The Dearing Report: A Transatlantic View

The Dearing Report reflects the perspectives on higher education of the Government that appointed it, perspectives that are widely shared among the leaders of British institutions outside of academic life. It is of interest for that, rather than for its recommendations, which are fundamentally flawed. The Report does not show an intimate knowledge of the institutions about which it advises; it separates its discussions of finance from its comments on teaching and learning; it ignores the wide diversity of higher education institutions, subjects, and students in making its sweeping recommendations, and it does not recognise the limits of its own knowledge, nor make provision for the continuing improvement of the knowledge and understanding on which future policies for British higher education might be based. For these and other reasons, the Report is now one of the many problems facing British higher education rather than part of their solution.     

More than Bags of Words: Sentiment Analysis with Word Embeddings

ABSTRACT

Moving beyond the dominant bag-of-words approach to sentiment analysis we introduce an alternative procedure based on distributed word embeddings. The strength of word embeddings is the ability to capture similarities in word meaning. We use word embeddings as part of a supervised machine learning procedure which estimates levels of negativity in parliamentary speeches. The procedure’s accuracy is evaluated with crowdcoded training sentences; its external validity through a study of patterns of negativity in Austrian parliamentary speeches. The results show the potential of the word embeddings approach for sentiment analysis in the social sciences.     

Archives and Historians of Sport

Archives and the documents within them are at the heart of the practice of history and the occupational culture of historians. A majority of historical work has been characterized and defined by research in archives of varying kinds. Yet, the material within archives is both partial and political and using it is never straightforward. For historians of sport, the material available in archives can be especially limited but, with some careful reading between the lines, there is still much to learn from and interpret within traditional archives. This paper explores the different kinds of archives and archival material that historians of sport have used and the uses they have been and can be put to. Archives, however, are not static entities and the paper also discusses the impact and implication of digitization processes and programmes to popularize and legitimize traditional archives. Although sport has been seen as one of the ways of diversifying the content and audience of archives, the paper argues that the practical and interpretative challenges historians of sport face in archives are no different to those faced by other historians.     

The Role of Sex of Peers and Gender‐Typed Activities in Young Children's Peer Affiliative Networks: A Longitudinal Analysis of Selection and Influence

A stochastic actor‐based model was used to investigate the origins of sex segregation by examining how similarity in sex of peers and time spent in gender‐typed activities affected affiliation network selection and how peers influenced children's (N = 292; M_age = 4.3 years) activity involvement. Gender had powerful effects on interactions through direct and indirect pathways. Children selected playmates of the same sex and with similar levels of gender‐typed activities. Selection based on gender‐typed activities partially mediated selection based on sex of peers. Children influenced one another's engagement in gender‐typed activities. When mechanisms producing sex segregation were compared, the largest contributor was selection based on sex of peers; less was due to activity‐based selection and peer influence. Implications for sex segregation and gender development are discussed.     

Personal Narratives of Students With and Without Learning Disabilities

This study investigated personal narratives produced by children with and without learning disabilities in the context of naturalistic conversation. The high‐point analysis was applied to compare the referential and evaluative aspects of children's personal narratives. Participants were 60 students in Grades 4 and 5 in public suburban schools, with an almost equal number of boys and girls. The participants with learning disabilities were matched individually with typically achieving peers for chronological age, grade, ethnicity, and gender. Despite significant differences in expressive semantic and syntactic skills, both groups produced narratives that were equivalent in terms of length, structural organization, and global coherence. Group differences centered around the decreased inclusion of high points in narratives produced by girls with learning disabilities, indicating that these girls may struggle with generating coherent personal narratives and communicating their own perspective on the recounted personal experiences. This specific narrative performance is accounted for by the unique profile of cognitive and academic characteristics demonstrated by girls with learning disabilities. Practical implications for the multifaceted assessment of referential and evaluative narrative functions are discussed, and interventions for enhancing narrative skills are suggested. The study's findings are also discussed in the context of previous research and directions for future inquiries.     

Electromyographic analysis of bow string release in highly skilled archers

A predominant archery coaching tenet holds that the most effective means of releasing the bow string is by relaxation of the finger flexor muscles without activation of finger extensors. To evaluate the validity of this view, EMG patterns of the flexor digitorum superficialis and extensor digitorum muscles of the draw arm were examined using surface EMG electrodes in 15 highly skilled archers as each performed six shots. Each archer displayed consistent EMG patterns from shot-to-shot and two distinct flexor-extensor patterns were exhibited by the sample. The first, characterized by eight of the archers, supported the relaxation principle. For these archers, both flexor and extensor digitorum activity decreased markedly immediately prior to or at arrow release. The second pattern, characteristic of the remaining seven archers, contradicted the coaching tenet. While the flexor digitorum pattern was essentially the same as that described for the first pattern, the extensor digitorum displayed a marked increase in activity just prior to release, indicating that string release was facilitated by an active extension of the fingers. It was concluded that highly skilled archers do not predominantly reflect a release consistent with the coaching canon and that factors other than the string release mechanism discriminate the performances of skilled archers.