An Experimental Study of the Relationship BetweenSpatial Ability and the Learning of a Graphical User Interface

The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is one of the most revolutionary changes to occur in the evolution of modern computing systems. ... This revolution has increased the accessibility and usability of computersystems to the general public ... (Mandelkern, 1993, p. 37). In the excitement over Graphical User Interfaces, developers often overlook the fact that they are making assumptions about how users best process information. A key assumption in the GUI is that users are effective processors of spatial information. In fact, there are individual differences in how well people process information spatially. This paper describes an experiment that measures these differences and looks for their effects on users\u27 abilities to learn command line and GUI interfaces for simple file management tasks

Az angliai kutatások eredményei az IKT iskolai használatáról

2006-ban a DfES (Department for Children, Schools and Families) megbízásából a Becta átfogó beszámolót készített az IKT (infokommunikációs technológia) használatának iskolai munkára gyakorolt hatásáról az Egyesült Királyságban. A 2007-ben megjelent tanulmány készítői igyekeztek strukturált módon összegezni mindazokat a megállapításokat és tapasztalatokat, amelyek a témáról készült különböző jellegű publikációkból leszűrhetők voltak

Az angliai kutatások eredményei az IKT iskolai használatáról

2006-ban a DfES (Department for Children, Schools and Families) megbízásából a Becta átfogó beszámolót készített az IKT (infokommunikációs technológia) használatának iskolai munkára gyakorolt hatásáról az Egyesült Királyságban. A 2007-ben megjelent tanulmány készítői igyekeztek strukturált módon összegezni mindazokat a megállapításokat és tapasztalatokat, amelyek a témáról készült különböző jellegű publikációkból leszűrhetők voltak

Chemical Similarity and Threshold of Toxicological Concern (TTC) Approaches: Report of an ECB Workshop held in Ispra, November 2005

There are many national, regional and international programmes – either regulatory or voluntary – to assess the hazards or risks of chemical substances to humans and the environment. The first step in making a hazard assessment of a chemical is to ensure that there is adequate information on each of the endpoints. If adequate information is not available then additional data is needed to complete the dataset for this substance. For reasons of resources and animal welfare, it is important to limit the number of tests that have to be conducted, where this is scientifically justifiable. One approach is to consider closely related chemicals as a group, or chemical category, rather than as individual chemicals. In a category approach, data for chemicals and endpoints that have been already tested are used to estimate the hazard for untested chemicals and endpoints. Categories of chemicals are selected on the basis of similarities in biological activity which is associated with a common underlying mechanism of action. A homologous series of chemicals exhibiting a coherent trend in biological activity can be rationalised on the basis of a constant change in structure. This type of grouping is relatively straightforward. The challenge lies in identifying the relevant chemical structural and physicochemical characteristics that enable more sophisticated groupings to be made on the basis of similarity in biological activity and hence purported mechanism of action. Linking two chemicals together and rationalising their similarity with reference to one or more endpoints has been very much carried out on an ad hoc basis. Even with larger groups, the process and approach is ad hoc and based on expert judgement. There still appears to be very little guidance about the tools and approaches for grouping chemicals systematically. In November 2005, the ECB Workshop on Chemical Similarity and Thresholds of Toxicological Concern (TTC) Approaches was convened to identify the available approaches that currently exist to encode similarity and how these can be used to facilitate the grouping of chemicals. This report aims to capture the main themes that were discussed. In particular, it outlines a number of different approaches that can facilitate the formation of chemical groupings in terms of the context under consideration and the likely information that would be required. Grouping methods were divided into one of four classes – knowledge-based, analogue-based, unsupervised, and supervised. A flowchart was constructed to attempt to capture a possible work flow to highlight where and how these approaches might be best applied.JRC.I.3-Toxicology and chemical substance

Sometimes it is better to know less: How known words influence referent selection and retention in 18 to 24-month-old children

Young children are surprisingly good word learners. Despite their relative lack of world knowledge and limited vocabularies, they consistently map novel words to novel referents and, at later ages, show retention of these new word–referent pairs. Prior work has implicated the use of mutual exclusivity constraints and novelty biases, which require that children use knowledge of well-known words to disambiguate uncertain naming situations. The current study, however, presents evidence that weaker vocabulary knowledge during the initial exposure to a new word may be better for retention of new mappings. Children aged 18–24 months selected referents for novel words in the context of foil stimuli that varied in their lexical strength and novelty: well-known items (e.g., shoe), just-learned weakly known items (e.g., wif), and completely novel items. Referent selection performance was significantly reduced on trials with weakly known foil items. Surprisingly, however, children subsequently showed above-chance retention for novel words mapped in the context of weakly known competitors compared with those mapped with strongly known competitors or with completely novel competitors. We discuss implications for our understanding of word learning constraints and how children use known words and novelty during word learning

Probabilistic thinking and health risks: An editorial

This special issue is the third in a four-part series, Health Care Through the ‘Lens of Risk', which focus on risk categorisation, valuing, expecting and time-framing respectively, and published or to be published in 2012 and 2013. The present editorial introduces the issue of probabilistic thinking about health in relation to an interview-based article and five substantial research articles, with further articles to appear subsequently in an annex in the next issue of Health, Risk & Society