Professionalism, Golf Coaching and a Master of Science Degree: A commentary

As a point of reference I congratulate Simon Jenkins on tackling the issue of professionalism in coaching. As he points out coaching is not a profession, but this does not mean that coaching would not benefit from going through a professionalization process. As things stand I find that the stimulus article unpacks some critically important issues of professionalism, broadly within the context of golf coaching. However, I am not sure enough is made of understanding what professional (golf) coaching actually is nor how the development of a professional golf coach can be facilitated by a Master of Science Degree (M.Sc.). I will focus my commentary on these two issues

On ecological conceptualizations of perceptual systems and action systems

This article examines Gibson's concept of perceptual system and Reed's concept of action system. After discussing several assumptions underlying these concepts, the ontological status of these systems is considered. It is argued that perceptual systems and action systems should be conceptualized neither as parts of an animal's body nor as softly (temporarily) assembled devices; rather, they are best understood as animals' abilities to achieve functional relationships, that is, as dispositional properties. This conceptualization entails that these systems are relatively permanent properties of the animal that are causally supported by, though not identical to, anatomical substrates. Further, it entails that it is the animal that perceives and acts, not its perceptual and action systems

Specular optical-activity in GaAs

We report the first experimental observation of light polarization plane rotation, of approximately 10-3 rad, on normal reflection from a [001] GaAs surface. The rotation is attributed to both surface anisotropy and bulk crystal nonlocality due to violation of time-reversibility, appearing from the importance of the electron spin-orbit interaction

Detection of charged pions and protons in the segmented electromagnetic calorimeter TAPS

We present the characteristics of the segmented BaF2 calorimeter TAPS for the measurement of charged pions and protons. The method of particle identification exploits the relation between the kinetic energy of a particle, its mass and the time-of-flight required to reach the detector. The detection efficiency is calculated using GEANT-GCALOR simulations. The analysis method is applied in the reaction Ar-40 + Ca-nat at 0.8A GeV. The simultaneous detection of charged pions and protons can be used to search for correlated pairs signalling the de-excitation of the Delta(1232) resonance. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved

Multistep production of η\eta and hard π0\pi^{0} mesons in subthreshold Au-Au collisions

We present an unsupervised approach to cluster sequences. This method is inspired by topology learning methods for hidden Markov models, and is built upon the definition of a distance between Markov models. This type of technique may be used to learn Markovian character models from data or to identify allographs or handwriting styles

Production of π0\pi^0 and η\eta mesons in carbon-induced relativistic heavy-ion collision

The production of pi(0) and eta mesons has been investigated in the system C-12+C-12 at 0.8A GeV, 1.0A GeV, and 2.0A GeV using the TAPS photon detector. The production cross sections and transverse-momentum distributions measured around midrapidity extend the existing systematics of neutral-meson production to light systems and the highest energy available at the GSI accelerator facility. At all beam energies scaling of the differential production cross section with the transverse mass of the emitted meson is observed. In addition pi(0) production has been studied in the mass-asymmetric systems C-12+Au-197 and Au-197+C-12 at 0.8A GeV

Exclusive π0\pi^0- and η\eta-meson production in 40^{40}Ar +nat^{nat}Ca at 800A MeV

The impact-parameter dependence of pi degrees- and eta-meson production is reported for the system Ar-40+Ca-nat at a beam energy of 800 A MeV. Scaling of the meson abundances with the transverse mass is observed. The experimental results are compared to calculations within the BUU mode