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Parental evaluations and choice of math apps for their young children: Exploring the impact of individual differences
Get PDFWell-designed math apps can have positive effects on young children’s math abilities (Bang et al., 2023; Griffith et al., 2019; Outhwaite et al., 2023), but research indicates that many commercially available math apps are not well designed (Dubé et al., 2019; Meyer et al., 2021). Studies also find that parents struggle to identify relevant features from app store descriptions (Montazami et al., 2022; Pearson et al., 2023). The purpose of the present research was to investigate how parents evaluate the apps themselves, and to test whether individual differences can affect parental app evaluations and decisions. In two parts of Study 1 (part A and part B) 45 parents of children three- to six-years-old explored and rated four commercially available math apps that had been coded for content and design in previous research (Lee et al., 2019). In addition, participants responded to a survey about their own math anxiety level and math teaching confidence, as well as how they use and choose apps for their children (e.g., what features they look for and how often they co-use with their child). In Study 1 part A, participants’ ratings were examined when they evaluated the app in general terms (i.e., did the app teach “important numeracy skills”). In Study 1 part B, participants’ ratings were examined regarding specific numeracy skills featured (e.g., “identifying numerals”). Results showed that parents were able to identify some of the key features of a well-designed app, but some of their ratings differed from those of trained coders. Individual differences of parental math anxiety and teaching confidence affected parents’ evaluations of the apps, highlighting the importance of individual differences for understanding parental app choices. Given the prevalence of technology use and differences in communication in autistic children, Study 2 expanded upon Study 1 through an exploratory study of 13 parents of autistic children. Following the procedures of Study 1, the results of Study 2 showed that parental app evaluations were affected not just by individual parental differences (math anxiety and teaching confidence) but also by differences in their child’s neurotype. These parents valued different app features and had some differences in app ratings as well. The child’s communication abilities also seemed to affect choices to download apps. This set of studies provides support for future research to consider individual differences, including the child’s neurotype, in parental app decision making, as without these key differences, findings may not tell the whole story
“Here come the Canadians … to restore our freedom to us”: “And we will praise God, when the Canadians … have vanished back to Canada”
Get PDFThe following editorials and articles, translated from the Nijmegen newspaper De Gelderlander, offer English-language readers insight into the concerns and perspectives of the Dutch as they dealt with the uneven transition from occupation to liberation and the welcome yet at times troublesome presence of the Allied forces, the Canadians in particular. Although the physical damage inflicted by the war was everywhere visible, it was the moral and psychological effect of the occupation on the young that formed the greatest source of concern, especially when those who had come of age during years of deprivation and disorientation encountered exotic young soldiers eager to enjoy the pleasures of life after years of training and combat. The articles reveal the conflicting reactions of the liberated to their liberators in an extraordinary and unprecedented set of circumstances
The Vernon Military Camp and the Imperial Training Archipelago, 1939-45
Get PDFThe Vernon Military Camp was one of the many interwoven institutions that fed trained soldiers into the vast armies of the British Empire in the Second World War. Beginning the war as a barren hill that lacked modern equipment, it was eventually developed into a professional training centre that both served and benefitted from national, Imperial and Allied war efforts. Taking a ground-level view of Canadian Army training and inter-theatre learning, this article argues that army training camps, even those in the periphery, played a vital role in strengthening Imperial and Allied interoperability by facilitating knowledge transfer away from active combat
Preaching Peace, Selling Arms: The Evolution of Canadian Military Export Policy, 1946-49
Get PDFRecent sales of Canadian military equipment to Saudi Arabia have highlighted a contradiction between Canadian military export policy on paper and in practice. This contradiction is rooted in a series of policy decision made between 1946 and 1949, just after the Second World War. During this period Canadian policymakers accepted that military exports were economically and strategically necessary, and become an opportunistic exporter of military equipment to the non-communist world. The military export policies adopted during these years were flexible, pragmatic, and reactive; they incentivised risk-aversion and commercial competitiveness, but not internally consistency. Consequently, the defining principle of Canadian military export policy became flexibility—of preserving the discretion of Canadian officials to evaluate exports on a case-by-case basis not the universal enforcement of export restrictions based on specific criteria. This commitment to flexibility has created contradictions which can be construed as hypocrisy, especially regarding the government’s historical commitment to human rights considerations
Review of “The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading” by Andrew Pettegree
Get PDFReview of The Book at War: How Reading Shaped Conflict and Conflict Shaped Reading by Andrew Pettegre
The influence of visual perspective on the cognitive effort required for mental representation
Get PDFMental representation is the process by which an individual simulates an event in their mind’s eye. This process is the foundation of the ability to remember the past, engage in prospective thinking, or imagine fictitious scenarios. An individual can mentally represent any event through their own eyes—the first-person perspective or from the viewpoint of an external observer—the third-person perspective. The perspective of representation influences outcomes related to memory, visuospatial processing, affect, social cognition, clinical diagnoses, and language processing. In turn, an individual’s tendency to favour either perspective is shaped by related factors.
