South African hopes and fears twenty years into democracy: a replication of Hadley Cantril's pattern of human concerns

Fifty years have elapsed since Hadley Cantril (1965) published his work on the Pattern of Human Concerns. His line of inquiry has stood the test of time. In late 2012, the nationally representative South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS) replicated Cantril’s 1960s questions and methodology to elicit South Africans’ hopes and aspirations and worries and fears for self and country and their ratings of where self and country stood – past, present and will stand in future. Although Cantril’s ‘ladder‐of‐life’ scale is still regularly used as a measure of subjective well‐being, to our knowledge his full line of preliminary questioning has not been fielded again to date. Our study found that South African aspirations for self were mainly material ones for a decent standard of living and the means to achieve this goal. Hopes for the nation concentrated on economic and political progress to consolidate South Africa’s democracy. A large number of personal and national hopes were mirrored in fears that these aspirations might not be met. Cantril’s method also allowed us to review the main concerns and ratings across the diverse groups of citizens that make up the ‘rainbow nation’. There was a substantial degree of consensus on top hopes and fears but levels of standing on the Cantril ladder of life were still graded according to apartheid‐era inequalities with black South Africans scoring lower than other race groups. Nonetheless, the majority of South Africans rated their present life better than five years ago and projected life to get better in future. Such optimism may place considerable pressure on the state to deliver on personal and societal hopes as the country enters its third decade of democracy

Scale-dependent angle of alignment between velocity and magnetic field fluctuations in solar wind turbulence

Under certain conditions, freely decaying magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence evolves in such a way that velocity and magnetic field fluctuations delta v and delta B approach a state of alignment in which delta v proportional to delta B. This process is called dynamic alignment. Boldyrev has suggested that a similar kind of alignment process occurs as energy cascades from large to small scales through the inertial range in strong incompressible MHD turbulence. In this study, plasma and magnetic field data from the Wind spacecraft, data acquired in the ecliptic plane near 1 AU, are employed to investigate the angle theta(tau) between velocity and magnetic field fluctuations in the solar wind as a function of the time scale tau of the fluctuations and to look for the scaling relation similar to tau(1/4) predicted by Boldyrev. We find that the angle appears to scale like a power law at large inertial range scales, but then deviates from power law behavior at medium to small inertial range scales. We also find that small errors in the velocity vector measurements can lead to large errors in the angle measurements at small time scales. As a result, we cannot rule out the possibility that the observed deviations from power law behavior arise from errors in the velocity measurements. When we fit the data from 2 x 10(3) s to 2 x 10(4) s with a power law of the form proportional to tau(p), our best fit values for p are in the range 0.27-0.36

Evaluating weaknesses of "perceptual-cognitive training" and "brain training" methods in sport: An ecological dynamics critique

The recent upsurge in "brain training and perceptual-cognitive training," proposing to improve isolated processes, such as brain function, visual perception, and decision-making, has created significant interest in elite sports practitioners, seeking to create an "edge" for athletes. The claims of these related "performance-enhancing industries" can be considered together as part of a process training approach proposing enhanced cognitive and perceptual skills and brain capacity to support performance in everyday life activities, including sport. For example, the "process training industry" promotes the idea that playing games not only makes you a better player but also makes you smarter, more alert, and a faster learner. In this position paper, we critically evaluate the effectiveness of both types of process training programmes in generalizing transfer to sport performance. These issues are addressed in three stages. First, we evaluate empirical evidence in support of perceptual-cognitive process training and its application to enhancing sport performance. Second, we critically review putative modularized mechanisms underpinning this kind of training, addressing limitations and subsequent problems. Specifically, we consider merits of this highly specific form of training, which focuses on training of isolated processes such as cognitive processes (attention, memory, thinking) and visual perception processes, separately from performance behaviors and actions. We conclude that these approaches may, at best, provide some "general transfer" of underlying processes to specific sport environments, but lack "specificity of transfer" to contextualize actual performance behaviors. A major weakness of process training methods is their focus on enhancing the performance in body "modules" (e.g., eye, brain, memory, anticipatory sub-systems). What is lacking is evidence on how these isolated components are modified and subsequently interact with other process "modules," which are considered to underlie sport performance. Finally, we propose how an ecological dynamics approach, aligned with an embodied framework of cognition undermines the rationale that modularized processes can enhance performance in competitive sport. An ecological dynamics perspective proposes that the body is a complex adaptive system, interacting with performance environments in a functionally integrated manner, emphasizing that the inter-relation between motor processes, cognitive and perceptual functions, and the constraints of a sport task is best understood at the performer-environment scale of analysis

Administering Distance Education Programs: Current Challenges and Solutions

In response to then Security of Defense William Cohen's challenge to revolutionize defense business affairs and to accelerate the delivery of sophisticated defense systems that increase the effectiveness of our forces, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) began a journey into the delivery of graduate systems engineering distributed education program. This report focuses on an outreach approach to delivering the content of these programs to Navy laboratories and other facilities rather than having students seek the school as a provider. Given these challenges, unique strategies had to be developed for program development and delivery. This report will concentrate on two graduate systems engineering programs that are delivered by multiple configurations of blended approaches to distance education. The authors have served as program managers for these programs and have gathered lessons learned over eleven-years

