1,720,956 research outputs found
Grass-Root Training: a Challenge for Ethiopian Athletics
No full textInternational audienceThis paper analyses the problem of grassroots training in Ethiopian athletics, presenting the different institutions involved in athletics and their respective reasons for the lack of interest and involvement in grass-root training activities. The overall picture provided by this description reflects the poor conditions of Ethiopian athletics and the prevalence of a predatory system of selection in lieu of a comprehensive institutional organization for the promotion of sport. The data collected for this research proceed from interviews with officials of athletics federations and sponsors over several years of professional activity of the first author and on the basis of fieldwork observations by the second author
Introduction
No full textInternational audienceScientific studies on East-African distance runners usually follow the long tradition of research on ’Black’ populations, stating in essence that ‘these people are different from us‘. Generations of researchers have been basing their works on this undeclared and often unconscious premise, successively in medicine, phrenology, anatomy, physiology and more recently in genetics. And although very few of them would admit it in public, none of these research works has ever found any evidence of a more fundamental difference than the pigmentation of the skin to characterize the difference between these populations and others. Yet this paradigm is still in force, based on the deeply-rooted belief of a biological otherness of ‘Black’ populations.Challenging this tradition of research, we suggest a paradigm shift. First, discarding the premise of the biological otherness of ‘these people’. Instead, we should study them, and conduct research on them, in just the same way as we would do with ‘normal’ athletes. Is there any serious research team searching for the gene behind the success of Canadian ice-hockey players? Or any researchers measuring the ankle diameter of New-Zealand’s rugby players? This matter is not only scientific, but also political. Only hypocrites deny it. More specifically, the issue is racial, because we never look at ‘Black’ athletes in the same way we look at other athletes. As a consequence, don’t look into this book for revelations on any ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’ behind the success of Kenyan or Ethiopian runners. Simply because there is no ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’ in the East-African athletics, just as there is none in New Zealand rugby or in Canadian ice hockey
Introduction
No full textInternational audienceScientific studies on East-African distance runners usually follow the long tradition of research on ’Black’ populations, stating in essence that ‘these people are different from us‘. Generations of researchers have been basing their works on this undeclared and often unconscious premise, successively in medicine, phrenology, anatomy, physiology and more recently in genetics. And although very few of them would admit it in public, none of these research works has ever found any evidence of a more fundamental difference than the pigmentation of the skin to characterize the difference between these populations and others. Yet this paradigm is still in force, based on the deeply-rooted belief of a biological otherness of ‘Black’ populations.Challenging this tradition of research, we suggest a paradigm shift. First, discarding the premise of the biological otherness of ‘these people’. Instead, we should study them, and conduct research on them, in just the same way as we would do with ‘normal’ athletes. Is there any serious research team searching for the gene behind the success of Canadian ice-hockey players? Or any researchers measuring the ankle diameter of New-Zealand’s rugby players? This matter is not only scientific, but also political. Only hypocrites deny it. More specifically, the issue is racial, because we never look at ‘Black’ athletes in the same way we look at other athletes. As a consequence, don’t look into this book for revelations on any ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’ behind the success of Kenyan or Ethiopian runners. Simply because there is no ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’ in the East-African athletics, just as there is none in New Zealand rugby or in Canadian ice hockey
Introduction
No full textInternational audienceScientific studies on East-African distance runners usually follow the long tradition of research on ’Black’ populations, stating in essence that ‘these people are different from us‘. Generations of researchers have been basing their works on this undeclared and often unconscious premise, successively in medicine, phrenology, anatomy, physiology and more recently in genetics. And although very few of them would admit it in public, none of these research works has ever found any evidence of a more fundamental difference than the pigmentation of the skin to characterize the difference between these populations and others. Yet this paradigm is still in force, based on the deeply-rooted belief of a biological otherness of ‘Black’ populations.Challenging this tradition of research, we suggest a paradigm shift. First, discarding the premise of the biological otherness of ‘these people’. Instead, we should study them, and conduct research on them, in just the same way as we would do with ‘normal’ athletes. Is there any serious research team searching for the gene behind the success of Canadian ice-hockey players? Or any researchers measuring the ankle diameter of New-Zealand’s rugby players? This matter is not only scientific, but also political. Only hypocrites deny it. More specifically, the issue is racial, because we never look at ‘Black’ athletes in the same way we look at other athletes. As a consequence, don’t look into this book for revelations on any ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’ behind the success of Kenyan or Ethiopian runners. Simply because there is no ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’ in the East-African athletics, just as there is none in New Zealand rugby or in Canadian ice hockey
Introduction
No full textInternational audienceScientific studies on East-African distance runners usually follow the long tradition of research on ’Black’ populations, stating in essence that ‘these people are different from us‘. Generations of researchers have been basing their works on this undeclared and often unconscious premise, successively in medicine, phrenology, anatomy, physiology and more recently in genetics. And although very few of them would admit it in public, none of these research works has ever found any evidence of a more fundamental difference than the pigmentation of the skin to characterize the difference between these populations and others. Yet this paradigm is still in force, based on the deeply-rooted belief of a biological otherness of ‘Black’ populations.Challenging this tradition of research, we suggest a paradigm shift. First, discarding the premise of the biological otherness of ‘these people’. Instead, we should study them, and conduct research on them, in just the same way as we would do with ‘normal’ athletes. Is there any serious research team searching for the gene behind the success of Canadian ice-hockey players? Or any researchers measuring the ankle diameter of New-Zealand’s rugby players? This matter is not only scientific, but also political. Only hypocrites deny it. More specifically, the issue is racial, because we never look at ‘Black’ athletes in the same way we look at other athletes. As a consequence, don’t look into this book for revelations on any ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’ behind the success of Kenyan or Ethiopian runners. Simply because there is no ‘mystery’ or ‘secret’ in the East-African athletics, just as there is none in New Zealand rugby or in Canadian ice hockey
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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