Does early child negative emotionality moderate the association between maternal stimulation and academic readiness and achievement?

We investigated whether child temperament (negative emotionality, 5 months) moderated the association between maternal stimulation (5 months–2½ years) and academic readiness and achievement (vocabulary, mathematics, and reading). We applied structural equation modeling to the data from the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development (N = 1121–1448; mostly Whites; 47% girls). Compared to children with low negative emotionality, those with high negative emotionality had higher levels of academic readiness (6 years) and mathematics achievement (7 years) when exposed to high levels of maternal stimulation (β = 3.17, p < .01 and β = 2.91, p < .01, respectively). The results support the differential susceptibility model whereby highly emotionally negative children were more susceptible to the influences of low and high levels of maternal stimulation in academic readiness and mathematics achievement's developments.     

Das MINERVA-Projekt: Datenbankselektion für Peer-to-Peer-Websuche

Zusammenfassung In diesem Artikel wird MINERVA pr?sentiert, eine prototypische Implementierung einer verteilten Suchmaschine basierend auf einer Peer-to-Peer (P2P)-Architektur. MINERVA setzt auf die in der P2P-Welt verbreitete Technik verteilter Hash-Tabellen auf und benutzt diese zum Aufbau eines verteilten Verzeichnisses. Peers in unserem Ansatz entsprechen v?llig autonomen Benutzern mit ihren lokalen Suchm"oglichkeiten, die bereit sind, ihr lokales Wissen und ihre lokalen Suchm?glichkeiten im Rahmen einer Kollaboration zur Verfügung zu stellen. Wir formalisieren unsere Systemarchitektur und beschreiben das zentrale Problem einer effizienten Suche nach vielversprechenden Peers für eine konkrete Anfrage innerhalb des Verbundes. Wir greifen dabei auf existierende Methoden zurück and passen diese an unseren Systemkontext an. Wir pr?sentieren Experimente auf realen Daten, die verschiedene dieser Ans?tze vergleichen. Diese Experimente zeigen, dass die Qualit?t der Ans?tze variiert und untermauern damit die Wichtigkeit und den Einfluss einer leistungsstarken Methode zur Auswahl guter Datenbanken. Unsere Experimente deuten an, dass eine geringe Anzahl sorgf?ltig ausgew?hlter Datenbanken typischerweise bereits einen Gro?teil aller relevanten Ergebnisse des Gesamtsystems liefert.

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This paper presents the MINERVA project that protoypes a distributed search engine based on P2P techniques. MINERVA is layered on top of a Chord-style overlay network and uses a powerful crawling, indexing, and search engine on every autonomous peer. We formalize our system model and identify the problem of efficiently selecting promising peers for a query as a pivotal issue. We revisit existing approaches to the database selection problem and adapt them to our system environment. Measurements are performed to compare different selection strategies using real-world data. The experiments show significant performance differences between the strategies and prove the importance of a judicious peer selection strategy. The experiments also present first evidence that a small number of carefully selected peers already provide the vast majority of all relevant results.

CR Subject Classification H.4,H.3.3,H3.4     

Canadian Communication

E.B. Ogle, Long Distance Please: The Story of the TransCanada Telephone System (Toronto: Collins, 1979—$14.95)

Stuart McFadyen, et al., Canadian Broadcasting: Market Structure and Economic Performance (Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy/available in U.S. from Renouf, Old Post Rd., Brookfield, Vt. 05036—$15.95, paper)

The Information Revolution and its Implications for Canada by Shirley Serafini and Michel Andrieu (November 1980, 113 pp. —$4.95, paper)

Telecommunications and Canada: Consultative Committee on the Implications of Telecommunications for Canadian Sovereignty (March 1979, 98 pp.—$6.00, paper)

The 1980s: A Decade of Diversity–Broadcasting, Satellites, and Pay-TV (.July 1980, 94 pp.—$3.95, paper)

Attitudes of Canadians Toward Advertising on Television (1978, 55 pp.—$2.00, paper)     

