Health benefits of Kung Fu: a systematic review

The Chinese martial arts (Kung Fu) have existed for centuries and are generally accepted as being beneficial for health without much empirical data. The aim of this systematic review was to assess the health effects of "hard" Kung Fu styles by performing electronic and manual searches of the literature. The aspects of health and the Kung Fu style examined varied between most studies; in some cases, the martial art group consisted of practitioners of other martial art styles also. Of 2103 references identified, only nine papers were eligible and reviewed. All were observational studies, observing a range of health aspects possibly related to Kung Fu training or performance. Our findings suggest that there is no evidence that Kung Fu practice is associated with the prevention or treatment of any health condition. However, as a moderate- to high-intensity form of aerobic exercise, it may confer benefits similar to those attributed to other aerobic training modalities. However, this hypothesis remains to be tested in clinical trials. Physiological benefits (e.g., aerobic capacity and bone density) may be associated with long-term Kung Fu practice. Future research in this area should adopt experimental designs, clearly identifying eligibility criteria, testing and training protocols, and include health-related outcomes and documentation of adverse events, to advance knowledge in this field.     

Path analysis of self-efficacy and diving performance revisited

The Feltz (1982) path analysis of the relationship between diving efficacy and performance showed that, over trials, past performance was a stronger predictor than self-efficacy of performance. Bandura (1997) criticized the study as statistically "overcontrolling" for past performance by using raw past performance scores along with self-efficacy as predictors of performance. He suggests residualizing past performance by regressing the raw scores on self-efficacy and entering them into the model to remove prior contributions of self-efficacy imbedded in past performance scores. To resolve this controversy, we reanalyzed the Feltz data using three statistical models: raw past performance, residual past performance, and a method that residualizes past performance and self-efficacy. Results revealed that self-efficacy was a stronger predictor of performance in both residualized models than in the raw past performance model. Furthermore, the influence of past performance on future performance was weaker when the residualized methods were conducted.     

大学生“村官”参与新农村建设问题研究综述

大学生＂村官＂参与新农村建设问题是近年来党和政府、社会及学界非常关注的热点问题,学界对这一问题已经开始了积极地研究,并取得了不少研究成果,但目前的研究尚处于不成熟阶段。试图从大学生＂村官＂产生的必要性、对新农村建设的意义和作用、存在的问题及其对策等几个方面,对学界的研究成果进行了梳理和比较,在此基础上作出简要评析,以期为完善我国大学生＂村官＂政策和促进新农村建设提供参考与借鉴。     

Secondary analysis of large-scale assessment data: an alternative to variable-centred analysis

International large-scale assessments are now part of the educational landscape in many countries and often feed into major policy decisions. Yet, such assessments also provide data sets for secondary analysis that can address key issues of concern to educators and policymakers alike. Traditionally, such secondary analyses have been based on a variable-centred approach that gives rise to league tables. In the study reported here, a person-centred analysis is used as an alternative to the traditional approach. Data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) were analysed to investigate Asian students' attitudes to their future civic participation. Cluster analysis with validity measures showed that 4 distinct groups of students were identified within the societies studied thus highlighting the diversity within the samples. These results cannot be achieved with a conventional variable approach to analysis, and they suggest the usefulness of exploring alternative approaches to secondary data analysis.     

Broadcasting and Cable

Larry James Gianakos' Television Drama Series Programming: A Comprehensive Chronicle, 1959-1975 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978—$27.50)

Albert C. Book and Norman D. Cary's The Radio and Television Commercial (Chicago: Crain Books, 1978—$6.95, paper)

Jay S. Harris's TV Guide: The First 25 Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978—$14.95)

Steven R. Rivkin's A New Guide to Federal Cable Television Regulations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978—$25.00)

Felix Chin's Cable Television: A Comprehensive Bibliography (New York: Plenum Publishing, 1978—$45.00)     

Challenging the Visual Discourse of Reading: or,Do Teen Readers Look Like Google Images?

Popular culture images of reading tend to portray readers as solitary individuals deeply immersed in reading a single text in a quiet, undisturbed spot. Yet, in our documentation of adolescent students reading in Singapore secondary schools, we find that there are many ways and modes of reading, much of which is social in nature. Through the use of comparative, critical visual analysis, this paper expands the understanding of what it means to read and to understand how adolescent readers experience reading in school contexts. Visual images serve to disrupt dominant readings of what counts as reading to elicit new considerations for engaging adolescents in reading.     

Handling Missing Data in the Modeling of Intensive Longitudinal Data

Myriad approaches for handling missing data exist in the literature. However, few studies have investigated the tenability and utility of these approaches when used with intensive longitudinal data. In this study, we compare and illustrate two multiple imputation (MI) approaches for coping with missingness in fitting multivariate time-series models under different missing data mechanisms. They include a full MI approach, in which all dependent variables and covariates are imputed simultaneously, and a partial MI approach, in which missing covariates are imputed with MI, whereas missingness in the dependent variables is handled via full information maximum likelihood estimation. We found that under correctly specified models, partial MI produces the best overall estimation results. We discuss the strengths and limitations of the two MI approaches, and demonstrate their use with an empirical data set in which children’s influences on parental conflicts are modeled as covariates over the course of 15 days (Schermerhorn, Chow, & Cummings, 2010).