Morality has been a focus in criminal justice with recent events involving officers. This quantitative study offered research in the criminal justice field regarding the moral awareness of corrections officers. The main research question investigated the relationship between the security level of the prison unit in which a corrections officer works and his or her level of morality awareness. The study surveyed corrections officers of prison units in the Ohio Department of Rehabilitations and Corrections and focused on morality awareness of corrections officers. The independent variable was the security level of the prison unit worked in. The dependent variables were the correlational scores of the Defining Issues Test-2nd edition and the Corrections Officer Perception Survey. The security level of the prison unit was analyzed with a multiple regression analysis and concluded the significant difference of the security level. A paired sample t test and general linear multivariate analysis was conducted to determine the relation of variables. The results showed there was a correlation of general morality and morality in the workplace, but there was no significant difference between these two areas nor was there any significant difference in morality between the security levels of the prison units worked in. The lack of understanding and knowledge surrounding morality awareness of corrections officers involving sexual misconduct and other unethical acts has left the criminal justice field in a vulnerable position. This study contributes to social change by incorporating morality awareness of corrections officers that could be checked in preemployment screening in the future. These findings could also assist in reducing future lawsuits inviting all criminal justice employees to participate in future studies of morality awareness to assist in the same preventions.

Public awareness is crucial in the fight against human trafficking, but little academic research looks at the public policy implications of different types of messaging the public may be using in recognizing human trafficking. Using policy feedback theory as the theoretical lens, the purpose of this quantitative study was to compare mean awareness scores for both film and social media to determine if there was a statistically significant difference between the scores and their degree of public awareness. Data were collected through an online survey, which included questions related to both film and social media, using a participant pool service. The survey measured awareness of human trafficking with a sample of 100 participants who included diverse backgrounds, ethnicities, races, genders, and ages. These data were analyzed using an independent-samples t test where the participants' awareness scores were compared for the 2 awareness strategies tested. The findings indicated that there is a statistically significant difference between film and social media at creating awareness of the phenomenon, with film being statistically higher. The implications for positive social change stemming from these results include recommendations for further research to be performed on human trafficking, specifically human trafficking awareness strategies. With improved anti-trafficking awareness strategies and a more informed public, the number of individuals affected by human trafficking will diminish and, eventually, the issue will cease to exist.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the developmental abilities of young middle-class, caucasian children to perceptually discriminate their own segmented facial parts. The Segmented Facial Parts Test, which utilized a black and white, 8 inch by 10 inch photograph, was developed by the investigator as a part of the study. it was designed to explore degrees of developmental variance on facial awareness tasks. The SFPT was incorporated as the testing instrument. Children ages 8 1/2, 6 1/2 and 4 1/2 years were examined on nine facial segment tasks. Sociological, psychological and psychiatric theories were employed in order to explain the possible interconnections between body awareness and self concept maturation and enhancement. "Whole-part" perception theory was also clarified and substantiated by this study. Results indicated that mental and chronological maturity are significant variables affecting the amount of facial awareness occurring in young children. Young males and females exhibit no substantial differences in their segmented facial parts awareness. According to this study, younger children adhere to a "holistic" style of perceptual functioning. "Part" perception becomes more and more apparent as the child's age increases.

The effects of region and sex in relation to racial awareness were studied by comparing an interracial area to a predominately white area. The test ing of the hypotheses was carried out with two groups of preschool children comprised of 20 children from Utah State University in Logan , Utah, and 20 children from Children's World in Ogden, Utah. The instrument used was one developed by J. Kenneth Morland, the Chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Randolph- Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. The instrument con isted of s ix 8-by-10 black and white pictures about which questions were asked. In regard to region there was no significant difference in the two groups studied which would indicate that attitudes aren't necessarily formed by direct contact with Negroes, but rather with contact with the prevelent attitude toward Negroes. There was significant difference in sex with girls being more aware than boys. Three factors play a part in this difference . First a difference in maturation. Girls generally mature faster than boys and thus their increased aware ness. Secondly , the idea that personal appearance is more s tressed for girl than it is fof boys. Thirdly, simply an indifference among the boys to really think about and answer the questions. An interesting finding was the children's lack of clarity in regard to the term "colored. " It is not a term that is know by children in Utah as reflected in this sample.