The current research consists of four experiments, designed to characterize and contrast the electrophysiological correlates of mental representation from each perspective and the associated cognitive load. To this end, electroencephalography (EEG) was used to capture changes in slow-cortical potentials (SCPs), while participants formed mental representations based on short sentences, from either visual perspective. SCPs have a longer duration than other event-related potentials (ERPs) and originate primarily in the cortex; SCP negativity was used to index the cognitive load associated with mental representation.
Experiment 1 showed that third-person perspective imagining required more cognitive effort and that switching from the first- to the third-person perspective required more cognitive effort than performing the opposite switch. This difference was primarily observed in prefrontal electrodes, leading up to the perspective switch, at which point the effect the effect was observed across all but occipital electrodes. Third-person perspective events were rated as being easier to imagine when initially generated from the first-person perspective. Experiment 2 showed that concurrently manipulating personal pronouns and perspective cues did not effect reliable differences in SCP amplitudes but did influence the vividness of objects, locations, emotions, and the sense of touch. Experiments 3a and 3b showed that (morphosyntactic-given) temporal information modulated the impact of perspective on SCPs, during autobiographical memory (AM) retrieval/maintenance. Following perfective (but not imperfective) accomplishment cues, vividness ratings were higher for the first-person perspective.
Discussions further interpret and contextualize these novel results. Together, the current experiments showed that SCP amplitudes differentiated between first- and third-person perspective mental representation, but the timeline and magnitude of the observed differences varied greatly across experiments based on the influences of perspective-switching, lexical aspect (activities versus accomplishments), grammatical aspect (imperfective versus perfective), personal pronouns (“I” versus “He”/“She”), and type of mental representation (imagined events versus autobiographical memories). These variations occurred despite the consistency of the experimental stimuli and their presentation, across all experiments. As such, recommendations are provided for greater control of these factors in further SCP-based research
TrogloDYKE\u27s Delight: A Deep Listening of Pauline Olivero\u27s Troglodyte\u27s Delight
Get PDFPauline Oliveros, renowned lesbian composer, left a legacy of experimental music and groundbreaking ideas about music and sound, both as maker and listener. She is best known for her concept of Deep Listening, the active engagement of listening to sound and being open to all possibilities, being receptive to the resonant currents emanating from the sounds, to go beyond hearing and to listen, to Deeply Listen, to the sounds, to experience fully those sounds. Deep Listening was inspired by an experience Oliveros had in a cistern in 1988, where beneath the earth she truly experienced listening and the sounds present there as more than just something to hear. By playing with the cistern and the sounds present, Oliveros engaged herself fully in the practice of listening, of Deep Listening, going beyond merely hearing. She responded to the sounds, which shaped her. In turn, she by her unique identity of being her, with all her lived experience, shaped her listening experience. Each listening experience is specific and unique to the listener, and to the specific moment of listening, with all that each listener is and all that each space is contributing to the uniqueness of that listening experience.
In this autoethnographic thesis, I Deeply Listen to Oliveros’ 1990 album Troglodyte’s Delight. Recorded two years after her cistern epiphany, Troglodyte’s Delight is Oliveros exploring Deep Listening and playing as a response to natural sounds, as the album was recorded in a cave in New York State, underground, with water dripping in the cavern and Oliveros’ accordion music being shaped by the crevasses and walls of the cave. Through Deeply Listening to the album, my queer identity meets, is shaped by, and interacts with Oliveros’, through a process of resonate queer wavelengths where my queer realities (queerealities) meet with Oliveros’ as present on the album at the time of the recording. To better understand this experience of interaction happening between wavelengths sonic and queer, I explore Oliveros’ identity, history with Deep Listening, and her connection to lesbian politics to better understand where these resonant wavelengths are emanating from. Likewise, I explore my own queer identity and relationship with sound. I seek to understand how the Deep Listening to this album impacted me, and to do I needed to reckon with where I was at the time of listening, and where I had come from to arrive at this place, as who I am shapes the listening, too.
