Reflecting on Functioning in Trigger Happy America

Trigger warnings are posing serious threats to the ways that English educators can teach at the university level. If Aristotle – and Hillis-Miller years later – argue that literature must arouse and bring about catharsis, then proponents of trigger warnings are anaesthetising the power of words and watering down their ability to incite emotional responses and promote healing. By examining the relationship between proponents of the trigger warning and reflective functioning – a psychoanalytic concept that emerged out of the British psychoanalytic school – this article argues that English students and English educators who support the use of trigger warnings may suffer from poor reflective functioning. Individuals with poor reflective functioning have difficulty coping with their emotions as well as practising mentalisation during times of acute stress, which can be triggered in response to arousing interactions with texts. Finally, the article offers some suggestions for how English educators might use empathy, intentional self-disclosure and vulnerability as a means for enhancing reflective functioning in students and encouraging them to journey more freely and courageously into controversial, charged, and dramatic literary moments.     

Measuring Pharmacy Student Attitudes Toward Prayer: The Student Prayer Attitude Scale (SPAS)

The objective of this study was to develop and validate an instrument to assess the attitude of student pharmacists toward prayer in general and in particular as it relates to their academic performance. To fulfill the study objective, faculty from seven colleges of pharmacy located at Christian universities collaboratively developed the Student Prayer Attitude Scale (SPAS). The items were used to assess the attitudes of student pharmacists toward prayer as well as the effects of prayer on personal lives and academic performance. Faculty investigators asked 1,563 students to complete the survey and received 677 valid responses. A principal components analysis with promax rotation was conducted and revealed a two-factor structure: (a) general attitude toward prayer and (b) specific attitude regarding the impact of prayer on academic performance. Analysis of variance was used to compare student responses by religious identity. Students identifying as atheist or agnostic were significantly different in their responses than students from theistic religions; however, the responses of students from various theistic religions were not significantly different from one another. Faculty concluded that SPAS is a reliable tool for measuring student attitudes toward prayer. The use of such a tool could help faculty tailor educational opportunities to allow pharmacy students to explore prayer more fully and be aware of its impact on the patients they serve.     

Privacy,speech, and values: what we have no business knowing

In the United States the ascendancy of speech protection is due to an expansive and unjustified view of the value or primacy of free expression and access to information. This is perhaps understandable, given that privacy has been understood as a mere interest, whereas speech rights have been seen as more fundamental. I have argued elsewhere that the “mere interest” view of privacy is false. Privacy, properly defined, is a necessary condition for human well-being or flourishing. The opening section of this article will provide an overview of this theory. Next, after a few remarks on speech absolutism, privacy absolutism, and balancing theories, I will sketch several of the dominant argument strands that have been offered in support of presumptively weighty speech rights. While these arguments, taken together, establish that free speech is important, they do not support the view that speech should nearly always trump privacy. In final section I will present and defend a way to balance free speech and privacy claims.     

Identification and evaluation of technology trends in K-12 education from 2011 to 2021

Education and Information Technologies - Educational technologies have captured the attention of researchers, policy makers, and parents. Each year, considerable effort and money are invested into...     

Pre-service teachers’ perceptions of simSchool as preparation for inclusive education: a pilot study

The shift towards the inclusion of students with disabilities in regular schools has meant that general classroom teachers need to be skilled in educating students with a diverse range of needs and abilities. Together with theoretical study and as a supplement to practical experience, teacher educators have begun to explore virtual and simulated classrooms to help prepare pre-service teachers for the complexity of the teaching profession. In this pilot study, we examined the perspective of pre-service teachers on a classroom simulation program called “simSchool.” Two-hour-long tutorial sessions focusing on catering for student diversity and the educational needs of students with autism spectrum disorder were conducted. The pre-service teachers’ responses to an 11-item questionnaire are discussed, highlighting the potential of simSchool as well as some current limitations of this approach in the context of Australian teacher education courses.     