This study aims to determine whether the attitudes of students (and therefore future employers) towards people with physical disabilities can be modified by exposing them to the needs of disabled people, or whether perceptions of the needs of the disabled are too entrenched for education to effect any change. It also evaluates whether attitudinal changes are enduring and therefore continue to influence students’ responses to the disabled after a period of time has elapsed. Respondents were students on the Diploma of Hospitality Management at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), enrolled on an Accommodation Operations paper. A compulsory assessment for this paper was a group assignment that considered facilities offered by accommodation providers for guests with disabilities. Respondents were surveyed before (n = 54) and after (n = 24) the assignment to determine any attitude and knowledge changes. Both surveys were undertaken at the end of lectures. The surveys were distributed in class, so the number of respondents relates to the number of students in class during the particular lecture selected for survey distribution. Respondents were then invited to join a focus group to explore their feelings and opinions about disabled people. Another focus group was undertaken with students who had completed the disability assignment the previous year. The focus group was to assess whether or not the awareness of disability issues was still apparent after a period of time had elapsed. These findings would then prove whether or not exposure to such issues still influenced respondents’ attitudes. The second survey responses and comments made during the subsequent focus groups conclude that awareness of disability issues may be heightened with exposure to barriers, both physical and attitudinal, that are experienced by people with impairments. Understanding of disability issues is the first step in the removal of barriers and will help lead to the creation of a more inclusive environment for staff and guests in the hospitality industry. An inclusive environment is particularly desirable as more hotels are required in response to increases in tourist numbers. With increased visitors’ arrivals, it is reasonable to expect that tourists will have varying abilities, and therefore, modification of facilities to suit their needs will benefit a large number of people. The research also concludes that the knowledge gained in the assignment was still influential after the conclusion of the assignment. Students who have studied issues for people with impairments, as future managers, will have the knowledge and understanding to provide a more inclusive environment for guests that meets both social and legal obligations. Such an environment will be beneficial to both guests and potential employees with physical disabilities.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Stepping into the 21st century, we see more and more evidence of the growing trend towards the amalgamation of cyberspace and the physical world. This trend emerged as computing technologies moved o_ desktops and migrated into aspects of our lives through their ubiquitous presence in the physical world. As these technologies become enmeshed in our daily routines, they begin to `disappear' from our awareness and cease to be thought of as technologies and simply become tools of everyday use. Yet even as they disappear, these technologies afford a new way for us to interact with the environments of everyday life and with the ordinary objects within these environments. The furthering of this vision will require, in many cases, the tools and applications to possess greater levels of autonomy and an awareness of the user's context. As a result, the applications gradually depend more and more for their behaviour on the information (context information) that is relevant to user interactions. However, it is difficult to develop new context-aware applications that take into account the ever-increasing amount of context information. This is because: the context information sources vary not only in their types, but also in their availability in different environments; the developers have to spend significant programming efforts in gathering, pre-processing and managing the context information when designing and developing the new applications; and, the information sources can fail from time to time, resulting in operational disruptions or service degradation. To make such context information easily and widely available for to new context-aware applications, there is a need to provide information provisioning and management at the infrastructure level. This thesis explores the issues and challenges associated with the development of an autonomic middleware system that addresses the problems discussed earlier, with a particular focus on supporting fault-tolerant context information provisioning for multiple applications, providing the support of opportunistic use of the context sources (the sensors) and, maximising overall the system's interoperability for the open, dynamic computing environments (Ubiquitous computing, for example). The research presented in this thesis makes several key contributions. First, it introduces a novel standards-based approach to model heterogeneous information sources and data preprocessing components. Second, it details the design of a standards-based approach for supporting the dynamic composition of context information sources and pre-processing components. This approach plays an important role in supporting fault-tolerant information provisioning from the sensors and the opportunistic use of these sensors. More specifically, it enables any given piece of high-level context information, as required by applications, to be derived via multiple different pre-processing models, resulting in a higher degree of reliability. Third, it describes the design and development of an autonomic context management system (ACoMS), which harnesses the first two contributions above. Finally, the thesis shows how this autonomic context management system can support context-aware routing in wireless mesh networks. These contributions are evaluated through two corresponding case studies. The first is a practical firefighting scenario with three prototypical applications that validate the design and development of ACoMS. The second is an adaptive wireless mesh surveillance camera system that validates the concept of adopting ACoMS as a cross-layer information plane to ease the prototyping and development of new adaptive protocols and systems, and illustrates the needs of adaptive controls at the sensing layer to optimise resource usage.

