This chapter presents a culturally grounded framework for reimagining literacy development through authentic partnerships among families, schools, and communities. It argues that literacy is not solely a classroom-based or cognitive process but a relational, cultural, and socially situated practice shaped by children's lived experiences, languages, identities, and community contexts. Centering families as foundational partners, the chapter challenges compliance-based models of family engagement and advances reciprocal approaches that honor funds of knowledge, oral storytelling, diverse texts, multimodal practices, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. It further examines how schools can serve as community anchors, supporting shared responsibility for literacy growth through equitable collaboration, expanded assessment practices, and system-level implementation. Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates that evidence-based literacy instruction is most effective when integrated with culturally responsive, relational, and community-connected practices.
Hospital service robots must coordinate time-sensitive and heterogeneous tasks while maintaining reliable awareness of nearby robots in structured, human-populated clinical spaces where GPS, wireless communication, and global localization can be degraded. Existing studies typically address perception, task allocation, or path optimization as separate components, which limits their ability to support closed-loop multi-robot coordination under communication-constrained hospital conditions. This paper presents a graph-driven multi-robot coordination framework with situational awareness for hospital service robotics. The framework couples three coordination modules on a shared MAKLINK Graph Theory (MGT) representation of the hospital layout. First, a lightweight CNN-LiDAR module performs point-wise binary segmentation of 2D LiDAR scans to detect peer robots and maintain local fleet awareness during GPS or network outages. Second, the detected peer positions and confidence scores are passed to a priority-weighted Self-Organizing Map (SOM), which allocates asynchronous service tasks according to task urgency, deadline, risk, proximity, and workload balance, with Lazy Theta* generating feasible any-angle initial routes on the MGT graph inside the allocation loop to link assignment decisions to executable navigation. Finally, an improved Moss Growth Optimization (iMGO) module refines the initial routes by optimizing waypoint locations on a compact line-of-sight-preserving MAKLINK domain. Simulation and comparison studies validate the perception, allocation, path-refinement, and integrated pipeline components. The CNN-LiDAR subsystem sustains reliable peer-robot detection during GPS and communication outages, with near-perfect accuracy at the close range most critical for collision avoidance. The priority-weighted SOM improves task-completion behavior and workload balance compared with clustering and non-clustering genetic algorithm baselines. The iMGO module produces shorter and smoother collision-free paths with faster convergence than competing optimizers. The integrated multi-robot simulations further show reduced mission time and travel distance relative to random allocation, supporting the proposed framework as a scalable and safety-aware coordination architecture for hospital service robotics.
Introduction Walkable neighborhoods are central to public health agendas, yet how neighborhood environments shape everyday walking remains inconsistently understood and unevenly evidenced. Existing research relies mainly on objective spatial indicators, concentrates on well-studied megacities, and overlooks working-age adults. This study addresses these gaps by examining perceived qualities and purpose-specific walking among working-age adults in a non-western and non-mega context. Methods A questionnaire survey was conducted across four purposively selected residential communities in Ningbo, a second-tier city in eastern China. A total of 811 adults aged 19-59 were recruited. Ordinal logistic regression was used to identify associations between perceived built-environment qualities (26 items in four dimensions: accessibility, comfort, aesthetics, and safety) and three walking purposes (commuting, household errands, and leisure). Results Distinct patterns emerge across walking purposes. Perceived comfort and aesthetics show context-dependent associations with commuting walking, while perceived accessibility is positively associated with household walking, with limited evidence of contextual variation in the association with perceived safety. Leisure walking is most consistently associated with perceived accessibility and aesthetics. Notably, residents in the newly-built and relatively well-served community report lower levels of leisure walking despite higher perceived environmental ratings, suggesting a perception-behavior discrepancy within modern gated developments. Conclusions This study offers a comparative and perception-based approach, which provides transferable insights to other mid-sized Asian urban settings where megacity evidence may not hold. The findings suggest that urban planning should move beyond uniform infrastructure standards and physical provision, toward more diagnostic and trip-purpose-specific interventions that address the contextual constraints of different neighborhood environments.
We applied marital stress and stability frameworks to investigate how spousal, family, and friend dynamics contribute to marital instability risks during the first 16 years of marriage. Using longitudinal data from the Early Years of Marriage Project and a within-person approach, we examined how family and friend relationships temper or amplify marital risks in couples' more troublesome years. We also considered the sociocultural contexts of gender and race. Both spouses from 373 newlywed mixed-gender couples (199 Black American, 174 White American couples) completed questionnaires in Years 1, 3, 7, and 16 of marriage. Dyadic multilevel models showed marital distress and instability increased over time, while spousal responsiveness, friend support, and family support decreased across the 16 years. Wives also had poorer marital and family evaluations than husbands. In the years with less responsiveness or more marital distress, having low family support or high family-related tension intensified negative marital effect; in contrast, having more family support or less family-related tension helped protect marriages. Nevertheless, marital instability risks were lowest in years with less distress or more spousal responsiveness, regardless of family support or tension. The benefits of spousal responsiveness and negative effects of family-related tension were particularly potent for Black spouses, showing strong marital and family effects on instability, for better or worse. These findings demonstrate that more positive and less negative marital dynamics may protect spouses from unsupportive or strained families. In contrast, lacking supportive family ties may be especially harmful to spouses in less responsive or more distressing marriages.
Early childhood experiences are associated with the Dark Triad personality dimensions: psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. We examined how recalled parenting strategies (praise, indulgence, status, care, denial of psychological autonomy, and encouragement of behavioral freedom) of 720 college students predicted traits from each dimension within the Dark Triad using parallel three-factor models. High levels of recalled parental indulgence and low levels of praise were associated with negative personality outcomes, such as narcissistic antagonism, psychopathic meanness, and psychopathic disinhibition, and with lower levels of relatively positive outcomes like Machiavellian agency, Machiavellian planfulness, and narcissistic extraversion. Denial of psychological autonomy was positively associated with narcissistic antagonism, psychopathic disinhibition, and narcissistic extraversion. A perceived parental emphasis on status was associated with positive and negative traits. We identified a consistent pattern across the Dark Triad dimensions: antagonistic and impulsive traits were associated with low parental praise, high parental indulgence, greater emphasis on status, and higher denial of psychological autonomy, whereas agentic traits were linked to the opposite pattern – lower indulgence coupled with higher levels of praise and status emphasis. These results suggest that perceived parenting features such as praise, indulgence, and status-oriented behaviors may play meaningful roles in the development of Dark Triad traits, highlighting the value of using multidimensional models to more fully explore these associations.
