More laws for pauses: Replication and generalization.

The basic timescales governing animal life are generally determined by body size. Pauses in naturally occurring human speech were investigated to determine if pause timescales are also sensitive to body size. Reported is an analysis of pause duration allometry in recorded interviews of 61 athletes.

Laws for pauses.

It is shown that a particular class of pauses taken in both read and composed speech obey allometric laws such that mean pause length predicts body size. The pauses in this class have durations that roughly span 250 ms to 1,000 ms and are taken to mark grammatical and prosodic boundaries. A theory of pause allometry is developed based on the observation that these pauses are expressive, they give speech momentum and rhythm, and most importantly, their durations reflect temporal discrimination-they are not produced by articulatory constraints.

Allometric scaling laws for temporal proximity in perceptual organization.

In both space and time, proximity plays an important role in the formation of perceived groups, objects, and scenes. Proximity is especially critical in the temporal domain where there are constraints-pauses or delays between neighboring events, that when of sufficient size, defeat the grouping processes that underlay temporal integration. A framework is developed where temporal proximity constraints are theorized to reflect lifetimes of exponential decay processes, and this identification leads to an inquiry into their scaling properties.

Treatment patterns and cost-effectiveness of first line treatment of advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer in Medicare patients.

Aim: To assess the cost-effectiveness of first-line pemetrexed/platinum and other commonly administered regimens in a representative US elderly population with advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

Materials And Methods: This study utilized the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) cancer registry linked to Medicare claims records. The study population included all SEER-Medicare patients diagnosed in 2008-2009 with advanced non-squamous NSCLC (stages IIIB-IV) as their only primary cancer and who started chemotherapy within 90 days of diagnosis.

Assessing temporal integration spans in ADHD through apparent motion.

Objective: We use psychophysical methods to examine the maximum time intervals over which discrete events can be temporally integrated into the percept known as apparent motion. We hypothesized that the maximum time interval would be shorter in participants with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than it would be in a control group.

Method: Thirty-five adults with ADHD and 40 adult controls without ADHD participated in an apparent motion task, in which they viewed a stimulus flashing in 2 different locations and were asked to complete the trajectory of motion that they perceived.

A class of temporal boundaries derived by quantifying the sense of separation.

The perception of moment-to-moment environmental flux as being composed of meaningful events requires that memory processes coordinate with cues that signify beginnings and endings. We have constructed a technique that allows this coordination to be monitored indirectly. This technique works by embedding a sequential priming task into the event under study.

The serial process in visual search.

The conditions for serial search are described. A multiple target search methodology (Thornton & Gilden, 2007) is used to home in on the simplest target/distractor contrast that effectively mandates a serial scheduling of attentional resources. It is found that serial search is required when (a) targets and distractors are mirror twins, and (b) when the search elements lack the Gestalt property of intrinsic orientation.

XVII International AIDS Conference: From Evidence to Action - Clinical and biomedical prevention science.

The question of whether to initiate ART at higher CD4+ cell counts than currently recommended by World Health Organization (WHO) treatment guidelines received much attention at the XVII International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2008). If studies presented at the conference ultimately lead to a revision of WHO treatment guidance, the estimated number of people who will need ART globally will increase substantially. Task-shifting is emerging as an important strategy for dealing with the acute shortage of health care workers in many high-burden countries, and several studies presented at AIDS 2008 demonstrated the impressive health system efficiencies garnered by using nurses or other health care providers to deliver HIV care and treatment.

XVII International AIDS Conference: From Evidence to Action - Basic science.

This article focuses on the sessions in which basic science research was presented at the XVII International AIDS Conference (AIDS 2008). It also provides an analysis of basic science issues which generated significant discussion and debate at the conference and are likely to have implications for future laboratory and clinical research. Data presented at AIDS 2008 confirmed the speed with which HIV establishes latent viral reservoirs following infection and the resulting challenges to viral eradication given how effectively HIV proviral RNA inserts itself into human DNA within these reservoirs.

Contraction of time in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been associated with anomalies in dopamine systems. Recent advances in the understanding of the core cognitive deficits in ADHD suggest that dopamine dysfunction might be expressed through shortened time scales in reward-based learning. Here this perspective is extended by the conjecture that temporal span in working memory systems might generally be shortened.

Response variability in attention-deficit disorders.

Reaction times in a mental rotation task were measured across a diverse population that sorted into two groupings based on overall variability. Although both the low- and the high-variance groups produced data that displayed the trends typical of mental rotation, the two groups' reaction time sequences had very different autocorrelation functions. Power spectra derived from the two groups' data showed the presence of distinctive noise processes with long memory.

Managing Medicare's HIV caseload in the era of suppressive therapy.

Objectives: The 1996 introduction of antiretroviral medications changed Medicare's role in providing HIV care. We analyzed Medicare's patient database in an effort to document the new HIV therapies' effects on expenditures and outcomes.

Methods: We examined the medical billing records of a 5% national Medicare sample from 1997 through 2003.

Parallel and serial processes in visual search.

A long-standing issue in the study of how people acquire visual information centers around the scheduling and deployment of attentional resources: Is the process serial, or is it parallel? A substantial empirical effort has been dedicated to resolving this issue (e.g., J.

Provenance of correlations in psychological data.

Two distinct families of statistical processes are considered in the production of psychophysical time series data (Gilden, 1997, 2001; Gilden, Thornton, & Mallon, 1995). We inquire whether the spectral signatures of the underlying dynamics are better described in terms of short-range autoregressive moving-average (ARMA) processes or long-range fractal processes. A thorough presentation of both families is given so as to clarify the scope and generalizability of the models as descriptions of choice reaction time data.