Liquid zinc embrittlement of a high-manganese-content TWIP steel

The cracking resistance of a twinning induced plasticity (TWIP) steel with high-manganese content has been studied in relation to the liquid metal embrittlement phenomenon. This phenomenon was investigated by hot tensile tests carried out on electrogalvanised specimens using a Gleeble® simulator at temperatures ranging from 600°C to 1000°C. The results show that this steel can be embrittled by liquid zinc within a limited range of temperature depending on strain rate.     

Community Counselling in African Contexts

This article explores community counselling as a form of professional practice for psychologists, with a particular focus on practices that are relevant in African contexts. The discussion identifies and discusses various models of practice identified in community psychology, including an ecological perspective, a public health and community mental health framework, interventions that focus on promoting a sense of community, indigenous approaches to community counselling and a critical or social action framework. Examples relating to each of these models of practice are drawn from various African settings, providing practitioners with some insights into how theory can be operationalised into practices that are relevant to African contexts. The article concludes with a discussion on community research, with a particular focus on ethical considerations relevant to a community approach in African contexts. The latter discussion emphasises the importance of working with the community as partners, and suggests the possibility of developing a Code of Ethics aimed specifically at guiding community counselling practice in African contexts.     

Tel Aviv Mizrah

Before immigrating to Israel, first-generation Iraqi Jews were deeply attached to their identity as Mizrahi Jews. Their mother tongue was Arabic and they had grown up in an oriental environment. Therefore, it was not easy for them to adopt the Euro-Israeli identity that the dominant Ashkenazi-European stratum in Israel compelled them to accept. Despite strong Westernizing tendencies in Israeli society, the first generation of Iraqi Jewish immigrants maintained strong links to the Iraqi customs and traditions they had acquired in Iraq, particularly with regard to the musical folklore and oriental cuisine. On the other hand, second-generation Iraqi Jews were more familiar with Israeli society than their parents; they grew up in Israel and learned Hebrew in Israeli schools along with Ashkenazi Jews and other ethnic groups. This paper establishes connections between the historical realities of Iraqi Jewish immigrants and the literary representation of their world in the trilogy Tel-Aviv Mizrah (Tel Aviv East) written in 2003 by the Iraqi Jewish author Shimon Ballas, through a comparison of Ballas's literary vision with the historical realities of Iraqi Jewish identity in Israel over the course of two generations.     

The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire: Transformation from an Ordinal to an Interval Measure Using Rasch Analysis

The scientific study of happiness requires accurate measurement of the construct that satisfies assumptions of parametric statistics and thus allows both researchers and clinicians to make reliable and valid comparisons with the relevant data sources. The 29-item Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ) is a widely-used scale for assessment of personal happiness. While its psychometric properties are acknowledged to be acceptable, it presents scores on an ordinal scale and may thus not discriminate precisely between individual happiness levels. The current study aimed to improve precision and item functioning of the OHQ by applying Rasch analysis to a sample of 281 participants. To correct disordered thresholds items were rescored in a uniform fashion. Four items displayed poor relationships with the latent trait of happiness and were removed. Best fit to the unidimensional Rasch model was achieved after locally dependent items were combined into subtests and adjusted for personal differences. Using the ordinal-to-interval conversion tables published here, ordinal OHQ scores can now be transformed to interval level data and thus subjected to parametric statistical analysis without violating fundamental assumptions. The precision of the instrument can be improved significantly by these minor modifications without the need to modify the original response format.     

Building Schools of Character: A Case‐Study Investigation of Character Education's Impact on School Climate,Pupil Behavior,and Curriculum Delivery

Within an action research framework, this investigation used a mixed‐method case‐study approach to investigate what impact character education has on school climate and pupil behavior within a primary school situated in an Education Action Zone of East Anglia, England. Both quantitative and qualitative data sets suggest that the implementation of a multicomponent socioculturally inspired character‐education program can have positive effects on school climate, pupil behavior, and staff morale. In addition, the findings indicate that there is a positive effect on the school's ability to meet the social, emotional, and cognitive needs of pupils following the implementation of a whole‐school prosocial development program rooted in empirical evidence from psychological and educational research.     