This listening is present in the interaction of nature (the cave’s inherent nature noise) with queer identities. I would be remiss if I did not examine the connection between queerness and nature, as well as queerness, sound, and nature. I bring in queer ecology, as well as cultural geography, and scholarship on queer sound studies to better understand this crossroads I find myself at in this thesis, where nature, sound, and queerness meet in the figures of myself and Oliveros, interacting through the act of listening to her album Troglodyte’s Delight, over thirty years after it was first recorded
Advancing Machine Learning Interpretability: LIME Applications to Temporal Data and A Novel Method of Counterfactual Generation
No full textAs machine learning has advanced significantly over the past decade, predictive models have achieved substantial success across various domains. However, they often lack transparency in their decision-making processes. This opacity presents risks, particularly in sectors like healthcare and finance, where transparency is crucial. To address these challenges, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) has risen in importance. Techniques such as LIME (Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations) have been developed, utilizing simpler alternative models like linear regression or tree-based models to explain decisions for specific instances.
This thesis initially concentrates on the application of LIME to three global annual datasets, specifically within the relatively uncharted territory of explaining data with temporal changes. Through the utilization of LIME, we can effectively pinpoint the crucial features that influence predictions. Additionally, the incorporation of FLAML facilitates the exploration of various predictive methods, thereby enabling us to attain robust performance. Furthermore, we have executed a range of data preprocessing techniques to improve the quality of our predictions. To validate LIME\u27s effectiveness, Individual Conditional Explanation (ICE) plots are employed, grounding the explanations in observable data trends. This approach not only improves the understanding of LIME\u27s application in rendering complex datasets interpretable but also highlights the significance of feature importance within predictive models.
Building on this foundational understanding, the thesis then proposes a novel counterfactual generation method. Counterfactual explanations are a type of XAI to help users understand model decisions by posing \u27what-if\u27\u27 scenarios. These explanations focus on describing how slight changes in the input data could lead to different output results, effectively answering the question, What needs to change in the input for a different decision to be made by the model?\u27\u27 Characterized by the goal of simultaneously achieving validity, proximity and sparsity, our proposal employs simulated annealing optimization and post-pruning techniques to produce counterfactuals that are both effective and comprehensible. Specifically, LIME is adopted in the optimization process by prioritizing features and reducing the search space of candidate counterfactuals.
By advancing these methods, the thesis contributes to the field of explainable AI, providing strategies that not only help interpret model decisions but also empower users to influence future outcomes based on these insights
Making Sentencing Meaningful: How Victims Find Justice in the Sentencing Process
Get PDFThis article examines the role of victims in the criminal justice system, and how victims find justice through the sentencing process. It examines the role that providing a victim impact statement, receiving information about typical sentencing practices, and restorative or traditional sentencing play in how victims perceive justice in sentencing. Quantitative analyses were conducted analyzing the aforementioned variables and their relationship to participant perceptions of sentence effectiveness, anger, sentence harshness, and happiness, as well as their propensity to obedience. Qualitative analyses were conducted to better understand the reasoning behind victim perceptions and preferences in relation to restorative and traditional sentencing types. This article aims to contribute to the broader knowledge regarding victim satisfaction with sentencing, how victim involvement with the sentencing process can be improved, and how restorative justice can work to benefit both victims and offenders
Understanding health and well-being outcomes associated with protected coastal ecosystems: A Fundy National Park case study.
Get PDFThe COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the mental health and well-being of Canadians, prompting many to turn to nature for consolation and social interaction. However, there is a lack of evidence linking these outcomes specifically to coastal areas. To address this gap, we conducted a self-reported survey at Fundy National Park, New Brunswick, Canada, in summer 2022. Over 400 visitors participated, revealing nature enjoyment, physical health, and mental well-being as primary motivators for park visitation. Notably, mental well-being showed significant differences across gender, sexual identity, and ethnicity, with males, straight individuals, and others exhibiting distinct preferences compared to females, 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals, and BIPOC participants. Additionally, visitors reported substantial health benefits from coastal visits, particularly linked to place attachment. When examining the level of attachment associated with ethnicity, statistical differences emerged, indicating a need for further investigation into how cultural backgrounds influence individuals’ connections to coastal environments. Recommendations for visitor management, including inclusive strategies such as educational programs and interpretation services, are discussed. Future research opportunities in protected areas should focus on exploring the health benefits of coastal areas across Canada, investigating inclusive access to nature, and employing various methodological approaches to enhance our understanding of the intricate relationship between individuals and coastal areas. Future research should further explore coastal benefits and the perspectives of marginalized visitors, potentially through longitudinal studies and follow-up surveys, to ensure inclusive access to coastal ecosystems and the health and well-being benefits they provide