Anti-Market Research: Piracy,New Media Metrics,and Commodity Communities

Over a decade after Napster’s introduction, file sharing programs still shoulder much of the blame for music and other media’s declining sales. Although labels and industry associations point their fingers at the harm digital piracy and file-sharing cause, they are less likely to admit the extent to which these anti-markets inform everyday decisions. File-sharing technologies create networks of users that serve as profitable data for ratings and metrics agencies. Using a case study of BigChampagne and its relationship to Napster, this article considers how the look, structure, and function of file-sharing software helped turn an economically threatening community into a commodity and how piracy’s disruptive potential is always in tension with processes of commodification.     

Yoga for seniors: understanding their beliefs and barriers to participation

ABSTRACT

Yoga has been found to provide numerous health benefits to older adults including preventing or slowing physical frailty and subsequent functional limitations. The purpose of this study was to examine pre-frail or frail older adults’ beliefs about yoga as well as to identify barriers to participation. We recruited 37 older adults from a Faint, Fall, and Frailty Clinic at a medical center and asked them to complete questionnaires regarding their physical health and beliefs about yoga using the Beliefs About Yoga Scale. Frailty and fall risk were obtained through electronic health records. Participants’ had mean age of 72.81 years. Participants were considered to be prefrail (66.7%) or frail (33.3%), and most (78.4%) had fallen at least once in the past year. Over 72% of participants engaged in light physical activity. The BAYS mean score was 59.17 (SD = 12.5; Range 11–77). Higher scores indicted more optimistic beliefs about yoga. Over 90% of participants had not practiced yoga, 97.1% had no intentions to practice, 61.8% did not know locations placed where yoga classes were offered, 82.4% were unsure about the costs associated with yoga, and only 56.3% reported having transportation. The three primary barriers to practicing yoga were perceived difficulty of yoga practice, lack of motivation, and fear of injury. Participants held positive beliefs about yoga, yet had limited experience and little intention to participate indicating a need to provide targeted educational interventions to this population of older adults.     

基于专利引文分析的时间线技术

在对专利引文可视化技术现状进行分析的基础上,将基于引文分析的时间线技术运用到专利文献的可视化分析。详细阐述该技术的理论依据、设计思想,并用美国专利数据库中的DVD激光头专利进行技术应用,证明该技术能揭示专利文献中的技术热点及其发展演变,并挖掘关键技术。     

An Innovative Course Featuring Action Research Integrated with Unifying Science Themes

In this article, we describe an innovative capstone course for preservice K-8 teachers integrating action research and a unifying theme in science (AAAS in Science for all Americans. Oxford University Press, New York, 1989; NRC in National science education standards. National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1996). The goals of the capstone course are to increase student knowledge of the unifying theme, improve written communication skills, and introduce students to educational research. We provide evidence that each of these goals is met. Student growth in theme knowledge is demonstrated through concept maps, questionnaires, and previously reported assessments. Improved writing ability is demonstrated using the spelling and grammar checking feature of Microsoft Word. The analysis of action research reports demonstrates that students are able to connect their action research project results to previous research.     

Integrating expanded school mental health programs and school‐based health centers

This article provides background on national movements toward expanded school mental health (ESMH) programs and school‐based health centers (SBHCs), and presents advantages and challenges of joining these two systems of child and adolescent health care. Delivering ESMH through SBHCs promotes an interdisciplinary approach, health–mental health care integration, and benefits including enhancing referral bases, improving screening of problems, and enhanced confidentiality and privacy. But this integrated approach also presents challenges including managing referrals and significant needs, handling crises, building a focus on prevention and mental health promotion, handling administrative demands, and coping with limited resources. These challenges, ideas for overcoming them, and future directions for this promising service delivery approach are discussed. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 40: 297–308, 2003.     

A catalytic and evolutionary approach to horizontal technology policies (HTPs)

This paper presents an evolutionary framework for horizontal technology policies (HTPs) especially market-friendly ones involving project-based incentives (e.g. R&D project based grants rather than tax-based incentives to yearly expenditures on R&D). HTPs are a category of technological policies whose objective is to promote technological development per se, and associated management and organizational routines, irrespective of industrial branch or technological area. They are being increasingly adopted by both advanced countries and newly industrialized countries in response to the new opportunities and threats opened up by the technological revolution and by the processes of liberalization and globalization; and they complement the more specific and well-known selective and vertical policies aimed at individual sectors and technologies. The analysis is conducted within a learning-to-innovate framework with emphasis on collective, organizational learning; search; and market-building. The outcome is a technology policy cycle with distinct infant, growth, and mature phases. Proactive ‘generation’ of a critical mass of projects for efficient learning and diffusion of innovation routines becomes the aim of the infant phase; while the mature phase of the policy should focus on policy restructuring including drastic reductions in the support of routi projects and enhanced support of more complex types of innovation. The paper also emphasizes the importance of a neutrality component in incentives in the infant phase of increasing selectivity; and of building policy capabilities for efficient policy design and implementation.     

Expectancies as mediators in the differential-reward conditional discrimination performance of pigeons

In a series of within-subject experiments employing a two-choice delayed conditional discrimination task, pigeons chose correctly more often when kind of correct choice and kind of reinforcer were perfectly correlated than when uncorrelated. Correct choice behavior fell to chance levels when the correlation was reversed or when it was removed by using only one kind of reinforcer. Implications for mediation theories are discussed, with the conclusion being that, although the possibility that instrumental mediators are present in this situation cannot be dismissed, the overall pattern of results indicates that classical mediators are of principal importance in this type of task.     

Young Children''s Vulnerability to Self-Blame and Helplessness: Relationship to Beliefs about Goodness

Motivational helplessness, linked to conceptions of intelligence, has been well documented in older children. While some researchers have reported that children just starting school are motivationally invulnerable, others have found evidence of helplessness when these children encounter failure. The present study seeks to determine whether the reactions associated with helplessness can be identified in a new context, that of criticism, and whether any such responses are related to the child's conceptions of goodness. Subjects were 107 5- and 6-year-old children who enacted achievement situations in which teacher criticism was presented. The 39% of children whose own assessments were undermined by criticism exhibited the affect, task choices, and nonconstructive problem-solving strategies characteristic of helplessness. They were also more likely to make global negative self-judgments following criticism, including negative judgments of their goodness. Finally, these children were more likely to endorse stable and global beliefs about goodness.