AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN AUSTRIAN HIGHER EDUCATION

The slowness with which women were admitted to academic careers in Austria, following the graduation of the first women from an Austrian university in 1897, is evoked. Measures to be taken to bring the number of women in academic positions into equilibrium with the number of men in such positions are evoked in general terms.     

The Latin American studies association vs. the United States: The verdict of history

This paper grew out of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers, “Social Problems: The Constructionist Stance”, held at Southern Illinois University in 1992. The author thanks Professor Joel Best, director of the seminar, for his encouragement and suggestions.     

Shame and the sports fan

ABSTRACT

Sports fans sometimes feel shame for their team’s moral transgressions. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon. We offer an account of sports fan shame in terms of collective shame. We argue that this account is superior to accounts of sports fan shame in terms of shame for others and shame for oneself. We then argue that accepting the role that sports stars play in bringing about the collective shame amongst their fans provides a new way of justifying the claim that sport stars are subject to special moral obligations.     

The Future of Educational Research

Abstract

In order to determine the allocation of money for projects in continuing and vocational education, government agencies in the UK are providing more and more opportunities to bid for targeted funding. This article provides an overview of recent changes in funding policy in higher education and examines how such changes have impacted on continuing education deparatments in higher education, pointing up the increasing pressure to bid for UK government and European Union funds to develop provision which was once outside their sphere of operation. There appears to be little or no theoretical account of the effects of the growth in competitive tendering on continuing education, and so the impact of this relatively new funding strategy on staff and institutions is studied in order to assess its efficacy and significance for the sector as a whole. This study contextualises the familiar differences in culture between liberal adult education and vocational endeavours and between continuing education and ‘mainstream’ higher education. It also reinforces recent calls for a coherent policy of funding for continuing education.

     

Television director communication as perceived by production personnel

This study explored perceptions of television production crew members regarding production situations and communication behavior of a television director. Results suggest that calm communication behavior is related positively to perceived appropriateness of the director's communication, to social and task attractiveness, and to production crew outcome satisfaction. In support of attribution theory, agitated communication behavior produced more favorable evaluations in a threatening as compared to routine situation. These evaluations, however, were less favorable than the effects of a calm manner, regardless of the production situation.     

Non-reduced optimal observers for time-varying linear systems

A method is presented for constructing a nonreduced observer for a finite dimensional linear system. The systems considered are nth order, time-invariant or time-varying forced linear systems which are assumed to be bounded and uniformly completely state reconstructible. The observer dynamics are derived from an optimal estimation formulation which is related to the concept of observability. The cost functional used in this formulation includes a parameter which determines the relative weighting of the system output and the estimate of the initial system state. The result is a practical method of estimating the state of a linear system from noiseless measurements of the input and output. The results are also of theoretical significance in that a direct connection between reconstructibility and the existence of observers is established.     

Measuring the unmeasurable: a country's non-R&D expenditure on product and service innovation

Knowledge about non-R&D innovation expenditure, such as patenting and licensing, design, trial production, tooling-up, manpower training, market research and investment in fixed assets, is extremely sparse and questions about the latter were very poorly answered in the recent Community Innovation Survey (CIS). Using information regarding the quality of replies, we reach a tentative national estimate of 1992 innovation expenditure for all manufacturing and service industries in the Netherlands. Expenditure on product-related R&D represents about one quarter of total product (and service) innovation expenditure. Roughly half of the latter consists of investment in fixed assets, the latter being more important in services than in manufacturing.