Revisiting the cluster-based paradigm for implicit search result diversification

To cope with ambiguous and/or underspecified queries, search result diversification (SRD) is a key technique that has attracted a lot of attention. This paper focuses on implicit SRD, where the subtopics underlying a query are unknown. Many existing methods appeal to the greedy strategy for generating diversified results. A common practice is using a heuristic criterion for making the locally optimal choice at each round. As a result, it is difficult to know whether the failures are caused by the optimization criterion or the setting of parameters. Different from previous studies, we formulate implicit SRD as a process of selecting and ranking k exemplar documents through integer linear programming (ILP). The key idea is that: for a specific query, we expect to maximize the overall relevance of the k exemplar documents. Meanwhile, we wish to maximize the representativeness of the selected exemplar documents with respect to the non-selected documents. Intuitively, if the selected exemplar documents concisely represent the entire set of documents, the novelty and diversity will naturally arise. Moreover, we propose two approaches ILP4ID (Integer Linear Programming for Implicit SRD) and AP4ID (Affinity Propagation for Implicit SRD) for solving the proposed formulation of implicit SRD. In particular, ILP4ID appeals to the strategy of bound-and-branch and is able to obtain the optimal solution. AP4ID being an approximate method transforms the target problem as a maximum-a-posteriori inference problem, and the message passing algorithm is adopted to find the solution. Furthermore, we investigate the differences and connections between the proposed models and prior models by casting them as different variants of the cluster-based paradigm for implicit SRD. To validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches, we conduct a series of experiments on four benchmark TREC diversity collections. The experimental results demonstrate that: (1) The proposed methods, especially ILP4ID, can achieve substantially improved performance over the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods for implicit SRD. (2) The initial runs, the number of input documents, query types, the ways of computing document similarity, the pre-defined cluster number and the optimization algorithm significantly affect the performance of diversification models. Careful examinations of these factors are highly recommended in the development of implicit SRD methods. Based on the in-depth study of different types of methods for implicit SRD, we provide additional insight into the cluster-based paradigm for implicit SRD. In particular, how the methods relying on greedy strategies impact the performance of implicit SRD, and how a particular diversification model should be fine-tuned.     

Stata commands for importing bibliometric data and processing author address information

Given the recent trend in bibliometrics and information science to use increasingly complex statistical methods, it is necessary to have powerful toolboxes to work with data from Web of Science (Thomson Reuters). We developed such a toolbox with four specific commands for the statistical software package Stata. These commands refer to (1) the import of downloads from Web of Science to Stata, (2) the preprocessing of address information from authors of publications in the downloaded set, (3) the geocoding of address information, and (4) the calculation of the minimum and maximum distance between several co-authors of a single paper. An advantage of developing commands for an established and comprehensive statistical software package (like Stata) is that a large number of further commands are available for the analysis of bibliometric data. We will describe some of these useful commands as well.     

The influence of game location and outcome on behaviour and mood states among professional rugby league players

In this study, we examined the relationship between home and away matches on mood. In addition, the relationships between game location, game outcome, behavioural factors, and mood were investigated among 12 professional English rugby league players competing in the Super League. Participants completed daily diaries for 27 days. The diary consisted of six analogue scales measuring mood (relaxed-tense, energetic-weary, depressed-elated, tired-alert, anxious-calm, cheerful-miserable) as well as behavioural factors and self-rated performance. There were no significant differences in self-reported mood states leading up to home or away matches except for players feeling more tired when playing away. Significant relationships between mood and behaviours (e.g. sleep and eating) and subjective performance were observed. The outcome of the match was found to influence mood, with a defeat resulting in decreased mood. Our results show that game location did not influence mood and therefore does not provide an explanation for the home advantage.     

Core issues in pricing models for scholarly journals: a qualitative overview

Rhetoric about the ideal pricing model for scholarly content is often both strident and ill‐informed. Recognition of the nature of the business model is sometimes overlooked in favour of slogans or blanket accusations. This paper reviews qualitatively some of the core issues surrounding the creation of a sustainable pricing model that will enable authors, readers, and publishers to coexist. No particular examples are recommended or rejected; what is important is that interested parties explore thoroughly the available options and make decisions based on available facts, instead of emotion or trends.