Compulsive shopping and spending, an impulse disorder, form a specific psychodynamic complex with common developmental precursors of pathological narcissism. Compulsive shopping and spending are distinguished from other symptomatic uses of money and impulsive acts. Four cases illustrate some psychodynamic considerations and therapeutic implications.

Normalizing flows and autoregressive models have been successfully combined to produce state-of-the-art results in density estimation, via Masked Autoregressive Flows (MAF) (Papamakarios et al., 2017), and to accelerate stateof-the-art WaveNet-based speech synthesis to 20x faster than real-time (Oord et al., 2017), via Inverse Autoregressive Flows (IAF) (Kingma et al., 2016). We unify and generalize these approaches, replacing the (conditionally) affine univariate transformations of MAF/IAF with a more general class of invertible univariate transformations expressed as monotonic neural networks. We demonstrate that the proposed neural autoregressive flows (NAF) are universal approximators for continuous probability distributions, and their greater expressivity allows them to better capture multimodal target distributions. Experimentally, NAF yields state-of-the-art performance on a suite of density estimation tasks and outperforms IAF in variational autoencoders trained on binarized MNIST. 1

Array-based visualization techniques have been used for several decades to explore jetnoise properties such as source strength, size, and distribution. However, near-field acoustical holography (NAH) has only recently been utilized to study jet noise, and experiments are typically performed on laboratory jets in controlled environments. In this work, NAH was applied to measurements of a full-scale, installed jet engine. This paper outlines three different NAH methods applied to the data and addresses practical problems faced when NAH is performed on a full-scale jet. Holographic reconstruction of the jet-noise field at low frequencies shows phenomena consistent with radiation from large-scale turbulence structures. A comparison of reconstructed levels using both planar and cylindrical NAH methods suggests that cylindrical NAH outperforms planar NAH for jet noise sources.

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Patients on methadone maintenance were studied to determine which factors influence the continuation of heroin-free treatment, as opposed to the return to drug abuse. Psychosocial data, a Zung Depression Scale, and the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) were collected on those patients who returned to heroin use while on a methadone maintenance program during the one year of study (n = 48); they were compared to a control group as well as to themselves during a heroin-free maintenance period. The group of patients returning to heroin use showed the existence of such events as recent loss, depression, and exacerbation of intense affect coinciding with the occurrence of heroin use. Furthermore, their SRRS scores and number of SRRS items were significantly higher than those of the control group and than their own steady-state scores. The number and magnitude of stressful life events seem significantly related to patients' not adhering to methadone maintenance and returning to heroin use. The understanding of the importance and adaptive function of drugs to the addict in regulating and ameliorating otherwise overwhelming and catastrophic affective states is underscored otherwise overwhelming and catastrophic affective states is underscored by this study. The total number of life stress events as well as the specificity of meaning to the patient are both emotionally important in understanding, intervening, and treating these patients.