Brazilian mothers` socialization goals: Intracultural differences in seven Brazilian cities

The present study aimed to investigate Brazilian mothers` socialization goals. The participants in the study were 349 primiparous mothers, whose ages ranged from 17 to 47 years (mean = 26.6 years), who had children aged between 1 and 48 months (mean = 16.4 months). The families were living in seven different cities representing each of the five geographical regions of the country. A scale to evaluate the families` socio-economic status and an interview about socialization goals were used. The answers were coded in five categories defined in previous studies: self-maximization, self-control, lovingness, proper demeanor, and decency. Comparison of the means showed that Brazilian mothers gave more emphasis to self-maximization and proper demeanor than to the other categories, presenting a pattern that fosters the development of children`s autonomous-relational selves. The intracultural variation found was related to the different cities studied. GLM results showed main effects of both city size and mothers` educational level on their socialization goals. These findings contribute to the understanding of characteristics of socialization goals related with autonomy and sociocentrism.

The eagle and the starlings: Galileo's argument for the autonomy of science-how pertinent is it today?

After Galileo's argument for the autonomy of science is analysed and adapted to take into account later developments of scientific practices, we conclude that, in the final analysis, it is not compelling. Nevertheless, Galileo's argument still provides a useful point of reference, for aspects of it can be interpreted to anticipate central components of the often acclaimed ideal of science as value free, so that appraising it contributes to the larger purpose of exploring how well that ideal stands up today. Finally, we will argue that residue from Galileo's struggle with the Church remains with us, making it difficult to identify the conditions that would need to be put into place today for any robust sense of the autonomy of science to be defensible. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Modelling shared attention through relational reinforcement learning

Shared attention is a type of communication very important among human beings. It is sometimes reserved for the more complex form of communication being constituted by a sequence of four steps: mutual gaze, gaze following, imperative pointing and declarative pointing. Some approaches have been proposed in Human-Robot Interaction area to solve part of shared attention process, that is, the most of works proposed try to solve the first two steps. Models based on temporal difference, neural networks, probabilistic and reinforcement learning are methods used in several works. In this article, we are presenting a robotic architecture that provides a robot or agent, the capacity of learning mutual gaze, gaze following and declarative pointing using a robotic head interacting with a caregiver. Three learning methods have been incorporated to this architecture and a comparison of their performance has been done to find the most adequate to be used in real experiment. The learning capabilities of this architecture have been analyzed by observing the robot interacting with the human in a controlled environment. The experimental results show that the robotic head is able to produce appropriate behavior and to learn from sociable interaction.

Harassment at work? Empowerment and autonomy as coping strategies of young workers

There is a considerable number of researches about workplace violence, but few relate young workers and work harassment. This study aimed to investigate the reported perceptions of young apprentices and trainees about moral harassment at work and related coping strategies. Forty adolescent workers (22 men and 18 women) between 15 and 20 years old who received training by a non-governmental organization in Sao Paulo, Brazil, participated in the study. Data collection included individual and collective interviews. It was used an in-depth semi structured interview protocol. The discourses were analyzed using the hermeneutic-dialectic frame. Results showed that young workers reported little or no knowledge of strategies to cope with moral harassment at work, showing vulnerability to the effects of aggression. Effective coping strategies at work should embrace two important concepts of health promotion: empowerment and autonomy.

MR-Radix: a multi-relational data mining algorithm

Abstract Background Once multi-relational approach has emerged as an alternative for analyzing structured data such as relational databases, since they allow applying data mining in multiple tables directly, thus avoiding expensive joining operations and semantic losses, this work proposes an algorithm with multi-relational approach. Methods Aiming to compare traditional approach performance and multi-relational for mining association rules, this paper discusses an empirical study between PatriciaMine - an traditional algorithm - and its corresponding multi-relational proposed, MR-Radix. Results This work showed advantages of the multi-relational approach in performance over several tables, which avoids the high cost for joining operations from multiple tables and semantic losses. The performance provided by the algorithm MR-Radix shows faster than PatriciaMine, despite handling complex multi-relational patterns. The utilized memory indicates a more conservative growth curve for MR-Radix than PatriciaMine, which shows the increase in demand of frequent items in MR-Radix does not result in a significant growth of utilized memory like in PatriciaMine. Conclusion The comparative study between PatriciaMine and MR-Radix confirmed efficacy of the multi-relational approach in data mining process both in terms of execution time and in relation to memory usage. Besides that, the multi-relational proposed algorithm, unlike other algorithms of this approach, is efficient for use in large relational databases.

Hands-on experiments in the Practicum: repositioning student teachers' autonomy.

Following a worldwide trend, the Initial Teacher Education (ITE) Programmes in Brazil are recently searching for ways of integrating practice into curriculum. It raises question about what practice must be integrated and how. Notably, university-based courses are disconnected from school and have low commitment with school issues (Zeichner, 2009).The student teacher induction into school daily life is not an easy task, mainly when the practitioners are transforming physics classroom practice toward an active learning. Drawing on cultural-historical framework (Wolff-Michael Roth & Lee, 2007; Vygotsky, 1978) this study addresses the articulation between Practicum in Physics Classes and the Hands-on Experiments (HoE) used throughout the Practicum. Although in a different level, both Practicum and HoE are linked with an idea of practice. Particularly, this study focuses on how HoE might foster student teachers' autonomy and agency in the Practicum. Data was gathered in the course Practice of Physics Teaching at University of São Paulo/Brazil in 2010; in a cohort of 60 student teachers doing a year-long Practicum in urban school in São Paulo city. Data was analysed using qualitative research methods (Roth, 2005), based on 14 interviews and video records of the student teacher preparing the HoE for Practicum we will present in general lines the role of HoE for student teacher autonomy.