University of Rochester

About: University of Rochester is a education organization based out in Rochester, New York, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Laser. The organization has 63915 authors who have published 112762 publications receiving 5484122 citations. The organization is also known as: Rochester University.

Achievement goals, study strategies, and exam performance: A mediational analysis.

Abstract: Two studies examined achievement goals as predictors of self-reported cognitive/ metacognitive and motivational study strategies and tested these study strategies as mediators of the relationship between achievement goals and exam performance in the normatively graded college classroom. The results support hypotheses generated from the trichotomous achievement goal framework. Mastery goals are positive predictors of deep processing, persistence, and effort; performance-approach goals are positive predictors of surface processing, persistence, effort, and exam performance; and performance-avoidance goals are positive predictors of surface processing and disorganization and negative predictors of deep processing and exam performance. Persistence and effort mediate the relationship between performance-approach goals and exam performance, whereas disorganization mediates the relationship between performance-avoidance goals and exam performance.

The Biopsychosocial Model 25 Years Later: Principles, Practice, and Scientific Inquiry

Abstract: The biopsychosocial model is both a philosophy of clinical care and a practical clinical guide. Philosophically, it is a way of understanding how suffering, disease, and illness are affected by multiple levels of organization, from the societal to the molecular. At the practical level, it is a way of understanding the patient’s subjective experience as an essential contributor to accurate diagnosis, health outcomes, and humane care. In this article, we defend the biopsychosocial model as a necessary contribution to the scientific clinical method, while suggesting 3 clarifications: (1) the relationship between mental and physical aspects of health is complex—subjective experience depends on but is not reducible to laws of physiology; (2) models of circular causality must be tempered by linear approximations when considering treatment options; and (3) promoting a more participatory clinician-patient relationship is in keeping with current Western cultural tendencies, but may not be universally accepted. We propose a biopsychosocial-oriented clinical practice whose pillars include (1) self-awareness; (2) active cultivation of trust; (3) an emotional style characterized by empathic curiosity; (4) self-calibration as a way to reduce bias; (5) educating the emotions to assist with diagnosis and forming therapeutic relationships; (6) using informed intuition; and (7) communicating clinical evidence to foster dialogue, not just the mechanical application of protocol. In conclusion, the value of the biopsychosocial model has not been in the discovery of new scientific laws, as the term “new paradigm” would suggest, but rather in guiding parsimonious application of medical knowledge to the needs of each patient.

Algorithms and Thermodynamics for RNA Secondary Structure Prediction: A Practical Guide

Abstract: This article is about the current status of the mfold package for RNA and DNA secondary structure prediction using nearest neighbor thermodynamic rules. The details of the free energy rules and of the latest version 3.0 software are described. Future plans are also discussed.

Algorithms for scalable synchronization on shared-memory multiprocessors

Abstract: Busy-wait techniques are heavily used for mutual exclusion and barrier synchronization in shared-memory parallel programs. Unfortunately, typical implementations of busy-waiting tend to produce large amounts of memory and interconnect contention, introducing performance bottlenecks that become markedly more pronounced as applications scale. We argue that this problem is not fundamental, and that one can in fact construct busy-wait synchronization algorithms that induce no memory or interconnect contention. The key to these algorithms is for every processor to spin on separate locally-accessible flag variables, and for some other processor to terminate the spin with a single remote write operation at an appropriate time. Flag variables may be locally-accessible as a result of coherent caching, or by virtue of allocation in the local portion of physically distributed shared memory.We present a new scalable algorithm for spin locks that generates 0(1) remote references per lock acquisition, independent of the number of processors attempting to acquire the lock. Our algorithm provides reasonable latency in the absence of contention, requires only a constant amount of space per lock, and requires no hardware support other than a swap-with-memory instruction. We also present a new scalable barrier algorithm that generates 0(1) remote references per processor reaching the barrier, and observe that two previously-known barriers can likewise be cast in a form that spins only on locally-accessible flag variables. None of these barrier algorithms requires hardware support beyond the usual atomicity of memory reads and writes.We compare the performance of our scalable algorithms with other software approaches to busy-wait synchronization on both a Sequent Symmetry and a BBN Butterfly. Our principal conclusion is that contention due to synchronization need not be a problem in large-scale shared-memory multiprocessors. The existence of scalable algorithms greatly weakens the case for costly special-purpose hardware support for synchronization, and provides a case against so-called “dance hall” architectures, in which shared memory locations are equally far from all processors. —From the Authors' Abstract