The nature of naive explanations of natural selection

Unlike some pivotal ideas in the history of science, the basic notion of natural selection is remarkably simple and so one might expect most students to easily grasp the basic principles of the Darwinian theory; yet many students nevertheless have difficulty understanding Darwinian evolution. We suggest that misconceptions about natural selection arise from mistaken categorization. Our thesis for explaining students’ failure to understand this concept or evolution in general is not that they necessarily fail to understand individual Darwinian principles; rather, they often fail to understand the ontological features of equilibration processes, of which evolution is one instance. They thus attribute the evolutionary process in general, and natural selection in particular, with event‐like properties. For example, naive students appear to focus on the idea of survival of the fittest, but embed this idea within an event ontology that involves actors struggling to overcome obstacles and achieve goals. Results showed that most naive subjects’ evolutionary explanations reflected an event ontology. Furthermore, event ontology attributes were positively correlated with non‐Darwinian explanations; by contrast, equilibration attributes, when present, were positively correlated with key Darwinian principles. These findings suggest that students would greatly benefit from science instruction that emphasized the underlying ontology of modern evolutionary theory.     

Counseling With HEART: A Relationship Violence Prevention Program for College Students

Relationship violence is a salient concern on college campuses today, and psychoeducational groups may be an appropriate prevention format. This article describes a study measuring the impact of college student participation in the HEART (Help End Abusive Relationships Today) program, a series of group sessions designed to increase knowledge and awareness of relationship violence. Findings indicated significant changes for group participants postintervention. Implications and recommendations for college counselors are discussed.     

Early Child Language Mediates the Relation Between Home Environment and School Readiness

Home environment quality is a well-known predictor of school readiness (SR), although the underlying processes are little known. This study tested two hypotheses: (a) child language mediates the association between home characteristics (socioeconomic status and exposure to reading) and SR, and (b) genetic factors partly explain the association between language and SR. Data were collected between 6 and 63 months in a large sample of twins. Results showed that home characteristics had direct effects on SR and indirect effects through child language. No genetic correlation was found between language and SR. These results suggest that home characteristics affect SR in part through their effect on early language skills, and show that this process is mainly environmental rather than genetic in nature.     

Reading in French-speaking adults with dyslexia

This study investigated the reading and reading-related skills of 15 French-speaking adults with dyslexia, whose performance was compared with that of chronological-age controls (CA) and reading-level controls (RL). Experiment 1 assessed the efficiency of their phonological reading-related skills (phonemic awareness, phonological short-term memory, and rapid automatic naming (RAN)) and experiment 2 assessed the efficiency of their lexical and sublexical (or phonological) reading procedures (reading aloud of pseudowords and irregular words of different lengths). Experiment 1 revealed that adults with dyslexia exhibited lower phonological reading-related skills than CAs only, and were better than RL controls on the RAN. In experiment 2, as compared with RL controls, only a deficit in the sublexical reading procedure was observed. The results of the second experiment replicated observations from English-language studies but not those of the first experiment. Several hypotheses are discussed to account for these results, including one related to the transparency of orthographic systems.     

Iron status in Winter Olympic sports

Iron status was surveyed amongst 92 Winter Olympic sport athletes from Nordic and Alpine skiing, figure and speed skating and ice hockey. Haemoglobin and serum ferritin values were obtained by physicians as part of a monitoring programme, since iron deficiency would have an adverse effect on maximal performance. Four (7%) of 56 men were anaemic (Hb < 14.0 gdl^‐1) and three (8%) of 36 women had haemoglobin values less than 12.0 gdl^‐1. Nine men (16%) and 14 women (39%) had prelatent iron deficiency (serum ferritin < 30 ng ml^‐1). Ice hockey had the lowest while Nordic skiing had the highest incidence of sub‐optimal iron status. A total of 50% of Nordic women skiers had prelatent iron deficiency and 7% were anaemic. An equal percentage of women speed skaters were low in serum ferritin as well. Only one of 20 male ice hockey players was low in serum ferritin. These results suggest there would be value in instituting screening procedures for iron status in Winter Olympic Sports.