Mother-Child Relationships as Sources of Support or Stress: A Comparison of Competent, Average, Aggressive, and Anxious Dyads

We tested the proposition that mother-child relationships can be sources of support or stress, by comparing patterns of mother-child interactions in a problem-solving task that children completed with their own and with an unfamiliar mother. 4 groups of preschoolers (n = 30 in each group)—identified on the basis of teacher ratings as socially competent, average, aggressive, or anxious—participated. Mothers of competent and average children were highly positive and reciprocal toward their own and unfamiliar children. Mothers of aggressive and anxious children were only positive and reciprocal toward unfamiliar children but generally indiscriminate (aggressive group) or aversive and negatively reciprocal (anxious group) toward their own. Children in all 4 groups tended to be reciprocal toward their own mothers, but only competent and average children were reciprocal toward unfamiliar mothers also. Aggressive and anxious children generally responded to unfamiliar mothers by ignoring or actively rejecting their overtures. Results (1) indicate that the relationship with the primary caregiver may serve as a major source of support or stress in the preschool years; (2) focus attention on the dynamic organization of interactions rather than on the presence or frequency of particular behaviors, indicating that a dynamic of reciprocity enables children and mothers to adapt positively to the ever changing demands of new social situations; (3) point to the need to develop new means of assessing relationships to better understand how they influence development; and (4) highlight the importance of incorporating transactional models in the diagnosis and treatment of childhood dysfunctions rather than accounting for them solely in terms of limited skills in parents or children.     

Code as speech: A discussion of Bernstein v. USDOJ, Karn v. USDOS, and Junger v. Daley in light of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent shift to Federalism

The purpose of this paper is to address the question of whethercomputer source code is speech protected by the First Amendmentto the United States Constitution or whether it is merelyfunctional, a ``machine', designed to fulfill a set task andtherefore bereft of protection. The answer to this question is acomplex one. Unlike all other forms of ``speech' computer sourcecode holds a unique place in the law: it can be copyrighted, likea book and it can be patented like a machine or process.Case law, intellectual property law and encryption exportregulations all reflect this contradictory dichotomy.     

Given the Boot: Reading the Ambiguities of British and Continental Football Boot Design

The robust design of the mass-produced British football boot from the late nineteenth century onwards appeared to evolve rather slowly compared with subsequent lightweight, flexible ‘continental’ fabrication. However, with careful reading we can identify considerable overlap and influence between manufacturers, distributors and retailers. Boot and shoe manufacturing was an intensely competitive industry and it was in the interests of entrepreneurs to pioneer advances in order to promote a particular brand. In developing football boots for the mass market this may have included much pseudo-science but even small innovations sought to improve performance and market share. Design ambiguities were also inherent because footwear manufacturers routinely borrowed and appropriated successful design elements for their own products. With more choice and consumer demand, football boots became increasingly less adapted from other outdoor footwear owned by the participant, to specialised models manufactured as part of the flourishing sporting goods industry. The internationalisation of the mass market for football boots is here explored though the distinct but related case studies of two family firms; Manfield from Northamptonshire, England and Adidas from Herzogenaurach, Germany. Arguing that there was much continuity between the designs and manufacturing processes of the two firms, the article explores how the design of the football boot became increasingly influenced by the fashion industry as items of conspicuous consumption. By 1954 the launch of the training shoe saw sportswear become a style trend worn on the street, rather than on the pitch. This in turn, influenced football boot design as both a highly technical item of elite sportswear and an expensive, aspirational essential in an everyday kitbag.     

A survey on evaluation of summarization methods

The increasing volume of textual information on any topic requires its compression to allow humans to digest it. This implies detecting the most important information and condensing it. These challenges have led to new developments in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) such as narrative summarization and evaluation methodologies for narrative extraction. Despite some progress over recent years with several solutions for information extraction and text summarization, the problems of generating consistent narrative summaries and evaluating them are still unresolved. With regard to evaluation, manual assessment is expensive, subjective and not applicable in real time or to large collections. Moreover, it does not provide re-usable benchmarks. Nevertheless, commonly used metrics for summary evaluation still imply substantial human effort since they require a comparison of candidate summaries with a set of reference summaries. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we provide a comprehensive overview of existing metrics for summary evaluation. We discuss several limitations of existing frameworks for summary evaluation. Second, we introduce an automatic framework for the evaluation of metrics that does not require any human annotation. Finally, we evaluate the existing assessment metrics on a Wikipedia data set and a collection of scientific articles using this framework. Our findings show that the majority of existing metrics based on vocabulary overlap are not suitable for assessment based on comparison with a full text and we discuss this outcome.     

