Children’s numeracy competencies are not only relevant for their academic achievement, but also later in life. The development of early numeracy competencies is influenced by children’s learning environment. Here, the home numeracy environment and parent’s own beliefs about mathematics play an important role for children’s numeracy competencies. However, only a few studies explicitly tested these associations separately for mothers and fathers. In our study, we assessed mothers’ and fathers’ mathematical gender stereotypes, self-efficacy and their beliefs on the importance of mathematical (...) activities at home, and tested their associations with parents’ numeracy activities and children’s numeracy competencies in a sample of N = 160 children with an average age of M = 59.15 months. Both, fathers and mothers regarded boys as being more competent in mathematics than girls. Fathers when compared to mothers reported a greater mathematical self-efficacy. Further, only mothers’ self-efficacy was associated with the frequency of numeracy activities with the study child. In contrast, only fathers’ beliefs on the importance of mathematics was associated with their numeracy activities which, in turn, predicted children’s numeracy competencies. However, the non-invariant constructs and varying results lead to the question whether a revision of existing scales assessing parental beliefs and home numeracy activities is needed to investigate differences of mothers and fathers and their potential associations with children’s numeracy outcomes. (shrink)

Although the importance of weak protein‐protein interactions has been understood since the 1980s, scant attention has been paid to this “quinary structure”. The transient nature of quinary structure facilitates dynamic sub‐cellular organization through loose grouping of proteins with multiple binding partners. Despite our growing appreciation of the quinary structure paradigm in cell biology, we do not yet understand how the many forces inside the cell – the excluded volume effect, the “stickiness” of the cytoplasm, and hydrodynamic interactions – perturb the (...) weakest functional protein interactions. We discuss the unresolved problem of how the forces in the cell modulate quinary structure, and to what extent the cell has evolved to exert control over the weakest biomolecular interactions. We conclude by highlighting the new experimental and computational tools coming on‐line for in vivo studies, which are a critical next step if we are to understand quinary structure in its native environment. (shrink)

Wirth beschreibt in diesem Buch Volkstum und Weltmacht in der Geschichte, im Original 1904 erschienen.