Evolving scholarly communication

Nature Publishing Group and the Alliance for Cellular Signaling formed a partnership in 2001 to develop a comprehensive website for researchers in the field of cellular signalling. This website aimed to evolve the traditional form of publication (an article with supplementary information and links) into something that made better use of web and database technologies, and provided more value to scientists. This article gives an overview of the project, some of the thinking behind it, and how it has developed.     

Exercise cardiac power and the risk of heart failure in men: A population-based follow-up study

Background:Little is known about exercise cardiac power(ECP),defined as the ratio of directly measured maximal oxygen uptake with peak systolic blood pressure during exercise,on heart failure(HF)risk.We examined the association of ECP and the risk of HF.Methods:This was a population-based cohort study of 2351 men from eastern Finland.The average time to follow-up was 25 years.Participants participated at baseline in an exercise stress test.A total of 313 cases of HF occurred.Results:Men with low ECP(<9.84 mL/mmHg,the lowest quartile)had a 2.37-fold(95%confidence interval(95%CI):1.68-3.35,p<0.0001)hazards ratio of HF as compared with men with high ECP(>13.92 mL/mmHg,the highest quartile),after adjusting for age.Low ECP was associated with a 1.96-fold risk(95%CI:1.38-2.78,p<0.001)of HF after additional adjustment for conventional risk factors.After further adjustment for left ventricular hypertrophy,the results hardly changed(hazards ratio=1.87,95%CI:1.31-2.66,p<0.001).One SD increase in ECP(3.16 mL/mmHg)was associated with a decreased risk of HF by 28%(95%CI:17%-37%).Conclusion:ECP provides a noninvasive and easily available measure from cardiopulmonary exercise tests in predicting HF.However,ECP did not provide additional value over maximal oxygen uptake.     

Developmental links of very early phonological and language skills to second grade reading outcomes: strong to accuracy but only minor to fluency

The authors examined second grade reading accuracy and fluency and their associations via letter knowledge to phonological and language predictors assessed at 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 years in children in the Jyv?skyl? Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia. Structural equation modeling showed that a developmentally highly stable factor (early phonological and language processing [EPLP]) behind key dyslexia predictors (i.e., phonological awareness, short-term memory, rapid naming, vocabulary, and pseudoword repetition) could already be identified at 3.5 years. EPLP was significantly associated with reading and spelling accuracy and by age with letter knowledge. However, EPLP had only a minor link with reading fluency, which was additionally explained by early letter knowledge. The results show that reading accuracy is well predicted by early phonological and language skills. Variation in fluent reading skills is not well explained by early skills, suggesting factors other than phonological core skills. Future research is suggested to explore the factors behind the development of fast and accurate decoding skills.     

Task-related variation in communication of mothers and their sons with learning disability

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether mother-child communication patterns vary as a function of the type of the task. Groups of learning disabled (LD=30) and normally achieving boys (NLD=30) were videotaped interacting with their mothers in two different tasks. The children were matched for age (8 to 11 year-olds) and for parent’s SES. The results indicated that the teaching task differentiated the groups more than did the story task. Academic character of the teaching task increased mothers’ task involvement in both groups. Mothers of the LD group showed, however, significantly more dominance and expressed less emotionality while teaching their child. Mothers’ interaction partly followed from their children’s behaviour on this task. The children with LD did not cooperate with their mothers and were not emotionally involved in the teaching task as highly as were the normally achieving children. Corresponding features of interaction were not found for the LD group in the story task. Consistency of children’s communication across the tasks was significant in the LD group. The normally achieving boys were more responsive to changes in task conditions showing different behavior as a function of task.     

The Validity of Comparative Educational Studies

What are the conditions that will allow for appropriate comparisons among groups" Should the concept of comparative validity be added to the lexicon of the psychometrician"     

Generalized Hamming Distance

Many problems in information retrieval and related fields depend on a reliable measure of the distance or similarity between objects that, most frequently, are represented as vectors. This paper considers vectors of bits. Such data structures implement entities as diverse as bitmaps that indicate the occurrences of terms and bitstrings indicating the presence of edges in images. For such applications, a popular distance measure is the Hamming distance. The value of the Hamming distance for information retrieval applications is limited by the fact that it counts only exact matches, whereas in information retrieval, corresponding bits that are close by can still be considered to be almost identical. We define a Generalized Hamming distance that extends the Hamming concept to give partial credit for near misses, and suggest a dynamic programming algorithm that permits it to be computed efficiently. We envision many uses for such a measure. In this paper we define and prove some basic properties of the Generalized Hamming distance, and illustrate its use in the area of object recognition. We evaluate our implementation in a series of experiments, using autonomous robots to test the measure's effectiveness in relating similar bitstrings.     

