One hundred and fifty years of sprint and distance running – Past trends and future prospects

Sprint and distance running have experienced remarkable performance improvements over the past century. Attempts to forecast running performances share an almost similarly long history but have relied so far on relatively short data series. Here, we compile a comprehensive set of season-best performances for eight Olympically contested running events. With this data set, we conduct (1) an exponential time series analysis and (2) a power-law experience curve analysis to quantify the rate of past performance improvements and to forecast future performances until the year 2100. We find that the sprint and distance running performances of women and men improve exponentially with time and converge at yearly rates of 4% ± 3% and 2% ± 2%, respectively, towards their asymptotic limits. Running performances can also be modelled with the experience curve approach, yielding learning rates of 3% ± 1% and 6% ± 2% for the women's and men's events, respectively. Long-term trends suggest that: (1) women will continue to run 10–20% slower than men, (2) 9.50 s over 100 m dash may only be broken at the end of this century and (3) several middle- and long-distance records may be broken within the next two to three decades. The prospects of witnessing a sub-2 hour marathon before 2100 remain inconclusive. Our results should be interpreted cautiously as forecasting human behaviour is intrinsically uncertain. The future season-best sprint and distance running performances will continue to scatter around the trends identified here and may yield unexpected improvements of standing world records.     

Discipline and the gifted child

The gap between intellectual and social development in gifted children can be bridged by providing opportunities for expanded social experiences.     

Informationist programme in support of biomedical research: a programme description and preliminary findings of an evaluation

BACKGROUND: The informationist programme at the Library of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD, USA has grown to 14 informationists working with 40 clinical and basic science research teams. PURPOSE: This case report, intended to contribute to the literature on informationist programmes, describes the NIH informationist programme, including implementation experiences, the informationists' training programme, their job responsibilities and programme outcomes. BRIEF DESCRIPTION: The NIH informationist programme was designed to enhance the library's service capacity. Over time, the steps for introducing the service to new groups were formalized to ensure support by leadership, the team being served and the library. Job responsibilities also evolved from traditional library roles to a wide range of knowledge management activities. The commitment by the informationist, the team and the library to continuous learning is critical to the programme's success. RESULTS / OUTCOMES: NIH scientists reported that informationists saved them time and contributed to teamwork with expert searching and point-of-need instruction. Process evaluation helped refine the programme. EVALUATION METHOD: High-level, preliminary outcomes were identified from a survey of scientists receiving informationist services, along with key informant interviews. Process evaluation examined service implementation, informationists' training and service components. Anecdotal evidence has also indicated a favourable response to the programme.     

A Rational Analysis of the Process of Instruction

Instruction is defined as a process for controlling student behavior so as to insure student learning, rather than as a process for merely presenting information to students to learn in whatever way they can. Learning, in turn, is defined in terms of behavioral associationism. Thus, the problem of specifying an instructional program so as to lead to effective control of student learning as directly as possible is largely a problem of adequately describing the behaviors required of the student at specified points in the instructional program. The main body of the paper is concerned with the general application of these basic definitions to the problems of: 1) Identifying what it is that is to be learned, 2) Sequencing the order in which instructional materials are to be presented, 3) Designing instructional situations for accomplishing the desired learning. Evaluation is defined as consisting of two major aspects: 1) Evaluation of the effectiveness of the instruction for inculcating students with the behaviors selected for them to learn, 2) Evaluation of the effectiveness of the behaviors selected for the student to learn for producing adequate job performance.     

Extracting knowledge from U.S. department of defense freedom of information act requests with social media

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has facilitated the release of large amounts of government information that has been of great value to researchers, journalists, and other interested parties. The fraction of this information released in electronic format has been growing as has its volume. While offering great potential for research, large amounts of data disgorged from government information systems can pose challenges to human interpretation and knowledge extraction. Using the Office of the Secretary of Defense/Joint Staff Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Logs for 2007–2009, this research identifies (1) a process for finding relationships between the FOIA requests through keywords extracted from Wikipedia and (2) a technique for visualizing these relationships in order to provide context and improve understanding when working with born-digital government data.     

Child sexual abuse: A study of prevalence in Great Britain

Of 2019 men and women (aged 15 years and over) interviewed as part of a MORI Survey of a nationally representative sample of Great Britain, 10% reported that they had been sexually abused before the age of 16 (12% of females; 8% of males). There was no increased risk associated with specific social class categories or area of residence. For all types of sexual abuse, the mean age of victims when first abused was significantly lower for females. Subjective reports of the effects of sexual abuse indicated that the majority (51%) felt harmed by the experience, while only 4% reported that it had improved the quality of their life. We estimate that there are over 4.5 million adults in Great Britain who were sexually abused as children, and that a potential 1,117,000 children will be sexually abused before they are 15 years of age. At least 143,000 of these will be abused within the family. The social and mental health implications are enormous, and the authors suggest that an effective intervention and prevention policy is urgently required.