Embedded microcontrollers are becoming increasingly prolific, serving as the primary or auxiliary processor in products and research systems from microwaves to sensor networks. Microcontrollers represent perhaps the most severely resource-constrained embedded processors, often with as little as a few bytes of memory and a few kilobytes of code space. Language and compiler technology has so far been unable to bring the benefits of modern object-oriented languages to such processors. In this paper, I will present the design and implementation of Virgil, a lightweight object-oriented language designed with careful consideration for resource-limited domains. Virgil explicitly separates initialization time from runtime, allowing an application to build complex data structures during compilation and then run directly on the bare hardware without a virtual machine or any language runtime. This separation allows the entire program heap to be available at compile time and enables three new data-sensitive optimizations: reachable members analysis, reference compression, and ROM-ization. Experi-mental results demonstrate that Virgil is well suited for writing microcontroller programs, with five demonstrative applications fitting in less than 256 bytes of RAM with fewer than 50 bytes of metadata. Further results show that the optimizations presented in this paper reduced code size between 20% and 80% and RAM size by as much as 75%.

Children with intellectual disability are at heightened risk for behaviour problems, and these are known to increase parenting stress. This study explored the relation of behaviour problems to less child-related domains of parent well-being (depression and marital adjustment), as well as the moderating effect of a personality trait, dispositional optimism. Participating children (N = 214) were classified as developmentally delayed, borderline, or nondelayed. Mothers' and fathers' well-being and child behaviour problems were assessed at child ages 3 and 4 years. Parents of delayed and nondelayed preschoolers generally did not differ on depression or marital adjustment, but child behaviour problems were strongly related to scores on both measures. Optimism moderated this relationship, primarily for mothers. When child behaviour problems were high, mothers who were less optimistic reported lower scores on measures of well-being than did mothers who were more optimistic. Interventions for parents that aim to enhance both parenting skills and psychological well-being should be available in preschool. It may be beneficial for such programmes to focus not only on behaviour management strategies aimed at child behaviour change, but also on parents' belief systems, with the aim of increasing dispositional optimism.

While the current antipsychotic medications have profoundly impacted the treatment of schizophrenia over the past 50 years, the newer atypical antipsychotics have not fulfilled initial expectations, and enormous challenges remain in long-term treatment of this debilitating disease. In particular, improved treatment of the negative symptoms and cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia which greatly impact overall morbidity is needed. In this review we will briefly discuss the current pipeline of drugs for schizophrenia, outlining many of the strategies and targets currently under investigation for the development of new schizophrenia drugs. Many of these compounds have great potential as augmenting agents in the treatment of negative symptoms and cognition. In addition, we will highlight the importance of developing new paradigms for drug discovery in schizophrenia and call for an increased role of academic scientists in discovering and validating novel drug targets. Indeed, recent breakthroughs in genetic studies of schizophrenia are allowing for the development of hypothesis-driven approaches for discovering possible disease-modifying drugs for schizophrenia. Thus, this is an exciting and pivotal time for the development of truly novel approaches to drug development and treatment of complex disorders like schizophrenia.

We evaluated the efficacy of a manualized multimodal treatment program for young externalizing children. Families were assigned randomly to an immediate 12-week parent and child treatment condition (n = 24) or to a delayed-treatment condition (n = 23). Parents had high attendance, high satisfaction with treatment, and increased knowledge of behavior management principles. Relative to the waitlist condition, treatment parents reported statistically and clinically significant reductions in child behavior problems, improved parenting practices (i.e., increased consistency, decreased power assertive techniques), an increased sense of efficacy, and reduced parenting stress. There was a trend toward parents improving their attitudes toward their children. In considering the process of change, we found evidence that improved parenting practices mediated reductions in child behavior problems and that child improvements mediated changes in parent attitudes and stress. Five months following treatment, teachers reported significant improvements in child behaviors, whereas parents reported that reductions in child behavior problems and parenting stress were maintained.

