Contextual influences and athlete attitudes to drugs in sport

This article reports on 11 narrative-based case histories which sought to: (1) uncover the attitudes of players and athletes to drugs in sport, and (2) explore contextual factors influencing the formation of those attitudes as informed by social ecology theory. Overall, participants viewed the use of banned performance-enhancing substances as cheating, ‘hard’ non-performance-enhancing recreational or illicit substances as unwise, legal non-performance-enhancing substances as acceptable, and legal performance-enhancing substances as essential. In short, attitudes were sometimes quite libertarian, and contingent upon first, the legality of the substance, and second, its performance impact. Results also indicated that athletes’ attitudes about drugs were fundamentally shaped by sport's culture. Other significant factors included its commercial scale, closely identifiable others, early experiences and critical incidents of players and athletes, and their level of performance.     

Noetica: a tool for semantic data modelling

Noetica is a tool for structuring knowledge about concepts and the relationships between them. It differs from typical information systems in that the knowledge it represents is abstract, highly connected and includes meta-knowledge (knowledge about knowledge). Noetica represents knowledge using a strongly-typed semantic network. By providing a rich type system it is possible to represent conceptual information using formalised structures. A class hierarchy provides a basic classification for all objects. This allows for a consistency of representation that is not often found in “free” semantic networks and gives the ability to easily extend a knowledge model while retaining its semantics. We also provide visualisation and query tools for this data model. Visualisation can be used to explore complete sets of link-classes, show paths while navigating through the database, or visualise the results of queries. Noetica supports goal-directed queries (a series of user-supplied goals that the system attempts to satisfy in sequence) and path-finding queries (where the system find relationships between objects in the database by following links).     

Intelligence and academic achievement in a clinical adolescent population

Three canonical variate analyses were carried out on the CAT, WRAT, and WISC/WAIS scores obtained from a sample of 182 emotionally disturbed adolescents. A large general variate emerged in all three analyses. Two additional variates tentatively identified as attentional and symbolization factors also appeared in the analyses of the WRAT-WISC/WAIS and the WRAT-CAT.     

Intelligence,academic achievement,and personality: A canonical variate analysis

Intelligence and Academic Achievement Scores of 180 emotionally disturbed adolescents were related to the personality profiles (16PF or HSPQ) via a canonical variate analysis. Results of the analysis indicated that the emotionally disturbed adolescent who is low in ego strength, tense, guilt prone, sensitive, shy, and submissive tended to be more intelligent and demonstrate higher academic achievement.