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Kraska, James. Maritime Power and the Law of the Sea. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. 464pp. $95'In the unrelenting struggle of peoples,' the historian Pete Padfield wrote, 'those ascendant [...]

The increasing number of pirate attacks in and around Somali waters prompted the United Nations Security Council to approve Resolutions 1816. The resolution permits mandated countries to enter Somali waters to counter terrorism and the impact of this move will be felt during the initial six month period.

Both researchers and practitioners need to know more about how laboratory treatment protocols translate to real-world practice settings and how clinical innovations can be systematically tested and communicated to a skeptical scientific community. The single-case time-series study is well suited to opening a productive discourse between practice and laboratory. The appeal of case-based time-series studies, with multiple observations both before and after treatment, is that they enrich our design palette by providing the discipline another way to expand its empirical reach to practice settings and its subject matter to the contingencies of individual change. This article is a user's guide to conducting empirically respectable case-based time-series studies in a clinical practice or laboratory setting. Keywords: time series, single-subject research, time-series analysis, psychotherapy research

Previous investigations of adult age differences in the redundant signals effect suggest that both older and younger adults benefit from the presentation of redundant information. However, age deficits in divided attention may cause older adults to process redundant information in a different manner. In the present experiment, we tested between two competing explanations for the redundant signals effect: separate activation and coactivation. To investigate this issue, we used a bimodal detection task in which the auditory signal was a 1000-Hz tone and the visual signal was an asterisk. Both age groups showed significant violations of Miller's race model inequality, providing evidence for coactivation. These results suggest that, despite age-related deficits in divided attention, the ability to coactivate information from bimodal signals is spared with increased age.

The authors report a lexical decision experiment designed to determine whether activation is the locus of the word-frequency effect. K. R. Paap and L. S. Johansen (1994) reported that word frequency did not affect lexical decisions when exposure durations were brief; they accounted for this by proposing that data-limited conditions prevented late-occurring verification processes. Subsequently, P. A. Allen, A. F. Smith. M. Lien, T. A. Weber, and D. J. Madden (1997) and K. R. Paap, L. S. Johansen, E. Chun, and P. Vonnahme (2000) reported additional evidence that word-frequency effects do and do not have an activation locus, respectively. The authors further tested this issue in a lexical decision experiment using data-limited procedures--predicted by verification models to eliminate word-frequency effects. The authors observed word-frequency effects using individually determined exposure durations that were only 1 screen cycle longer than the exposure duration that yielded chance performance. Word-frequency effects persisted even when an adjusted measure of performance was used. Keywords: (locus of) word-frequency effect, activation, verification

In this project we examined the effect of adult age on visual word recognition by using combined reaction time (RT) and accuracy methods based on the Hick--Hyman law. This was necessary because separate Brinley analyses of RT and errors resulted in contradicting results. We report the results of a lexical decision task experiment (with 96 younger adults and 97 older adults). We transformed the error data into entropy and then predicted RT by using entropy values separately for exposure duration (thought to influence peripheral processes) and word frequency (thought to influence central processes). For exposure duration, the entropy--RT functions indicate that older adults show higher intercepts and slopes than do younger adults, suggesting an encoding decrement for older adults. However, for word frequency, older adults show higher intercepts but not steeper slopes than younger adults. Older adults thus show a peripheral processing decrement but not a central processing decrement for lexical decision.

Evaluation of overlapping processing in younger and older adults using the psychological refractory period technique reveals that the effect of word frequency on the lexical-decision task show that older adults perform as well as younger adults the task in question in parallel with the shape discrimination task.

Results show that the age does affect across the cognitive, sensory, and physiological factors in aged individuals as indicated by a decline in the task processing speed. Data point out that no single mechanism can explain all age-related cognitive declines.

A study was conducted to characterize a way to monitor a reaction sequence on resin. Magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and Fourier transform infrared were used for the nondestructive monitoring process. The identity of acrylate was determined using 13C NMR while alkylation was carried out to form the tetrasubstituted amine salt with allylic bromide. Results indicated that the combination of techniques can effectively support the nondestructive testing of resins.

Research was conducted to investigate the application of the Hofmann elimination of tetrasubsituted amine salts on solid-phase resin to produce diverse combinatorial libraries of trisubstituted amines. The diversity of disubstituted amines, cyclic and noncyclic was examined as a second step of alkylation while quaternary ammonium compounds were bound by overnight agitation. Results showed the success of amberlite-promoted Hofmann eliminations in solution-phase organic syntheses.

Strachan, Hew, and Sibylle Scheipers, eds. The Changing Character of War. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. 564pp. $110 Academic strategists have been agonizing over whether war is changing its [...]

Kleinen, John, and Manon Osseweijer, eds. Pirates, Ports, and Coasts in Asia: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Singapore and Leiden: ISEAS Press and International Institute for Asian Studies, 2010. 312pp. $74 [...]