Search

Abstract By applying network analysis techniques to large input–output system, we identify key sectors in the local/regional economy. We overcome the limitations of traditional measures of centrality by using random-walk based measures, as an extension of Blöchl et al. (Phys Rev E 83(4):046127, 2011). These are more appropriate to analyze very dense networks, i.e. those in which most nodes are connected to all other nodes. These measures also allow for the presence of recursive ties (loops), since these are common in economic systems (depending to the level of aggregation, most firms buy from and sell to other firms in the same industrial sector). The centrality measures we present are well suited for capturing sectoral effects missing from the usual output and employment multipliers. We also develop and make available an R implementation for computing the newly developed measures.

Although most states across the United States have enacted anti-bullying legislation, state laws vary greatly in detail and direction, leaving many school districts wondering how to best address the problem of bullying and comply with their state's legislative requirements. In response, a comprehensive, statewide training initiative was conducted for school personnel to offer guidance on developing and implementing such policies at the local level. In the present piece, the authors explicate the process by which they (a) derived theoretically grounded, empirically driven recommendations; (b) developed training materials and a project website; and (c) disseminated the material and recommendations across the state. They also present key outcomes as a result of this training initiative.

The experience of peer victimization, or being the target of aggression, is common throughout childhood and adolescence and often results in negative developmental outcomes. Further knowledge of peer victimization is needed for effective prevention and intervention to promote positive youth development. The current study extends the victimization literature by (a) examining victimization rates at locations both within and outside of the school context, (b) identifying the forms of victimization most prevalent in these locations, and (c) determining whether the forms of victimization vary by gender across different locations. In a sample of 278 third through fifth graders, gender differences were examined across physical, relational, and cyber victimization. Findings indicate that physical and relational victimization are likely to occur in similar locations, with the playground and home noted as frequent locations. However, cyber victimization was reported as occurring at home and on the bus. Several notable gender differences emerged when examining these locations by the form of victimization. Findings suggest that encouraging adults both within and outside of the school environment to collaborate in their efforts to prevent and intervene with peer victimization may be particularly useful. Specific ways to improve adult training efforts are discussed.

A child's first words mark the emergence of a uniquely human ability. Theories of the developmental steps that pave the way for word production have proposed that either vocal or gestural precursors are key. These accounts were tested by assessing the developmental synchrony in the onset of babbling, pointing, and word production for 46 infants observed monthly between the ages of 9 and 18 months. Babbling and pointing did not develop in tight synchrony and babble onset alone predicted first words. Pointing and maternal education emerged as predictors of lexical knowledge only in relation to a measure taken at 18 months. This suggests a far more important role for early phonological development in the creation of the lexicon than previously thought.

Cyberbullying behavior among youth has become a growing concern among parents, educators, and policymakers due to emerging evidence documenting its harmful consequences on youths' development. As such, schools are increasingly required to address to this form of bullying. Thus, effective responses by school staff are needed. However, no study to date has examined the likelihood of cyberbullying intervention among certified and noncertified school personnel. To that end, the present study assessed whether perceptions, attitudes, and self-efficacy beliefs predicted the likelihood of cyberbullying intervention and examined whether these relationships were moderated by staff status (e.g., certified and noncertified). Results revealed that attitudes toward victims and self-efficacy beliefs to intervene were significant predictors of the likelihood of cyberbullying intervention among staff; however, the prevalence of bullying and staff attitudes toward bullies were not significant predictors of intervention likelihood. Implications for in-service staff training efforts are discussed.

Classroom conversations about mathematics--math talk--between early care and education providers and young children have been associated with growth in mathematical thinking. However, professional development opportunities to learn about math teaching and learning are limited in many community-based child development centers. New approaches that are less costly and time consuming are needed to support providers in planning and implementing rich math experiences for young children. Professional development activities that are offered within the work site and during work hours may be most feasible for a large percentage of community-based programs. The purpose of this study was to design and test the impact of brief, data-based staff meetings during naptime in child care classrooms on providers' math interactions with their students. Findings indicate that such meetings increase participants' math talk in specific domains and predict growth in children's math abilities 6 months later. The potential of naptime data meetings to enhance math interactions and other areas of professional practice are discussed. Future directions for additional research are recommended.

