Search results

The purpose of this study was to investigate effects of existential counseling on 20 police officers. Existential group therapy was expected to change locus of control beliefs from external to internal, have a positive effect on self‐efficacy, and assist in lowering aggressive tendencies.

An experimental research design was used to compare effects of existential group therapy on police officers with an untreated control group of police officers. Both groups completed the self‐efficacy scale, belief in personal control, aggression questionnaire prior to and following the 20‐week treatment program. A short demographic survey was completed prior to beginning the study.

No changes were found from pre‐test to post‐test on self‐efficacy, locus of control, and aggression. While the statistical findings were not significant, anecdotal comments indicated that police officers benefited from their participation in the program.

The sample size was too small to allow for generalizations to all police officers in the large urban area in which the study was conducted. Additional research with a larger group is needed to validate the findings of the present study.

Although no statistically significant differences were found, the participants in the treatment group reported personal and professional benefits from learning that their peers experienced some of the same concerns when dealing with the public and superiors.

No research was found that had used police officers in counseling groups to help them become more internal and less aggressive.

The Chemistry Online Retrieval Experiment (CORE), a five‐year R&D project, was one of the earliest attempts to make a substantial volume of the text and graphics from previously published scholarly journals available to end‐users in electronic form, across a computer network. Since CORE dealt with material that had already gone through traditional print publication, its emphasis was on the process (and limitations) of conversion, the optimization of presentation, and use of the converted contents for readers. This article focuses on the user response to the system.

Though contemporaries, Adam Smith and Sir James Steuart are commonly portrayed as if they belonged to different eras. Whereas Smith went down in history as both founder of the science of political economy and patron saint of economic liberalism, Steuart became known as the last, outdated advocate for mercantilist policies in Britain. Smith himself was responsible for popularizing the notion of the “system of commerce” as an approach to political economy that dominated the early modern period. As a historiographical concept, the mercantile system became a misguided international trade theory grounded upon the Midas fallacy and the favorable balance of trade doctrine. Smith’s treatment of international trade in the Wealth of Nations, however, was criticized for its inconsistencies and lack of analytical clarity even by some among his own followers. Given Smith’s doubtful credentials as an international trade theorist, the chapter investigates the reasons that led him and Steuart to be placed on opposite sides of the mercantilist divide. The authors analyze the works of both authors in depth, showing that their disagreements had chiefly to do with different views on money and monetary policy. Additionally, the authors explore how early nineteenth-century writers such as Jean-Baptiste Say and J. R. McCulloch helped forge the intellectual profiles of both Steuart and Smith.

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.

A NEW YEAR is always a time for a glance backwards and forwards, in the library world as in other worlds. If 1937 was not particularly dramatic in events or achievements, it was at least a year which was not unworthy in the library movement. A list of the libraries which came into being appears every year in the Annual Report of the L.A. and we are convinced that the one for the year just ended will be quite sizeable. The opening of a branch library now‐a‐days, as an addition to a large system, or to serve a lately‐populated part of a new area, excites little comment; and that, in itself, is significant and gratifying. People are coming to regard the provision of public libraries as a normal part of urban and even village equipment.

CONFERENCES are becoming difficult. Recently the chairman of the Ray Committee remarked that there were too many of them, and added that if they were held in Wigan rather than Bournemouth or such places they would not be well attended. The assumption is that we attend them for our pleasure only. We do find pleasure in them, but any delegate who goes through a Library Association Conference has done a week's work more strenuous than most men do in their busiest business weeks. In fact he is worked much too hard. Sir William Ray is too experienced a public man not to know why an assembly of several thousands of persons cannot descend on places which are without accommodation. In any case the Library Association has met in recent years in Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow, which have their amenities but are not exactly pleasure resorts.

ALL the auguries for the Bournemouth Conference appear to be good. Our local secretary, Mr. Charles Riddle, seems to have spared neither energy nor ability to render our second visit to the town, whose libraries he initiated and has controlled for thirty‐seven years, useful and enjoyable. There will not be quite so many social events as usual, but that is appropriate in the national circumstances. There will be enough of all sorts of meetings to supply what the President of the A.L.A. describes as “the calling which collects and organizes books and other printed matter for the use and benefit of mankind and which brings together the reader and the printed word in a vital relationship.” We hope the discussions will be thorough, but without those long auto‐biographical speeches which are meant for home newspapers, that readers will make time for seeing the exhibitions, and that Bournemouth will be a source of health and pleasure to all our readers who can be there.

IN the meridian of the year the librarian, like other people, turns his back upon his work, and with gleeful heart hies him away to sea or mountain side, there to forget for a brief season book and pen and general public, and all the worries which vex the soul of the servant of these three mighty taskmasters. A little before the happy time of freedom a sudden and deep disgust for his work and everything connected with it will seize upon his soul. He feels the need of a wider horizon than that of five by three—the catalogue card. The neatness and order of his classified shelves in which he was wont to take such delight and pride appear to him now but a vanity and a vexation of the spirit. Oh, for something unclassified, like nature, where rock and tree and water and air and sky are not parcelled out and separated one from another, in the trivial sortage of the laboratory or shop, but all are piled together in grand and sharp confusion, or subtly blended in exquisite harmonies which defy the namer and confound the analyst. Then do the days drag slowly along until the curtain of the roll‐top desk is finally shut down, and the wearied labourer goes forth—free.

“Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at any consideration of “good” and “evil” as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative, to be a class matter… It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil.” Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, Warning to the West, 1975.

If one were revisiting the list of the Seven Wonders of the World, Uzbekistan and the Silk Road region would offer many candidates. The Registan in Samarkand, the central square in Bukhara, the Ichan Kala in Khiva, all offer architectural marvel after marvel. Our task, sadly, is to consider wonders of another kind. Any list of the worst disasters of the world would also rank Uzbekistan at the top, making clear reference to the massive transformation of western Uzbekistan (and Kazakhstan) from home to the fourth largest inland sea to host of a barren desert. All of the waterborne life force of the Aral Sea has been swept from the region and converted into dry sands and dusty winds. The void that remains is a scar on nature of unprecedented magnitude. In the Aral's collapse, the disaster has sucked into its vacuum the peoples of the region, their lives and livelihood, their health and well being, and certainly their hopes and aspirations. And it has created regional and global issues of great urgency and sensitivity.