Selected List of Periodicals on Hawaii,the American Virgin Islands,and Their Culture

An annotated list is presented describing eight periodicals that cover significant aspects of Hawaii and U.S. Caribbean Islands and their culture in whole or in part. The titles included are a selective and representative sampling. The entry for each periodical includes the following information: periodical title, publisher/editor and address, basic information, publication data, content, Internet information, and an abstract/annotation.     

Communities in the making: Pedagogic explorations using oral history

This article discusses two projects supported by the Higher Education Active Community Fund, which involved student and staff volunteers in working with local communities and community-based organisations in two London boroughs. Oral history methods were used to investigate and represent the experiences of elderly people living in Borough A and young people who have been in foster care in Borough B and their carers. Both projects involved collecting detailed life stories on video and editing these for exhibition in the public domain. The video for Borough A was to form part of the Council's website, the older people's portal. The video for Borough B was to be used to train people providing professional services to young people in foster care and to involve the young people in filming, editing and producing a soundtrack. The article discusses the aims and context of the two projects and critically reviews the learning experiences involved. It analyses issues raised by volunteering, working with local communities, and attempting to represent marginalised experience. It reflects critically on notions of community and community development and discusses relations between oral history projects and community definition, higher education and society.     

Culture and equality in education

The advent of comprehensive education implies a search for a common culture, or a common treatment of culture, across the whole school population. This article reviews the present stage in this search, attempting to define a suitable treatment of culture by secondary schools. The history of schools’ treatment of cultural sources is briefly invoked, particularly the differences in treatment found in grammar and secondary modern schools. Purportedly progressive attitudes to ‘formal’ or ‘high’ culture are analysed and found to be too simplistic. Traditional education is shown not to have genuinely served its own’ supposed cultural aims, whilst progressives’ rejection to those aims is shown to be inadequate as a reaction to what traditional education actually did rather than claimed to do. It is proposed that a more engaged approach to formal culture, involving critical receptivity, is appropriate for all pupils, and would also require the nourishment of a more receptive attitude to pupils’ own creativity.

Since we have liberated the term ‘culture’ from meaning merely a rarified level of works of art, it has become so all‐embracing as to be almost unmanageable. Influenced by anthropology, we now tend to think of culture as extending to the most casual level of value and idea by which we live our daily lives. It even includes our most informal language habits.

The difficulty, of course, with such an all‐embracing notion is that it makes the subject almost impossible to talk about. Criteria of quality , and currency are blurred. Part of the same confusion is that the education system, formerly seen as the custodian of ‘culture’, now has no name for the special resources of knowledge which are ‐‐ or used to be ‐‐ its particular responsibility.

I will use culture here to mean those public works or activities which represent man to himself and are value laden. Thus literature, psychology, history, philosophy, politics, law, economics and sociology would all be included. They might have scientific elements but they still convey normative images of man.

If the concept of culture itself, even as so defined, has a blunt edge, we must discriminate elements within it in order to make the area susceptible to discussion. To get a picture of how schools, traditionally, have mediated culture, we must distinguish at least five broad elements:

1. formal, by which is meant that part in which academic and professional institutions specialize;

2. informal, meaning relatively spontaneous and non‐centralized activities, including ordinary conversation;

3. mass culture, such as films, television, popular music, advertising;

4. avant‐garde culture, arising out of a sense of crisis in the formal culture; and

5. ethnic, other than that which coincides with the content of previous categories.

These are pretty crude categories, but they are a little better than such common divisions as ‘high/low’, ‘popular/serious’ and ‘traditional/contemporary’, and they permit some analysis of relationships between different elements within our culture as a whole.     

Redesigning library orientation for first-year medical students during the pandemic

Background:Prior to 2020, library orientation for first-year medical students at Weill Cornell Medicine took the form of an on-site treasure hunt competition. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the orientation for the MD class of 2024 was shifted to an all-virtual format. This shift mandated a full redesign of the library orientation.Case Presentation:The Samuel J. Wood Library sought to preserve the excitement and fun of the treasure hunt in the new virtual format. The competition was redesigned as a Zoom meeting using breakout rooms, with library faculty and staff serving as team facilitators. Tasks were rewritten, shifting the focus from the library''s physical spaces to its virtual services and online resources. The redesigned orientation was evaluated using two data sources: a postsession survey of student participants and a debriefing of the library employees who participated. Student evaluations were positive, while the faculty and staff provided numerous suggestions for improving future virtual orientations.Conclusions:A successful virtual library orientation requires careful preparation, including testing the competition tasks, full rehearsal with library facilitators, and a thoughtful approach to technology and logistics. We have chosen to share the materials we developed for other academic health sciences libraries that may wish to take a similar approach to their own virtual orientations.     

