“Excellent Library”—A Holistic Quality Model and Certificate for Libraries: Concept and Experiences from Germany

In Germany, more than 15 libraries are operating successfully with the quality model Excellent Library. They are part of a research project at Stuttgart Media University where the quality model and certificate have been developed since 2008. The article reflects the experiences of the project: A short introduction to the German library system and quality projects in German libraries will be followed by an overview over the model and certificate. Furthermore, the challenging process of becoming an Excellent Library and related effects will be described.     

The criterion-related validity of the WISC-R performance scale and other nonverbal IQ tests for deaf children

Despite the popularity of nonverbal IQ tests for psychoeducational assessment of deaf children, criterion-related validity is lacking. This may be because nonverbal IQ tests lack criterion-related validity, or because inappropriate scaling attenuates IQ achievement correlations. Two studies used samples of deaf children to test these hypotheses. The first study (N = 33) correlated WISC-R PIQs with Stanford Achievement Test-Hearing Impaired Edition (SAT-HI) grade equivalents and age-based percentiles (rs less than .37, NS). The second study (N = 64) correlated nonverbal IQs from many tests with SAT-HI scores (rs .05 to .42). The results implicate the hypothesis that criterion scale affects IQ-achievement correlations. The role of nonverbal IQ in the psychoeducational assessment of deaf children is discussed.     

Information-analytical support of priority fields in science and technology: Branch and differentiated approaches

This paper considers the urgent problems of information-analytical support of Russian scientific technological and innovation policy, as well as modern tasks of information-analytical support of the innovation activities of scientific and educational organizations, and proposes methodical approaches that have potential for improving the Russian system of patent searches and analytics. It is shown to be expedient to build complex information-retrieval systems with maximum access to relevant arrays of branch information and multi-service analytical components, which make it possible to implement the differentiated approach to consumers and a diversity of scenarios of scientific information activities, which are particular to different groups of consumers.     

Thoughts on Online Teaching with a Focus on Management

This article gives the author's evaluation of the relative structural advantages and disadvantages of classroom and online education. He believes that online education is more effective in teaching concepts and individual skills because it offers the possibility of requiring all students to interact more frequently with course content and allows them to work at their own pace and to review course materials. He was not, however, willing to teach management online because the classroom experience is better at teaching, through interactive exercises, a focus on student interactions, and the use of guest lecturers, the soft skills needed for successful management.     

Compassion in the face of terror: a case study of recognizing suffering,co-creating hope,and developing trust in a would-be school shooting

Current theoretical conceptualizations of compassion say little about communicating compassion to people whose suffering is wrapped in a cloak of anger, threat, resistance, and fear. This article attends directly to this issue by examining the conversational particulars of compassion communicated by school bookkeeper Antoinette Tuff to would-be school shooter Michael Hill. The case serves as the basis for advancing propositions about communicating compassion to unwilling recipients and suggests the importance of careful conversational timing, face-enhancement strategies, convergence/mirroring techniques, co-creating hope, physical presence, and vulnerable self-disclosure. The case extends current conceptualizations of compassion and provides a vivid picture for enacting compassion when sufferers are angry, threatening, or resisting help.     

Prosodic correlates of stress in babbling: an acoustical study

Prelinguistic babbling often seems remarkably speech-like, not because it has recognizable words but because it seems to have adult-like prosody. To quantify this impression, we compared disyllabic sequences from five infants and five adults in terms of the use of frequency, intensity, and duration to mark stress. Significantly larger values for the three acoustic variables were observed on stressed than on unstressed syllables independent of syllable position for both groups. Adults showed the correlates of utterance final syllables--lower f0, lower intensity, and longer duration; infants showed only decrease in intensity. Ratios for stressed to unstressed syllables and participation of the three variables in stress production in individual disyllables were highly similar in both groups. No bias toward the English lexical trochaic stress pattern was observed. We conclude that infants in English environments produce adult-like stress patterns before they produce lexical items, which specify stress. Acoustic and perceptual analyses are used to explore stress marking by prelinguistic infants in an English language environment. Results show that infants employ the three acoustic correlates of stress in individual syllables in a manner largely similar to that of adult speakers, although they do not show second-syllable declination effects or an English language trochaic stress bias.