Early Childhood Parenting Predicts Late Childhood Brain Functional Connectivity During Emotion Perception and Reward Processing

Seventy-nine 3-year olds and their mothers participated in a laboratory-based task to assess maternal hostility. Mothers also reported their behavioral regulation of their child. Seven years later, functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired while viewing emotional faces and completing a reward processing task. Maternal hostility predicted more negative amygdala connectivity during exposure to sad relative to neutral faces with frontal and parietal regions as well as more negative left ventral striatal connectivity during monetary gain relative to loss feedback with the right posterior orbital frontal cortex and right inferior frontal gyrus. In contrast, maternal regulation predicted enhanced cingulo-frontal connectivity during monetary gain relative to loss feedback. Results suggest parenting is associated with alterations in emotion and reward processing circuitry 7–8 years later.     

Summary of an Extended Comparative Analysis on European Private Higher Education1

In November 2005, UNESCO‐CEPES organized a conference on Private Higher Education in Europe and Quality Assurance and Accreditation from the Perspective of the Bologna Process Objectives. Thirteen country reports and a comparative analysis study were commissioned for this specific initiative. The countries included in the project were: Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Turkey and the Ukraine. This article provides a brief summary of several main points of the comparative analysis study. The data referred to in this summary is taken solely from the sources cited in the full text study.     

Welding brass tits on the armor: An examination of the quest metaphor in Robin McKinley'sThe Hero and the Crown

Anna E. Altmann teaches children's literature in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta.     

Can constrained relevance feedback and display strategies help users retrieve items on mobile devices?

Searching online information resources using mobile devices is affected by small screens which can display only a fraction of ranked search results. In this paper we investigate whether the search effort can be reduced by means of a simple user feedback: for a screenful of search results the user is encouraged to indicate a single most relevant document. In our approach we exploit the fact that, for small display sizes and limited user actions, we can construct a user decision tree representing all possible outcomes of the user interaction with the system. Examining the trees we can compute an upper limit on relevance feedback performance. In this study we consider three standard feedback algorithms: Rocchio, Robertson/Sparck-Jones (RSJ) and a Bayesian algorithm. We evaluate them in conjunction with two strategies for presenting search results: a document ranking that attempts to maximize information gain from the user’s choices and the top-D ranked documents. Experimental results indicate that for RSJ feedback which involves an explicit feature selection policy, the greedy top-D display is more appropriate. For the other two algorithms, the exploratory display that maximizes information gain produces better results. We conducted a user study to compare the performance of the relevance feedback methods with real users and compare the results with the findings from the tree analysis. This comparison between the simulations and real user behaviour indicates that the Bayesian algorithm, coupled with the sampled display, is the most effective. Extended version of “Evaluating Relevance Feedback Algorithms for Searching on Small Displays, ” Vishwa Vinay, Ingemar J. Cox, Natasa Milic-Frayling, Ken Wood published in the proceedings of ECIR 2005, David E. Losada, Juan M. Fernández-Luna (Eds.), Springer 2005, ISBN 3-540-25295-9