Biological Pest Control of a Biscuit Beetle (Stegobium paniceum) Infestation in an Old Masters Paintings Storage Area

ABSTRACT

We report on biological control of an active infestation by biscuit beetles (Stegobium paniceum) of museum objects (Old Masters paintings) in the storage facilities of the Museum of Fine Arts in Vienna. Because chemical and non-chemical treatment methods would have been very problematic, the release of parasitic wasps (Lariophagus distinguendus) was discussed and accepted by the director of the collection. We released 3000 wasps every month from August 2013 until September 2014 in the two infested storage rooms and monitored the activity of biscuit beetles on sticky blunder traps and light traps, and also by visual inspection. In the insect monitoring of 2014 until 2018 no more biscuit beetles were found in the two storage depositories, showing that the treatment was 100% successful. To our knowledge, this is the first proof of a fully successful biological control of a museum pest using parasitoids only, and also of stored product/food pest, outside a laboratory experimental setup. This biological pest control method allowed avoiding negative side effects such as contamination from treatments with biocides, or costly logistics in case of chemical-free methods.     

Extending the testimony problem: evaluating the truth, scope, and source of cultural information

Children's learning--in the domains of science and religion specifically, but in many other cultural domains as well--relies extensively on testimony and other forms of culturally transmitted information. The cognitive processes that enable such learning must also administrate the evaluation, qualification, and storage of that information, while guarding against the dangers of false or misleading input. Currently, the development of these appraisal processes is not clearly understood. Recent work, reviewed here, has begun to address three important dimensions of the problem: how children and adults evaluate truth in communication, how they gauge the inferential potential of information, and how they encode and evaluate its source.     

COGNITIVE LOAD THEORY AND THE ACQUISITION OF COMPLEX COGNITIVE SKILLS IN THE ELDERLY: TOWARDS AN INTEGRATIVE FRAMEWORK

The purpose of this article is to explore the advantages of instructional formats based on cognitive load theory for elderly learners engaged in the acquisition of complex cognitive skills. A great body of research has demonstrated that cognitive aging is accompanied by a reduction of working - memory capacity, a general slowing of mental processes, and a decline of the ability to repress irrelevant information. The core idea of cognitive load theory is that working - memory capacity is limited and should therefore be managed with great care and discretion. Cognitive load theory claims that this can be achieved by minimizing the level of extraneous cognitive load, which is the portion of load that does not contribute to schema acquisition, and by maximizing the level of germane cognitive load, which directly contributes to the construction of cognitive schemata. Since instructions based on cognitive load theory deal with cognitive limitations, in that they lead to an efficient use of the available resources, it was hypothesized that they are especially effective when elderly people are involved. This idea was analyzed by means of a framework merging cognitive load theory with the aforementioned research findings concerning cognitive aging. It was concluded that cognitive load theory, enabling elderly people to acquire new complex skills, can be regarded as an essential guide for educational gerontology.     

Early Training in Oral Comprehension and Phonological Skills: Results of a Three-Year Longitudinal Study

A sample of 1,273 4-year-old children were followed for 3 years. The children participated in 1 of 2 comprehension training programs, or in a phonological awareness training program. The comprehension programs explored the possibility of improving young children's oral comprehension in an educational setting. The first focused on the component skills of comprehension; the second involved storybook reading. Phonological awareness and oral language comprehension skills were measured repeatedly in the course of the study. The data were analyzed using multilevel growth-curve models. The results showed that it is possible to improve oral comprehension if the training focuses on its component skills and extends over 2 semesters. When these conditions were met, training effects still existed 9 months after the program had ended. Finally, phonological training improved phonological awareness but not comprehension, and comprehension-skill training improved oral comprehension but not phonological awareness.     

Educators' perspectives on working with a humanoid robot in a French preschool class for autistic children

Humanoid robots have shown to provide interesting perspectives for autistic children. Yet, few studies have looked at educators' point of view on the use of such robots in educational settings. This paper presents a case study of the use of a humanoid robot, NAO, in a French preschool class dedicated to autistic children. Our work focuses on the perspectives of the adults working with these children. We interviewed the professional staff about changes in their teaching due to the presence of the robot, about the effects on the pupils' behaviour, and about the collaboration between the special needs teacher, the special needs support worker and the operational specialist from the digital education department of the district academic head office. Four themes were identified: joint reflection and collaboration when working with NAO, working with NAO, impact of NAO on pupils, impact of NAO on adults. The professionals underscored the necessity of adopting certain attitudes, in particular, the most neutral facial expression possible, so as not to disturb the children's learning process. They were under the impression that the robot had a beneficial effect on the pupils in terms of learning and social skills, and that it facilitated collaboration among them.     

A latent profile analysis of teachers’ causal attribution for academic success or failure

European Journal of Psychology of Education - In educational contexts, interpersonal attributional theory (Weiner, 2019) posits that teachers’ beliefs about the causes underlying their...     

The role of location and social strength for friendship prediction in location-based social networks

Recent advances in data mining and machine learning techniques are focused on exploiting location data. These advances, combined with the increased availability of location-acquisition technology, have encouraged social networking services to offer to their users different ways to share their location information. These social networks, called location-based social networks (LBSNs), have attracted millions of users and the attention of the research community. One fundamental task in the LBSN context is the friendship prediction due to its role in different applications such as recommendation systems. In the literature exists a variety of friendship prediction methods for LBSNs, but most of them give more importance to the location information of users and disregard the strength of relationships existing between these users. The contributions of this article are threefold, we: 1) carried out a comprehensive survey of methods for friendship prediction in LBSNs and proposed a taxonomy to organize the existing methods; 2) put forward a proposal of five new methods addressing gaps identified in our survey while striving to find a balance between optimizing computational resources and improving the predictive power; and 3) used a comprehensive evaluation to quantify the prediction abilities of ten current methods and our five proposals and selected the top-5 friendship prediction methods for LBSNs. We thus present a general panorama of friendship prediction task in the LBSN domain with balanced depth so as to facilitate research and real-world application design regarding this important issue.     

The effects of representational format on learning combinatorics from an interactive computer simulation

The current study investigated the effects of different external representational formats on learning combinatorics and probability theory in an inquiry based learning environment. Five conditions were compared in a pre-test post-test design: three conditions each using a single external representational format (Diagram, Arithmetic, or Text), and two conditions using multiple representations (Text + Arithmetic or Diagram + Arithmetic). The major finding of the study is that a format that combines text and arithmetics was most beneficial for learning, in particular with regard to procedural knowledge, that is the ability to execute action sequences to solve problems. Diagrams were found to negatively affect learning and to increase cognitive load. Combining diagrams with arithmetical representations reduced cognitive load, but did not improve learning outcomes.