Seeking high-quality digital content for children in Turkey

What kind of digital content is available for children in Turkey? How are Turkish parents deciding rules about screen time and tablet use? What do children use tablets for? Burcu Izci and colleagues compare young children’s tablet use in Turkey and the US, and also the extent to which parents limit children’s access to tablet devices. Burcu Izci and Yasin Yalcin are PhD candidates at Florida State University (USA); Tugba Bahcekapili is a PhD candidate at the Middle East Technical University (Turkey) and a research assistant at the Karadeniz Technical University (Turkey); and Dr Ithel Jones is a professor at Florida State University

Online information searching behaviours: examining the impact of task complexity, information searching experience, and cognitive style

Cebi, Ayca/0000-0002-5457-5956; BAHCEKAPILI, Tugba/0000-0003-3339-7756WOS: 000485470300001While the impact of behavioural and cognitive processes on online information searching behaviours have been studied in some depth, little is known about the impact of procedural and metacognitive processes on online information searching behaviours. in addition, although the literature contains studies examining online information searching behaviours based on experience, cognitive styles, and task complexity separately, there is only a limited number of studies that investigate how online information searching behaviours vary depending on individual characteristics by taking task complexity as a basis. the aim of this study is to explore whether university students' information searching behaviours, task completion times, and task completion rates in simple and difficult tasks differ depending on information searching experience and cognitive style. the study was conducted with a sample of 20 university students. the results of this study indicated that in difficult search tasks, online information searching experience is influential on the exhibition of online information searching behaviours associated with the metacognitive domain. in simple and difficult tasks, experience and cognitive styles cause differentiation in online information searching behaviours. When task complexity is taken as a basis, the experience is more influential on task completion time and task completion rate compared to cognitive styles

A Performance Study of Hashing Functions for Hardware Applications

Hashing is used extensively in hardware applications such as page tables for address translation. There is not much literature in this regard although hashing has been extensively studied for file organization. More specifically, there is no study of the practical performance of hashing functions used. In the literature we find bit extraction and exclusive ORing hashing functions used, but there is no mention of the performance of these functions. Moreover, the performance of the hashing functions in relation to the theoretical performance of hashing schemes is not addressed. In this paper we study the practical performance of a particular class of hashing functions. Our results show that by choosing functions randomly from this class of hashing functions, which can be readily implemented in hardware, we can achieve analytically predicted performance of hashing schemes with real life data. 1622 1 Introduction Hashing is a widely used technique of organizing tables which also finds ..

Validation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire in Turkey and its relation to cultural schemas of individualism and collectivism

Although Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) is claimed to be universally applicable, the data brought to bear in its support come from a self-selected population with mostly English-speaking participants. To the best of our knowledge, the theory has not been hitherto tested in a predominantly Muslim country with non-western moral and religious sensibilities. In Study 1, we replicated previous findings using Turkish participants by showing through confirmatory factor analyses that the 5-factor structure of MFT provided a better fit than alternative models. In Study 2, the participants' cultural schemas of individualism and collectivism were experimentally manipulated to see the distinctness and separate manipulability of the five individual foundations. The individualism prime led to an increased concern with the harm dimension whereas the collectivism manipulation led to an increased concern with the loyalty dimension. Taken together, the findings suggest that the 5-factor model of morality is the best fitting model in Turkey as well and that it is useful in predicting the results of cultural prime manipulations. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

The relationship between erythropoietin pretreatment with blood-brain barrier and lipid peroxidation after ischemia/reperfusion in rats

