In this study, we investigated a new instrument: the Southampton Test of Empathy for Preschoolers (STEP). The test incorporated 8 video vignettes of children in emotional scenarios, assessing a child's ability to understand (STEP-UND) and share (STEP-SHA) in the emotional experience of a story protagonist. Each vignette included 4 emotions (angry, happy, fearful, sad) that reflected emotion judgments based on the protagonist's facial expression, situation, verbal cues, and desire. The STEP was administered to 39 preschool children, and internal reliability, concurrent validity, and construct validity were addressed. The results showed good internal consistency. They also highlighted moderate concurrent validity with parent-rated empathy, a measure of facial indices, and construct validity with teacher-rated prosocial behavior.

The growth in the use of interconnected devices in the UK is well-documented. Society has embraced new technology allowing access to information, systems, and people; children are being described as digital natives and social networking, internet telephony, and accessing digital entertainment are a major part of their lives. However, whilst the ubiquitous nature of modern communication systems has brought many benefits, there exist a minority that uses the technology to harass others. This paper considers the phenomenon of Cyberstalking and presents an analysis of the problem and the responses provided on the first survey that addresses issue specifically. The paper discusses the nature of attacks, the victim-attacker relationship, the impact of the attacks and the actions taken to resolve the issue. The paper also considers both the legal and technological aspects and presents recommendations to help reduce the occurrence of Cyberstalking.

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Current developments in grid and service oriented technologies involve fluid and dynamic, ad hoc based interactions between delegates, which in turn, serves to challenge conventional centralised structured trust and security assurance approaches. Delegates ranging from individuals to large-scale VO (Virtual Organisations) require the establishment of trust across all parties as a prerequisite for trusted and meaningful e-collaboration. In this paper, a notable obstacle, namely how such delegates (modelled as nodes) operating within complex collaborative environment spaces can best evaluate in context to optimally and dynamically select the most trustworthy ad hoc based resource/service for e-consumption. A number of aggregated service case scenarios are herein employed in order to consider the manner in which virtual consumers and provider ad hoc based communities converge. In this paper, the authors take the view that the use of graph-theoretic modelling naturally leads to a self-led trust management decision based approach in which delegates are continuously informed of relevant up-to-date trust levels. This will lead to an increased confidence level, which trustful service delegation can occur. The key notion is of a self-led trust model that is suited to an inherently low latency, decentralised trust security paradigm.

Current developments in grid and service oriented technologies involve fluid and dynamic, ad hoc based interactions between delegates, which in turn, serves to challenge conventional centralised structured trust and security assurance approaches. Delegates ranging from individuals to large-scale VO (Virtual Organisations) require the establishment of trust across all parties as a prerequisite for trusted and meaningful e-collaboration. In this paper, a notable obstacle, namely how such delegates (modelled as nodes) operating within complex collaborative environment spaces can best evaluate in context to optimally and dynamically select the most trustworthy ad hoc based resource/service for e-consumption. A number of aggregated service case scenarios are herein employed in order to consider the manner in which virtual consumers and provider ad hoc based communities converge. In this paper, the authors take the view that the use of graph-theoretic modelling naturally leads to a self-led trust management decision based approach in which delegates are continuously informed of relevant up-to-date trust levels. This will lead to an increased confidence level, which trustful service delegation can occur. The key notion is of a self-led trust model that is suited to an inherently low latency, decentralised trust security paradigm.

Much work is under way within the Grid technology community on issues associated with the development of services fostering the integration and exploitation of multiple autonomous, distributed data sources through a seamless and flexible virtualized interface. These developments involve fluid and dynamic, ad hoc based interactions between dispersed service providers and consumers. However, several obstacles arise in the design and implementation of such services. In this article, the authors examine a notable obstacle, namely how to keep service consumers informed of relevant changes about data committed in multiple and distributed service provider levels, and most importantly, when these changes can affect others’ well-being. To achieve this, the authors use aggregated case scenarios to demonstrate the need for a data-Grid push service in a disaster management situation. In this regard, the article describes in detail the service architecture, as well as its mathematical analysis for keeping interested stakeholders informed automatically about relevant and critical data changes.

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