Doping – die Züchtung des Übermenschen

Uncovering new doping scandals does not take an end. The exclamation against this practice of the contest distortion becomes ever louder. The anti-doping wave is about to loom up itself to a tsunami. But why? And against what actually? Doping belongs to the modern occidental culture and philosophy history like space flights and the human enhancement. Doping is the expression of our nihilistic postmodernism. The deregulation and legalization of doping would thus correspond to our historical development rather than its prohibition. And a closer look at the anti-doping wave reveals it as a mere symptom of the prevailing nihilism. The question remains whether we achieve an appropriate “Verwindung” (tortion) of the nihilism rather with or without doping.     

New Perspectives on the Adult: An Argument for Lifelong Education

The article brings into question the issue of regional network strategies aiming at implementing structures of lifelong learning in the local context, the so‐called learning communities. Facing a broad diversity in their implementation all over Europe, one can observe on the other hand much less effort to discuss conceptual frameworks that deal explicitly with this subject as a whole. Yet it seems essential to categorise these colourful patterns of practice and to identify key issues—notably with regards to the aspect of lifelong learning—to develop the discourse further and to render it adaptive to international debate.

For this purpose the paper draws attention to three instrumental case studies of learning communities (a Norwegian one, an English one and a German one) that were conducted within an exploratory research strategy. Designed as a between‐method triangulation, the case studies represent a mixed qualitative‐quantitative approach by means of an anonymous questionnaire and half‐standardised interviews. The members of the network and its key stakeholders from the meta‐level were investigated just as the local framework itself. Hence, the study intends not only to demonstrate exemplarily the European variety of learning communities, their origins and leading structures, but also to propose a further structuring of the topic by introducing a typology of learning communities. This eventually opens up controversial issues about lifelong learning strategies in general; for example the question, if these strategies will possibly rather widen already existing structures of inequality and exclusion than raising participation in lifelong learning.     

Differing Map Construction and Text Organization and Their Effects on Retention

On the basis of Kulhavy's (R. W. Kulhavy, J. B. Lee, & L. C. Caterino, 1985) conjoint retention model of text learning with organized spatial displays, the authors conducted 2 experiments to analyze the effects of different types of maps and a considerate text (i.e., a text that follows the scanning pattern of the map) or an inconsiderate text. In the 1st study, 158 participants viewed an intact or a segmented map and a considerate or a randomized text. Those participants who viewed the intact map and read the considerate text recalled significantly more information than those who viewed the intact map and read the randomized text. In the 2nd study, 179 participants viewed a flat map, a 1-point perspective map, or a 2-point perspective map, and a considerate text formulated on the basis of the predicted scanning pattern of the map. Those participants who viewed the flat map recalled significantly more information than those who viewed the perspective maps.     

How to modify the g-index for multi-authored manuscripts

A recently suggested modification of the g-index is analysed in order to take multiple coauthorship appropriately into account. By fractionalised counting of the papers one can obtain an appropriate measure which I call g_m-index. Two fictitious examples for model cases and two empirical cases are analysed. The results are compared with two other variants of the g-index which have also recently been proposed. Only the g_m-index shows the correct behaviour when datasets are aggregated. The interpolated and continuous versions of the g-index and its variants are also discussed. For an intuitive comparison of the determination of the investigated variants of the h-index and the g-index, a visualization of the citation records is utilized.