Risk Taking Behaviors In Emerging Adults And Peer, Sibling & Parental Relationships

Research shows emerging adults are more likely than younger and older cohorts to engage in such risky behaviors. However, research on the outcomes of emerging adults and their relations with peers, parents, and siblings is less conclusive. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between emerging adults\u27 perceptions of peers\u27, siblings\u27, and parents\u27 risk-taking behaviors, and risk behavior after controlling for participants\u27 sensation seeking tendencies. This study explored the moderating role of emerging adults\u27 relationships with peers, siblings, and parents in the relation between these models\u27 risk taking behaviors and emerging adults\u27 risk taking behaviors, The mediating role of positive and negative expectancies for risky behaviors on the relationships between perceived peer involvement in risky behaviors and frequency of involvement in risky behaviors was also examined. Data were collected from a sample of 240 participants who were attending a suburban community college in the Midwestern section of the country. Results indicated that emerging adults\u27 risky behaviors were associated with risky behaviors of those related to them. Close peer relations moderated relations between involvement in risky drug behaviors and risky alcohol use and self-reported involvement in risk taking behaviors. Close relations with siblings (closest) appear to be role models for emerging adults who tended to engage in risky behaviors if their close siblings were participating in these behaviors. Conversely, when emerging adults have close relations with their general siblings, they tended to model their siblings\u27 risky drug behavior. Close parental relations did not moderate relations between self-reported involvement in risky sex, drug, and alcohol behaviors and parent involvement in these behaviors. Emerging adults who had close parent relations were less likely to be involved in risky drug and alcohol behaviors. These findings did not extend to sexual behaviors. Results also indicated partial and full mediations for positive outcome expectancies and the relation between perceived parent, peer, and sibling involvement in risky behaviors and emerging adults\u27 frequency of involvement in risky behaviors. None of the mediation analyses that used negative outcome expectancies provided results that were statistically significant. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are included

Data Preservation at LEP

The four LEP experiments ALEPH, DELPHI, L3 and OPAL successfully recorded e+e- collision data during the years 1989 to 2000. As part of the ordinary evolution in High Energy Physics, these experiments can not be repeated and their data is therefore unique. This article briefly reviews the data preservation efforts undertaken by the four experiments beyond the end of data taking. The current status of the preserved data and associated tools is summarised.Comment: 7 pages, contribution to proceedings of the "First Workshop on Data Preservation and Long Term Analysis in HEP

The Cost of Trust in the Dynamics of Best Attachment

The need of trust is growing in several contexts as e-commerce, virtual communities, distributed on-line services and many others as an essential precautionary component for users during interactions with strangers, either other people or virtual agents. Generally trust metrics endorse the principle "the higher the trust, the more legitimate that user will be''; a consequence is that getting trusted must require some effort, otherwise all participants would easily achieve high trustworthiness. In this work we study how a user can achieve and preserve a good trust and what costs it requires over time; we also investigate some heuristics that allow reducing the complexity in exploring the rank-effort space especially for large networks

Network robustness improvement via long-range links

Abstract Many systems are today modelled as complex networks, since this representation has been proven being an effective approach for understanding and controlling many real-world phenomena. A significant area of interest and research is that of networks robustness, which aims to explore to what extent a network keeps working when failures occur in its structure and how disruptions can be avoided. In this paper, we introduce the idea of exploiting long-range links to improve the robustness of Scale-Free (SF) networks. Several experiments are carried out by attacking the networks before and after the addition of links between the farthest nodes, and the results show that this approach effectively improves the SF network correct functionalities better than other commonly used strategies