Connecting in the Kitchen:An Empirical Study of Physical Interactions while Cooking Together at Home

Recent research has explored the role technology might play in future kitchens, including virtually dining together, recipe sharing, augmented kitchen furniture, reactive cooking utensils and gestural interaction. When people come together in a kitchen to cook it is about more than just production of sustenance – it is about being together, helping each other, exchanging stories, and contributing to the gradual emergence of a shared meal. In this paper we present a digital ethnography of how people coordinate and cooperate in their kitchens when cooking together for the purpose of inspiring the design of social natural user interactions for technologies in the kitchen. The study is based on 61 YouTube videos of people cooking together analyzed using the frameworks of proxemics and F-formations. Our findings unfold and illustrate relationships between people’s spatial organization, their cooking activities and physical kitchen layouts. Based on these we discuss the kitchen as a design space and particularly the opportunities for social natural user interaction design. Author Keywords F-formations; proxemics; natural user interaction; cooking together; digital ethnography; digital kitchens; the home ACM Classification Keywords H5.3 Computer-supported cooperative wor

Academic achievement : the role of praise in motivating students

The motivation of students is an important issue in higher education, particularly in the context of the increasing diversity of student populations. A social-cognitive perspective assumes motivation to be dynamic, context-sensitive and changeable, thereby rendering it to be a much more differentiated construct than previously understood. This complexity may be perplexing to tutors who are keen to develop applications to improve academic achievement. One application that is within the control of the tutor, at least to some extent, is the use of praise. Using psychological literature the article argues that in motivating students, the tutor is not well served by relying on simplistic and common sense understandings of the construct of praise and that effective applications of praise are mediated by students' goal orientations, which of themselves may be either additive or interactive composites of different objectives and different contexts

Emotional Resilience in Early Childhood

To test whether the development of emotional resilience is a function of sensitive caregiving and child negative affect, we tested the joint contributions of 7-month maternal sensitivity and infant negative affect to the prediction of 33-month emotional resilience across the first 3 years of life. The aims of this study were to examine whether maternal sensitivity and infant negative affect predict long-term emotional resilience and whether this was associated with preschool behavior problems. Using a sample of 181 mother–infant dyads, we found that ( a ) maternal sensitivity at 7 months, but not infant negative affect, longitudinally predicted emotional resilience during preschool and ( b ) emotional resilience was negatively associated with anxiety/depression in preschool.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73467/1/annals.1376.033.pd

Adolescent Propensity to Engage in Health Risky Behaviors: The Role of Individual Resilience

In this paper we create indices of resilience to identify adolescents at risk of smoking, drinking alcohol, and using illegal drugs. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, three manifestations of resilience were identified: overall-resilience, self/family-resilience, and self-resilience. Our analysis reveals that the overall-resilient were less likely to engage in risky behaviors. The self/family resilient were more likely to engage in risky behaviors, but consumed less. The self-resilient had reduced risk for smoking and drinking alcohol but elevated risk for using illegal drugs and being in an addictive stage of smoking and drinking, if participating

Anaerobic pond treatment of pig farm effluent in New Zealand: exploring opportunities for enhanced performance

The objective of this project is to explore ways to enhance the performance of covered anaerobic ponds to increase methane production, reduce odour emission, and improve digestate quality. The methane production and effluent quality of pond systems on two pig farms will be characterised and compared. One farm uses a fat-rich dairy by-product in the pig feed and reports anaerobic pond issues, while the other farm does not use the fat-rich dairy by-product and reports no issues

The role of pre-school quality in promoting resilience in the cognitive development of young children

The study reported here investigates the role of pre-school education as a protective factor in the development of children who are at risk due to environmental and individual factors. This investigation builds upon earlier research by examining different kinds of 'quality' in early education and tests the hypothesis that pre-schools of high quality can moderate the impacts of risks upon cognitive development. Cognitive development was measured in 2857 English pre-schoolers at 36 and 58 months of age, together with 22 individual risks to children's development, and assessments were made of the quality of their pre-school provision. Multilevel Structural Equation Modelling revealed that: the global quality of pre-school can moderate the effects of familial risk (such as poverty); the relationships between staff and children can moderate the effects of child level risk (such as low birth weight); and the specific quality of curricular provision can moderate the effects of both. Policy makers need to take quality into account in their efforts to promote resilience in young 'at risk' children through early childhood services