<p>This study was conducted to examine the primary theoretical relation between metacognition andmindfulness. 98 university students participated, the possible influence of their age and number ofeducation years on the concepts were also examined. A short version of the MetacognitiveAwareness Inventory along with the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale were employed to measure theconcepts. The results indicated that awareness, a central component of mindfulness wassignificantly related to metacognition. The results suggest that the concepts to some extent areinterrelated. Comparisons were made between students above, and below the median of age (22),and education years (1.5); no significant differences in metacognition or mindfulness were found.Neither were age and education years together significantly associated with the concepts.</p>

This study was conducted to examine the primary theoretical relation between metacognition andmindfulness. 98 university students participated, the possible influence of their age and number ofeducation years on the concepts were also examined. A short version of the MetacognitiveAwareness Inventory along with the Philadelphia Mindfulness Scale were employed to measure theconcepts. The results indicated that awareness, a central component of mindfulness wassignificantly related to metacognition. The results suggest that the concepts to some extent areinterrelated. Comparisons were made between students above, and below the median of age (22),and education years (1.5); no significant differences in metacognition or mindfulness were found.Neither were age and education years together significantly associated with the concepts.

The first part of this report consists of a theoretical survey of the metalinguistic domain, the main focus being upon metaphonological abilities. Metaphonological tasks are analyzed in terms of cognitive demands and degree of automaticity. The importance of metaphonological abilities for reading, spelling, and dyslexia is discussed on the basis of this theoretical analysis. It is assumed that metaphonological abilities are a prerequisite for learning to read and spell.In the second part results from three empirical studies are reported. In the first one 46 dyslexies and their matched control group were studied during their first three years at school. The development of metaphonological skills (segmentation, sound blending, sound position analysis, and segment deletion), language skills, cognitive abilities, reading, and spelling skills was studied on several occasions. The main purpose of this longitudinal study was to gain a better understanding of the causal relationship between metaphonological abilities and reading and spelling. Several causal structural equation models were tested by the LISREL method. The results supported the hypothesis that metaphonological abilities have a causal influence on reading and spelling while no support was found for a reverse causal influence.The purpose of Study II was to investigate the development of metaphonological skills. Two randomly selected classes were given four different metaphonological tests (segmentation, sound blending, sound position analysis and segment deletion) in grade 1 and grade 2. The results showed that metaphonological abilities undergo a substantial increase during the first years at school. The performance on metaphonological tasks was also very sensitive to small variations in task demands.In Study III the effects of metaphonological training on segmentation, blending and spelling were experimentally investigated in grade 1. There was a significant effect of training in the segmentaion and blending tasks. However, the effect of metaphonological training on spelling was significant only for the children with the lowest segmentation and blending pretest performance.The main conclusions to be drawn from the three studies were that metaphonological abilities are of critical importance for learning to read and spell. Furthermore, metaphonological abilities develop during a rather long period and some children might profit from carefully designed metaphonological training tasks in order to prevent reading and spelling disorders. / digitalisering@umu