Dystopia on the Health Superhighway

The emerging Information Superhighway is starting to induce visions of dystopia within the medical profession. In several countries, doctors have opposed plans for the establishment of national health data networks. In the most recent example, the Council of the British Medical Association threatened to boycott the government's national data strategy. This action followed the lead of Australian doctors, many of whom have consistently opposed a national wide-area network for health data. In common is the fear that this data linkage will erode medical independence, increase the power of government health authorities, and eliminate the confidentiality of medical information. Doctors have a duty of care to patients to protect confidentiality, and they say the emerging national networks compromise this responsibility. Here, I argue that the emerging health superhighways should either conform to strict privacy standards or they should be demolished.     

回顾过去,展望未来澳大利亚国家档案馆电子文件管理30年

发动变革的引擎 30多年前,澳大利亚国家档案馆(下简称国家馆)首次接收移交进馆关于石油开发勘测中海底爆破的数量庞大的计算机文件.     

National/Global Synergy in the Development of Higher Education and Science in China since 1978

The paper reviews the rapid development of higher education and science in China in the last forty years. It discusses the conditions and strategies of that development, including the ways that it embodies a distinctive Chinese approach to higher education. In particular, the paper reflects on the policies whereby China coordinated with globalization in higher education and science after 1978, in building national capacity and global influence. Scale, nation-state policy goals and accelerated investment on their own are necessary but not sufficient (otherwise Saudi Arabia’s research universities would be stronger than they are). The effective national/global synergy developed by China, made possible by the international openness and part-devolution to science communities that was implemented in the Deng Xiaoping era, has been crucial in the rapid rise of China’s universities and science. This national/global synergy—and its potentials, tensions and limits—in turn has determined the nature of the achievement and will shape its future evolution.     

‘Why am I putting myself through this?’ Women football coaches’ experiences of the Football Association's coach education process

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the provision of formal coach education. However, research has repeatedly demonstrated how coach education has had a limited impact on the learning and development of coach practitioners. To date however, these investigations have avoided female coach populations. Ten women football coaches who had recently completed various association football coach education courses participated in this study. Following the interpretive analysis of 10 semi-structured interviews the findings revealed high levels of gender discrimination and inappropriate cultural practice. The women's experiences are discussed in line with the Bourdieuian notions of social acceptance, symbolic language and power. The women coaches provided a number of recommendations for future coach education provision, which in turn, may help to improve the experiences for those women who participate in the coach education process.     

Perfectionism and training distress in junior athletes: The mediating role of coping tendencies

Training distress occurs when athletes fail to cope with physiological and psychological stress and can be an early sign of overtraining syndrome. Recent research has found that perfectionism predicts increases in training distress in junior athletes over time. The current study provides the first empirical test of the possibility that coping tendencies mediate the perfectionism-training distress relationship. Adopting a cross-sectional design, 171 junior athletes (mean age?=?18.1 years) completed self-report measures of perfectionistic strivings, perfectionistic concerns, problem-focused coping, avoidant coping, and training distress. Structural equation modelling revealed that avoidant coping mediated the positive relationship between perfectionistic concerns and training distress, and mediated the negative relationship between perfectionistic strivings and training distress. Problem-focused coping did not mediate any relationships between dimensions of perfectionism and training distress. The findings suggest that the tendency to use coping strategies aimed at avoiding stress may partly explain the relationship between perfectionism and training distress but the tendency to use, or not use, problem-focussed coping does not.