Differences in the utilisation of active power in squat and countermovement jumps

The aim of this article was to understand how active power is used in squat and countermovement jumps. A simple empirical model comprising a mass, a spring, an active element and a damper, together with an optimisation principle, was used to identify the mechanical factors that maximise performance of jumps without countermovement (squat jumps, SJ) and with countermovement (CMJ). Twelve amateur volleyball players performed SJ from two initial positions and CMJ with two degrees of counterbalancing, while kinematic data were collected (jump height, push-off duration and position of the centre of mass). The model adjusted well to real data of SJ through all the impulse phase, and slightly less adequately at the end of this phase for CMJ. Nevertheless, it provides a satisfactory explanation for the generation and utilisation of active power for both type of jumps. On average, the estimated power of the active elements, the spring, and the damper were greater in the SJ. Based upon the result obtained with this model, we suggest that active power is best evaluated with SJ. The reason for this is that, during this kind of jump, the elements associated with the damper consume much of the energy produced by the active elements. The participation of the elements that consume the energy generated by the active elements is less in CMJ than in SJ, allowing for a better utilisation of this energy. In this way it is possible to achieve a better performance in CMJ with less active power.     

A survey of talent identification and development processes in the youth academies of professional soccer clubs from around the world

ABSTRACT

Talent identification (TID) and development (TDE) are large fields in professional soccer and in science. However, TID and TDE processes in youth academies have not been assessed in detail. As such, our aim was to survey professional clubs from around the world about their youth academy TID and TDE processes, with 29 clubs responding to the survey. TID and TDE processes changed as a function of player age. TID processes involved finding the best players locally and regionally, but for older players the search widened to nationally and internationally for the needs of the first team. Clubs used a multidisciplinary approach to TID, but more so with older players. Median number of academy players was 80, 100, and 66 players at 8–11 years, 12–16 years, and 17–21 years, respectively. Annual player turnover in the most recent season (selections/de-selections) was 29% across all age groups, with competition from other clubs cited as a limitation to TID. TDE processes involved weekly matches and 3–5 training sessions per week led by experienced, well-qualified coaches, with most clubs providing players with academic education, residency and transportation services. Our findings extend previous research assessing professional soccer youth academy TID and TDE processes by quantifying worldwide practices.     

Decisions Hispanic families make after the identification of deafness

This study examines the decision-making process for Hispanic families living in the United States who have a child with a hearing loss. Twenty-nine families in four geographical areas shared their experiences in searching for appropriate interventions and making choices regarding communication and education. We explored the impact of language, culture, minority status, and access to information and services on the decision-making process. The results indicate that the deliberations of Hispanic parents are often complicated by language and cultural barriers and by limited access to information, resources, and a full range of options. The communication method chosen tended to be the one recommended by professionals, usually a combination of spoken English and sign language. Parents frequently expressed the hope that their child would learn Spanish as well. These subjects displayed a higher degree of assertiveness in obtaining services for their children than other studies have suggested.     

意大利实心粉年(节选)

村上春树的作品总是承载着幽幽的孤独、脉脉的温情和淡淡的忧伤,流淌着一种孤独之美。该文亦如是。女主人翁与男朋友分手后,一个人孤独地怀念,孤独地怨恨,孤独地冥想,孤独地和自己的心灵对话。那日复一日吃意大利实心粉的执著,那大得可以装下德国牧羊人的铝锅以及捏成德国牧羊人的实心粉,那如零碎的记忆般的拜访者,那印象模糊的电话那端的女孩……这一切都将女主人翁的内心世界展露无遗。村上春树笔端细腻,刻画人物内心情感丝丝入扣,震撼人心。