Current parental stress in maltreating and nonmaltreating families of children with multiple disabilities.

Questionnaires were mailed to families of children with multiple disabilities to investigate whether differences in parental perception of stress and burden of care could be identified in those families who had previously been reported and substantiated as abusive or neglectful as compared to those families who had not been so reported. Two hundred and fifty-seven parents completed Friedrich's revised version of Holroyd's Questionnaire on Resources and Stress (QRS-F), an instrument designed to measure stress and burden of care in families of children with disabilities. Twenty-five (9.7%) had previously substantiated maltreatment reports. Results suggest that a history of maltreatment is not related to the family's currently perceived stress levels as measured by the Friedrich scale. Implications of the results are discussed.     

Science Letters:Brain metastases of melanoma-mechanisms of attack on their defence system by engineered stem cells in the microenvironment

This report gives a better emphasis on the role of targeted effectors (e.g. a combination of 5-FC with CD-NSPCs as compared to the application of NSPCs alone) and how such delivery of pro-drug activating enzymes and other tumor-killing substances may overcome melanocytic defence system, interact with and promote the host defence and immune response modulations not only in melanoma but, potentially, in other highly-metastatic cancers.     

Competence Development and Appraisal in Organizations

This contribution focuses on the way in which employees and managers perceive themselves and each other. Based on two PhD-projects, one in which differences between self-ratings and supervisor ratings have been studied, and one in which the focus was the differences between team leaders' self-perception and the team members' perception, it was concluded that supervisors and employees have a different view on the competencies and behavior of one another. Some explanations for these results are given. Also, implications for competence development and appraisal of employees and managers will be described.     

The tools of quality in electronic engineering education

The university lecture rooms are the main work places where universities can develop their intermediary function between students and society. This function can be influenced by some factors: diploma curriculum, entrepreneurial environment and teacher research. The primary objective of this paper is to integrate these three factors in the lecture room. For that purpose, we started a new field in our centre: the innovation of quality in education. This field will provide the students with a work methodology in agreement with the professional world and will allow continuous improvement in the educational methodology. The experimental intervention was based on the application of the tools of quality to the problem-solving in telecommunications engineering. As a result, we detected the most significant troubles and we obtained guidelines to improve the design and development of the laboratory practices. Two main conclusions were obtained. First, we show that these quality techniques have been revealed as a powerful educational tool for continuous improvement. Second, the students made a good valuation of this way of making them approach their future engineering work. This work will lead us to new activities in the same field.     

Student counselling in Turkish universities

This article presents general information about the history, relevant laws and legislation, present status and anticipated future development in Turkish Universities, as well as the student counselling services within these institutions. Special emphasis is placed upon the perceived understanding of counselling as commonly accepted by the society, students and counsellors. While discussing the present status of Turkish University Counselling Centers, the proposed models, research findings and problems of the centers are documented. As a more specific example, the Middle East Technical University Counselling Center is described with a discussion of some of the drawbacks and recommended changes for the advancement of the center. Finally, suggestions for a culturally relevant model in terms of the nature, components and organisational structure of the system are discussed.     

How to repair the Hill cipher

INTRODUCTION Owing to the advance in network technology, information security is an increasingly important problem. Popular application of multimedia tech- nology and increasingly transmission ability of net- work gradually leads us to acquire information di- rectly and clearly through images. Hence, data secu- rity has become a critical and imperative issue. Hill cipher is a block cipher that has several advantages such as disguising letter frequencies of the plaintext, its simplicity be…     

A longitudinal think-aloud study of spontaneous strategic processing during the reading of multiple expository texts

This study examined the strategiesspontaneously used by university students asthey tried to understand multiple expositorytexts as part of their normal reading andstudying. Law students read self-selected textsat different points in time during onesemester. Think-aloud protocols generatedduring reading were analyzed to identify typesof strategic text processing. It was foundthat students' strategic processing changedover time, with some of the changes associatedwith changes in students' perception of thenature of the reading task. Different changesin strategic processing were observed forstudents at different levels of performance.