Development of 1-mile walk tests to estimate aerobic fitness in children

To examine the reliability and validity of 1-mile walk tests for estimation of aerobic fitness (VO_2max) in 10- to 13-year-old children and to cross-validate previously published equations. Participants (n = 61) walked 1-mile on two different days. Self-reported physical activity, demographic variables, and aerobic fitness were used in multiple regression analyses. Eight models were developed with various combinations of predictors. The recommended model for fitness testing in schools was: VO_2max = 120.702 + (4.114 × Sex [F = 0, M = 1]) – (2.918 × 1-mile Walk Time [min]) – (2.841 × Age), R = .73, standard error of estimate = 6.36 mL·kg^?1·min^?1. Cross-validation of previously published equations demonstrated lower correlations with measured VO_2max than the newly developed walk tests. Evidence of reliability and validity for 1-mile walk tests to estimate VO_2max in young children was provided. The model that included 1-mile walk time, age, and sex may be appropriate for youth fitness testing in physical education, particularly for unmotivated or overweight young children.     

A robust low-complexity tracker design with preassigned performance for uncertain high-order nonlinear systems with unknown time-varying delays and high powers

A robust low-complexity design methodology is presented for global tracking of uncertain high-order nonlinear systems with unknown time-varying delays. In contrast to the existing literature, this paper assumes that nonlinear bounding functions of time-delay nonlinearities and high powers of virtual and actual control variables are unknown. Furthermore, a delay-independent tracking scheme using nonlinearly transformed error surfaces is simply designed without the knowledge of nonlinear bounding functions of model nonlinearities, the adaptive technique, and the calculation of repeated time derivatives of certain signals. Thus, the proposed tracker is implemented with low complexity. It is recursively shown that the tracking error is preserved within the predefined bounds of transient and steady-state performance in the Lyapunov sense.     

Robust event-driven tracking control with preassigned performance for uncertain input-quantized nonlinear pure-feedback systems

This paper presents a simplified design methodology for robust event-driven tracking control of uncertain nonlinear pure-feedback systems with input quantization. All nonlinearities and quantization parameters are assumed to be completely unknown. Different from the existing event-driven control approaches for systems with completely unknown nonlinearities, the main contribution of this paper is to design a simple event-based tracking scheme with preassigned performance, without the use of adaptive function approximators and adaptive mirror models. It is shown in the Lyapunov sense that the proposed event-driven low-complexity tracker consisting of nonlinearly transformed error surfaces and a triggering condition can achieve the preselected transient and steady-state performance of control errors in the presence of the input quantization.     

Cultivating borrowed futures: the politics of neoliberal loanwords in South Korean cross-national policy borrowing

This paper examines the politics of policy-borrowing in Korean education. I use the term ‘loanwords’ as a metaphor for the practice in some Korean educational sectors of using borrowed English-origin educational rhetoric to create actual policy reform. I argue that discourses of choice and diversity, as loanwords, are initially bifurcated into progressivist and neoliberal policies; recently, they have been used to highlight particular aspects of market-based policies that are advantageous to particular social groups. I also demonstrate that the upper-class tends to make use of the terms choice and diversity in ways aligned with neoliberal perspectives in order to validate the pursuit of privileged opportunities, such as the right to choose to attend an elite high school.     

A case study of low‐status women’s attitudes towards computers

This study investigates the attitudes of a group of low‐status women towards computers through a deliberately designed computer training programme. Four aspects of the women’s attitudes were examined, including computer anxiety, confidence, liking and usefulness. Data sources consist of pre‐ and post‐surveys and interviews with the participants. The results show that the participants’ attitudes towards computers improved greatly after attending the training course, especially in terms of the aspect of anxiety. It was also found that the instructor’s patience, repeated step‐by‐step demonstrations, detailed notes presented with screen‐image snapshots, stand‐by tutors and a friendly learning environment were the main elements that effectively helped the learners increase their positive feelings towards learning to use computers. The study reveals that once women have opportunities to use computers and once they are adequately instructed, the majority will be connected to the digital world in no time.     

