Students' Models of Newton's Second Law in Mechanics and Electromagnetism

We investigated students' use of Newton's second law in mechanics and electromagnetism contexts by interviewing students in a two-semester calculus-based physics course. We observed that students' responses are consistent with three mental models. These models appeard in mechanics contexts and were transferred to electromagnetism contexts. We developed an inventory to help instructors identify these models and direct students towards the correct one.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figues and 4 table

Bad news from Fallujah

This study uses the thematic analysis developed by the Glasgow University Media Group to explore how the US, UK and German national press covered the US/Coalition assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah in November 2004. The study relies on quantitative and qualitative full text content analyses to assess 428 news, editorial and commentary items. The article suggests that, while government and military officials of the US/Coalition had argued the military ‘operation’ was necessary to secure Iraq and defeat an ‘insurgency’, organisations and actors from Iraqi society refer to the ‘operation’ as ‘collective punishment’ and a ‘massacre’ that targeted the Iraqi population. The article investigates how the press represented each of these perspectives. The findings suggest that the press overemphasised the US/Coalition perspective despite striking counter evidence. Critical aspects of coverage largely focused on tactical elements of the military dimension of the event. The article concludes that such findings are in accord with hegemonic models of media performance

Engolo and Capoeira. From Ethnic to Diasporic Combat Games in the Southern Atlantic

This article provides a re-examination of the main Afrocentric narrative of capoeira origins, the engolo or ‘Zebra Dance’, in light of historical primary sources and new ethnographic evidence gathered during fieldwork in south-west Angola. By examining engolo’s bodily techniques, its socio-historical context and cultural meanings, the piece emphasises its insertion into a pastoral lifestyle and highlights the relatively narrow ethnic character of the practice in Angola. This analysis and the comparison with capoeira helps us to develop certain hypotheses about the formation, migration, and re-invention of diasporic combat games between southern Angola and coastal Brazil, and more broadly, to increase our understanding of how African cultures spread across the southern Atlantic

Incipient Social Groups: An Analysis via In-Vivo Behavioral Tracking

Social psychology is fundamentally the study of individuals in groups, yet there remain basic unanswered questions about group formation, structure, and change. We argue that the problem is methodological. Until recently, there was no way to track who was interacting with whom with anything approximating valid resolution and scale. In the current study we describe a new method that applies recent advances in image-based tracking to study incipient group formation and evolution with experimental precision and control. In this method, which we term "in vivo behavioral tracking," we track individuals' movements with a high definition video camera mounted atop a large field laboratory. We report results of an initial study that quantifies the composition, structure, and size of the incipient groups. We also apply in-vivo spatial tracking to study participants' tendency to cooperate as a function of their embeddedness in those crowds. We find that participants form groups of seven on average, are more likely to approach others of similar attractiveness and (to a lesser extent) gender, and that participants' gender and attractiveness are both associated with their proximity to the spatial center of groups (such that women and attractive individuals are more likely than men and unattractive individuals to end up in the center of their groups). Furthermore, participants' proximity to others early in the study predicted the effort they exerted in a subsequent cooperative task, suggesting that submergence in a crowd may predict social loafing. We conclude that in vivo behavioral tracking is a uniquely powerful new tool for answering longstanding, fundamental questions about group dynamics