Scale of attitudes of schoolchildren towards immigrant pupils

In the academic year 2004–2005, approximately 400,000 immigrant pupils were enrolled in Spanish schools and six-form colleges. The racial and ethnic diversity that Spanish society and schools present could be a source of new opportunities and social enrichment, for the national as well as the immigrant population. However, this contact between nationals and immigrants is not free of problems. School is one of the areas where attitudes towards different social groups begin to be formed, while at the same time being the main opportunity that our society has to create an environment of coexistence and attitudinal change. The first step to look at such a complex phenomenon in more detail is to have evaluation tools available that allow us to measure it. In this article we present the results referring to psychometric features, and we carry out a differential analysis of the Scale of attitudes of school-children towards immigrant pupils.     

Black women’s bodies,ideology, and the public curriculum of the pro- and anti-choice movements in the US

This paper explores how opposite sides of the abortion debate employ a discourse of endangerment to mobilise political support for their ideologies about black women’s bodies. I examine the role of black women within that rhetorical strategy through various rhetorical artefacts. To analyse these artefacts, I employ the theoretical framework of ideological or ideographic criticism. This framework helps us see how the artefacts used by both pro and anti-choice movements ‘condition’ the audience not merely to adopt a set of ‘beliefs and behavior, but a vocabulary of concepts that function as guides, warrants, reasons, or excuses for behavior and belief’. Though the two sides of the abortion debate differ in their overt political views, they turn out to share an implicit ideology about black women. This ideology prevents the voices of black women from being heard and valued in a debate that is nonetheless focused on black women’s bodies.     

Failure is not an option: Entrepreneurship and the existential crisis of internationalization in the U.S.

Internationalization has become intertwined with efforts for institutions to compensate for declines in public funding with the development of new revenue streams. The purpose of this study is to understand the social construction of entrepreneurship in internationalization in the United States as well as explore the multiple meanings of entrepreneurship and its contradictions in discourse among senior international officers. The findings discuss and explore competing views, tensions and ethical complexities of the ‘new entrepreneurism’ increasingly common in internationalization, which blends creative problem-solving with pressures for revenue generation. The findings of this study illustrate that as the world faces genuine existential crises that threaten the continued existence of our species on the planet, internationalization is in the midst of an identity crisis. The drift towards privatization is proving to be increasingly unsustainable and an entirely insufficient response to the existential threats that face the world.     

NATSUM: Narrative abstractive summarization through cross-document timeline generation

A new approach to narrative abstractive summarization (NATSUM) is presented in this paper. NATSUM is centered on generating a narrative chronologically ordered summary about a target entity from several news documents related to the same topic. To achieve this, first, our system creates a cross-document timeline where a time point contains all the event mentions that refer to the same event. This timeline is enriched with all the arguments of the events that are extracted from different documents. Secondly, using natural language generation techniques, one sentence for each event is produced using the arguments involved in the event. Specifically, a hybrid surface realization approach is used, based on over-generation and ranking techniques. The evaluation demonstrates that NATSUM performed better than extractive summarization approaches and competitive abstractive baselines, improving the F1-measure at least by 50%, when a real scenario is simulated.     

Rivalries: China,Japan and South Korea – Memory,Modernity, Politics,Geopolitics – and Sport

Sport is an effective modern means for revealing a country's political preoccupations and geopolitical concerns. For China, Japan and South Korea, the pre-eminent countries in the recent Asian Games, sport has become a sharp tool for promoting nationalism and national identity. There is a history of bitter rivalry between these countries, not least, due to Japan's occupation of Korea and the Second Sino-Japanese War, the largest Asian war in the twentieth century. Consequently, a prominent characteristic of Korean and Chinese nationalism is anti-Japanese antipathy. This essay examines China–Japan–Korea rivalry through global sports events hosted in Asia during the past decade cumulating in the Guangzhou Asian Games. Here, the focus is on the use of these events as manifestations of resentment and revenge arising out of historic rivalries. This use may well grow in intensity as these nations grow in wealth, confidence and power as the EAST ASIAN EPOCH comes closer. This essay is the first to draw attention to the tripartite politics of sport as confrontation in the region's past, present and future.     

Execution time, kinetics, and kinematics of the mae-geri kick: comparison of national and international standard karate athletes

Little is known of the performance characteristics of the shotokan karate mae-geri kick. The aim of this study was to compare the execution time, the lower limb kinetics and kinematics, and their respective repeatability in the mae-geri kick of karate athletes of two different standards. Seventeen adult black belt karate competitors (9 national and 8 international athletes) performed six kicks with their dominant lower limb on a striking surface, combining maximum force impact and velocity. Execution time of movement and lower limb kinematics were recorded with a high-speed camera. Maximum force at impact and the forces exerted on the ground were measured using three force plates. The duration of the kick was significantly shorter for international than for national standard athletes. However, no significant difference in the maximum impact force of the kick was observed between the two groups. In addition, significant kinematic differences were observed between the groups, with two angles of motion and one velocity peak occurring sooner in the kick movement for the international athletes, specifically for the knee joint. International athletes also performed the kick with a significantly higher repeatability for duration and kinematics, specifically during the pre-loading phase that precedes the attack phase. We conclude that the duration of the kick and repeatability of lower limb kinematics could be useful in selecting top-level karate athletes and monitoring their training status.