Human Performance Technology Blooms in the High Desert

As our first presentation in a series of academic program profiles, we are pleased to present the Organization, Information, and Learning Science (OILS) program at the University of New Mexico (UMN). The OILS program began in the 1980s as a vocational education program and has evolved into a program that focuses on human performance technology (HPT), instructional design (ID), and learning sciences. The OILS program is organizationally a part of the College of University Libraries and Learning Science. The library faculty brings positive synergy to OILS in terms of data management and information technology, research, education, and applied practices. The program offers an undergraduate degree as well as masters and doctoral degrees. It is very rare to provide an undergraduate degree in the HPT and ID fields, and the OILS program is proud of these pioneering efforts. OILS has a pragmatic tradition. The faculty members of OILS and its graduate students have conducted scholastic and practical research projects in HPT, ID, and learning sciences. Coursework emphasis is on cultivating students’ capabilities for excellent performance in the workplace. The program has a strong network within the local community with local employers as well as with local chapters of professional societies. The present demographics in the State of New Mexico in terms of the majority‐minority status are similar to the overall demographics that the United States as a whole will face within the next 30 years. OILS is an innovative program. – Sung “Pil” Kang, PhD and Yeol Huh, PhD, column editors     

Discourse on guomin (‘the citizen’) in late Qing China, 1895∼1911 1

Abstract

The term guomin is found in Chinese texts from an early period. However, as commonly used today – as a modern political concept of special value and significance – guomin belongs to a political vocabulary adopted by Chinese intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Japan’s new usages. The goal of this essay is to explain how this important concept was formed and what it signified. The term guomin has basically conveyed two levels of meaning since the late Qing. In essence, the term is similar to the English word ‘citizenship’, and it reveals a kind of awakening of a new political consciousness on the part of Chinese intellectuals since the late Qing. Through the discourse of guomin, they began to emphasize the subjectivity of each individual in the national political process, along with all of their rights and duties. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the criticisms and reflections of Chinese intellectuals about traditional politics, society and culture, and thought have basically developed along the lines of the logic of ‘turning subjects into citizens’. However, the pursuit of a strong nation‐state under a civil crisis sparked by foreign pressure marked the historical conditions that generated the modern Chinese guomin discourse. Limited by this kind of ‘national identity,’ the discourse and construction of guomin since the late Qing have never been able to escape the shadow of the state. Under these ideological conditions, guomin could only become a means of the nationalist project for survival; it could never become an autonomous and universal category. Guomin, as it turns out, has been, and still remains, ‘the people of the state’.     

“I am well-cooked food”: survival strategies of North Korean female border-crossers and possibilities for empowerment

Abstract

More than the half the people who cross the North Korea–China border are women, with most leaving home to seek food, economic benefits and a more comfortable life. From the human rights perspective, it is clear that the dangerous nature of their journeys across the border and their illegal status in China place them in a very vulnerable position with regard to human trafficking and many types of sexual and physical violence. However, some women voluntarily and strategically use migration, marriage and gender as arenas of agency through which to improve their lives and empower themselves. This paper aims to reveal the complexity of these experiences, which occur where specific forms of gender, intimacy and mobility meet. In doing so, I hope to argue for the possibility of agency beyond an overly simplified victim discourse of North Korean border-crossing. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in South Korea and China to reveal the trajectories of North Korean female border-crossers who developed survival strategies, and employed their gender and sexuality to skilfully use marriage-migration for their own purposes, empowering them to settle or keep moving on to better places. This instrumental orientation to empowerment worked alongside a more normative orientation to helping their “blood” families back in their homeland through remittances or through being able to bring along children from previous marriages. They were willing to adopt the role of temporary “wife” in order to be good “daughters,” “sisters” and “mothers” both now and later. In this sense, the North Korean women and their experiences imply an ambivalent approach to marriage and family.     

The ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism: the post‐ideological cultural representation of North Korea and the cultural criticisms of Korean nationalism

Abstract

This essay questions the ‘truth politics’ of anti‐North Koreanism in which a ‘genuine’ figuration of North Korea is presumed to be achievable at the popular level. I define the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism as the political‐cultural discursive formation obscuring the ideological powerfulness of anti‐North Koreanism that hinges on ‘the normality of nationalism’. The truth politics reinscribes and reinforces the populist and functionalist belief in national unification that justifies developmentalist agendas for North Korea. As an alternative, I discuss the post‐colonial cultural criticism that calls into question the identity politics of popular nationalism, which implicitly performs along the lines of the Sunshine Policy guidelines to naturalize the normality of nationalism under economic developmentalism. The questionable formation of nationalism prevents South Koreans from gaining self‐reflexive access to the way in which heterogeneous tropes of the nation rupturing in the discursive practice of popular nationalism are exploited. But I also critically interrogate the analytical framework presumed within the criticism, because it constrains its own scope and abilities of questioning the truth politics of anti‐North Koreanism the criticism ostensibly targets.