Branding the Role and Value of Intercollegiate Athletics

In this paper, I critically examine Myles Brand’s criticisms of what he calls the Standard View of the role and value of intercollegiate athletics. According to Brand, the Standard View, held by most faculty members, undervalues college sports and should be replaced by the Integrated View that properly stresses the educational value of participating in athletics. I claim that Brand’s analogical argument has a variety of problems. I show that Brand’s conclusion, derived from his attempt to compare the experiences of student-musicians and student-athletes is unpersuasive, yet his argument forces us to confront persistent and important questions about liberal arts education and the role and value of the arts, especially music, in higher education.     

Introduction: Political Communication in Asia

This study analyses the structure of programmes of the Bangladesh Television (BTV) broadcast over a period of 23 years (1966–89). It presents an analysis of programmes of ten different time‐points, and determines the changes over this time period. The ratio of imported and domestic programmes in Bangladesh Television is also studied. One of the findings of this study is that television in Bangladesh is used predominantly as a medium of entertainment since its inception in 1964 and is still being treated as such. Despite phenomenal development in the technical facilities, its structure of programmes remains almost the same. This study also reveals that Bangladesh Television is still dependent upon imported programmes to a large extent to feed its transmission hour.     

Medical Education in China

The Earliest chapters of the history of medicine in China are shrouded in the mists of four thousand and even five thousand years ago.     

Initial-link duration and acquisition of preference in concurrent chains

Initial-link response allocation in concurrent chains becomes less extreme as the absolute duration of the initial links increases (Fantino, 1969). The present study asked whether initial-link duration affected how quickly response allocation reached asymptote (i.e., acquisition of preference). Six pigeons were trained on a concurrent-chains procedure in which the terminal links were fixed-interval (FI) 8 sec FI 16 sec or FI 16 sec FI 8 sec and were reversed every 20 sessions. Across conditions, all possible combinations of transitions between variable-interval (VI) 8-sec (short) and VI 24-sec (long) initial-link schedules were studied. Overall, the rate of acquisition was faster when the durations of the initial links preceding the reversal were short rather than long, and when the durations of the initial links following the reversal were long rather than short. By contrast, initial-link duration had no effect on acquisition or asymptotic measures of temporal control of terminal-link responding. These results support the core principle of delay-reduction theory (Fantino, 1969) that the impact of a conditioned reinforcer varies directly with initial-link duration, but also suggest that temporal learning during the terminal links proceeds independently of initial-link duration. nt]mis|These data were presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis, Boston, May 2004.