25 research outputs found
Greek Young Childrenâs Engagement with Media in the Home: Parentsâ and Childrenâs Perspectives
Recent developments in literacy studies suggest that everyday media experiences of children should be included and inform school literacy. In light of this, in the present study, we map childrenâs access and patterns of use, as well as childrenâs and parentsâ stance and views on media. From the analysis of interviews with children and questionnaires with parents, it was made clear that children have rich media experiences in the home, having access to print, screen entertainment and digital media, whereas the presence of video games in Greek homes is more limited compared with other countries. Parents seem to be affected by the âmoral panicsâ often surrounding young childrenâs use of media. Moreover, our study indicated that families with a more privileged social and educational background seem to be more oriented to print and digital media than families with a lower social status. In contrast, families of lower social and educational background tend to be more oriented to screen entertainment media. On the other hand, some significant differences with respect to the childrenâs gender were disclosed, which seem to be linked to the social expectations and the distinct social roles of what means to âbe a girlâ and âa boyâ. In conclusion, we suggest that a study including both the perspectives of parents and children on the latterâs media activities in the home can better address the limitations of (self)-reporting and complement observational studies of literacy practices
Membrane-mediated interactions
Interactions mediated by the cell membrane between inclusions, such as
membrane proteins or antimicrobial peptides, play important roles in their
biological activity. They also constitute a fascinating challenge for
physicists, since they test the boundaries of our understanding of
self-assembled lipid membranes, which are remarkable examples of
two-dimensional complex fluids. Inclusions can couple to various degrees of
freedom of the membrane, resulting in different types of interactions. In this
chapter, we review the membrane-mediated interactions that arise from direct
constraints imposed by inclusions on the shape of the membrane. These effects
are generic and do not depend on specific chemical interactions. Hence, they
can be studied using coarse-grained soft matter descriptions. We deal with
long-range membrane-mediated interactions due to the constraints imposed by
inclusions on membrane curvature and on its fluctuations. We also discuss the
shorter-range interactions that arise from the constraints on membrane
thickness imposed by inclusions presenting a hydrophobic mismatch with the
membrane.Comment: 38 pages, 10 figures, pre-submission version. In: Bassereau P., Sens
P. (eds) Physics of Biological Membranes. Springer, Cha
Exploring Balkanet Shared Ontology for Multilingual Conceptual Indexing
As the size of the Web grows, it becomes an imperative to equip search engines with sophisticated indexing modules in order to enable a meaningful organization of the stored data. In this paper we present a structured multilingual conceptual repository that has been employed as the backbone of a conceptual indexing and retrieval system. Our conceptual warehouse originates from a multilingual semantic network (Balkanet) and its Inter-Lingual-Index, which was enriched with domain ontology information inherited from the SUMO ontology. We report on the ontology's design principles and provide a description of its structure. We argue that an important attribute of the Balkanetâs ILI is its flexibility in incorporating new concepts and/or languages by allowing the percolation of shared semantic attributes to all concepts represented within taxonomies. We further present our approach to conceptual indexing, and introduce an indexing algorithm that utilizes Balkanetâs classified conceptual taxonomies. Finally, we discuss how conceptual taxonomies can help retrieval algorithms in making links between terms used in search requests and semantically related terms that might be found in the indexed documents