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Abstract.In the present study, we investigated individual differences in the motivation for Facebook use. In total N= 736 participants from Europe and Asia took part in the study. They filled in the Facebook questionnaire (FQ), including the two factors Attitude toward Facebookand Online Sociability, and the Unified Motive Scale (UMS-3), measuring the motives Achievement, Affiliation, Intimacy, Power,and Fear. The results showed that the Attitude toward Facebookwas more positive in the subsample from Asia, but no differences could be found between the Asian and European sample with respect to the frequency of use of different activities on Facebook. The motives Fear, Power, Affiliation,and Intimacysignificantly predicted the FQ factor Attitudes. Furthermore, the Attitude toward Facebookmediated the associations between the motives Power/Affiliationand Online Sociability. However, these results were only found for the European sample. The associations found suggest the important role of different motives such as Power/Affiliationfor the study of Facebook use. The present work shows the possibility of motivational factors for Facebook use to differ depending on the culture. The study adds to the literature by investigating a classic motivation theory in the context of Facebook use.

Abstract:The goal of this article is to discuss the meanings given to fairy tale texts by teacher candidates in preschool and primary education. Identifying meanings allows prediction of future strategies for designing tasks based on texts, the foundation of literary education, and to assign the activities of future teachers to a particular pedagogical discourse. Fairy tales—read in school as typically didactic works—are deprived of their potential effect on the emotions, the development of aesthetic sensitivity, and the imagination. This understanding implies creating tasks for the reader in the form of simple instructions not referring to the deepest value of the text: showing human inner reality. This vision also emerges from analyzing reconstructions of fairy tale stories prepared by 91 students in primary and preschool education programs at the University of Łodź.

The paper is concerned with clustering with respect to the shape and size of 2D contours that are boundaries of cross-sections of 3D objects of revolution. We propose a number of similarity measures based on combined disparate Procrustes analysis (PA) and dynamic time warping (DTW) distances. A motivation and the main application for this study comes from archaeology. The computational experiments performed refer to the clustering of archaeological pottery.

The paper explores the nature of fairy tales’ protagonists in a traditional literary fairy tale and in the modern one from the perspective of pupils who are from seven to ten years old. The fairy tales are often being used in the early childhood education field as the starting point for school plays, as play themes or as a ‘background’for language, science or mathematics activity. Children’s symbolic perception of the fairy tales’ characters and their relationships reveals that there is a way of pupils’ reception of texts in which those texts are treated (and analysed) as a work of literary art. The article presents the results of research, in which – through the application of a non-verbal method – children indicated the interactions between Cinderella from the traditional literary fairy tale and a daisy from Hans Christian Andersen’s story (The Daisy).

In the contemporary special pedagogy, it is clearly seen, that we are dealing with a situation of passing over scholarly programmes that refer, i.a. to the medical and social model of disability. We remain in a inter-paradigmatic transition period, in which new views on disability are appearing. One of the most popular scholarly approaches is the posthumanism, the characteristics of which are, i.a.: the critique of humanism, the departure from anthropocentrism, the appearance of a new materialism, the direction of research towards objects, animals, as well as, the relations of people and non-people. The example of such posthumanist approach, that may constitute the context for the creation of new models of disability, is the Actor-Networktheory developed by Bruno Latour and his associates.

The Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale-2 (GPIUS-2) is a short self-report questionnaire assessing Internet addiction based on a cognitive behavioral model. Our main goal was to evaluate the psychometric properties of its French version among a sample of students and to appraise the relevance of the generalized problematic Internet use model.

Mitochondrial diseases are defined by a respiratory chain dysfunction and in most of the cases manifest as multisystem disorders with predominant expression in muscles and nerves and may be caused by mutations in mitochondrial (mtDNA) or nuclear (nDNA) genomes. Most of the proteins involved in respiratory chain function are nuclear encoded, although 13 subunits of respiratory chain complexes (together with 2 rRNAs and 22 tRNAs necessary for their translation) encoded by mtDNA are essential for cell function. nDNA encodes not only respiratory chain subunits but also all the proteins responsible for mtDNA maintenance, especially those involved in replication, as well as other proteins necessary for the transcription and copy number control of this multicopy genome. Mutations in these genes can cause secondary instability of the mitochondrial genome in the form of depletion (decreased number of mtDNA molecules in the cell), vast multiple deletions or accumulation of point mutations which in turn leads to mitochondrial diseases inherited in a Mendelian fashion. The list of genes involved in mitochondrial DNA maintenance is long, and still incomplete.

Migraine is a common neurological disorder characterized by a particular phenotype, complex pathophysiology and a heterogeneous genetic background. Among several heritable forms, familial hemiplegic migraine is the best described one. In the majority of cases it is caused by mutations in one of three different genes.

AbstractHuman identity is the result of a dynamic process of social interactions that comprises understanding, interpreting, and agreeing upon social and individual expectations. People with intellectual disabilities show limitations in these abilities and this may lead to problems with construction of identity. This article reviews what is known about this issue and includes a discussion of the Polish education, rehabilitation, and social welfare systems with respect to supporting activities. Strategies for helping those with intellectual disability to develop a stable, cohesive, and separate identity are also discussed.

Application of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for analysis of DNA from mites is presented. DNA extraction and amplification techniques for mites have been developed and described. Primers are presented which have been found to be useful for a number of mite species. The results indicate that the PCR technique should provide a fast and efficient means obtaining sequence data for use in phylogenetic reconstruction and other types of studies involving mites.