis of the workload in a medium sized operating theatre suite (at 6,000 cases/year) to be undertaken. In addition to providing Database, Spreadsheet and Wordprocessor modules, each with rapid and easy exchange of data from one module to another, Smart incorporates its own programming language. This may be used to build up complex series of instructions for data manipulation, to generate menus and create a naive user front end to the finished program. Although an adequate knowledge of database construction and basic programming are necessary, professional programming skills are not required. NOTIS, the Newham Operating Theatre Information System, is a menu driven program designed to be used by clerical staff, and accepting patient data derived from within the operating theatre. At the end of each month a set of predetermined reports are produced. These reports are designed to provide information on the workload, case type and medical personnel involvement applicable to theatre managers, anaesthetists and surgical staff.

Human pattern recognition: evidence for a switching between strategies in analyzing complex stimuli.

In a preceding multidimensional scaling experiment, with "size" and "brightness" as parameters, subjects were found to use individually different strategies in processing compound stimuli: Most subjects adhered to either the Euclidean or the City-block metric (Ronacher and Bautz, 1985). In the experiment reported here, participants of the previous study were induced - by a manipulative instruction - to modify their strategy. With 5 out of 10 subjects a switching to another strategy occurred, which manifested itself in a drastic shift of the respective best metric (e.g. from Euclidean to City-block or vice versa). The extent and speed of changes as well as - in some instances - the stability of estimation accuracy show that subjects were not forced by the instruction to develop a new strategy. Results rather suggest that adult subjects have easily available two, or perhaps even more, alternative processing modes, the decision for one of them being a matter of a subject's preferences rather than of individually different abilities.