Embedded systems pose unique challenges to Java application developers and virtual machine designers. Chief among these challenges is the memory footprint of both the virtual machine and the applications that run within it. With the rapidly increasing set of features provided by the Java language, virtual machine designers are often forced to build custom implementations that make various tradeoffs between the footprint of the virtual machine and the subset of the Java language and class libraries that are supported. In this paper, we present the ExoVM, a system in which an application is initialized in a fully featured virtual machine, and then the code, data, and virtual machine features necessary to execute it are packaged into a binary image. Key to this process is feature analysis, a technique for computing the reachable code and data of a Java program and its implementation inside the VM simultaneously. The ExoVM reduces the need to develop customized embedded virtual machines by reusing a single VM infrastructure and automatically eliding the implementation of unused Java features on a per-program basis. We present a constraint-based instantiation of the analysis technique, an implementation in IBM's J9 Java VM, experiments evaluating our technique for the EEMBC benchmark suite, and some discussion of the individual costs of some of Java's features. Our evaluation shows that our system can reduce the non-heap memory allocation of the virtual machine by as much as 75%. We discuss VM and language design decisions that our work shows are important in targeting embedded systems, supporting the long-term goal of a common VM infrastructure spanning from motes to large servers.

The Morris water maze (MWM) has been widely used as a diagnostic tool to detect alterations in hippocampal-dependent learning induced by pharmacological or genetic manipulations in rats and mice. However, with the frequent use of the paradigm some questions have arisen regarding the complex nature of the effects of environmental and biological factors that influence behavioral performance of rodents in this task. One of the most contentious issues is whether MWM can consistently detect genetic differences independent of environmental, i.e., laboratory and experimental conditions. In the present paper, we demonstrate that changes in environmental factors, due to holding mice in large vs. small home cages, can lead to significant and robust spatial learning alterations in one inbred strain (C57BL/6) while having minimal or no effects on another (129/SVEV). The detected genotype-environment interaction underscores the need for experimenters to diligently control and document all possible environmental factors in order to make their results comparable across multiple test environments and laboratories.

Abalone populations in southern California have declined dramatically since the 1950s when they supported a multispecies, commercial, and recreational fishery producing more than 3,000 t per year. Today the commercial fishery is closed statewide and the recreational fishery is closed south of San Francisco. In contrast, red abalone, Haliotis rufescens (Swainson, 1822), populations in northern California continue to sustain a 1,100 1 per year free-diving recreational fishery. We used standardized Abalone Recruitment Modules (ARMs) made of half cinder blocks (area = 2.6 m(2)) to compare the recruitment of juvenile abalone in northern California. where stocks are abundant, with southern California where stocks have declined. We compared the abundance of abalone inside ARMs (n = 12) in Van Damme State Park (VDSP). northern California with abalone inside ARMs (n - 82) in the Channel Islands National Park from 2001 to 2003. Abalone densities on the reefs Surrounding the ARMs at VDSP, averaged 8300/ha compared with abalone densities of 30/ha on reefs in three of the northern Channel Islands. Red, flat abalone, H. walallensis and pinto abalone. H. kamstchatkana kamstchatkana were found in the northern ARMs, whereas in the south red, pink, H. corrugata, threaded, H. kamtchatkana assimilis, and the endangered white abalone, H. sorenseni, were rare in the southern ARMs. Abalone were 30 times more abundant inside the ARMs in the north (5.30/ARM) compared with the south (0.18/ARM). Similar numbers of abalone were found in all 3 years in the ARMs in northern (69, 69, and 53 abalone) and southern California (14, 11, and 20 abalone). The majority of abalone in both the north and the south were less then 100 mm in shell length. Ironically, the rare flat abalone was more abundant in the north, than pink abalone were in the south, a species which once supported a major fishery. Clearly. abalone stocks in southern California are so low that recruitment is failing, despite their potential high fecundity and the fishery closure. These results demonstrate that ARMs call be used to monitor recruitment in the northern fishery, as well as establish quantitative recovery criteria to assess abalone restoration efforts that are desperately needed in the south.