Search

The present meta-analysis examined the stability of vocational interests from early adolescence (age 12) to middle adulthood (age 40). Stability was represented by rank-order and profile correlations. Interest stability remained unchanged during much of adolescence and increased dramatically during the college years (age 18-21.9), where it remained for the next 2 decades. Analyses of potential moderators showed that retest time interval was negatively related to interest stability and that rank-order stability was less stable than profile stability. Although cohort standings did not moderate stability, interests of the 1940s birth cohort were less stable than those of other cohorts. Furthermore, interests reflecting hands-on physical activities and self-expressive/artistic activities were more stable than scientific, social, enterprising, and clerical interests. Vocational interests showed substantial continuity over time, as evidenced by their higher longitudinal stability when compared with rank-order stability of personality traits. The findings are discussed in the context of psychosocial development.

A wireless system consisting of a finite number of heterogeneous users transmitting packets over a slotted ALOHA Rayleigh-fading channel is investigated in this paper. In this system, each user tries to minimize its number of transmission attempts while meeting the throughput demand. The user interaction in such an ALOHA network is modeled as a random access game. A novel technique to better exploit the channel state information (CSI) named adaptive CSI transmission method is proposed. Benchmarking with the no-CSI method and threshold-based CSI method, it is revealed that the proposed adaptive CSI method can yield up to 9.9% more throughput and 12.3% power reduction. Two simple yet effective guidelines on selecting among these CSI-related methods are formulated for systems with different SNRs and capture ratios. A distributed algorithm is proposed to find the optimal transmission probability. Both analytical and simulation results show that the algorithm exhibits fast convergence speed and is robustness against changes on the number of active nodes in the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]