‘Playing Dead’ and Killing Off Amateurism: Bribery Scandals,Illegal Player Payments,Rule Expunging,and the Victorian Football League’s Authorization of Professionalism in 1911

Abstract

Australian football is an indigenous game codified in 1859. In Melbourne, the code’s birthplace, the game remained officially committed to the amateur ideal for over a half-century. Illegal player payments nonetheless became increasingly commonplace. Moreover, periodically rumours swirled of champion footballers taking bribes to ‘play dead’. By the early 1900s, the code’s leading competition, the Victorian Football League (VFL), was derided with the ‘shamateurism’ label. Following a sensational match-fixing investigation that resulted in two players receiving five-year bans, in 1911 the VFL expunged its rule prohibiting player payments. Was the timing merely coincidental or was the League’s historic switch to professionalism a deliberate countermeasure to redirect press attention, renew public confidence, and restore the game’s integrity? By consulting the League’s official records and contemporary press articles, this work examines the overlooked yet discernible linkages between rising match-fixing allegations and the VFL’s decision to eschew amateurism and embrace professionalism. It argues that Australian football offers an instructive historical perspective of a sporting body tackling mounting concerns over corruption, taking back the ascendency by amending its rules to better govern over dishonest players and duplicitous club officials, thereby growing its popularity and restoring public perception of its integrity in the process.     

Bridging the digital divide with off-line e-learning

Abstract

This paper explores a proposal for an off-line e-learning platform that will provide a bridge for digitally unconnected students and educators to join the contemporary information and communications technology (ICT) intensive world. Individual remote and unconnected learners face a chicken and egg problem for engagement with contemporary e-learning offerings. Without connectivity, remote learners have no way of engaging with now common ICT intensified learning materials that are intended to teach them how to engage in an ICT intensive world! The paper takes systems approach to developing a solution that will fit into the world we have, and not one we wish we had in terms of infrastructure, economics and skills available in remote and developing regions. Digital learning courses are placed onto a portable e-learning environment that is not reliant on a constant network connection to function but retains interactivity, analytics and the ability to synchronise data with an educational institution when a connection is found.     

‘Sport was the centre of my memories’: the performance of sport in Australia’s Asian garrisons

ABSTRACT

For better or worse, sport mirrors and mediates much of everyday life. Within both the military and colonial spheres, the physical attributes of sport are especially prized as tangible representations of social and cultural hierarchies. In turn, this further enhances the prestige and influence of sport within these two particular environments. Sport becomes particularly potent in instances where military forces undertake garrison duties in overseas colonial and post-colonial environs. This paper highlights the centrality of sport to the lives of the Australian service personnel and their families who were posted to Australia’s garrisons in the decades after World War II. The myriad roles of sport within these overseas garrison environments – as comforter, connector, healer and reinforcer on the one hand, and as isolator, oppressor and subverter on the other – are explored. This paper suggests that, for a variety of reasons, participation in sports served as the central organising force for most Australian service personnel and their families in these Australian military communities.     

The Control of Reaching Movements by Young Infants

Samples of reaches were obtained from groups of infants aged 4.5, 6, and 7.5 months. Split-screen video recordings were transcribed as sequences of (x,y,z) hand coordinates, and the hand path was examined for evidence of initial aiming and subsequent correction of the movement path. At all ages, the initial direction of the movement was correlated with target direction, providing evidence that the hand was aimed toward the target. Additionally, changes in movement direction made after the commencement of the movement tended to curve the hand path toward the target, providing evidence of error correction. Local minima of hand speed evident within segments of continuous motion were associated with turn toward the target. However, the movement path was also curved toward the target within the movement elements bounded by these minima. This finding was seen as consistent with "continuous" correction of movement errors and as contrary to the suggestion that infant movements are concatenations of ballistic movement units whose boundaries are marked by troughs in the speed profile.     

Academic Engagement and Achievement Among Latina/o and Non-Latina/o Adolescents

This article presents an exploratory study of the relation between academic engagement and academic achievement for Latina/o and non-Latina/o adolescents attending a predominantly low-income, Latina/o urban middle school in Southern California. A sample of 61 students (37 Latinas/os and 24 non-Latinas/os) participated in the study. The Latina/o students’ mean grade point average was lower than the non-Latina/o students’ mean grade point average. The study results revealed a significant interaction between academic engagement and grade point average for Latina/o students but not for non-Latina/o students. Findings are discussed in regard to the promotion of Latina/o adolescent achievement through increased levels of academic engagement.     

Gandhi and Mao on manual labour in the school: A retrospective analysis

Mahatma Gandhi's views on relating the world of formal education to the world of work were developed first in his experimental ‘Tolstoy Farm’ in South Africa. On his return to India, Gandhi insisted that a required manual labour component in the curriculum would help regenerate India's village economy, develop in India's children a deeper understanding of India's cultural roots, motivate children to relate ‘book learning’ to life in society, and destroy invidious caste distinctions. The major proposals and suggestions in Gandhi's writing will be discussed in the context of his hopes for using schooling as an agent of progress in India. Mao Ze-Dong's views, on the other hand, were developed in the context of his Yenan experience in the 1930s, i.e. the decision to consolidate a power base in the interior of China before waging a class war against the landlords and capitalists of China. Mao's views were also, to some extent, rooted in the Chinese reality of stagnant, poverty-stricken rural areas. But, Mao's writings indicate that Marxist hopes to relate theory and practice (as understood in dialectical materialism) and to ensure that everyone participated in mental as well as manual labour in a socialist society had led him to formulate his proposals. Both Gandhi's and Mao's views and proposals have been more or less abandoned in India and China respectively. The similar and dissimilar reasons which led to such a fate are examined in this retrospective analysis.     

George Andrew Olah

Hungarian born American chemist, George Andrew Olah was a prolific researcher. The central theme of his career was the pursuit of structure and mechanisms in chemistry, particularly focused on electron-deficient intermediates. He leaves behind a large body of work comprising almost 1500 papers and twenty books for the scientific community. Some selected works have been published in three aptly entitled volumes, Across Conventional Lines.There is no way to capture the many contributions of Olah in a short essay. For this appreciation, we have chosen to high-light some of those contributions that to our mind represent a significant advance to the state of knowledge.     

Examination reform in traditional universities: a few steps forward,many steps back

After a brief discussion of the historical background, this article examines national attempts to reform the examination system in India. Reform attempts are discussed under eight categories: syllabus review and revision; increased frequency of public examinations; introduction of internal assessment; development of question banks; changeover to a grading system; semesterisation; improving the efficiency of the public examination bureaucracy, and, creation of autonomous colleges. Most of the impetus for reforming the examination system came from the availability of Western experts at very little cost to India and admiration for American and British practices among Indian higher education authorities. The failure of most of the reforms provide salutary lessons regarding educational borrowing for reform. The concluding pages discuss the theoretical issues related to the reform effort.First published inHigher Education Reform in India, eds. Philip G. Altbach and Suma Chitnis (New Delhi: Sage Publications India P.T. Ltd.).