The usefulness of personality questionnaires in officer selection and training : a paper submitted in fulfilment of the Master of Science degree

The aim of the current research was to assess whether the Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ-R) and the Gordon Personal Profile-Inventory (GPP-I) could predict future behaviour in a sample of NZ Army officers and officer cadets. Personality questionnaire data completed at the time of selection was correlated with a workplace behaviour questionnaire (WBQ) developed specifically for the purposes of the research. It was hypothesised that (1) EPQ-R and GPP-I scales should correlate significantly with their corresponding scales on the WBQ, (2) the Neuroticism/Lie and Psychoticism/Lie correlation should indicate the presence of faking, (3) officers serving longer than three years should show more similar personality profiles than officers serving less than three years, (4) immediate superiors of the same gender and ethnicity should rate participants more favourably than those of a different gender and ethnicity, and (5) scores on the WBQ measuring High Psychoticism, High Neuroticism, Low Emotional Stability, Low Ascendancy, and Low Cautiousness should not be endorsed highly if selection has been effective. Only the fifth hypothesis was supported and the results are discussed in light of methodological shortcomings and earlier research

Departure

Postcard from Sean Bowden, during the Linfield College Semester Abroad Program at Kanto Gakuin University in Yokohama, Japa

No ‘Clash of Civilizations’: Harvard Economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen Says Huntington Got It Wrong

None of us are just Christians or just Muslims or just Jews, Hindus or Buddhists. We are human beings—messy, mixed-up conglomerations of innumerable categories, every one of which offers an opportunity for commonality with others, for dialog instead of conflict. Our civilizational identity, Sen insists, is not our destiny

Symplectic 4-manifolds with fixed point free circle actions

We show that recent results of Friedl-Vidussi and Chen imply that a symplectic manifold admits a fixed point free circle action if and only if it admits a symplectic circle action and we give a complete description of the symplectic cone in this case. This then completes the characterisation of symplectic 4-manifolds that admit non-trivial circle actions.Comment: 5 pages (to appear in Proc. Amer. Math. Soc.