The role of emotions in student teachers’ professional identity

This paper presents findings of a qualitative interview study of the role of emotions in the professional identity of student teachers. Strong positive and negative emotions (mostly related to pupils and supervisors) were expressed about personal teaching experiences. The results confirm that emotions play an important role in social learning and, therefore, influence the development of professional identity. The two most important findings were that negative emotions exercised the strongest influence and that supervisors neglected the role of positive emotions as a support for learning. The study supports the concept that it is important for teacher educators to help student teachers understand their emotional experiences (focusing foremost on positive factors in their experience) and to develop the ability to express their own emotions in addition to understanding the emotions of others.     

Winter Art Education Project

The purpose of this article is to describe how the Department of Art Education at the University of Lapland in Finland has developed winter art as a method of environmental and community‐based art education. I will focus on the Snow Show Winter Art Education Project, a training project funded by the European Union and the State Provincial Office of Lapland. The general aim of the project was to increase the know‐how of winter art in Northern Finland. This goal was put into practice through workshops on snow construction, documentation of winter art, winter‐oriented media production, and snow and ice sculpting; through continuing education seminars, workshops, and school projects for teachers; and through public lectures and seminars on winter and winter art. In this article, I describe the challenges that winter offers to community and environment‐based art education in the North. Further, I introduce the methods of implementation and the outcomes of winter art exercises carried out by several schools in Lapland in cooperation with and inspired by the Snow Show Winter Art Education Project.     

Growth Mixture Models Outperform Simpler Clustering Algorithms When Detecting Longitudinal Heterogeneity,Even With Small Sample Sizes

The expansion in the number of people entering higher education has resulted in a substantial increase in the proportion of students enrolling in nontraditional modes, such as part-time study. This study examined the question of whether part-time study curtails the development of the types of intellectual capabilities needed for a knowledge-based economy, because the students would have markedly less exposure to a stimulating campus environment than their full-time counterparts. Graduates from discrete full- and part-time programs from 1 university in Hong Kong completed a survey seeking perceptions of the nurturing of a range of capabilities, together with measures of teacher-student relationships and type of teaching experienced. Two hypotheses were tested by structural equation modeling: (a) the same mechanism for capability development operated for full- and part-time modes and (b) the principal element of the mechanism was the nature of teaching and the quality of teacher-student interaction. Hypothesis 1 was supported because configural invariance between hypothesized models for capability development between the 2 modes was found. Hypothesis 2 was also supported because the models showed that the principal influence on capability development came from teaching for understanding, through promoting active learning experiences and the degree and quality of teacher-student interaction.     

Children's concepts of gears and their promotion through play

The mechanical transmission of motion, which is observable in gears’ turning direction (TD) and turning speed (TS) can be understood as part of the core concept “force and motion”. Previous studies have suggested that most children before the age of nine have naïve concepts of gears’ TD and TS. However, these studies relied on children's explanation data and might have therefore underestimated young children's potential. Moreover, these studies did not examine whether preschoolers can overcome their naïve concepts through teaching. Recently, educators have proposed guided play as an educational approach that combines children's play with teacher guidance in a purposefully designed environment. We conducted two subsequent studies. In Study 1, we investigated the children's (naïve) concepts of gears’ TD and TS with a cross‐sectional approach using a nonverbal test procedure. This study comprised 248 children aged 5–10 years and 73 adults. The results showed that the proportion of children with adequate concepts increased with age. More specifically, 7‐ to 8‐year‐olds differed significantly from 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds, indicating a developmental shift around this age. However, naïve concepts of TS were more persistent with age than naïve concepts of TD. Altogether, the results indicated the potential to foster 5‐ to 6‐year‐olds’ concepts of both TD and TS in an intervention. Thus, in Study 2, we developed and tested a guided play intervention to foster 5‐ to 6‐year‐old children's concepts of TD and TS. We conducted a prepost‐intervention design with a guided play group (n = 19) and a free play group (n = 21). The results suggested stronger learning gains in the guided play group (d_TD = 0.337, d_TS = 0.758) than in the free play group (d_TD = 0.224, d_TS = 0.158).