Construction of a basketball official's test presented by videotape

The purpose of this study was to construct an objective basketball official's test through the medium of television. Seventy-one illustrated situations of basketball play were edited from twelve hours of women's college games. Seventy-one questions and separate answer sheets were constructed to accompany the illustrated situations on videotape. The questions were true-false and multiple choice with contingent parts related to the response to the first section of each question. All questions were based on the Division for Girls and Women's Sports Basketball Guide, 1973-1974 (1973). The test was administered to forty-four subjects with a varying knowledge of and experience in basketball officiating. The knowledge and experience ranged from students in a basketball officiating class to ten nationally rated officials. Objectivity of each illustrated situation was established by six or more of eight national officials, acting as judges, agreeing upon the correct response. An item analysis was computed by the Testan-Item analysis program on the first choice of each question and the question as a whole. Fourteen questions were rejected due to insufficient objectivity and, after the two item analyses, fifteen additional questions were rejected on the basis of poor discrimination. The reliability of the revised t>;st found by the Kuder-Richardson formula, was 0.7899

Do Engineering Students Learn Ethics From an Ethics Course?

The goal of the present research is to develop machine-assisted methods that can assist in the analysis of students’ written compositions in ethics courses. As part of this research, we analyzed Social Impact Assessment (SIA) papers submitted by engineering undergraduates in a course on engineering ethics. The SIA papers required students to identify and discuss a contemporary engineering technology (e.g., autonomous tractor trailers) and to explicitly discuss the ethical issues involved in that technology. Here we describe the ability of three machine tools to discriminate differences in the technical compared to ethical portions of the SIA papers. First, using LIWC (Language Inquiry and Word Count) we quantified differences in analytical thinking, expertise and self-confidence, disclosure, and affect, in the technical and ethical portions of the papers. Next, we applied MEH (Meaning Extraction Helper) to examine differences in critical concepts in the technical and ethical portions of the papers. Finally, we used LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to examine differences in the topics in the technical and ethical portions of the papers. The results of these three tests demonstrate the ability of machine-based tools to discriminate conceptual, affective, and motivational differences in the texts that students compose that relate to engineering technology and to engineering ethics. We discuss the utility and future directions for this research.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Negotiating 'Normal': the Management of Feminine Identities in Rural Britain

This paper examines the management of feminine identities in a women\'s rugby team in a rural British community. In so doing, the issue of new, and potentially problematic, forms of femininity are explored, with their attendant social consequences. The team, known as the Jesters, is situated in a social context which is dominantly masculine and heterosexist, with rigidly enforced gender roles. Due to their participation in rugby, a \'man\'s game\', the Jesters are threatened with marginalisation for their apparent failure to conform to, and potential disruption of, established gender norms. This threat is managed through the performance of certain \'inauthentic\' feminine identities (hyper-femininity and heterosexuality) on the part of the entire team. It is this \'team identity\' which lies at the heart of this paper. This paper therefore examines the group dynamics of identity performance and negotiation. In negotiating \'normal\' the Jesters are forced to confront changing gender norms and social contexts within the team itself. This paper also examines the difficulties faced by individuals when their own interests are opposed to the interests of the group of which they are a part. Although largely uncaring about the private lives of team members, the heterosexual members of the Jesters refuse to tolerate the performance of alternative versions of femininity when it may result in the exclusion of the team as a whole. This paper therefore examines the differing interests of heterosexual and lesbian femininities within a potentially marginalised group and some of the coping mechanisms adopted by both groups to develop a coherent team image.Normal, Identity, Gender, Sexuality, Performance

Washington University Record, September 20, 2002

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/record/1941/thumbnail.jp

‘This growing genetic disaster’: obesogenic mothers, the obesity ‘epidemic’ and the persistence of eugenics

In this era of ever-increasing emphasis on personal responsibility the 'obesity epidemic', officialised in global health warnings, threatens to swamp the West with the consequences of overindulgence. With childhood obesity identified as a particular threat, maternal feeding behaviour from conception onwards has come under scrutiny for its obesogenic potential. Epigenetic research now suggests that the mother's poor diet and excessive intake of calories can permanently damage not only the fetus itself but the genetic coding it carries, thus (re)creating a narrative of degeneration which performs complex cultural and social functions. While mothers have always been associated with the weakening and/or poisoning of children and the national body, the new narrative of degenerative uterine toxicity focuses attention on poor maternal choice as productive of a 'bio-underclass', and thus diverts attention from the many structural and socioeconomic associations of obesity with poverty, and particularly inequality. As government and child protection agencies in the UK and US attempt to discipline parents through surveillance and prosecution and the austerity agenda lends moral weight to discourses of 'waste' and necessary 'belt-tightening', the contradictions and implications of obesity as a 'disease' of 'overindulgence' in consumer cultures founded on 'indulgence' are too easily avoided by political and scientific focus on the abject body of the obesogenic 'underclass' mother

Spartan Daily, April 22, 1993

Volume 100, Issue 52https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/8410/thumbnail.jp

Open Access, Law, Knowledge, Copyrights, Dominance and Subordination

The concept of open access to legal knowledge is at the surface a very appealing one. A citizenry that is well informed about the law may be more likely to comply with legal dictates and proscriptions, or at a minimum, will be aware of the consequences for not doing so. What is less apparent, however, is whether an open access approach to legal knowledge is realistically attainable without fundamental changes to the copyright laws that would recalibrate the power balance between content owners and citizens desiring access to interpretive legal resources. A truly useful application of open access principles would require adoption of compulsory licensing regimes with respect to proprietary legal resources, and significant government subsidies as well. Because affluent individuals today are both more likely to gain access to information and more likely to have the resources to use it, this Article concludes that the open access construct currently does little to actually empower access to legal information in any significant way

The existence of Roma in youth justice discourses

Critical scholars have repeatedly emphasised the importance of how various categories become constructed. This paper discusses the ‘existence’ of ‘the other’ in youth justice discourses. Drawing on qualitative analysis of police, prosecution, youth court and social services discourses, this paper discusses the positioning of migrant youths, referred to youth court on suspicion of having committed an offence. The talk particularly focuses on Czech and Slovak Roma in two legal departments in Belgium. I discuss in what types of cases and discourses the case of Roma (i.e. references to ethnicity and popular images of the ‘Roma culture’) exists and in what instances it seizes to exist. Particular attention is directed to the constitutions, circularity and contexts of ethnicising discourses throughout youth justice trajectories, as well as their performative nature

Spartan Daily, April 22, 1993

Volume 100, Issue 52https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/8410/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, February 13, 1981

Volume 76, Issue 15https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6719/thumbnail.jp