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The purpose of this paper is to provide aging services professional insights into older adult responses to brain fitness programs that may not appear on quantitative program evaluations.

Qualitative data obtained via observations, instructor interviews and feedback, open-ended responses on course evaluations and participant focus groups.

Participants come to brain fitness programs with a variety of expectations and preferences about program content. Some are looking for educational content, some wanted to learn memory strategies, and others are looking for drilling or brain games. Participants responded very positively to descriptions of brain fitness research and scientific details. However, presenting such content posed a challenge to non-expert instructors, and efforts should be made to reduce this burden. Instructors can play a valuable role in goal setting, but instructors and participants felt that small rewards for meeting goals were unnecessary. Both instructors and participants felt that peer-to-peer interaction is a particularly valuable component of such courses. Overburdening participants should also be avoided. Organizations offering the program were also found to be adapting the course to better fit the organization’s capacities and the desires of participants.

The participant population is largely Caucasian, well-educated and middle to high socioeconomic status.

Due to the characteristics of the participant population, it is not known which, if any, of the findings apply to a less well-educated, lower income populations, or populations from other racial/ethnic groups.

These insights can assist senior living professionals in successfully creating, adopting or adapting brain fitness programs in order to best meet the needs of the populations that they serve.

Discusses the issues associated with a surge in information demand in a relatively small organization. Introduces the idea of imaging and text retrieval to handle information demand. Discusses the criteria used by the Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) organization to make its decision on selecting a product. Presents situations in which use of the imaging and text retrieval system has had significant impact on the day‐to‐day conduct of business in the organization.

This paper explores four works of contemporary fiction to illuminate formal and informal regulation of sex. The paper’s co-authors frame analysis with the story of their creation of a transdisciplinary course, entitled “Regulating Sex: Historical and Cultural Encounters,” in which students mined literature for social critique, became immersed in the study of law and its limits, and developed increased sensitivity to power, its uses, and abuses. The paper demonstrates the value theoretically and pedagogically of third-wave feminisms, wild zones, and contact zones as analytic constructs and contends that including sex and sexualities in conversations transforms personal experience, education, society, and culture, including law.

The transition from school to higher education is a complex process. Peer mentoring is often used by institutions to facilitate this process. The purpose of this research, which was conducted at a South African university, was to determine whether a peer mentoring programme, which involved a large number of students and a limited number of mentors, could successfully assist students to adapt to the academic and psychosocial demands of university life.

A sequential explanatory mixed method design was implemented. In the first phase, a questionnaire was used to collect data to establish participants' experience of the programme. The findings from the questionnaire were used to inform the qualitative phase, in which the participants' perceptions of the benefits of the mentor programme were further explored by means of group interviews. The qualitative data were analysed using inductive qualitative content analysis.

The results indicate that a structured peer mentoring programme, in which a mentor works with up to 70 mentees in a group setting, can be a useful tool to assist with students' transition to university. The research found that the peer mentoring programme contributed to the students' academic, social and personal integration into the higher education environment.

The perspectives of mentors and faculty were not included. No comparative study with students who did not participate in the programme was conducted.

This research illustrates that it is possible to mentor large groups of disadvantaged and vulnerable students notwithstanding limited resources.

In contrast to the existing literature on peer mentoring in higher education, which focuses on one-on-one or small-group mentoring, this research suggests that peer mentoring of larger groups can also play an important role in assisting students to transition to higher education. The description of the programme and the benefits students derived from it offer other institutions with limited resources some ideas about how a peer mentoring programme can be implemented.

The purpose of this paper is to summarise the available risk and assessment tools for child abuse material (CAM) offenders. Noting the rise of internet-based offences surrounding CAM, it has been proposed that there may be substantial differences between internet only (IO) offenders, contact only and mixed profile sexual offenders.

Through online searches, risk assessment tools for sexual offenders were identified. Scoring manuals were consulted for applicability to IO offenders.

Nine risk assessment tools for sexual offenders were included. Risk assessment tools for sexual offenders use cautionary language regarding the application of sexual offence risk assessment tools to IO offenders. An additional five tools were identified specifically addressing IO offenders. Three of these tools address risk assessment and two assess cognitions and behaviours.

Limitations include the identification of static and dynamic risk factors and the application of structured professional judgement.

By drawing together existing tools and recommendations for use with the IO offender population, a gap is identified for CAM specific risk assessment tools.

Appropriate risk assessment, case planning and treatment will contribute to the appropriate management and treatment of the IO offender population.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

This chapter weaves together the voices of five teachers and teacher educators (two first-year classroom teachers and three teacher education faculty) collaborating to better understand socially just outcomes in the field of English language arts teacher preparation. Building from the premise that it is the seeking of multiple perspectives and the notion of voice that lie at the heart of socially just pedagogy, this collaboration aims to tell one story – a research narrative – through many voices. As White, female educator-researchers who experience privilege along a multitude of dimensions (e.g., socioeconomic status, language, race, ability, sexual orientation), the authors embrace activist-ally identities that seek to understand systemic injustices; act with an empowered and critically self-reflective sense of agency; and mobilize their resources in concert with others. This chapter narrates the authors’ learning of how activist-oriented teaching and research is (and might be) conceptualized and realized in the contexts of their work in one public high school, one K-12 charter school, and one teacher education program. Each author will share the inspirations, successes, and barriers she encountered while purposefully eliciting the perspectives, questions, and voices of multiple stakeholders, including K-12 students, cooperating school personnel, families, and other community members. Through the telling of this story as a collage of many voices, the authors hope to encourage others to act as allies for social justice on the ground – that is, in the teacher education and K-12 classrooms where we learn to teach as we consider how that learning impacts those it most directly affects.