Development of a tablet application for the screening of receptive vocabulary skills in multilingual children: A pilot study

For professionals working with multi-lingual children, detecting language deficits in a child’s home language can present a challenge. This is largely due to the scarcity of standardised assessments in many children’s home languages and missing normative data on multilingual language acquisition. A common approach is to translate existing English language vocabulary measures into other languages. However, this approach does not take into account the cultural and linguistic differences between languages. This pilot study explored whether English and home language receptive vocabulary skills can be objectively and reliably screened using a tablet application. Preliminary data on mono- and multilingual vocabulary skills was collected from 139 children aged 6-7 years. A tablet application was designed to assess children’s receptive vocabulary in both English, and an additional eight languages using a four choice picture paradigm. Linguistically controlled and pre-recorded target items are presented orally via the tablet in each language and responses are made via the touchscreen and automatically scored. The English version of the test was administered to 67 mono- and 72 multilingual children, while 38 multilingual children also completed the test in their home language. Test criteria measures, including reliability and concurrent validity showed satisfactory results. These findings suggest that the tablet application could be a useful tool for professionals to screen receptive vocabulary skills in mono- and multilingual children. Limitations of the first version of the RVS and future steps are discussed

Pervasive transition of the Brazilian land-use system

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Biology and conservation of freshwater bivalves : past, present and future perspectives

Freshwater bivalves have been highly threatened by human activities, and recently their global decline has been causing conservational and social concern. In this paper, we review the most important research events in freshwater bivalve biology calling attention to the main scientific achievements. A great bias exists in the research effort, with much more information available for bivalve species belonging to the Unionida in comparison to other groups. The same is true for the origin of these studies, since the publishing pattern does not always correspond to the hotspots of biodiversity but is concentrated in the northern hemisphere mainly in North America, Europe and Russia, with regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia being quite understudied. We also summarize information about past, present and future perspectives concerning the most important research topics that include taxonomy, systematics, anatomy, physiology, ecology and conservation of freshwater bivalves. Finally, we introduce the articles published in this Hydrobiologia special issue related with the International Meeting on Biology and Conservation of Freshwater Bivalves held in 2012 in Braganc¸a, Portugal.We would like to express our gratitude to our sponsors and institutions, especially to the Polytechnic Institute of Braganca for all the logistic support. We acknowledge all keynote speakers, authors, session chairpersons and especially to all attendees whose contributions were fundamental for the success of this meeting. We would also like to thank all referees of this special issue and to Koen Martens, Editor-in-Chief of Hydrobiologia, for all the valuable comments and suggestions. The chronogram was built with the help of the expert opinion of fellow colleagues Rafael Araujo, Arthur Bogan, Kevin Cummings, Dan Graf, Wendell Haag, Karl-Otto Nagel and David Strayer to whom we are very grateful. The authors acknowledge the support provided by Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and COMPETE funds-projects CONBI (Contract: PTDC/AAC-AMB/117688/2010) and ECO-IAS (Contract: PTDC/AAC-AMB/116685/2010), and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through the COMPETE, under the project "PEst-C/MAR/LA0015/2011"

Developing an Architecture to Support the Implementation and Development of Scientific computing Applications

As scientific computing applications continue to become more complex, it has become apparent, now more than ever, that there is a need for robust software architectures to facilitate the conceptualization, design, implementation, deployment and maintenance of these applications. This paper attempts to shed light on how the unique characteristics of scientific computing applications, as well as computational scientists, make impositions upon the framework used to support research efforts. We use our experience with NetSolve, a toolkit designed just for such interactions, as a means to present the approach of one infrastructure intended to support scientific computing and show how it implements the unique model of using a single system to aggregate, manage and access distributed hardware and software resources