Blood-brain barrier (BBB) leakage plays a role in the pathogenesis of many pathological states of the brain including ischemia and some neurodegenerative disorders. In recent years, erythropoietin (EPO) has been shown to exert neuroprotection in many pathological conditions including ischemia in the brain. This study aimed to investigate the effects of EPO on BBB integrity, infarct size and lipid peroxidation following global brain ischemia/reperfusion in rats. Wistar male rats were divided into four groups (each group n=8); Group I; control group (sham-operated), Group II; ischemia/reperfusion group, Group III; EPO treated group (24 h before decapitation-3000 U/kg r-Hu EPO i.p.), Group IV; EPO+ ischemia/reperfusion group (24 h before ischemia/reperfusion-3000 U/kg r-Hu EPO i.p.). Global brain ischemia was produced by the combination of bilateral common carotid arteries occlusion and hemorrhagic hypotension. Macroscopical and spectrophotometrical measurement of Evans Blue (EB) leakage was observed for BBB integrity. Infarct size was calculated based on 2,3,5-triphenyltetrazolium chlofide (TTC) staining. Lipid peroxidation in the brain tissue was determined as the concentration of thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS) for each group. Ischemic insult caused bilateral and regional BBB breakdown (hippocampus, cortex, corpus striatum, midbrain, brain stem and thalamus). EPO pretreatment reduced BBB disruption, infarct size and lipid peroxide levels in brain tissue with 20 min ischemia and 20 min reperfusion. These results suggest that EPO plays an important role in protecting against brain ischemia/reperfusion through inhibiting lipid peroxidation and decreasing BBB disruption. (c) 2007 Published by Elsevier Inc

Tolerance to pentylentetrazol-induced convulsions and protection of cerebrovascular integrity by chronic nicotine

The authors' previous studies have shown that in nicotine-induced seizures sensitivity was decreased and blood-brain barrier (BBB) disruption was prevented as a consequence of nicotine pretreatment. This study aimed to investigate the possible protective actions of nicotine on cerebrovascular permeability and seizures induced by pentylentetrazol (PTZ) injection. Cerebrovascular effects of nicotine were evaluated by measuring the permeability changes of BBB using Evans-Blue (EB) dye and specific gravity (SG), which indicates brain water and protein content. The experiments were carried out on Wistar rats. Animals were randomly divided into two groups. Convulsions were induced by injection of PTZ (80 mg/kg i.v.) in rats either pretreated with nicotine daily with a low dose of 0.8 mg/kg day.for 21 days or injected with a single dose of 6 mg/kg mecamylamine. The same procedures were followed in control rats with the exception that they were injected only with saline. PTZ injection caused tonic-clonic convulsions and increased the EB dye leakage and specific gravity values in saline-injected control rat brains. Daily injection of nicotine lessened the intensity of seizures. These were accompanied by marked decreases in both the leakage of EB and brain water content. Acute administration of a nAChR antagonist mecamylamine significantly increased seizure latency and decreased the duration of seizures. Thereby, mecamylamine reduced the EB leakage and water content in most brain regions. These results indicate that development of tolerance to PTZ convulsions can be produced by chronic nicotine administration in rats. The mechanism for this effect currently needs clarification. Moreover, the data also suggest that cholinergic activity may account for occurrence of PTZ-induced convulsions

Nicotine improves learning and memory in rats: Morphological evidence for acetylcholine involvement

It has been suggested that nicotine improves rapid information processing (learning and memory) tasks. However, it is not clear which aspects of cognition actually underlie these improvements because relatively less attention has been given to nicotinic cholinergic systems compared to muscarinic systems. The authors therefore studied the effects of nicotine on the learning and memory performance by a step-through passive avoidance task. Nicotine (0.4 mg/kg) was administered s.c. single dose (acute group), once a day for 3 days (subchronic group) or 21 days (chronic group). Nicotine treated and control rats were trained in one trial learning step-through passive avoidance task, where retention latencies were carried out 1 h, 24 h, and 3 days after learning trial. Treatment with nicotine before training session prolonged the latencies significantly (p<.01). Control group, acute, subacute and chronic nicotine treatment groups showed latencies 4.75 +/- 0.6, 69.4 +/- 14, 116.2 +/- 30, and 118.5 +/- 23 s, respectively. In addition, to prove the actual contribution of nicotinic cholinergic system in improvement of learning and memory processing, histological methods that permit the visualization and quantification of ACh levels were used. Electron microscopic evaluation revealed increased numbers of Ach-containing vesicles especially in hippocampus in chronic nicotine-treated rats; although frontal and temporal cortex in addition to hippocampus showed increment in Ach vesicles in a lesser extent in all nicotine treatment groups. These results indicate that long-term nicotine treatment can be important for improving cognitive function in regard to increased cholinergic activity