Comparative studies of authoritarian-personality characteristics across culture, language and methods

This research was to determine whether the large differences in scores on the F scale found in previous studies (Bradburn, 1963; Kagitcibasi, 1970; Kinnis, 1977) were due to cultural differences in personality characteristics or due to differences in language and/or structure of measuring instruments.The subjects were three groups of university students from the United States and Turkey. The Turkish/English (T/E) sample attended a Turkish University where all classes were in English. The Turkish/Turkish (T/T) sample attended a Turkish University where all classes were in Turkish. The American/English (A/E) sample attended a Midwestern University.Each of the samples were administered three Scales measuring authoritarian personality characteristics. They were: Rokeach's (1960) Dogmatism scale (D scale) the standard F scale (Adorno et al., 1950) and a multiple choice format of the F scale called A scale (Neel, 1977). For the T/E and A/E subjects these scales were in English and for the T/T subjects in Turkish.For each cultural group the composite scores on each scale were obtained and used for inter-group comparisons through one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). Within-group correlations across the three measures, the means and standard deviations of individual items and T tests were also computed. Interculture and language comparisons resulted in two significant differences on both the Dogmatism and F scales. Analysis of group, composite scales shows that these differences are due to disparities between the A/E and T/T culture/language groups. Differences across language and culture groups for the A scale were not significant. The A measure behaves differently from D and F for the two Turkish culture groups. For the A/E group, D, F, and A measures are almost undifferentiable. The results suggest the effect of measurement instruments on inter-cultural differences in inter-measure comparisons. This indicates a response format effect (agreer bias or acquiescence set).     

Ethics in health sciences librarianship

Against a background of discussion about drafting of an ethical code for librarians and a review of articles confronting ethical issues in librarianship, the authors surveyed the 150 institutional members of the Health Science Librarians of Illinois (HSLI) regarding their perceptions of ethical concerns. Among the issues addressed in the survey are library organization, personnel policies, and professional competency, along with the traditional concerns of professional versus personal values, privacy and confidentiality, access to materials, and materials selection criteria in a health sciences context. Based on a 60% response rate, survey results indicate widespread agreement on some issues and a conspicuous lack of consensus on others. Further research is suggested in order to assess the need for a separate ethical code for health sciences librarians.     

The National Advisory Body Planning Exercise 1987–88: A Shot in the Foot

The National Advisory Body was established to advise the Secretary of State for Education and Science on the allocation of money to support advanced work in polytechnics and colleges. The committee system of NAB was representative of local authority and college interests and there was always a tension between NAB and the Department of Education and Science. The paper charts the decisions that were taken by NAB in progressing the 1987–88 planning exercise. The policy context of these decisions is analysed and the political consequences are discussed. The paper argues that the 1987–88 exercise was the wrong approach to the planning problems and that the resulting conflict with the Government destroyed the credibility of NAB.     

Automatic spelling correction using a trigram similarity measure

A nearest neighbour search procedure is described for the automatic correction of misspellings. The procedure involves the replacement of a misspelt word by that word in a dictionary which best matches the misspelling, the degree of match being calculated using a similarity coefficient based on the number of trigrams common to the two words. Experiments with a collection of 1544 misspellings and a dictionary of 64,636 words suggest that the procedure results in the unique identification of the correct spelling for over 75% of the misspellings if the correct form of the word is in the dictionary, and that this figure may be increased to over 90% if near, rather than nearest, neighbours are acceptable.     

Influence of single-leg training on muscle metabolism and endurance during exercise with the trained limb and the untrained limb

We have previously shown that single-leg training results in improved endurance for exercise with the untrained leg (UTL) as well as for exercise with the trained leg (TL). The purpose of this study was to see whether the improved endurance of the untrained leg could be explained on the basis of changes in muscle metabolism. Exercise time to exhaustion at 80% of maximum oxygen uptake (VO2 max) was determined for each leg separately, pre- and post-training. Muscle metabolite concentrations were measured pre- and post-training in biopsy samples obtained immediately before this endurance test and at the pre-training point of exhaustion (END1). After six weeks of single-leg training endurance time was increased for both the UTL and the TL (UTL 34.0 +/- 16.4 min vs 97.9 +/- 26.3 min, P less than 0.01; TL 28.3 +/- 10.1 min vs 169.0 +/- 32.6 min, P less than 0.01). No changes in muscle metabolite concentrations were found in resting muscle. Training increased muscle ATP (P less than 0.05) and glycogen (P less than 0.01) concentrations and decreased muscle lactate concentration (P less than 0.05) in the TL at END1. No significant changes in muscle metabolite concentrations were found for the UTL. The improved endurance of the contralateral limb after single-leg training could not be explained on the basis of changes in muscle metabolism.