Steiner and the Humours: The Survival of Ancient Greek Science

The paper reviews the way in which Steiner schools have attached importance to the categorisation of pupil character and behaviour, drawing on a tradition going back to ancient Greek science.     

Who determines teacher work: The teacher,the organization,or both?

This paper examines how teachers responded when some organizational constraints on their work were loosened and why they responded as they did. It first reviews the sociological literature on teacher work to identify the main determinants studied. It then presents results of an ethnographic study of teachers in an urban school. The literature tends to portray teacher work as overly determined and may remove more responsibility from teachers for determining their own work than is warranted.     

A method for personalising the blade size for competitors in flatwater kayaking

The intent of this project was to explore the feasibility of personalising the paddle blade size for individual flatwater kayakers based on their power output profiles. Twelve elite male kayakers performed on a kayak ergometer at the same intensity and resistance that they would normally experience while paddling at race pace for 500 m on the water. The kayak ergometer was instrumented so that power profiles could be determined from the instantaneous force and velocity of the representative centre point of the paddle blade. From the power profile information, the researchers calculated a personalised blade size that was expected to improve performance for those kayakers differing more than 5% from the calculated ‘ideal’ size. For the elite kayakers studied, it was recommended that seven of the paddlers should increase their blade size by approximately 5–10%. For the remaining five paddlers, the results indicated that their current blade sizes were within the expected measurement error of their predicted ideal value and should be retained. It is anticipated that this research will provide the theoretical rationale for elite kayakers to see the need to personalise their blade size based on their own muscle power profiles.     

Helping the One You Hurt: Toddlers’ Rudimentary Guilt,Shame, and Prosocial Behavior After Harming Another

This study explored the role of guilt and shame in early prosocial behavior by extending previous findings that guilt‐ and shame‐like responses can be distinguished in toddlers and, for the first time, examining their associations with helping. Toddlers (n = 32; M_age = 28.9 months) were led to believe they broke an adult's toy, after which they exhibited either a guilt‐like response that included frequently confessing their behavior and trying to repair the toy; or a shame‐like response that included frequently avoiding the adult and seldom confessing or attempting to repair the toy. In subsequent prosocial tasks, children showing a guilt‐like response helped an adult in emotional distress significantly faster and more frequently than did children showing a shame‐like response.     

The effect of use and access on citations

It has been shown (Lawrence, S. (2001). Online or invisible? Nature, 411, 521) that journal articles which have been posted without charge on the internet are more heavily cited than those which have not been. Using data from the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ads.harvard.edu) and from the ArXiv e-print archive at Cornell University (arXiv.org) we examine the causes of this effect.     

Designing for communication at work: A case for technology-enhanced boundary objects

In this article we conceptualise the challenges of communication between a mortgage company and its customers in terms of crossing boundaries between communities. Through an ethnographic study we first address the question: what are the challenges of communication between sales agents and customers of a mortgage company around mathematical artefacts? Insight into these challenges formed the basis for an intervention in which we designed technology-enhanced boundary objects (TEBOs) that were reconfigurations of problematic symbolic artefacts. Secondly, we ask what the sales agents learned from the intervention. The data suggest that the intervention with the TEBOs helped employees to develop a better understanding of the mathematics behind the mortgages they sold, and to improve communication with their customers.