Tangible cooperative gestures: Improving control and initiative in digital photo sharing

© 2015 by the authors. This paper focuses on co-present digital photo sharing on a notebook and investigates how this could be supported. While analyzing the current digital photo sharing situation we noticed that there was a high threshold for visitors to take control of the personal computer of the photo owner, resulting in inequity of participation. It was assumed that visitors would have the opportunity to interact with the notebook more freely if this threshold was lowered by distributing the user interface and creating a more public, instead of personal, interaction space. This, in turn, could make them feel more involved and in control during a session, creating a more enjoyable experience. To test these assumptions a design prototype was created that stimulates participants to use tangible artifacts for cooperative gestures, a promising direction for the future of HCI. The situation with the cooperative gestures was compared with the regular digital photo sharing situation, which makes use of a keyboard. In dyads, visitors felt more involved and in control in the design prototype cooperative gestures condition (especially during storytelling), resulting in a more enjoyable digital photo sharing experience

Nonfatal reinfarction as an independent riskfactor for subsequent mortality in post-myocardial infarction patients

Pericas, Enric;Ordóñez, Estrell

The relationship of school performance with self-control and grit is strongly genetic and weakly causal

The non-cognitive skills self-control and grit are often considered predictors of school performance, but whether this relationship is causal remains unclear. We investigated the causality of this association using a twin design. Specifically, we evaluated the direct impact of self-control and grit on school performance, while controlling for genetic or environmental influences common to all three traits (i.e., confounding). Teachers of 4891 Dutch 12-year-old twin pairs (of which 3837 were complete pairs) completed a survey about school performance (school grades), self-control (ASEBA self-control scale), and the perseverance aspect of grit. Our analysis aimed to determine the direct impact of self-control and grit on school performance, while simultaneously controlling for genetic or environmental confounding. Establishing the regression relationship corrected for confounding supports the interpretation of the regression relationship as causal. In all analyses, we corrected for sex, rater bias of the teachers, and parental socioeconomic status. Initially, in the standard regression, self-control, and grit explained 28.4% of the school performance variance. However, allowing for genetic confounding (due to genetic pleiotropy) revealed that most of this association could be attributed to genetic influences that the three traits share. In the presence of genetic pleiotropy, the phenotypic regression of school performance on self-control and grit accounted for only 4.4% (i.e., the effect size association with the causal hypothesis). In conclusion, self-control and grit predict school performance primarily due to genetic pleiotropy, with a much smaller causal effect (R 2  = 4.4%). This suggests that interventions targeting self-control and grit alone may yield limited improvements in school performance. </p