Importance of Promoting Self-Regulatory Abilities in Early Childhood Period

Self-regulation is defined as an individual’s self-awareness, one’s awareness about the environment and the determination of how to interact with the environment to achieve his/her own goals. Self-regulation, which has an important role in an individual’s social relations and increasing his/her quality of life, starts developing after birth. Early childhood period is a period in which children start to use their mental strategies to control their impulses, emotions, and thoughts; to behave according to social and ethical values; and to direct their own thoughts and behaviors to meet their own goals and others' expectations. All of these abilities that are targeted to be acquired in early childhood are conceptualized as self-regulatory abilities. Self-regulation is a structure that keeps a balance between socio-cultural values and individual’s needs. Self-regulation acquired in early childhood period also affects processes such as pro-social behaviors, school readiness, academic achievement and high levels of empathy. This study is a review research emphasizing the importance of self-regulatory abilities that should be promoted in early childhood period. In the study, literature is reviewed, self-regulatory abilities are defined, and suggestions are made regarding promoting children’s self-regulatory abilities in early childhood period. Keywords: Early childhood period, Self-regulation, Childhoo

<i>‘We’re not that gullible!’</i> Revealing dark pattern mental models of 11-12 year-old Scottish children

Deceptive techniques known as dark patterns specifically target online users. Children are particularly vulnerable as they might lack the skills to recognise and resist these deceptive attempts. To be effective, interventions to forewarn and forearm should build on a comprehensive understanding of children’s existing mental models. To this end, we carried out a study with 11-12 year old Scottish children to reveal their mental models of dark patterns. They were acutely aware of online deception, referring to deployers as being ‘up to no good’. Yet, they were overly vigilant and construed worst-case outcomes, with even a benign warning triggering suspicion. We recommend that rather than focusing on specific instances of dark patterns in awareness raising, interventions should prioritise improving children’s understanding of the characteristics of, and the motivations behind, deceptive online techniques. By so doing, we can help them to develop a more robust defence against these deceptive practices

Mental Models of Dark Patterns

In this paper, we report on the literature related to understanding young learners’ mental models related to deceptive “dark patterns” used by malicious agents online: so-called sludge. We also discuss elicitation of mental models, particularly when carrying out activities to reveal the mental models of young learners. In addition, we review the ethical considerations when carrying out research in this domain. Finally, we propose the design of an activity to implement the lessons we have learned to assess the sludge-related mental models of young learners

Improving Energy Conservation Using Bulk Transmission over High-Power Radios in Sensor Networks

International audienceLow power radios, such as the CC2420, have been widely popular with recent sensor platforms. This paper ex- plores the potential for energy savings from adding a high- power, high-bandwidth radio to current sensor platforms. High-bandwidth radios consume more power but signifi- cantly reduce the time for transmissions. Consequently, they offer net savings in total communication energy when there is enough data to offset wake-up energy overhead. The analysis on energy characteristics of several IEEE 802.11 radios show that a feasible crossover point exists (in terms of data size) after which energy savings are possible. Based on this analysis, we present a bulk data transmission proto- col for dual radio systems. The results of simulations and prototype implementation show significant energy savings at the expense of introducing acceptable delay

Fighting Sinkhole Attacks in Tree-based Routing Topologies

This work focuses on: (1) understanding the impact of sinkhole attacks on tree-based routing topologies in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), and (2) investigating cryptography-based strategies to limit network degradation caused by these attacks. This work is particularly important as WSN protocols that construct a fixed routing topology may be significantly affected by malicious attacks. Furthermore, considering networks deployed in a difficult to access geographical region, building up resilience against such attacks rather than detection is expected to be more beneficial. We thus first provide a simulation study on the impact of malicious attacks based on a diverse set of parameters, such as the network scale and the position and number of malicious nodes. Based on this study, we propose a single but very representative metric for describing this impact. Second, we present the novel design and evaluation of two \emph{simple and resilient} topology-based reconfiguration protocols that broadcasts cryptographic values. The results of our simulation study show that our reconfiguration protocols are practical and effective in improving resilience against sinkhole attacks, even in the presence of some collusion

'We're not that gullible!' Revealing 'dark pattern' mental models of 11-12 year-old Scottish children

Deceptive techniques known as dark patterns specifically target online users. Children are particularly vulnerable as they might lack the skills to recognise and resist these deceptive attempts. To be effective, interventions to forewarn and forearm should build on a comprehensive understanding of children's existing mental models. To this end, we carried out a study with 11-12 year old Scottish children to reveal their mental models of dark patterns. They were acutely aware of online deception, referring to deployers as being 'up to no good'. Yet, they were overly vigilant and construed worst-case outcomes, with even a benign warning triggering suspicion. We recommend that rather than focusing on specific instances of dark patterns in awareness raising, interventions should prioritise improving children's understanding of the characteristics of, and the motivations behind, deceptive online techniques. By so doing, we can help them to develop a more robust defence against these deceptive practices

The Myth of Power Control in Routing

Energy management remains a critical problem in ad hoc networks since battery technology cannot keep up with rising expectations in wireless communications. Current approaches to energy conservation focus on reducing the energy consumption of the wireless interface either for a given communication task or during idling. However, these communication-time and idle-time approaches are not necessarily complementary. Therefore, we explore the interactions between the two approaches and their impact on the design of a complete solution to energy conservation. Essentially, a complete solution requires minimizing the energy spent in communication (i.e., for data and control overhead) and in idling while satisfying communication needs. This problem can be expressed as an energy-efficient network design problem, which is, not surprisingly, NP-hard. Therefore, we study several heuristic approaches. Our study shows that minimizing energy consumed in data transmissions as a primary goal does not save energy. Furthermore, jointly reducing energy consumed for both data and in idling becomes cost-prohibitive when the energy spent in control overhead is considered. Hence, we propose a two-stage approach that prioritizes idling energy consumption over energy spent for data transmissions. Due to its low control overhead, this two-stage approach provides an effective way to meet the challenge of operating the network with low energy cost

TITAN: On-Demand Topology Management in Ad Hoc Networks

To reduce energy consumption from idle listening, nodes in ad hoc networks can switch to a power-save mode. However, some nodes may need to stay in active mode to support forwarding. The main challenge of selecting which nodes should stay in active or power-save mode stems from the need to conserve energy while maintaining communication. Although, topology management protocols identify redundant nodes that may power down their radios, such protocols incur proactive backbone maintenance overhead even when the network is idle. On-demand power management manages node transitions from active to power-save mode based on information from the routing protocol. However, on-demand power management is only traffic-driven and may result in keeping redundant nodes awake. In this paper, we propose TITAN, which builds a forwarding backbone reactively utilizing information about both ongoing communication and the current power-management mode of nodes along potential routes. The design of TITAN is based on our analysis of the tradeoffs between using shorter routes and waking up power-saving nodes and using longer routes through nodes that are already active. Through extensive simulation, we demonstrate that TITAN achieves energy conservation while maintaining efficient communication without incurring any additional control overhead for topology management