Narcissism and adjustment in preadolescence

Narcissism-a strong need to be admired for a grandiose self-is a problematic personality trait for children as well as adults. This study of 236 preadolescents (M age = 11.3 years; 129 girls, 107 boys) evaluated 2 intrapersonal (cognitive) pathways by which narcissism might contribute to maladjustment. The first was that narcissism combines with salient self-serving gender stereotypes to encourage aggressive and selfish behavior. The second was that narcissism places children who perceive that they are failing to realize their grandiose self at risk for aggression and depression. Although concurrent-correlational, the data support the pathways, illuminate the content and dynamics of narcissistic children's minds, and suggest directions for future investigation.     

The impact of international students on measured learning and standards in Australian higher education

International students, who are also often from non-English language speaking backgrounds (NESB students), are an important source of revenue for Australian universities. Yet little large-scale evidence exists about their performance once they arrive. Do these students perform worse than other students in Australian undergraduate classrooms? What happens to other students’ performance when these students are added to classrooms? I provide new empirical evidence on these questions using recent administrative panel data from the business schools of two Australian Technology Network universities. Results show strong and highly statistically significant main effects and spillover effects, raising concerns about the integration of international NESB students into the Australian tertiary environment.     

Formal verification

This is a short tutorial on formal methods which are techniques for specifying and verifying complex software and hardware systems. A few examples of successful industrial use of these are also presented.     

Adoptions: Follow-up from an orphanage in Bombay

The practice of adoption, though long accepted as a social phenomenon, is only recently gaining popularity in India. Due to the paucity of adequate follow-ups, evaluation of these adopted children is incomplete. For the purpose of studying the well-being of these children after adoption, they were followed-up at the various places, i.e., orphanages, institutions, juvenile courts and adoption agencies, responsible for their care. One hundred sixty children, 63 boys and 97 girls, adopted from an orphanage in the vicinity of our hospital over a period of 13 years are included in this study. There were 104 local and 56 foreign adoptions. Due to sociocultural background in Indian adoptions, males were preferred; whereas the international adoptions mostly depended on human considerations without any specific preference for the sex of the child. On follow-up, all children except three were reported to be physically healthy and well-adjusted emotionally in the new family, and well accepted by the society. Although adoption is not the only solution for an abandoned child, it may open some avenues for the betterment of socially deserted and deprived children.     

Improving comprehension of expository text in students with LD: a research synthesis

This article summarizes the findings of research studies designed to improve the comprehension of expository text for students with learning disabilities. Twenty-nine studies were located that met the inclusion criteria. Interventions gleaned from the review were categorized as content enhancement (i.e., advance and graphic organizers, visual displays, mnemonic illustrations, and computer-assisted instruction) or cognitive strategy instruction (i.e., text structure, main idea identification, summarization, questioning, cognitive mapping, reciprocal teaching). Treatment outcomes are discussed in relation to the various instructional approaches, student characteristics (e.g., grade, IQ), instructional features (e.g., materials, treatment length), methodological features, strategy maintenance, and generalization components. Implications for classroom practice and future research directions are provided.     

Resignifying Alan Kurdi: news photographs,memes, and the ethics of embodied vulnerability

The Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir’s photograph of the drowned refugee child Alan Kurdi attained worldwide recognition as a media spectacle, initially prompting humanitarian responses and political action, but later morphing into online memes and inciting public backlash as “war porn.” The author argues here that the ethical motivations of photojournalism and memes are oppositional with regard to their representations of embodied vulnerability. While photojournalistic depictions of vulnerable bodies are motivated by an ethics of care intended to generate empathy and progressive social change, memes disrupt those affective connotations through processes of mimicry and replication. By means of a comparative semiological analysis, this paper examines the way the sign system of Demir’s photograph was mutated into memes, radically changing the ethical connotations of the former. The differing ethical affordances of news photos versus memes, and their relationship, explain the reversal of the cosmopolitan humanitarianism initially sparked by the Alan Kurdi photograph and tell us more about the ethical frictions and contrapositions at work in the contemporary media environment.     

A biologically active constituent of withania somnifera (ashwagandha) with antistress activity

In Ayurvedic medicine,Withania somnifera (Ashwagandha) is well known for its anti-stress activity. A passive rat experimental model, where the animals are subjected to multiple stress of cold, hypoxia, restraint (C-H-R) has been developed to evaluate adaptogenic properties of various fractions of W. somnifera root extracts. We have carried out extraction of roots of W. somnifera with water and further isolated one of the active constituents called compound X and also tested its anti-stress activity in C-H-R model. The effect of administration of W. somnifera water suspension (360 mg/Kg bw) and compound X (20mg/Kg bw) on the fall and recovery of colonic temperature was noted. There was an increase of ≈38% and ≈54% in the time taken to attain T_rec 23°C by rats given a single dose of fresh aqueous suspension and biologically active constituent (Compound X) respectively, where as decrease in the recovery time to attain T_rec 37°C is ≈13% and ≈33% respectively, as compared to control group. It is clear that rats treated with the fresh aqueous suspension and compound X ofWithania somnifera, could withstand the multiple stress of C-H-R better than control group.