A cross-cultural exploration of children's perceptions of wellbeing:Understanding protective and risk factors

There is a growing body of literature on children’s wellbeing. However, historically, focus has been on adults’ perspectives, leading to adult-centric views of wellbeing. Although recent years have witnessed an increase in researchers eliciting children’s perspectives, it is not clear whether children's perceptions of wellbeing are universal, or whether they are culturally distinct. This study sought to explore children’s perceptions of wellbeing across Wales and the Czech Republic. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 53 children aged 9–12 years and analysed via thematic analysis. The results revealed similarities in the perceptions of children in Wales and Czech Republic, with children in both cultures drawing on risk and protective factors that children believe impacts on their wellbeing. Risk factors include disrupted family relationships, peer difficulties, and anxiety, while protective factors include positive parent-child relationships, meaningful friendships, and effective coping strategies. This paper suggests that warm parent-child and child-peer interactions contribute to children’s positive socioemotional functioning

Conceptualising emotional and cognitive dysregulation amongst sports bettors; an exploratory study of ‘tilting’ in a new context

Tilting is a poker-related phenomenon that involves cognitive and emotional dysregulation in response to unfavourable gambling outcomes. Tilting is characterised by an increase in irrational, impulsive and strategically weak betting decisions. This study aimed to adapt and investigate the concept of tilting amongst sport bettors in order to provide preliminary insight regarding previously unexplored instances of maladaptive sports betting. The sample consisted of 225 sports bettors who completed an online questionnaire that investigated their reported tilting episodes, awareness of tilting, impulsivity, perceived skill, gambling severity, gambling frequency, and product preferences. Cluster analyses revealed three distinct groups of sports bettors based on their reported tilting episodes and their awareness of this phenomenon. The first group were labelled ‘Conscious tilters’ due to being cognizant of their own tilting occurrence which was significantly higher than the other two groups. These ‘Conscious tilters’ had the highest mean problem gambling severity that was indicative of the ‘problem gambler’ categorisation. The second group were labelled ‘Unconscious tilters’ due to their underestimation of their own tilting occurrence and were categorised as ‘moderate risk gamblers’. The third group were labelled ‘Non-tilters’ due to a relatively accurate perception of their low to non-existent tilting occurrence and were categorised as ‘low-risk gamblers’. Additionally, there were significant differences between these groups in relation to reported gambling frequency, impulsivity, and product preferences. There is evidence of various classifications of ‘tilters’ within sports betting. Specific sports betting product features may also facilitate tilting and therefore require further research in this context. It is important for this research area to develop in order to mitigate harms associated with the rapidly changing sport betting environment

Fatty acids, minerals, phenolics and vitamins in the seeds of <i>Inocarpus fagifer</i>, a Pacific Island underutilized legume

Recently, Pacific nations have faced to alarming increase in prevalence of noncommunicable diseases connected with consumption of non-traditional processed food. It is believed that re-introduction of native diet may mitigate these negative trends. One of the traditional staple food of Pacific region are seeds of underutilized leguminous tree Inocarpus fagifer. Nevertheless, information on their chemical composition and nutritional properties are missing. Therefore we decided to analyze this crop for the presence of fatty acids, minerals, phenolics and vitamins. Performed analyses revealed a slightly predominating portion of unsaturated (e.g. 18:2 n-6; 18:1 n-9 and 18:3α n-3) over saturated (e.g. C18 and C16) fatty acids. Considering minerals, the substantial concentrations of copper, magnesium, manganese, potassium and zinc (19.32; 1823.21; 8.44; 23308.41 and 77.99 mg kg-1 of dry matter respectively) were recorded. Ferulic and coumaric acids were the most abundant phenolics (3.23 and 1.48 mg kg-1 of dry matter respectively), whereas flavonoids, isoflavonoids and coumestrol were also present. Regarding vitamins, niacin and riboflavin were found in respective concentrations 131.80 and 4.47 mg kg-1 of dry matter. Our findings suggest I. fagifer seeds as a prospective food source of several health-beneficial constituents which might contribute to the well-being of Pacific islanders.   The online version of this article (doi: 10.5073/JABFQ.2016.089.034) contains a supplementary file

Entropy based statistical inference for methane emissions released from wetland

We concentrate on the paradigm question how much stochasticity and how much chaos are present in the methane emission model. In particular we analyze the residua from the process of methane emissions from wetlands in the sedge-grass marsh, in South Bohemia, Czech Republic. Relation to entropy and a specific version of Kullback–Leibler divergence will be given. A graphical tool to assess the amount of entropy in the system is developed and illustrated on real data from the sedge-grass marsh methane emission

On ANOVA-Like Matrix Decompositions

The analysis of variance plays a fundamental role in statistical theory and practice, the standard Euclidean geometric form being particularly well established. The geometry and associated linear algebra underlying such standard analysis of variance methods permit, essentially direct, generalisation to other settings. Specifically, as jointly developed here: (a) to minimum distance estimation problems associated with subsets of pairwise orthogonal subspaces; (b) to matrix, rather than vector, contexts; and (c) to general, not just standard Euclidean, inner products, and their induced distance functions. To make such generalisation, we solve the following problem: given a set of nontrivial subspaces of a linear space, any two of which meet only at its origin, exactly which inner products make these subspaces pairwise orthogonal? Applications in a variety of areas are highlighted, including: (i) the analysis of asymmetry, and (ii) asymptotic comparisons in Invariant Coordinate Selection and Independent Component Analysis. A variety of possible further generalisations and applications are noted

Forme della traduzione. Europa mediterranea & Europa centrale

Volume che raccoglie i risultati di una ricerca svolta nell'ambito dell'accordo tra Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche e Accademia Slovacca delle Scienze. La pubblicazione del volume è supportata da un finanziamento dell'Agenzia del Ministero della pubblica istruzione della Repubblica Slovacca e dell'Accademia Slovacca delle Scienze VEGA nr. 02/6075/2