University of Massachusetts Amherst

About: University of Massachusetts Amherst is a education organization based out in Amherst Center, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Galaxy. The organization has 37274 authors who have published 83965 publications receiving 3834996 citations. The organization is also known as: UMass Amherst & Massachusetts State College.

Cognitive-Experiential Self-Theory of Personality

Abstract: Cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST) is a psychodynamic theory of personality that achieves a high degree of integration through a synthesis of the psychodynamic, emotional unconscious of psychoanalysis, the affect-free unconscious of cognitive science, and principles of learning theory. According to CEST, people operate by two information-processing systems, a predominantly conscious, verbal, rational system and a predominantly preconscious, automatic, experiential, learning system. The two systems operate in parallel by different rules and are interactive. The influence of the experiential system on the rational system can account for everything that the psychoanalytic unconscious can and, unlike the latter, to do so in a manner consistent with evolutionary principles and cognitive science. An extensive research program is described that provides support for many of the assumptions in CEST, including the operating principles of the experiential system and the interaction of the two systems. The implications of the theory are discussed for psychotherapy and psychological research. According to CEST, there are three basic ways in which psychotherapeutic change can occur: by using the rational system to correct the experiential system, by learning directly from emotionally significant experience, and by communicating with the experiential system in its own medium (e.g., fantasy, imagery, metaphor). It is important in research to take into account the two processing systems and their influence on each other, rather than following the more customary procedure of assuming there is a single, unified system. Keywords: basic beliefs; basic needs; cognitive-experiential self-theory; experiential system; intuitive thinking; preconscious; psychotherapy; rational system; unconscious

The role of student involvement and perceptions of integration in a causal model of student persistence

Abstract: This study uses a revised integrated model ofundergraduate persistence to examine first-yearretention at a private, highly selective researchuniversity. Findings from the study provide strongsupport for use of the model in futurestudies.

The deepest divergences in land plants inferred from phylogenomic evidence.

Abstract: Phylogenetic relationships among the four major lineages of land plants (liverworts, mosses, hornworts, and vascular plants) remain vigorously contested; their resolution is essential to our understanding of the origin and early evolution of land plants. We analyzed three different complementary data sets: a multigene supermatrix, a genomic structural character matrix, and a chloroplast genome sequence matrix, using maximum likelihood, maximum parsimony, and compatibility methods. Analyses of all three data sets strongly supported liverworts as the sister to all other land plants, and analyses of the multigene and chloroplast genome matrices provided moderate to strong support for hornworts as the sister to vascular plants. These results highlight the important roles of liverworts and hornworts in two major events of plant evolution: the water-to-land transition and the change from a haploid gametophyte generation-dominant life cycle in bryophytes to a diploid sporophyte generation-dominant life cycle in vascular plants. This study also demonstrates the importance of using a multifaceted approach to resolve difficult nodes in the tree of life. In particular, it is shown here that densely sampled taxon trees built with multiple genes provide an indispensable test of taxon-sparse trees inferred from genome sequences.

iPlane: an information plane for distributed services

Abstract: In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of iPlane, a scalable service providing accurate predictions of Internet path performance for emerging overlay services. Unlike the more common black box latency prediction techniques in use today, iPlane adopts a structural approach and predicts end-to-end path performance by composing the performance of measured segments of Internet paths. For the paths we observed, this method allows us to accurately and efficiently predict latency, bandwidth, capacity and loss rates between arbitrary Internet hosts. We demonstrate the feasibility and utility of the iPlane service by applying it to several representative overlay services in use today: content distribution, swarming peer-to-peer filesharing, and voice-over-IP. In each case, using iPlane's predictions leads to improved overlay performance.

Type I and II Endometrial Cancers: Have They Different Risk Factors?

Abstract: Purpose Endometrial cancers have long been divided into estrogen-dependent type I and the less common clinically aggressive estrogen-independent type II. Little is known about risk factors for type II tumors because most studies lack sufficient cases to study these much less common tumors separately. We examined whether so-called classical endometrial cancer risk factors also influence the risk of type II tumors. Patients and Methods Individual-level data from 10 cohort and 14 case-control studies from the Epidemiology of Endometrial Cancer Consortium were pooled. A total of 14,069 endometrial cancer cases and 35,312 controls were included. We classified endometrioid (n = 7,246), adenocarcinoma not otherwise specified (n = 4,830), and adenocarcinoma with squamous differentiation (n = 777) as type I tumors and serous (n = 508) and mixed cell (n = 346) as type II tumors. Results Parity, oral contraceptive use, cigarette smoking, age at menarche, and diabetes were associated with type I and type II tumors to...