From Sportswear to Leisurewear: The Evolution of English Football League Shirt Design in the Replica Kit Era

The football shirt is of iconic significance, defining a club's visual identity through its role as sporting uniform and fan identifier, providing a canvas for commercial interactions and increasingly acting as the focus of nostalgia and collector culture. In this article we focus on the football shirt's extension from sportswear to a replica product worn as cross-generational leisurewear. We first consider how a replica's authenticity, its principal attribute, exists in objective, constructive and existential contexts. We then demonstrate how the subsequent focus of kit manufacturers and clubs on satisfying these differing interpretations of authenticity has influenced football shirt design. For two decades, replica kits were marketed as sportswear to children, with attempts to enhance the football shirt's authenticity through distinctiveness and exclusivity leading to copyrighted designs, manufacturer's logos and increased patterning. However, as the replica football shirt became adult leisurewear, the changing customer base led to retrospective and recycled shirt designs proclaiming a club's distinct identity through its heritage, fulfilling fans' nostalgic interpretations of a club's authentic kit, and reflecting fans' use of replica shirts to display their authenticity as a genuine fan. These ideals have also inspired a parallel retro-replica industry and, we argue, caused stagnation in the development of the aesthetic elements of contemporary kit design, which had previously demonstrated innovation interspersed with periods of consolidation, but had taken few retrospective turns. Genuine innovation in football shirt design has increasingly become restricted to technological advances and marketing strategies.     

Codeswitching techniques: evidence-based instructional practices for the ASL/English bilingual classroom

The authors present a perspective on emerging bilingual deaf students who are exposed to, learning, and developing two languages--American Sign Language (ASL) and English (spoken English, manually coded English, and English reading and writing). The authors suggest that though deaf children may lack proficiency or fluency in either language during early language-learning development, they still engage in codeswitching activities, in which they go back and forth between signing and English to communicate. The authors then provide a second meaning of codeswitching--as a purpose-driven instructional technique in which the teacher strategically changes from ASL to English print for purposes of vocabulary and reading comprehension. The results of four studies are examined that suggest that certain codeswitching strategies support English vocabulary learning and reading comprehension. These instructional strategies are couched in a five-pronged approach to furthering the development of bilingual education for deaf students.     

Assessment in a Rwandan higher education institution: a quest for aligned assessment to promote socio-economic transformation

Assessment in institutions of higher learning has been researched worldwide. However, there are gaps in research exploring the implications of assessment practices for learners’ access to the kind of knowledge enabling them to participate in their communities’ socio-economic transformation. This is the case in the African Great Lakes region, including Rwanda. This paper investigated the assessment practices at the University of Rwanda-College of Education to establish whether they enable students to access powerful knowledge for socio-economic transformation, which promotes critical thinking and creativity, or the knowledge of the powerful, which promotes memorization of knowledge produced by experts. The study adopted mixed methods, where 361 questions from 20 examinations papers for 2014/2015 and 2015/2016 academic years were analysed using Bloom’s revised taxonomy. Interviews with lecturers and group discussions with students were conducted. The findings revealed that assessment practices heavily encourage the knowledge of the powerful, with limited focus on the socio-economic transformative knowledge. Such practices are unlikely to lead to national socioeconomic transformation, which the government expects from education. The paper recommends revisiting assessment practices in Rwandan higher education to instil in the graduates the required knowledge for active contribution to socio-economic transformation.     

Effects of Computerized Instruction on the Use of Punctuation Strategies by Students with LD

An interactive multimedia software program was developed for teaching punctuation strategies and then tested with middle‐school and high‐school students with learning disabilities. Students at each school level were randomly selected into an experimental or control group. Results showed that experimental students at both school levels performed similarly by earning significantly higher scores on a test of punctuation usage than the control students. Additionally, experimental students in both school cohorts inserted significantly fewer incorrect punctuation marks than the controls. Furthermore, the experimental students generalized their use of the strategies to a test where they wrote their own sentences. Thus, this study shows that students with LD can learn punctuation strategies at a high level of mastery and can generalize their skills to sentence editing and sentence construction tasks when taught through interactive multimedia.