In 2 studies that draw from the social role theory of sex differences (A. H. Eagly, W. Wood, & A. B. Diekman, 2000), the authors investigated differences in agentic and communal characteristics in letters of recommendation for men and women for academic positions and whether such differences influenced selection decisions in academia. The results supported the hypotheses, indicating (a) that women were described as more communal and less agentic than men (Study 1) and (b) that communal characteristics have a negative relationship with hiring decisions in academia that are based on letters of recommendation (Study 2). Such results are particularly important because letters of recommendation continue to be heavily weighted and commonly used selection tools

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Semantic and syntactic aspects of sentence comprehension were investigated for 3 patients who showed different patterns of performance on short-term memory tasks. On a sentence anomaly judgment task assessing the retention of semantic information, only patient A.B. showed a detrimental effect on comprehension with increases in the number of words to be held in an unintegrated fashion. On judgments of grammatical acceptability, only patient M.W. demonstrated a detrimental effect of increasing the number of words intervening between the words signaling that a sentence was ungrammatical. The results suggest that semantic and syntactic components must be postulated in addition to the phonological and articulatory components of A. D. Baddeley's (1986Baddeley's ( , 1990 working memory model. Although the phonological, semantic, and syntactic components may be differentially affected by brain damage, the components interact and support each other in normal comprehension.

A system for staging the clinical status of patients with soft tissue sarcomas is presented, based on the clinical characteristics of the primary tumor (size, extension), the involvement of lymph nodes, the presence of metastases, and the grade of the tumor. This represents the TNM system with grade of tumor (G) added. The system evolved was based on examination of 1215 cases of 13 types of soft tissues sarcomas, primarily in the extremities (fibrosarcoma, liposarcoma, etc.). Nine stages are described, and they are correlated with survival in the cases reviewed. The staging system now can be used for case evaluation for therapy determination and for intercomparison of series of patients as to incidence of different kinds of tumors, effects of treatment, and survival.