Locking the virtual filing cabinet: A researcher's guide to Internet data security

As the Internet has grown in popularity, the opportunity it provides for conducting research has also become too large for researchers to ignore. Thus many have flocked to put surveys, experiments, and other data collection measures online in an attempt to gather empirical evidence in a variety of fields. While some choose a commercial provider to host surveys or experiments, others require the additional flexibility that comes with creating and maintaining a custom server. Herein lies a crucial problem: Most researchers lack the skills necessary to design, implement, and manage a server end-to-end. To overcome this limitation, they often hire programmers and administrators, who while usually competent, are not ultimately accountable to granting agencies funding research or Institutional Review Boards overseeing the research. This puts the researcher in a position of accountability in data security, confidentiality, and privacy concerns. The goal of the present paper is to outline a typical server setup, and highlight issues pertaining to data security in language accessible to researcher. This paper also presents data collected and analyzed from an anonymous distributed survey asking researchers questions assessing their management of research data. Our findings from the responses confirmed the legitimacy of our concerns by demonstrating the evident need for stricter security measures in research settings. By reading this paper, we hope that researchers will be cognizant of the optimal security practices which can be equipped to avoid the extreme consequences of data security breaches and gain a deeper understanding of the software they use to collect research data.     

Brain Regions for Perceiving and Reasoning About Other People in School-Aged Children

Neuroimaging studies with adults have identified cortical regions recruited when people think about other people's thoughts (theory of mind): temporo-parietal junction, posterior cingulate, and medial prefrontal cortex. These same regions were recruited in 13 children aged 6–11 years when they listened to sections of a story describing a character's thoughts compared to sections of the same story that described the physical context. A distinct region in the posterior superior temporal sulcus was implicated in the perception of biological motion. Change in response selectivity with age was observed in just one region. The right temporo–parietal junction was recruited equally for mental and physical facts about people in younger children, but only for mental facts in older children.     

What Is Benford's Law?

The surprising property of many data sets that their first significant digits follow Benford's Law provides examples that can pique and hold students’ interest. Several ideas for student activities are presented.     

The relationship between child abuse,parental divorce,and lifetime mental disorders and suicidality in a nationally representative adult sample

ObjectivesTo determine how the experiences of child abuse and parental divorce are related to long-term mental health outcomes using a nationally representative adult sample after adjusting for sociodemographic variables and parental psychopathology.MethodsData were drawn from the National Comorbidity Survey (NCS, n = 5,877; age 15–54 years; response rate 82.4%). Logistic regression models were used to determine the odds of experiencing lifetime psychiatric disorders and suicidal ideation and attempts.ResultsParental divorce alone was associated with some psychiatric disorders after adjusting for sociodemographic variables (AOR ranging from 1.30 to 2.37), while child abuse alone was associated with psychiatric disorders (AOR ranging from 1.39 to 6.07) and suicidal ideation (AOR = 2.08; 95% CI = 1.57–2.77) and attempts (AOR = 1.54; 95% CI = 1.02–2.31) after adjusting for sociodemographic variables. However, having experienced both parental divorce and child abuse together resulted in significantly increased odds for lifetime PTSD (AOR = 9.87; 95% CI = 6.69–14.55), conduct disorder (AOR = 4.01; 95% CI = 2.92–5.51) and suicide attempts (AOR = 2.74; 95% CI = 1.84–4.08) compared to having experienced either parental divorce or child abuse alone. These results were attenuated when further adjusting for parental psychopathology.ConclusionsWhen the experience of parental divorce is accompanied with child abuse, the associations with some poor mental health outcomes are significantly greater compared to the impact of either parental divorce or child abuse on its own. Therefore, parental divorce is an additional childhood adversity that significantly contributes to poor mental health outcomes especially when in combination with child abuse. Parental psychopathology attenuated these relationships suggesting that it may be one possible mechanism to explain the relationships between child abuse, parental divorce, and psychiatric disorders and suicide attempts.     

A practical illustration of multidimensional diagnostic skills profiling: Comparing results from confirmatory factor analysis and diagnostic classification models

In recent years there has been an increasing international interest in fine-grained diagnostic inferences on multiple skills for formative purposes. A successful provision of such inferences that support meaningful instructional decision-making requires (a) careful diagnostic assessment design coupled with (b) empirical support for the structure of the assessment grounded in multidimensional scaling models. This paper investigates the degree to which multidimensional skills profiles of children can be reliably estimated with confirmatory factor analysis models, which result in continuous skill profiles, and diagnostic classification models, which result in discrete skill profiles. The data come from a newly developed diagnostic assessment of arithmetic skills in elementary school that was specifically designed to tap multiple skills at different levels of definitional grain size.     

