Diversity research in the United States Navy: An update

Researchers at the Navy Personnel Research and Development Center (NPRDC) have investigated issues related to gender, racial, and ethnic diversity for over two decades. Rosenfeld, M.D. Thomas, Edwards, P.J. Thomas, and E.D. Thomas (1991) provided a comprehensive review of NPRDC diversity research conducted between 1970 and 1990. This article examines NPRDC diversity research conducted during the past 5 years and identifies future research issues. The present review is divided into four major topic areas and a final section of conclusions and future directions. The first section describes the Navywide and unit-specific programs to assess equal opportunity climate and sexual harassment. The second section summarizes research pertaining to issues raised by women's changing roles and their increased participation in the Navy. In the third section, the findings of Navy discipline studies shed light on the issue of higher disciplinary rates among minority personnel. Research on Hispanics is reviewed in the fourth section. Finally, in the Discussion and Conclusions section, potential future research emphases are identified.     

The information practices and politics of migrant-aid work in the US-Mexico borderlands

Abstract

Numerous organizations work to provide humanitarian aid to undocumented migrants along the US-Mexico border—from running shelters in Mexico to placing water on migratory trails. Resistance to information-sharing between organizations (and to the public), especially through technologically mediated means, is common. However, some organizers and volunteers work across organizational boundaries and share information informally. Information secrecy is often justified by concerns that law enforcement authorities or anti-immigration activists might gain access to information, allowing them to harm, detain or remove migrants, or interfere with humanitarian work. The choices made about the collection and (non)disclosure of information are manifestations of what we call “liminal” information practices: such behaviors are unique to humanitarian volunteers working in the gray, ethical area between law enforcement and humanitarian values and action, and they are guided by the information politics at play within this context.     

Syntactic and discourse skills in Chinese adolescent readers with dyslexia: a profiling study

This study aims to investigate the relation of syntactic and discourse skills to morphological skills, rapid naming, and working memory in Chinese adolescent readers with dyslexia and to examine their cognitive–linguistic profiles. Fifty-two dyslexic readers (mean age, 13;42) from grade 7 to 9 in Hong Kong high schools were compared with 52 typically developing readers of the same chronological age (mean age, 13;30) in the measures of word reading, 1-min word reading, reading comprehension, morpheme discrimination, morpheme production, morphosyntactic knowledge, sentence order knowledge, digit rapid naming, letter rapid naming, backward digit span, and non-word repetition. Results showed that dyslexic readers performed significantly worse than their peers on all the cognitive-linguistic tasks. Analyses of individual performance also revealed that over half of the dyslexic readers exhibited deficits in syntactic and discourse skills. Moreover, syntactic skills, morphological skills, and rapid naming best distinguished dyslexic from non-dyslexic readers. Findings underscore the significance of syntactic and discourse skills for understanding reading impairment in Chinese adolescent readers.     

Software for calculating blood lactate endurance markers

Abstract

Blood lactate markers are used as summary measures of the underlying model of an athlete's blood lactate response to increasing work rate. Exercise physiologists use these endurance markers, typically corresponding to a work rate in the region of high curvature in the lactate curve, to predict and compare endurance ability. A short theoretical background of the commonly used markers is given and algorithms provided for their calculation. To date, no free software exists that allows the sports scientist to calculate these markers. In this paper, software is introduced for precisely this purpose that will calculate a variety of lactate markers for an individual athlete, an athlete at different instants (e.g. across a season), and simultaneously for a squad.     

The core components of reading instruction in Chinese

The present study aimed at identifying core components of reading instruction in Chinese within the framework of the tiered intervention model. A curriculum with four teaching components of cognitive-linguistic skills was implemented in a Program school for 3 years since Grade 1. The findings showed that the Tier 1 intervention was effective in enhancing the literacy and cognitive-linguistic skills of children in the Program school. The positive effects were maintained at the end of Grade 2. Progress in both word-level and text-level cognitive-linguistic skills predicted significantly progress in reading comprehension. Based on the present findings, the four core reading components in Chinese were proposed—oral language, morphological awareness, orthographic skills, and syntactic skills. Comparing the Big Five in English and the four core components in Chinese reflects different cognitive demands for reading diverse orthographies.     

Paradoxes of Press Freedom in Colonial West Africa

This article describes the shifts and contradictions in British approaches to the control of print media in colonial West Africa between the 1920s and 1940s. Well before the Colonial Office's post-war interventions to create an ‘enlightened and educated’ West African citizenry through mass education, decades of independent newspaper production in the region helped to shape independent and critical readerships. For the British, however, an upsurge in African nationalist journalism in the mid-1930s coincided with a perceived Communist infiltration of ‘British West Africa’ to make censorship and surveillance more palatable than before to colonial officials in London, in spite of the new emphasis on public relations.     

Screening for Chinese Children with Dyslexia in Hong Kong: The use of the Teachers' Behaviour Checklist

Primary school teachers rated the frequency of occurrence of 65 reading‐related behavioural characteristics in a sample of 251 Grade 1 to Grade 6 Chinese school children in Hong Kong. These behavioural characteristics were in the areas of general performance, reading, dictation, writing, mathematics, language, memory, concentration, sequential ability, motor co‐ordination, spatial orientation, and social/emotional adjustment. Of these 12 areas, 10 yielded scale scores that could distinguish children with dyslexia from those without dyslexia, identified on the basis of their performance in five domains of literacy and cognitive skills. Using a summary score derived from the 10 relevant scales, an optimal cut‐off score was suggested to arrive at a balance between high sensitivity and an acceptable rate of false positives in screening for children with dyslexia. The need for cross‐replication in screening children with dyslexia using the behaviour checklist with different samples of school students is emphasised.