Accessing High Momentum States In Lattice QCD

Two measures are defined to evaluate the coupling strength of smeared interpolating operators to hadronic states at a variety of momenta. Of particular interest is the extent to which strong overlap can be obtained with individual high-momentum states. This is vital to exploring hadronic structure at high momentum transfers on the lattice and addressing interesting phenomena observed experimentally. We consider a novel idea of altering the shape of the smeared operator to match the Lorentz contraction of the probability distribution of the high-momentum state, and show a reduction in the relative error of the two-point function by employing this technique. Our most important finding is that the overlap of the states becomes very sharp in the smearing parameters at high momenta and fine tuning is required to ensure strong overlap with these states.Comment: 10 page

Charting freedom: inequality beliefs, preferences for redistribution, and distributive social policy in contemporary South Africa

While the transition to democracy in South Africa extended civil and political rights and freedoms to all South Africans, there has been disagreement over the preferred nature and scope of social rights within post-apartheid society, reflecting debates over the trajectory of economic policy. Appreciable developmental gains have been made by the state over the last quarter-century, yet the challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality persist, coupled with mounting popular discontent with the pace of transformation and political accountability. This has led to fundamental questions about social justice, restitution, and the kind of society we wish to promote. Appeals for a more inclusive, transformative social policy have also emerged, arguing that a wider vision of society is required involving multiple government responsibilities and informed by an ethic of equality and social solidarity. Against this background, in this thesis I study the views of the South African public towards economic inequality, general preferences for government-led redistribution, as well as support for social policies intended to promote racial and economic transformation. The research has been guided by several overarching questions: To what extent do South Africans share common general beliefs about material inequality? Does the public exhibit a preference for government redistribution in principle? And how unified or polarised are South Africans in their support for specific redress policies in the country? Responding to these questions has been achieved by drawing on unique, nationally representative data from the South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS), which has enabled me to chart social attitudes over a period of almost fifteen years between late 2003 and early 2017. Use has also been made of social citizenship as a guiding conceptual framework to understanding social policy predispositions and analysing attitudinal change. The results demonstrate that the public is united in its awareness of and deep concern about economic inequality. Since the early 2000s, a significant majority has consistently expressed the view that the income gap in the country is too large, articulated a strong preference for a more equitable social structure, and acknowledged the class and social tensions that economic inequality has produced. There is also a preference for a narrowing of earnings disparities, a more generous minimum wage, and regulatory limits on executive pay. While this suggests a desire for fair and legitimate remuneration, the analysis also reveals that South Africans are willing to tolerate fairly high levels of inequality. Nonetheless, these beliefs are generally interpreted as a desire for a more equitable and fair society. This preference for change is reflected in a fairly strong belief that government should assume responsibility for reducing material disparities. One’s social position, mobility history, awareness of inequality, political leaning and racial attitudes all have a bearing on how weak and strong this predisposition is, but the normative demand for political redistribution remains fairly widely shared irrespective of these individual traits. Greater polarisation is however evident with respect to redistributive social policy, especially measures designed to overcome historical racial injustice (affirmative action, sports quotas, and land reform). These intergroup differences converge considerably when referring to class-based policy measures. One surprising finding is the evidence that South Africa’s youngest generation, the so-called ‘Born Frees’, tend to adopt a similar predisposition to redress policy as older generations, thus confounding expectations of a post-apartheid value change. I conclude by arguing that there seems to be a firmer basis for a social compact about preferences for interventions designed to produce a more just society than is typically assumed. Intractably high levels of economic inequality during the country’s first quarter-century of democracy is resulting in a growing recognition of the need for a stronger policy emphasis on economic inequality in South Africa over coming decades if the vision enshrined in the Freedom Charter and the Constitution is to be realised. South Africans may not be able to fully agree about the specific elements that constitute a socially just response to economic inequality. Yet, the common identification of and concern with redressable injustice, coupled with a broad-based commitment to government redistribution and classbased social policies, could serve as a foundation on which to rekindle the solidaristic spirit of 1994 and forge progress towards a more equitable society

An Analysis of the Factors Affecting the Career Orientation of Federal Civilian Engineers

This study was conducted to analyze the factors that affect the career orientation of federal civilian engineers at the Naval Avionics Center in Indianapolis, Indiana. One hundred and sixty-seven scientists and engineers from several engineering divisions were surveyed regarding turnover intentions. Based on literature reviews in the area of turnover with this particular population, a model was developed containing several factors related to intent to remain in the organization. Results indicated that this model predicts the turnover intention with 87.5 percent accuracy. Findings are interpreted in light of ongoing efforts on an organization-wide basis to introduce change in the Center's culture through a quality management program. Keywords: Career orientation, Job satisfaction turnover. (sdw)Naval Avionics Center, Civilian Personnel Departmenthttp://archive.org/details/analysisoffactor00robeN0016389WR90118NAApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited