This exploratory study investigates student attitudes towards culturally-oriented educational games for practicing computer programming, where the mainstream culture appeals to all of the students irrespective of their cultural background. We show that a shared appreciation of culture along the lines of humour promotes positive student attitude towards culturally-aware game based learning which...

If object-oriented programmers are more productive than other programmers, they should be paid more, assuming that wages are determined based on the value of a worker’s marginal productivity. The human capital model is used to assess the current salary premiums of programmers who know object-oriented programming (OOP). While the human capital model employed quantifies this premium, it also cont...

Couples therapy has experienced a shift in therapeutic approaches from those that focus on dysfunction and deficits to postmodern approaches that emphasize clients’ strengths and skills. Additionally, researchers have found that resources, such as self-esteem and social support, serve to enhance couples’ relationships. One therapeutic approach that emphasizes strengths and resources is solution...

We propose an optimization algorithm to execute a previously unlearned task-oriented command in an intelligent machine. We show that a well-defined, physically bounded, task-oriented problem can be solved if a machine has knowledge of the goal of the task, is capable of determining the advantage of a decision, has knowledge of itself, has knowledge of the perimeters of the problem space, and is...

The book aims at both biologyand computation-oriented audiences and is designed as a number of 'crashcourses' quickly updating the reader on the basics of bioinformatics. It starts with a preface outlining main biological and technological concepts of the modern computational biology. The rest is organized into four sections consisting of 18 chapters elaborating on essential bioinformatics tool...

Knowledge about aging of perceptual-motor skills is based almost exclusively on cross-sectional studies. We examined age-related changes in the retention of mirror-tracing skills in healthy adults who practiced for 3 separate days at baseline and retrained 5 years later at follow-up. Overall, the speed and accuracy of an acquired skill were partially retained after a 5-year interim, although th...

Both general practitioners and community physicians practise a range of activities along a spectrum from health care to prevention, but increasingly they have come to regard preventive medicine as the key to their respective future roles. This convergence of goals is deceptive because the primary care model of prevention is individual-oriented while that of community medicine is population-orie...

Schools are overloaded with health promotion programs that, altogether, focus on a broad array of behavioral domains, including substance abuse, sexuality and nutrition. Although the specific content of programs varies according to the domain focus, programs usually address similar concepts: knowledge, attitudinal beliefs, social influences and skills. This apparent conceptual overlap between b...

Although the role of health care professionals is known to have changed over the last years, few formal efforts have been made to examine this change through means of a scientific review. Therefore, the goal of this paper was to investigate the changing role of health care professionals in nursing homes, as well as the conditions that make this change possible. A systematic review of health car...

A worked–out example is given to show how mathematical and educational insights can be incorporated in the structure of high–stakes K–12 math tests in a way that promotes more effective learning and better teaching practices. The example concerns symbolic skills deficits seen in students from calculator–oriented K–12 programs.