Effectiveness Related to Personality and Demographic Characteristics of Secondary School Counselors

In a study of 123 secondary school counselors in three states the authors found significant correlations among tested personality characteristics and supervisor-rated job performance. Counselors rated as effective by supervisors expressed higher job satisfaction, tested higher in tolerance for ambiguity and in self-esteem, and had more congruent personality-environment Holland codes than did their ineffective counterparts. Sex, age, years of experience, certification status, and academic degrees held were not correlated with effectiveness ratings. Results were considered tentative and heuristic in nature because many aspects of effectiveness could not be tested.     

Regulating Academic Pressure: From Fast to Slow

This paper investigates the impact of publication pressure on the ethics and the scientific integrity in the domain of mathematics and of the arts. Both research fields are specific in their methodology, being that they do not start from a classical hypothesis and researchers in these areas are not knowing what the outcome will be. The research design is open, and creativity is a main part of the research investigation. Both research fields do not rely on empirical cases nor on data collection or data handling. This could be a reason why mathematics and arts seem to be less subject to scientific misconduct. After presenting the (inter)national regulations on ethics and integrity, we will investigate a philosophical analysis in which we consider possible influences from publication pressure that became widespread over all disciplines. We will clarify if and how mathematics and the arts are sensitive to scientific research misconduct or questionable research practices.     

Caught in the Middle: Arendt,Childhood and Responsibility

This essay critiques the infection of the curriculum with the concerns of the adult political community, treating successive generations of children as if they were responsible for changing the world and that education was the vehicle. Such impulses are, in part, the result of a failure to consider childhood as a particular, liminal, space rather than a refraction of the public spaces of the agora. The drive to see education as a vehicle and schools as the site of political change is not confined to the ideological obsessions of Right or Left; both may be considered culpable. Here I illustrate the normative problem through the particulars of a number of socio-political challenges faced by ‘the World’, and in each case show why it is inappropriate to treat the school and education as the solution. Rather than teaching children how to solve the challenges of the agora, I suggest that what we in actuality do, is teach them the art and artifice of deferral and procrastination because we have failed to assume responsibility for the world. Drawing on Arendt's insights on natality, I suggest that schools should be spaces of ‘qualified’ shelter and that students should not be exposed to the harshness of political choice, nor should teachers merely act as a surrogate for political interests irrespective of their provenance or driving imperative.     

The Ethics of Research Excellence

We here analyse the ethical dimensions of the UK's ‘Research Excellence Framework’ (REF), the latest (2014) version of an exercise which assesses the quality of university research in the UK every seven or so years. We find many of the common objections to this exercise unfounded, such as that it is excessively expensive by comparison with alternatives such as various metrics, or that it turns on the subjective judgement of the assessors. However there are grounds for concern about the crude language in which for example all relevant scholarship becomes called ‘research’ and publications become ‘outputs’. The focus on the impact of research, which was a new feature of the most recent exercise, is particularly problematic, creating as it does a tendency to what Aristotle called alazony, self‐aggrandisement, on the part of academics. We conclude that the REF is a mixed good from an ethical point of view, and that more could be done to mitigate its more unfortunate features.     

Teaching as an Immortality Project: Positing Weakness in Response to Terror

Teaching as a profession can be read as an immortality project, a form of compensation to help resolve a certain kind of existential terror. Terror management theory can help us understand the ways teachers might compensate for their limitedness as humans by imposing prescribed attributes on their students. In response to the freighted reality of teaching as quasi‐missionary work, we suggest a new orientation, namely that the profession embrace the terror of the future that it cannot know. Through a theoretical engagement with Weak Theology in the context of Eugene Thacker's philosophical ‘doomcore’, we hope to re‐orient the educational project into one with lower stakes, a shift from immortality to more ‘goodness’. The desired result is to refocus on the relationships we develop with other humans as well as with the planet.     

Exercise,plasma catecholamine concentrations and decision-making performance of soccer players on a soccer-specific test

The main aim of this study was to compare the decision-making performance of college soccer players on a soccer-specific, tachistoscopically presented test, at rest and while exercising at their adrenaline threshold and at their maximum power output. These were determined following an incremental test to exhaustion on a cycle ergometer. After the initial maximum power test, participants (n= 9) were allowed 10 habituation trials on the soccer decision-making test. Participants' decision-making performance was tested at rest, while cycling at a power output that had previously been determined to elicit their adrenaline threshold and while cycling at maximum power output. Accuracy and speed of decision were the dependent variables. A one-way repeated measures analysis of variance showed no significant effect of exercise on accuracy, and showed speed of decision to be significantly affected by exercise. Tukey post-hoc tests showed that speed of decision at rest was significantly slower than in the other two conditions, which did not differ significantly from one another. Based on allocatable resources theories of arousal and performance, we conclude that the adrenaline threshold may be indicative of increases in the resources available to the individual. Furthermore, we considered that exercise at maximum power output may only induce a moderate rather than a high level of arousal.     

The University of the Twenty-First Century: From Blueprint to Reality

During the 1990s, a typical theme of a conference on the role of the university was "the university of tomorrow". Now, however, tomorrow has arrived, and universities are undergoing very powerful stimuli to transform themselves. The principal driving forces are the development of knowledge societies and economies, the all-pervasiveness of the information technologies, globalization, and the debate on the public or private nature of higher education. These forces generate a myriad of responses that, while defying the elaboration of blueprints, call for constant change and diversity.