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This study assessed perspectives of NCAA D-II and D-III Athletics Directors (ADs) regarding the possible implementation of competitive e-Sports on college campuses. It examines if ADs view e-Sports as a legitimate sport in parallel with others that are traditionally offered by athletic departments, and their perspective regarding where on college campuses e-Sports should be housed. Results demonstrated that ADs view e-Sports differently than other sport programs (F = 13.439; p =.001), and this was key in determining where they thought e-Sports programs should be administered (F = 6.696; p =.013). However, some expressed a willingness to consider implementing e-Sports due to the opportunity it could present (F = 2.209; p =.021). These results suggest that an apparent conflict exists between ADs' perceptions of e-Sports and of its potential as a growth opportunity. However, if colleges decide to implement e-Sports as an athletic program, consideration should be given to governance concerns, budgetary concerns, and the health and wellness of participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper examines the possibilities for restorying the self through drama conventions using narrative poetry as a stimulus. Using the poem "The Terrorist, He's Watching" by Wislawa Szymborska to engage with drama conventions, we illustrate how educators might support young and marginalised people to participate in the process of restorying. In doing so, we argue for the importance of using poetry and drama to create meta-narratives of discourse which empower participants to restory themselves into the dominant forms of narrative through creative exploration. Szymborska's poem has been chosen as a stimulus due to the poet's use of multiple perspectives and roles, in different times and places, which enable people to reshape and reimagine their identity and explore dominant narratives about terrorism. The authors intend to follow this conceptual piece with an empirical study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microcredit schemes have become a popular means of improving smallholders' access to credit and making long term investment possible. However, it remains to be explored whether the current microcredit schemes are more successful than earlier formal small scale lending in identifying successful borrowers. We studied shrimp farming in a rural region in Bangladesh where formal microlending is well established, but where more expensive informal microlending coexists with the formal schemes. Farmers - both those who exclusively use formal loans and those who also use informal loans - remain credit-constrained; both types overutilize labour in order to reduce the need for working capital. However, the credit constraint is actually milder for the informal borrowers: the implicit shadow price of working capital is substantially higher in the group that only takes formal loans than in the group that also uses informal loans. These results suggest that informal lenders - with their closer ties to the individual farmers - remain more successful in identifying those smallholder farmers that are most likely to use the borrowed funds successfully. Informal lenders have an information advantage that formal microlenders lack: the latter need to find routes to access this information in order for formal microcredit schemes to succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study looked at the economic and financial characteristics of three range-based livestock systems on communal land in Botswana. Small-scale traditional livestock keeping is inherently efficient and provides important household income. However, these private returns are attributable to subsidies, and economic efficiency is very low due to open access. Low input, unfenced, cattle post production is economically efficient, but the returns to land are low. Fenced commercial ranching is not privately or economically viable in the more remote communal land. The loss of favoured European market access for beef could make all the systems studied economically unsound. The current subsidies to livestock production might be more economically efficient if they were redirected, from input costs reduction, to directly support initiatives that enhance the average herd productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trivalent chromium [Cr(III)] is recognized as an essential nutrient, and is widely used as a nutritional supplement for humans and animals. Recent reports of the induction of genetic damage in cultured cells exposed to Cr(III) compounds in vitro have heightened the concern that Cr(III) compounds may exert genotoxic effects under certain conditions, raising the question of the relative benefit versus risk of dietary and feed supplementation practices. We have reviewed the literature since 1990 on genotoxic effects of Cr(III) compounds to determine whether recent findings provide a sufficient weight of evidence to modify the conclusions about the safety of this dietary supplement reached in the several comprehensive reviews conducted during the period 1990-2004. The extensive literature on genotoxic effects of Cr(III) compounds includes many instances of conflicting information, with both negative and positive findings often reported in similar test systems. Outcomes of in vitro tests conducted with Cr(III) in cultured cells are quite variable regardless of the chemical form of the chromium compound tested. The in vitro data show that Cr(III) has the potential to react with DNA and to cause DNA damage in cell culture systems, but under normal circumstances, restricted access of Cr(III) to cells in vivo limits or prevents genotoxicity in biological systems. The available in vivo evidence suggests that genotoxic effects are very unlikely to occur in humans or animals exposed to nutritional or to moderate recommended supplemental levels of Cr(III). However, excessive intake of Cr(III) supplements does not appear to be warranted at this time. Thus, like other nutrients that have exhibited genotoxic effects in vitro under high exposure conditions, nutritional benefits appear to outweigh the theoretical risk of genotoxic effects in vivo at normal or modestly elevated physiological intake levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on exempla about the First Crusade. An exemplum is a specific medieval literary form. The possibility of identifying the crusade exemplum as a subgenre within the broader category of exempla exists. But exempla about crusading were not necessarily associated with crusade preaching.

The nine-dot problem is a classic in the field of human problem solving. Cognitive accounts of the problem's difficulty have been criticized on the grounds that the experimental methods on which they rely for support involve a qualitative change to the task requirements of the problem. The three experiments reported here utilize visual and visual–procedural hints to examine the notion that its difficulty is rooted in a mismatch between problem shape and solution shape. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a perceptual cue to the shape of the solution in the form of shading gave rise to only minimal improvements in performance; an additional hint about the relevance of the shading gave rise to modest, but not statistically significant, improvements. Experiment 2 replicated these findings against an additional control condition in which a solely verbal hint to violate the perceptual boundary of the problem shape was given. Furthermore, when both the verbal and visual hints were provided, performance improved only slightly. Experiment 3 provided participants with experience in producing the shape of the correct solution in problem variants closely related to the nine-dot problem. Performance on the transfer task, the basic nine-dot problem, remained at floor, however. These data suggest that visual constraint relaxation is unlikely to be the sole process by which the insight required to find a solution is achieved. The results are interpreted in terms of a previously proposed computational model of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major application of computer videotex systems is in providing access to general information for the public. Typically, information is retrieved from such systems using the menu page (or tree) method. However, findings with the major national and other systems have indicated that users have difficulty using the menu page method. A consistent finding has been that the top pages of the systems are a major source of error. The present paper proposes that providing keyword indexes as an adjunct to menus may allow users to bypass the top levels of a tree index and thus improve performance and satisfaction. The paper reports two experiments which test the feasibility of this keyword-menu method of retrieval. The first experiment simulated such a system, and found that keywords improved performance over menu-only retrieval. The second experiment tested the method on an operational Telidon system. The addition of a small keyword index (250 items) improved user performance and satisfaction. The study indicated that the addition of a limited keyword directory is likely to enhance menu retrieval for novice users. This should be true for computer retrieval in general as well as for videotex systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]