The Peer Interaction in Primary School Questionnaire: testing for measurement equivalence and latent mean differences in bullying between gender in Egypt,Saudi Arabia and the USA

The Peer Interaction in Primary School Questionnaire (PIPSQ) was developed to assess individuals’ levels of bullying and victimization. This study used the approach of latent means analysis (LMA) within the framework of structural equation modeling (SEM) to explore the factor structure and gender differences associated with the PIPSQ in a sample of Egyptian (N = 361), Saudi Arabian (N = 350) and USA (270) children. Results of the confirmatory factor analysis are consistent with previous work and support the cross-cultural validity of the PIPSQ factor structure. The PIPSQ factor loadings were invariant across Egyptian and Saudi samples, whereas only partial invariance was met between Egyptian or Saudi samples and the USA sample. Full measurement invariance was met between gender within the three cultures, that is the PIPSQ was useful to compare bullying and victims between gender within the three cultures, but it is only valid to compare those two constructs between Egyptian and Saudi boys and girls. The results indicated that Egyptian and Saudi boys/girls had a higher level of bullying than American boys/girls, whereas no differences were displayed among the three cultures on the victimization subscale. Boys had a higher level of bullying than girls in the three cultures, and boys and girls had a similar level of victimization in three cultures.     

An imprecise goal programming approach for modeling design team's preferences in quality function deployment planning process

The Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is an approach that facilitates designing product by analyzing and projecting the Customer's Needs (CNs) in the Engineering Characteristics (ECs) of a product. The aim of QFD planning process is to determine the target levels for ECs of a product that achieve high level of overall customers' satisfaction. However, integrating design team's preferences in this preliminary stage of product design could make the design more realistic and could also avoid unfeasibility in posterior phases of the product development processes. Moreover, this process is performed within an imprecise environment, and more than one factor must be taken into account in determining targets levels of ECs; especially, the limited resources and increased market competition. This paper presents an imprecise goal programming approach to determine the best aspiration levels of ECs in QFD planning process. Based on benchmarking data of ECs, the concept of satisfaction functions will be utilized to integrate explicitly the design team's preferences and incorporate the competitive analysis of target market into the modelling and solution processes. In addition, the relationships linking CNs and ECs and the ECs to each other are integrated by functional relationships. The proposed approach will be illustrated through an example of product development of an emulsification dynamite packing machine. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Orthographic and Morphological Masked Priming Effects in Arabic: Evidence from Lexical Decision Task in Children with and Without Dyslexia

In this study, we conducted a lexical decision test using masked priming paradigm to examine the morphological and orthographic priming effects in word recognition. Morphologically related word pairs can be derivational, sharing the same root or not (pseudo derivational). However, the orthographically related pairs share the same letters in different positions. Two groups of native Arabic-speaking children (N?=?57) from grade 4 and 5 participated in this study: typical readers (n?=?39) and dyslexic readers (n?=?18). To examine whether a potential morphological priming effect is driven by semantic or orthographic properties of shared morphemes, we compared prime-target pairs with derivation morphology and pseudo-derivation word related pairs. Between groups comparisons showed that a priming effect occurred only in typical readers. Comparisons between conditions revealed that a priming effect only occurred for accuracy in derivational morphology. No priming effect occurred in reaction times (RTs) between groups or conditions. These results provide evidence for root-based word recognition in Arabic children and give support to semantically rather than orthographically driven lexical access.     

Perisaccadic parietal and occipital gamma power in light and in complete darkness

Our objective was to determine perisaccadic gamma range oscillations in the EEG during voluntary saccades in humans. We evaluated occipital perisaccadic gamma activity both in the presence and absence of visual input, when the observer was blindfolded. We quantified gamma power in the time periods before, during, and after horizontal saccades. The corresponding EEG was evaluated for individual saccades and the wavelet transformed EEG averaged for each time window, without averaging the EEG first. We found that, in both dark and light, parietal and occipital gamma power increased during the saccade and peaked prior to reaching new fixation. We show that this is not the result of muscle activity and not the result of visual input during saccades. Saccade direction affects the laterality of gamma power over posterior electrodes. Gamma power recorded over the posterior scalp increases during a saccade. The phasic modulation of gamma by saccades in darkness--when occipital activity is decoupled from visual input--provides electrophysiological evidence that voluntary saccades affect ongoing EEG. We suggest that saccade-phasic gamma modulation may contribute to short-term plasticity required to realign the visual space to the intended fixation point of a saccade and provides a mechanism for neuronal assembly formation prior to achieving the intended saccadic goal. The wavelet-transformed perisaccadic EEG could provide an electrophysiological tool applicable in humans for the purpose of fine analysis and potential separation of stages of 'planning' and 'action'.