Background: Despite growing concern about the impact of cyberbullying on youth, few studies to date have investigated this phenomenon among elementary school samples. Consequently, little is known about cyber victimization exposure among younger children. Objective: The purpose of the present study was to examine the prevalence and nature of cyber victimization among a sample of elementary school students and determine whether significant differences existed between cyber victimized and non-cyber victimized students. Methods: A total of 660 3rd-5th grade students in six schools completed an online survey on measures of traditional and cyber bullying and victimization. Descriptive statistics were used to determine prevalence, mechanism (e.g., social media), identity of the perpetrator, and whether incidents were reported to others. Fixed effects regression models, including dummy coded school variables to control for nesting, were run to assess group differences. Results: Descriptive findings revealed that a substantial number of youth (17.7 %; n = 114) reported cyber victimization, predominantly through online games. Only 38% (n = 43) of cyber victimized children knew the identity of the perpetrator and almost 50% reported they did not tell anyone about the incident. Results also revealed that cyber victimized children reported significantly higher rates of traditional victimization and bullying involvement along with higher pro-bullying attitudes and lower pro-defending attitudes and self-efficacy for defending others. Conclusions: The results of the present study suggest the need for developmentally appropriate prevention and intervention programs implemented at the elementary school level if efforts to address this complex problem are to be successful.

Cyberbullying is a pervasive problem among youth that has detrimental consequences on the social and emotional functioning of those involved. Cyberbullying results from the interaction of individual and environmental factors. Thus, strategies intended to address this type of bullying must look beyond individual characteristics and consider peer, family, community, and societal contexts as well. Social workers, with their unique person-in-environment perspective, are in an optimal position to take an active role in addressing the far-reaching impact of cyberbullying. Accordingly, it is critical for school social workers to have an awareness of cyberbullying so that they can incorporate this knowledge into their practice with youth. This article reviews the research to date on cyberbullying and provides assessment recommendations for school social workers.

Studies of phonological development that combine speech-processing experiments with observation and analysis of production remain rare, although production experience is necessarily relevant to developmental advance. Here we focus on three proposals regarding the relationship of production to word learning: (1) "Articulatory filter": The hypothesis that children are influenced in noticing words in input speech by their resemblance to patterns they can produce has recently received experimental support. (2) "Systematization and regression": It is proposed that the decline in accuracy that follows first-word production is the consequence of an increase in systematicity (with renewed accuracy emerging only later). (3) "Word-production experience facilitates new word learning": Evidence that expressive vocabulary growth in itself facilitates new word learning supports the idea that knowledge is gradient, involving increases in stability and reliability with repeated exposure and use.

The early relationship between children's emerging articulatory abilities and their capacity to process speech input was investigated, following recent studies with English-learning infants. Twenty-six monolingual Italian-learning infants were tested at 6 months (no consistent and stable use of consonants, or vocal motor schemes [VMS]) and at the age at which they displayed use of at least one VMS. Perceptual testing was based on lists of nonwords containing one of three categories of sounds each: produced by infant (own VMS), not yet produced but typical of that age (other VMS), or not typically produced by infants at that age (non-VMS). In addition, size of expressive lexicon at 12 months and 18 months was assessed using an Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI). The results confirmed a relation between infant preverbal production and attentional response to VMS and also between age at first VMS and 12-month vocabulary. Maternal input is shown not to be a specific determinant of individual infant production preferences. A comparison between the English and Italian experimental findings shows a stronger attentional response to VMS in isolated words as compared to sentences. These results confirm the existence of an interaction between perception and production that helps to shape the way that language develops.

Previous studies have shown that by 11 but not by 10 months infants recognize words that have become familiar from everyday life independently of the experimental setting. This study explored the ability of 10-, 11-, and 12- month-old infants to recognize familiar words in sentential context, without experimental training. The headturn preference procedure was used to contrast passages containing words likely to be familiar to the infants with passages containing words unlikely to have been previously heard. Two stimulus words were inserted near the beginning and end of each of a set of simple sentence frames. The ability to recognize the familiar words within sentences emerged only at 12 months of age. The contrast between segmentation abilities as they emerge as a result of everyday exposure to language, as assessed here, and those abilities as measured in studies in which words are experimentally trained is discussed in terms of memory-based mechanisms.

Support for baby signing (BS) with hearing infants tends to converge toward three camps or positions. Those who advocate BS to advance infant language, literacy, behavioral, and cognitive development rely heavily on anecdotal evidence and social media to support their claims. Those who advocate BS as an introduction to another language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), advocate early bilingual language learning. A third group warns against BS, emphasizing that it competes for attention with, and thereby potentially delays, spoken language acquisition in hearing infants. Empirical evidence to support any of these camps has been scarce. In this retrospective investigation we analyzed videotapes of sixteen infants from 9 through 18 months of age; eight had been exposed to BS, and eight had not been exposed to signing (NS). We compared their manual activity and found no differences in the quantity of manual activity accompanying vocal activity and no qualitative differences in the handshapes used during manual and vocal activity. More babies in the BS group reached the 4-, 10-, and 25-word milestones than babies in the NS group, but the differences were not statistically significant. In addition, monthly lexical growth from 12 to 18 months did not reveal signing to have a statistical impact on vocabulary acquisition.

