Does group size matter? Cheating and cooperation in Brazilian school children

Cooperation between individuals is an important requisite for the maintenance of social relationships. The purpose of this study was to investigate cooperation in children in the school environment, where individuals could cooperate or not with their classmates in a public goods game. We investigated which of the following variables influenced cooperation in children: sex, group size, and information on the number of sessions. Group size was the only factor to significantly affect cooperation, with small-group children cooperating significantly more than those in large groups. Both sex and information had no effect on cooperation. We suggest that these results reflect the fact that, in small groups, individuals were more efficient in controlling and retaliating theirs peers than in large groups. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A novel strategy for building interoperable MPI environment in heterogeneous high performance systems

Breakthrough advances in microprocessor technology and efficient power management have altered the course of development of processors with the emergence of multi-core processor technology, in order to bring higher level of processing. The utilization of many-core technology has boosted computing power provided by cluster of workstations or SMPs, providing large computational power at an affordable cost using solely commodity components. Different implementations of message-passing libraries and system softwares (including Operating Systems) are installed in such cluster and multi-cluster computing systems. In order to guarantee correct execution of message-passing parallel applications in a computing environment other than that originally the parallel application was developed, review of the application code is needed. In this paper, a hybrid communication interfacing strategy is proposed, to execute a parallel application in a group of computing nodes belonging to different clusters or multi-clusters (computing systems may be running different operating systems and MPI implementations), interconnected with public or private IP addresses, and responding interchangeably to user execution requests. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of this proposed strategy and its effectiveness, through the execution of benchmarking parallel applications.

Impact of benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECTS) on school performance

BECTS represents the vast majority of childhood focal epilepsy. Owing to the age peculiarity of children who suffer from this disease, i.e., school-going age of between 6 and 9 years, the condition is often referred to as a school disorder by parents and teachers. Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the academic performance of children with BED'S, according to the clinical and electroencephalographic ILAE criteria, and compare the results of neuropsychological tests of language and attention to the frequency of epileptic discharges. Methods: The performances of 40 school children with BED'S were evaluated by applying a school performance test (SBT), neuropsychological tests (WISC and Trail-Making), and language tests (Illinois Test Psycholinguistic Abilities - ITPA - and Staggered Spondaic Word - SSW). The same tests were applied in the control group. Results: Children with BED'S, when compared to those in the control group, showed lower scores in academic performance (SPT), digits and similarities subtests of WISC, auditory processing subtest of SSW, and ITPA - representational and automatic level. The study showed that epileptic discharges did not influence the results. Conclusion: Children with BED'S scored significantly lower scores in tests on academic performance, when compared with those in the control group probably due to executive dysfunction. (C) 2011 British Epilepsy Association. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.