New Releases by Neil Christopher

Quitting smoking is a major problem for many people all over the world. Each year, thousands of people attempt to quit untreated, but only 3% to 5% maintain abstinence for six to 12 months after a given quit attempt. When treated, the success rate increases to a range of 13% to 36%. The people who are not successful often get discouraged, which can make it even harder for them to quit. This study examined the effectiveness of a program using an Internet-based delivery system (www.smokefade.com), based on the gradual reduction approach used in Project SCRAP-Tobacco, which employed both cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and motivational interviewing (MI) approaches to reduce smoking behavior. A total of 73 California smokers were recruited from the student population at San Diego State University (SDSU) for this test of a self-administered, Internet-based program. Smokers, who received class research credit for participating, were randomly assigned to either 28-day CBT/MI treatment or a self-report control condition. Initially, website failure caused complications; there was simultaneous implementation of control and experiment conditions. However, this error was rectified with manual implementation of the control condition. Cigarette consumption and motivation levels were recorded at baseline and daily in both conditions. Participants in the experiment condition received daily, automated emails that employed MI and CBT techniques to encourage gradual smoking reductions and increase non-smoking self-efficacy. Per-week totals of cigarette consumption over 4 weeks were compared using a mixed-model ANOVA for analysis. Participants in the CBT/MI condition showed a steady and significant decline in consumption over the 4-week intervention period: on average, 1.85 cigarettes per week. Conversely, participants in the control condition showed no reduction in cigarette consumption over the 28-day period. It is expected that participants who continue to use the techniques learned via the experiment condition would be able to exhibit greater control over their smoking behavior and would have more success at cutting back, quitting, and maintaining this change. Overall, the results of this research suggest smokefade.com has the potential to be a useful tool for individuals interested in quitting smoking.

Kappianaqtut provides readers with an in-depth academic examination of two mythological creatures from Inuit mythology.

Finally, we present a framework for application scheduling that is specifically targeted at computational scientists. This framework allows for the selection of scheduling objective function, but generally aims at dependability over speed because of the inherent need for reproducibility of results.

The word Taiksumani means the past. This book looks backwards into the past to Inuit mythology. Inuit stories are full of supernatural beings, and brings a collection of traditional stories that highlight these fantastic beings. Their stories vary from region to region in the north. This bilinguial edition was first published in 1996. 72 pages are in English and 72 are in Inuktitut.

''PEG-a-Cys'' reagent, synthesized by the esterification of monomethoxy-poly(ethylene glycol) to Ellman''s reagent [5,5''-dithiobis (2-nitrobenzoic acid)], is demonstrated to react to form a disulfide bond with the cysteine residue of ALC, a 25-residue synthetic peptide (H2 N-REAAALAAAAALAAWAALCPARRRR-CO2H) designed to model a fusion protein of a membrane protein transmembrane segment. Enzymatic digestion of the four charged residues at the carboxyl terminus of the peptide--which mimics the enzymatic cleavage of a TM segment from the fusion protein--releases a hydrophobic peptide which precipitates from aqueous solution within 24 hours. The PEG-a-Cys-modified peptide remains soluble for at least 7 days following identical enzymatic digestion, as measured by amino acid analysis of ultracentrifuged samples. Circular dichroism spectra reveal that neither PEG-a-Cys-modification nor digestion of ALC cause major changes in its primarily Ã-helical secondary structure. Routine solubilization of hydrophobic peptides is expected to simplify the purification and structural characterization of membrane protein TM segments.