A study regarding the spontaneous use of geometric shapes in young children’s drawings

The studies regarding how the comprehension of geometric shapes evolves in childhood are largely based on the assessment of children's responses during the course of tasks linked to the recognition, classification or explanation of prototypes and models. Little attention has been granted to the issue as to what extent the geometric shape turns out to be an expressive tool that young children spontaneously use in their pictorial productions and also, whether or not methodological research approaches aimed at the examination of unprompted usage of geometric shapes in childhood may be useful regarding the study of the development of geometric thinking. This evidence provided by this study is coherent with the assumption that before starting primary education, internal representation of closed curves, quadrilaterals and triangles should have been developed by a significant number of children and, more interestingly, that young children’s graphical expressivity appears liaised to their skill to depict two-dimensional geometric shapes.     

Managing structured queries in probabilistic XML retrieval systems

Focusing on the context of XML retrieval, in this paper we propose a general methodology for managing structured queries (involving both content and structure) within any given structured probabilistic information retrieval system which is able to compute posterior probabilities of relevance for structural components given a non-structured query (involving only query terms but not structural restrictions). We have tested our proposal using two specific information retrieval systems (Garnata and PF/Tijah), and the structured document collections from the last six editions of the INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX).     

Critical Race Theory Meets the NYPD: An Assessment of Anti-Racist Pedagogy for Police in New York City

This research describes and assesses Critical Race Theory (CRT) pedagogy in a higher education ethnic studies course for police officers. CRT pedagogy aims to help students overcome “color-blind” thinking, which minimizes awareness of racism, by raising their critical understanding of racism and framing it as a pervasive and institutionalized reality that everyone has a responsibility to change. Using the Color Blind Racial Awareness (COBRA) Scale, critical awareness in three cluster areas, white privilege, institutional discrimination, and blatant racism, is measured among those completing the ethnic studies course and a comparison group of officers completing a different college course for police. Conclusions reflect on the impact of the course on students’ awareness of racism, the correlation of identity and awareness of racism, the hypothetical impact of such awareness in policing and possibilities for future research.     

Laser cleaning of terracotta decorations of the portal of Palos of the Cathedral of Seville

Laser cleaning has been used to restore the soiled terracotta statues and decorations of the tympanum of the portal of Palos of the Cathedral of Seville in Spain. A simultaneous laboratory study performed on a representative sample helped to identify the optimum laser conditions to remove the dark soiling layer produced by air pollution. It was found that irradiation at 1064 nm with a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser was more effective than the harmonic wavelengths of 532 or 266 nm. LIBS and Raman microscopy gave information on the composition of terracotta and identified the presence of a protective layer made of gypsum and calcite. As detected by Raman spectroscopy, laser irradiation caused the elimination of the carbon component of the soiling layer and the appearance of an anhydrite component in the laser irradiated gypsum layer applied over the terracotta substrate for protective purposes. Local heating of the surface caused by laser irradiation at 1064 nm, the laser wavelength used for restoration of the portal, might be responsible for a process of partial dehydration of gypsum into anhydrite.     

The Determinants of Artistic Innovation: Bringing in the Role of Organizations

This article deals with the determinants of artistic innovation by arts organizations. First, we define artistic innovation. Second, we review the literature on its determinants, identifying some gaps. In particular, we observe that existing research mostly focuses on macro-environmental factors and tends to ignore the role of the organizations themselves. Thus, drawing from the organizational literature on innovation we formulate testable propositions that relate organizational factors to artistic innovation. We hope that our focus on organizational factors contributes to a more comprehensive framework on the determinants of artistic innovation in particular and programming in general.     

Soothing pain-elicited distress in infants with swaddling and pacifiers

The effectiveness of pacifiers and swaddling in reducing pain-induced distress was compared in 2-week-old infants who underwent heel-sticks and 2-month-old infants who received injections. Crying, state, and heart rate were measured on 32 infants at each age during baseline, the stress of heel-stick or injection, and during 3-min soothing intervention and postintervention periods. At 2 weeks, infants' HR levels and crying declined significantly more rapidly in the pacifier than in the swaddling condition. At 2 months, both conditions produced similar rates of decline in HR and crying. At both ages, infants in the pacifier group spent significantly more time in an alert state than did swaddled infants. Following termination of the intervention at both ages, HR and crying tended to rebound more in the pacifier than in the swaddling group. Swaddling and pacifiers thus reduce pain-elicited distress differently.     

Measuring the academic reputation through citation networks via PageRank

The objective assessment of the prestige of an academic institution is a difficult and hotly debated task. In the last few years, different types of university rankings have been proposed to quantify it, yet the debate on what rankings are exactly measuring is enduring.To address the issue we have measured a quantitative and reliable proxy of the academic reputation of a given institution and compared our findings with well-established impact indicators and academic rankings. Specifically, we study citation patterns among universities in five different Web of Science Subject Categories and use the PageRank algorithm on the five resulting citation networks. The rationale behind our work is that scientific citations are driven by the reputation of the reference so that the PageRank algorithm is expected to yield a rank which reflects the reputation of an academic institution in a specific field. Given the volume of the data analysed, our findings are statistically sound and less prone to bias, than, for instance, ad–hoc surveys often employed by ranking bodies in order to attain similar outcomes. The approach proposed in our paper may contribute to enhance ranking methodologies, by reconciling the qualitative evaluation of academic prestige with its quantitative measurements via publication impact.     

A new perspective on emotions

This paper reviews the recent history of the study of human emotions in psychology and traces the factors that have been responsible for a remarkable increase of interest in emotions, especially in human development. In particular, it traces the rise of the study of emotions as regulators of human behavior. A particularly clear and powerful illustration of the regulatory role of emotional expressions on behavior is the phenomenon of social referencing. This concept deals with the use of emotional information in another's facial, vocal or gestural expression to clarify uncertain situations. Research on social referencing is reviewed, showing the importance of social referencing with infants as young as 8.5 months. The clinical implications of the concept are briefly explored.     

Plato, Pascal, and the dynamics of personal knowledge

Abstract educational practices are to be based on proven scientific knowledge, not least because the function science has to perform in human culture consists of unifying practical skills and general beliefs, the episteme and the techne (Amsterdamski, 1975, pp. 43–44). Now, modern societies first of all presuppose regular and standardized ways of organizing both our concepts and our institutions. The explanatory schemata resulting from this standardization tend to destroy individualism and enchantment. But mathematics education is in fact the only place in which to treat the human subject’s relationship with mathematics. And that is what mathematics education is all about: make the human subject grow intellectually and as a person by means of mathematics. At first sight, mathematics, in its formal guise, seems the opposite of philosophy, because philosophy constructs concepts (meanings), whereas mathematics deals with extensions of concepts (sets). We shall, however, turn this problem into an instrument, using the complementarity of intensions and extensions of theoretical terms as our main device for discussing the relationship between philosophy and mathematics education. The complementarity of the “how” and the “what” of our representations outlines, in fact, the terrain on which epistemology and education are to meet.