Electronic social communication has provided a new context for children to bully and harass their peers and it is clear that cyberbullying is a growing public health concern in the US and abroad. The present study examined individual and contextual predictors of cyberbullying in a sample of 16, 634 students in grades 3-5 and 7-8. Data were obtained from a large cluster-randomized trial of the KiVa antibullying program that occurred in Finland between 2007 and 2009. Students completed measures at pre-intervention assessing provictim attitudes (defined as children's beliefs that bullying is unacceptable, victims are acceptable, and defending victims is valued), perceptions of teachers' ability to intervene in bullying, and cyberbullying behavior. Students with higher scores on provictim attitudes reported lower frequencies of cyberbullying. This relationship was true for individual provictim attitudes as well as the collective attitudes of students within classrooms. Teachers' ability to intervene assessed at the classroom level was a unique, positive predictor of cyberbullying. Classrooms in which students collectively considered their teacher as capable of intervening to stop bullying had higher mean levels of cyberbullying frequency. Our findings suggest that cyberbullying and other indirect or covert forms of bullying may be more prevalent in classrooms where students collectively perceive their teacher's ability to intervene in bullying as high. We found no evidence that individual or contextual effects were conditional on age or gender. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Cyberbullying among school-aged children has received increased attention in recent literature. However, no empirical evidence currently exists on whether existing school-based antibullying programs are effective in targeting the unique aspects of cyberbullying. To address this important gap, the present study investigates the unique effects of the KiVa Antibullying Program on the frequency of cyberbullying and cybervictimization among elementary and middle school youth. Using data from a group randomized controlled trial, multilevel ordinal regression analyses were used to examine differences in the frequencies of cyberbullying and cybervictimization between intervention (N = 9,914) and control students (N = 8,498). The effects of age and gender on frequencies of cyber behaviors were also assessed across conditions. Results revealed a significant intervention effect on the frequency of cybervictimization; KiVa students reported lower frequencies of cybervictimization at posttest than students in a control condition. The effect of condition on the perpetration of cyberbullying was moderated by age. When student age was below the sample mean, KiVa students reported lower frequencies of cyberbullying than students in the control condition. We also found evidence of classroom level variation in cyberbullying and cybervictimization, suggesting cyberbullying is in part a classroom-level phenomenon. KiVa appears to be an efficacious program to address cyber forms of bullying and victimization. We discuss several unique aspects of KiVa that may account for the significant intervention effects. Results suggest that KiVa is an intervention option for schools concerned with reducing cyberbullying behavior and its deleterious effects on children's adjustment.

Purpose: In this study, the authors looked for effects of vocal practice on phonological working memory. Method: A longitudinal design was used, combining both naturalistic observations and a nonword repetition test. Fifteen 26-month-olds (12 of whom were followed from age 11 months) were administered a nonword test including real words, "standard" nonwords (identical for all children), and nonwords based on individual children's production inventory (IN and OUT words). Results: A strong relationship was found between (a) length of experience with consonant production and (b) nonword repetition and between (a) differential experience with specific consonants through production and (b) performance on the IN versus OUT words. Conclusions: Performance depended on familiarity with words or their subunits and was strongest for real words, weaker for IN words, and weakest for OUT words. The results demonstrate the important role of speech production in the construction of phonological working memory.

The interaction between prosodic and segmental aspects of infant representations for speech was explored using the head-turn paradigm, with untrained everyday familiar words and phrases as stimuli. At 11 months English-learning infants, like French infants (Halle & Boysson-Bardies, 1994), attended significantly longer to a list of familiar lexical items than to a phonetically comparable rare list, but 9-month-olds did not. Reversing the stress pattern of the familiar items failed to block word-form recognition in 11-month-olds, although a time-course analysis showed that it delayed the infant response. Changing the initial consonant of English words did block word recognition while change to the second consonant did not. Time-course analyses of both the English and the original French data showed that altering the consonant of the unaccented syllable delays word-form recognition in both languages while change to the accented syllable has a stronger effect in English than in French.

