Greek Young Children’s Engagement with Media in the Home: Parents’ and Children’s 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 children’s access and patterns of use, as well as children’s and parents’ 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 ‘moral panics’ often surrounding young children’s 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 children’s gender were disclosed, which seem to be linked to the social expectations and the distinct social roles of what means to ‘be a girl’ and ‘a boy’. In conclusion, we suggest that a study including both the perspectives of parents and children on the latter’s 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 Balkanet’s 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 Balkanet’s 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