Intercultural communication for health personnel

In order to develop successful health care delivery systems, both in the United States and abroad, health service workers need to understand various cultural orientations and to communicate effectively within the cultures. The authors discuss the cultural implications of health problems in three countries, the need for training health science professionals in intercultural communication, and describe an intercultural communication course designed especially for health science students at California State University, Northridge.     

A hybrid approach to managing job offers and candidates

The evolution of the job market has resulted in traditional methods of recruitment becoming insufficient. As it is now necessary to handle volumes of information (mostly in the form of free text) that are impossible to process manually, an analysis and assisted categorization are essential to address this issue. In this paper, we present a combination of the E-Gen and Cortex systems. E-Gen aims to perform analysis and categorization of job offers together with the responses given by the candidates. E-Gen system strategy is based on vectorial and probabilistic models to solve the problem of profiling applications according to a specific job offer. Cortex is a statistical automatic summarization system. In this work, E-Gen uses Cortex as a powerful filter to eliminate irrelevant information contained in candidate answers. Our main objective is to develop a system to assist a recruitment consultant and the results obtained by the proposed combination surpass those of E-Gen in standalone mode on this task.     

How do the spellings of children with dyslexia compare with those of nondyslexic children?

Children with dyslexia are believed to have very poor phonological skills for which they compensate, to some extent, through relatively well-developed knowledge of letter patterns. We tested this view in Study 1 by comparing 25 dyslexic children and 25 younger normal children, chosen so that both groups performed, on average, at a second-grade spelling level. Phonological skill was assessed using phoneme counting and nonword spelling tasks. Knowledge of legal and illegal letter patterns was tested using a spelling choice task. The dyslexic children and the younger nondyslexic children performed similarly on all the tasks, and they had difficulty, for the most part, with the same linguistic structures. Supporting the idea that older dyslexics spellings are quite similar to those of typical beginners, we found in Study 2 that experienced teachers could not differentiate between the two groups based on their spellings.     

Stichwort: Entwicklung im Erwachsenenalter

In this review article, “aging and learning” is discussed from the perspective of life span developmental psychology. Accordingly, aging is regarded as a continuous and multidimensional process which is characterized by a potential for change (plasticity) at all ages. We give an overview of age-related changes in two psychological domains which are considered to be highly relevant for learning processes, namely cognitive resources and resources related to personality, motivation and emotion. In addition, we describe developmental contexts which were shown to contribute to plasticity in the second half of life. The findings allow for the conclusion that learning is possible throughout the adult life span, albeit under changing conditions. Key implications for learning processes and learning contexts are discussed.     

Why do high jumpers use a curved approach?

Currently, all elite high jumpers use the Fosbury Flop technique with a curved approach. This suggests that the curved approach presents some clear advantage, although there is no general agreement upon the mechanism or the mechanics. This study aimed to determine the characteristics of the approach curve and to investigate how it contributes to the generation of somersault rotation. A simple theoretical model was used to demonstrate that a tightening approach curve would change the inward lean towards the centre of the curve into outwards lean. Three-dimensional video analysis was used to record the performances of two elite male high jumpers in competition. It was found that in each case the radius of the approach curve and the inward lean angle both decreased towards the end of the approach. The amount of outward lean angular velocity generated was shown to be a major proportion of the required somersault angular velocity for a jump. It was concluded that the main advantage of a curved approach was that it resulted in the generation of somersault velocity providing the curve tightened towards the end of the approach.