This study suggests that familiarity and novelty preferences in infant experimental tasks can in some instances be interpreted together as a single indicator of language advance. We provide evidence to support this idea based on our use of the auditory headturn preference paradigm to record responses to words likely to be either familiar or unfamiliar to infants. Fifty-nine ten-month-old infants were tested. The task elicited mixed preferences: familiarity (longer average looks to the words likely to be familiar to the infants), novelty (longer average looks to the words likely to be unfamiliar) and no-preference (similar-length of looks to both type of words). The infants who exhibited either a familiarity or a novelty response were more advanced on independent indices of phonetic advance than the infants who showed no preference. In addition, infants exhibiting novelty responses were more lexically advanced than either the infants who exhibited familiarity or those who showed no-preference. The results provide partial support for Hunter and Ames’ (1988) developmental model of attention in infancy and suggest caution when interpreting studies indexed to chronological age.

Analyzed vocalizations/verbalizations from children acquiring English or French in later single-word period to identify trochaic bias. Found that neither language's vocalizations were exclusively trochaic. French/English differences in iambic productions and acoustic realization of accent were traceable to adult input. Distribution of trochaic and iambic patterns in English-learning infants was traceable to integration of prosodic and segmental patterning in individuals. (Author/KB)

Social workers are expected to address a range of adverse and traumatic experiences among youths. One common, adverse experience is exposure to bullying. However, the degree to which schools of social work address bullying and thus prepare students to effectively intervene has yet to be investigated. Using a sample of 146 BSW students, the purpose of the present study was to describe students' exposure to content specific to traditional and cyberbullying and their general knowledge and perceptions of these issues and to explore students' reported self-efficacy to intervene and their preparedness to address bullying in their practice with youths and their families. Results revealed several notable trends. Overall, students reported little exposure to bullying-related content and only moderate levels of self-efficacy and preparedness to intervene. Implications for baccalaureate social work education are discussed in the context of enhancing bullying-related content, including exposure to efficacious prevention and intervention strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyberbullying is a pervasive problem among youth that has detrimental consequences on the social and emotional functioning of those involved. Cyberbullying results from the interaction of individual and environmental factors. Thus, strategies intended to address this type of bullying must look beyond individual characteristics and consider peer, family, community, and societal contexts as well. Social workers, with their unique person-in-environment perspective, are in an optimal position to take an active role in addressing the far-reaching impact of cyberbullying. Accordingly, it is critical for school social workers to have an awareness of cyberbullying so that they can incorporate this knowledge into their practice with youth. This article reviews the research to date on cyberbullying and provides assessment recommendations for school social workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The laparoscopic repair of non-midline ventral hernia (LNM) has been debated. The aim of this study is to analyze our experience performing the laparoscopic approach to non-midline ventral hernias (NMVHs) in Northwest Italy for 6 years.Methods: A total of 78 patients who underwent LNM between March 2008 and March 2014 in the selected institutions were analyzed. We retrospectively analyzed the peri- and postoperative data and the recurrence rate of four subgroups of NMVHs: subcostal, suprapubic, lumbar, and epigastric. We also conducted a literature review.Results: No difference was found between the four subgroups in terms of demographic data, defect characteristics, admission data, and complications. Subcostal defects required a shorter operating time. Obesity was found to be a risk factor for recurrence.Conclusions: In our experience, subcostal defects were easier to perform, with a lower recurrence rate, lesser chronic pain, and faster surgical performance. A more specific prospective randomized trial with a larger sample is awaited. Based on our experience, however, the laparoscopic approach is a safe treatment for NMVHs in specialized centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the genotype/phenotype cosegregation analysis of an F(2) intercross, from the crossbreeding of stroke-prone spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHRSP) and stroke-resistant spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR), we previously identified a quantitative trait locus for stroke on rat chromosome 5 (STR2) that colocalized with the genes encoding atrial and brain natriuretic peptides (ANP and BNP) and conferred a stroke-delaying effect. To further characterize ANP and BNP as candidates for stroke, we performed additional studies. Comparative sequence analysis revealed point mutations in both the coding and regulatory regions of ANP, whereas no interstrain differences were found for BNP. In in vitro studies in COS-7 and AtT-20 cells that were performed to test the relevance of a G-->A substitution at position 1125, a Gly-->Ser transposition in the SHRSP pro-ANP peptide resulted in different posttranslational processing of the SHRSP ANP gene product that was also associated with higher cGMP production (P<0.05). Furthermore, an analysis of a 5' end mutation affecting a PEA2 regulatory binding site in the 5' untranslated regulatory sequence of SHRSP ANP demonstrated a significantly lower ANP promoter activation in endothelial cells (P<0.05 versus the SHR ANP). In addition, the expression of ANP was significantly reduced in the brain, but not in the atria, of SHRSP compared with SHR (P<0.0001). No differences were detected with regard to BNP expression. The present results reveal substantial differences in ANP, but not BNP, structure and product among SHR and SHRSP, which supports a role of ANP in the pathogenesis of stroke in the SHRSP animal model.