Assessing the impact of learning environments: How to use student ratings of classroom or school characteristics in multilevel modeling

In educational research, characteristics of the learning environment (e.g., social climate, instructional quality, goal orientation) are often assessed via student reports, and their associations with outcome variables such as school achievement or student motivation then tested. However, studying the effects of the learning environment presents a series of methodological challenges. This article discusses three crucial elements in research that uses student reports to gauge the impact of the learning environment on student outcomes. First, from a conceptual point of view, it is argued that ratings aggregated at the relevant level (e.g., class or school level), and not individual student ratings, are of primary interest in these studies. Second, the reliability of aggregated student ratings must be routinely assessed before these perceptions are related to outcome variables. Third, researchers conducting multilevel analyses need to make very clear which centering option was chosen for the predictor variables. This article shows that conclusions about the impact of learning environments can be substantially affected by the choice of a specific centering option for the individual student ratings.     

Fault-tolerant control for commercial aircraft with actuator faults and constraints

In this paper, a constrained control scheme based on model reference adaptive control is investigated for the longitudinal motion of a commercial aircraft with actuator faults and saturation nonlinearities. Actuator faults and constraints are both important factors adversely affecting the stability and performance of flight control systems. An adaptive adjustment law based on Lyapunov function is utilized to adjust the fault-tolerant control law. Both additive and multiplicative faults are considered in the designed controller to deal with the three types of actuator faults: locked in place, loss of effectiveness, and bias. Moreover, different techniques are implemented in the basic and fault-tolerant controller to anti-windup. Proofs for the stability of the two modified controllers which improve the performance of control system operating in the presence of actuator faults and saturations are proposed. Finally, a numerical example of the anti-windup fault-tolerant controller for a commercial aircraft is demonstrated. The stability and performance improvements can be accrued with the presented fault-tolerant control scheme.     

Sensorimotor Control of Speech and Children’s Reading Ability

Studies of the role of phonological representations in learning to read have almost exclusively focused on speech perception. In the current study, we examined links between sensorimotor control of speech, reading, and reading-related abilities. We studied two languages, English and Dutch, which vary in the regularity of their spelling-to-sound mappings. There were 236 American and Dutch children, 4 to 8 years old, who performed an altered auditory feedback task in which the first formant of the /?/ vowel was altered. A stronger response to altered feedback for literate relative to preliterate children was observed, and this was particularly the case for the Dutch children. Moreover, the magnitude of the responses was related to precursors of reading in preliterate children and to reading skill in literate children. We propose that these findings could be related to changes in children’s speech production skills that facilitate the integration of orthographic and phonemic information.     

Call to Action: Elevating Activism in Performance

ABSTRACT

Social change develops over time, but it begins with individual and collective actions by real people. In the current American atmosphere of resistance, activism, and art-ivism, what are the tools that artists can employ to motivate audience members to act? This article illuminates the call to action, an essential element of persuasive speaking and writing, and relates it to theatre performance tracking effective practices and encouraging further development of this approach. An effective call to action is clear and direct, has the audience act quickly, lowers barriers to action, focuses on benefits for the audience, and is customized for each person. In theatre performance, it is customary for theatre artists to pose problems—and through this article, I urge the artist to go a step further by engaging in direct and specific calls to action.     

Sport management student as producer: embedding critical management studies in sport through contemporary pedagogy

In recent years there has been growing interest over the role of major sport events and the sports industry. The aftermath of 2008 global crisis exposed the myth of ‘end of history’ and raised several questions over the role of management and organisational practices and theories in all aspects of human activity, including sport. This article reviews the emergence of critical management studies (CMS) as a field within management and organisational studies. We focus on critical performativity theory (CPT) as a key concept of re-configuring managerial practices. We add our voices to those asking for more critical output in sport management and point out the potential contribution of CMS in sport and especially of CPT. Finally, we propose ‘student as producer’ as a pedagogical framework to act as a possible basis for incorporating critical theories into higher education teaching. We argue that this framework can contribute significantly towards providing future graduates with the skills and knowledge to enable them to deal with the contemporary challenges of modern sport’s industry and wider society.