No abstract

In the past few years, wireless devices, including pocket PCs, pagers, mobile phones, etc, have gained popularity among a variety of users across the world and the use of mobile phones in particular, has increased significantly in many parts of the world, especially in India. Cell phones are now the most popular form of electronic communication and constitute an integral part of adolescents' daily lives, as is the case for the majority of mobile phone users. In fact, mobile phones have turned from a technological tool to a social tool. Therefore, the influence of cell phones on young people needs to be thoroughly examined. In this paper, we explore the attitude of young adults towards cell phones and identify the hidden classes of respondents according to the patterns of mobile phone use. The Latent Class Analysis (LCA) serves as a tool to detect any peculiarities, including those gender-based. LCA measures the value of an unknown latent variable on the basis of the respondents' answers to various indicator variables; for this reason, a proper selection of indicators is of great importance here. In this work, we propose a method of selecting the most useful variables for an LCA-based detection of group structures from within the examined data. We apply a greedy search algorithm, where during each phase the models are compared through an approximation to their Bayes factor. The method is applied in the process of selecting variables related to mobile phone usage which are most useful for the clustering of respondents into different classes. The findings demonstrate that young people display various feelings and attitudes toward cell phone usage.

Over the years, academic cheating continues to be an endemic issue that has always been a threat to academic honesty and social values. Academic dishonesty among the students is a perplexing phenomenon, that exists in every stage of our education system, especially in colleges and universities. College and university administrators admit that academic dishonesty is an issue on campus but they often lack in preparing effective policies and procedures to monitor it and to deal with it. In addition, indecisive perceptions regarding academic dishonesty has adverse effects on paradoxical situation of education. The current study provides details about the causes that motivate students to cheat and describes the different forms of cheating practices performed by the students. The purpose of this study is to define the students of University of Jammu what is meant by academic cheating, to determine the factors associated with cheating behaviour and to classify of the students according to their cheating behaviour. From the current study, the main reasons due to which students go for cheating are not knowing/understanding the study material, performance pressure, inadequate exam preparations, etc. Also, around 42%, 6% and 52% of the respondents are found to be occasional, persistent and instantaneous cheaters, respectively. We suggest that students must understand that cheating is wrong not only for the society but also for their own knowledge because by indulging in cheating students prevent them from learning what they are studying and hence, deteriorate the intellectual human resource of the country.