The psychological aspects of left-handedness and sinistrality among schoolchildren

Nowadays, there are many schoolchildren who demonstrate a large number of left-sided motor and sensory preferences. It can be considered as external markers of functional hemispheric asymmetry of the brain. The main purpose of the study is to investigate psychological peculiarities and specificity of age-related dynamics of laterality pattern’s formation in junior schoolchildrenyesBelgorod State Universit

The Professional Identity of Gameworkers Revisited. A Qualitative Inquiry on the Case Study of German Professionals

The phenomena of computer games and the plethora of game cultures have already been drawing attention of researchers for many years, whereas the people behind computer games – the so called gameworkers – undeservingly remained in the shadows until quite recently. The lack of information about this workforce and its professional identity makes this research object especially interesting. The analysis relies on a pilot study about the issue of the professional identity of gameworkers, which aimed to dig deeper with the means of qualitative research. During that project nine German gameworkers were interviewed and an attempt to give an in-depth description of their professional identity was made. The study shows that the respondents have a very strong coherence with their profession and perceive themselves as a part of their profession and the team/studio they work with/at. The most salient reason for this is the deep interest the respondents have in computer games (for both making and playing games)

Case Study on an Investigation of Information Security Management among Law Firms

The integrity of lawyers trust accounts as come under scrutiny in the last few years. There have been many incidents of trust account fraud reported internationally, including a case in Australia, where an employee of a law firm stole $4,500,000 from the trust funds of forty-two clients. Our study involved interviewing principles of ten law companies to find out solicitors’ attitudes to computer security and the possibility of breaches of their trust accounts. An overall finding highlights that law firms were not current with technology to combat computer crime, and inadequate access control was a major concern in safeguarding account data. Our conclusions revealed the urgent need for law firms to adopt security controls, implement information security policies and procedures and obtain cooperation from management to communicate these policies to staff

Studying SCADA Organisations Information Security Goals: An Integrated System Theory Approach

Security awareness and its implementation within an organisation is crucial for preventing deliberate attacks or/and minimise system failures on organisation’s system especially where critical infrastructure is involved including energy, water, gas and etc. This study is based on Integrated System Theory (IST) and focuses on measuring and assessing security goals including policies, risk management, internal control and contingency management implemented in 101 organisations that operate Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Systems. The data collected were analysed using structural equation modelling to test the structural and measurement model. The major finding of this study is that organisational information security goals are strongly related to the key measurement indicators, which include items assessing security policies, risk management, internal controls and contingency management

A critical review on the rationality of popular failure criteria for composites

Popular failure criteria for fibre reinforced composites are subjected to critical scrutiny on their rationality. The rationality of a theory is about the mathematical and physical logic underlying the theory, rather than the closeness of their results in comparison with experimental data. Seeking for close comparisons with a set of experimental data before obtaining a basic level of rationality is not a scientific attitude, although the practice is becoming the norm in the community of science and engineering. A theory lacking of rationality can never be a sound one no matter how closely it compares with experimental data in one respect or another, since a good comparison in one respect comes at a price of poor agreement in some other respects usually, either unknown for the time being or hidden deliberately. The objective of this paper to raise the awareness of rationality, or the lack of it, in existing theories so that the users will be warned to exercise their judgement on the applicability of these theories before employing them in future. It should also help the researchers avoid incorporating illogical considerations into the formulations of the new theories they are developing

On understanding the applicability of Mohr-Coulomb failure hypothesis for composite materials using UnitCells©

The applicability of Mohr-Coulomb (M-C) failure hypothesis for anisotropic composite materials is re-examined in this paper. Mohr-Coulomb failure theory has been widely referred to in the literature to study the failure of unidirectional (UD) fibre reinforced composites under transverse loading including the renowned Puck’s criteria. This has been partially validated based on the experimental correlations with the predictions made by the M-C criterion for a few set of test cases, which remains a debatable way of formulating composites failure criterion. It is brought to attention that Mohr utilised the concept of principal stresses in constructing principal circles and assumed that the outermost circle represents the critical state of failure. This hypothesis and its derivative “failure is dictated by the stresses acting on the fracture surface” have thus been used for formulating the criterion for isotropic materials that exhibit brittle fracture characteristics. However, the concept of principal stresses is not employable in the analysis of composites. Hence, the same hypothesis may not be applicable in studying composite materials. Also, the micromechanical aspects that lead to failure have not been taken into consideration in this hypothesis which can lead to incorrect predictions in the case of composite materials. The capability of an appropriately representative unit cell model in better understanding the micromechanical aspects and the implications of the hypothesis is studied by attempting micromechanical analysis of UD composites through UnitCells© tool. It is utilised to locate stress concentrations within the unit cell from which the likely angle of the fracture surface can be identified. It has also been shown that the stress concentrations could help locate the fracture angle for UD composite materials as a sufficient but not a necessary requirement due to the presence of non-linear behaviour before fracture. If one wishes to employ M-C failure hypothesis to formulate a failure criterion, the assumption that the failure is determined by the stresses exposed on fracture surface has to be made with caution

Enriching higher education with social media : development and evaluation of a social media toolkit

While ubiquitous in everyday use, in reality, social media usage within higher education teaching has expanded quite slowly. Analysis of social media usage of students and instructors for teaching, learning and research purposes across four countries (Russia, Turkey, Germany, and Switzerland) showed that many higher education instructors actively use social media for private purposes. However, although they understand that their students also use it for learning purposes, and instructors sense the potential of social media in teaching, they mostly refrain from doing so due to various barriers. In response, an openly accessible trilingual Social Media Toolkit was developed which analyses the teaching scenario with several questions, before suggesting, based on an algorithm, the best matching class of social media, complete with advice on how to use it for teaching purposes. This paper explains the rationale behind the toolkit, its development process, and examines instructors’ perceptions towards it