Should physics students take a course in ethics?—Physicists respond

A survey was conducted of a subset of the physics community in order to gain insight into attitudes towards integrating ethics into the physics curriculum. The results indicated significant support among some groups for such an integration yet also revealed significant barriers to this process. Respondents were also asked to suggest topics which should be covered under the heading of ethical issues in physics. The great variety of results indicates both that there are many issues worth investigating and that many in the physics community have given a great deal of thought to these issues.     

The family of origin scale: A construct validation study

Data from 69 women and 63 men along with ratings from a panel of expert judges were used to assess the construct validity of the Family Of Origin Scale as a measure of family health. Loevinger's conception of construct validity, focusing on the substantive, structural, and external components of validity, was employed to organize the research procedures followed and the data analytic techniques used. Results showed that the instrument appears to be a useful measure of a warmth-coldness affect dimension in the family of origin, but the multi-dimensional structure of the test, as a measure of family-of-origin health, could not be validated. Suggestions for use, score interpretation, and further development are discussed.     

Review article

A Young Muslim's Guide to the Modern World. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 1993. Cambridge, The Islamic Texts Society. 270 pp., ISBN 0–946621–51–9

Seyyed Hossein Nasr's new book is intended both for the young Muslim born in the West and for overseas Muslim students who are studying here. It demands the serious attention not only of these groups but of all who inhabit our ‘global village’. In order to gather a range of views four postgraduate students from CSIC were invited to review the book from their particular perspectives. Two of the students were Muslim and two Christian. In both cases, one student was born in the West and the other was an overseas student. What follows are their analyses of the book.     

TIME DELAY: A TECHNIQUE TO INCREASE LANGUAGE USE AND FACILITATE GENERALIZATION IN RETARDED CHILDREN

Institutional breakfast-serving procedures were manipulated to assess what effect changes in that aspect of the environment would have on requests for food. During baseline, six severely retarded children were required to pick up their food trays and return to their seats. The first manipulation, delaying the giving of the food tray for 15 seconds, served as a cue to evoke meal requests by three of the six children. Two of the remaining three required a model of an appropriate meal request (i.e., “Tray, please.”) at the end of the 15-second delay before they began requesting their meals. To evoke meal requests from the sixth child, an intensive training procedure, consisting of massed trials of delay and modeling, was required. Three different probes were administered to assess generalization across the people serving the meals, across mealtimes, and across both people and mealtimes. Typically, generalized responding in these new situations could be prompted by use of the 15-second delay procedure. Functional aspects of the delay procedure and its potential usefulness for evoking speech and facilitating generalization are discussed.     

Semantic errors or statistical flukes? a note on allport's “on knowing the meaning of words we are unable to report”

Allport (1977) has claimed that normal subjects who view briefly a multi-word array, which is then pattern-masked, produce semantic errors analogous to those made by subjects with “deep dyslexia”. We claim that the rate at which normal subjects make such errors is consistent with their arising purely by chance.     

A multimethod generative CAI system for remedial mathematics

A computer-assisted instruction system for remedial mathematics has been written to yield four teaching methods based on two orthogonal variables: (1) With ad hoc frame orientation (AFO), training modules have a fixed order for all students, strict performance criteria must be met before moving to new modules, and students can ask only for problem solutions. With information structure orientation (ISO), the first two AFO conditions are dropped and students can also request partial answers and hints. (2) A confluent (affective) mode contrasts with didactic instruction by adding use of given names, self-report of moods, relaxation procedures, some communication with another student, and so on.     

The determination of optimal exposure to phobic stimuli in flooding therapy

The present study compared the value of various criteria for determining exposure duration to phobic stimuli in flooding therapy. Results indicated that basing exposure termination on a return to resting ranges of HR was not effective in increasing approach behavior, whereas basing termination on observer's judgements was quite effective. Employing self-reported anxiety reduction as the termination criterion was no more effective than using either the HR criterion or a procedure that combined all three criteria (HR, self-report, and observer's judgements). Self-reported fear data showed similar trends with the HR criterion again failing to produce any greater benefits than control procedures. Nine-weeks follow-up indicated a persistence of the behavioral changes with some loss of the gains in subjective anxiety, and a reduction in the differences between groups.