Patricia Vertinsky

Clinical styles and motivation: a study of laboratory test use.

The study reported in this paper examines clinical reasoning styles with a focus on laboratory utilization. A stratified sample of 80 physicians participated in the solution of a simulated patient management problem. The analysis focuses on variation in the portfolio of laboratory tests ordered as a function of practice setting (e.g., physicians in practice versus physicians in training). The study also examines the response of physicians to the imposition of constraints on ordering, as well as behavior, when unlimited ordering capacity is provided. Overall, the data profiles emerging from the analysis indicate the variety inherent in physician decision-making strategies, and point to the necessity of employing a cautious and flexible approach toward any general scheme of constraints upon medical diagnostic procedures.

Risk benefit analysis of health promotion: opportunities and threats for physical education.

This paper examines the oppomnity for developing new professional molds in physical education presented by the increasing popularity of health promotion and lifestyle management techniques. Mobiiing the physical education profession to assist the transformation of North Americans into a society of healthy people, however, must be tempered with a careful look at the threats contained within the opportunity of building a platform upon “suasion for health.” Four contentious issues regarding the implanting of beliefs about desirable levels of health and fitness, and the promotion of techniques to correct and sustain these levels, are identified as grist for professional concern. These are (a) the misuse and costs of suasion, (b) imposing values packaged in scientific wrapping, (c) social inequities and individual consequences resulting from a choice of the locus of responsibility, and (d) biases in the communication of health risk information. This paper then enumerates the direct costs and benefits accruing ...

Mind the Gap (or Mending It): Qualitative Research and Interdisciplinarity in Kinesiology

This article addresses the perceived gap between the humanities and social sciences, and the sciences in kinesiology faculties and departments as interdisciplinary pressures mount in an increasingly complex world. I use an historical lens to highlight past difficulties in working across the two solitudes and describe Stephen Jay Goulds efforts to mend the gap. Likening the humanities to the cunning fox and science to the persistent hedgehog, he argued that with care the two seeming opposites can be unified. I discuss how kinesiologists might follow his advice in developing more fertile collaborative interdisciplinary approaches in research, teaching, and professional training and provide some suggestions for mechanisms that might enhance the benefits of working together to bridge the divide. I conclude that we had better seek productive ways—in mutual respect and frequent conversations—to stick together in our broad and useful diversity.

Making Chinese-Canadian masculinities in Vancouver's physical education curriculum

Our paper illustrates how males of Chinese descent in British Columbia (BC) have historically been victims of overt and subtle forms of discrimination, and describes how racism is and was integrally linked to notions of class, gender and the body. Highlighted in our historical overview are issues around race and masculinity for Chinese males as they existed (and still exist) in the BC educational system, especially in sport-related and physical education (PE) contexts. We examine how some of these issues continue to impact Vancouvers schools through Millingtons (2006) study of masculinities in secondary PE which showed how that environment, while offering the potential for various masculinities to flourish, tended to promote hegemonic gender identities as ‘normal’. In particular, we show how Chinese-Canadian boys, both Canadian born as well as more recent immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, continue to be subject to subtle racist understandings of Chinese masculinities—understandings that are often camouflaged by the dominant national rhetoric of multiculturalism. We conclude the paper by arguing that if indeed schools’ curricula exacerbate problematic understandings of race and masculinity that underlie discriminatory behaviours and attitudes, then physical educators need the tools to develop strategies for change.

Prediction of wins and losses in a series of field hockey games: A study of probability assessment quality and cognitive information-processing models of players

Abstract The ability of players in a competitive team sport to assess win/loss probabilities, and the role that feedback plays in improving the quality of their assessments are the major foci of this study. The paper describes a study of sequential probability assessments by members of a womens field hockey team participating in a championship series. Several classes of cognitive models of probability revision were postulated and tested. The results of the paper indicate that (1) players generally attain a high level of calibration in their assessments, (2) their assessments are reliable and of high quality, (3) those who systematically and sensitively revise their probabilities attain, on average, significantly higher quality forecasts than those who are more conservative in responding to feedback scores, and (4) most of those who systematically revise their assessments in response to feedback scores appear to employ myopic models utilizing information about only one team—either their own or their opponents.

The gendering of physical education in Hong Kong: east, west or global?

How gender operates is a key factor in the ways in which physical education is organized, taught and experienced by students and teachers. This essay highlights the gendered contours of the history of physical education development in Hong Kong, its Chinese heritage and its colonial foundations – the persistent influence of British approaches to physical education teacher education and the promotion of sport. The paper is a collaborative work between Chinese-born and Western scholars. It examines the relative influences of Chinese attitudes towards gender roles and the active, sporting body and the continued impact of Western approaches to physical education and sport in a post-colonial society.

Japan's Energy Strategy at the Crossroads

HE WORLD OF ENERGY POLICY is characterized by sharp discontinuil ties and high stakes. Responses to energy supply uncertainties and the quest for energy security vary among nations, reflecting the different decision-making systems, resource profiles, and the values and perceptions of the future which are dominant in a country at a particular time. Indeed, the energy strategies of Japan reflect its unique social decisionmaking system and position as a major actor in world energy markets, with few natural resources except for a large population and a system disciplined to pursue national economic security objectives. The importance of Japan in the energy sphere, however, is not limited to the effects of its own consumption upon short-term supply and demand for different fuels. Japan has successfully changed technologies, which, in turn, has affected world demand patterns for energy, and influenced the longer-term development of certain important global energy resources such as coal. The attributes of Japans energy strategies in the past two decades provide an interesting model of response to a turbulent, complex environment. The Japanese model masterfully blends aggressive and defensive tactics, harmonizes competition with cooperation, and combines a longer-term assessment of domestic and international events with flexibility and a sensitive response to the current environment. In this article we analyze the development of Japanese energy policy and attempt to predict Japans future actions to secure its energy supply.

‘Building the Body Beautiful’ in The Women's League of Health and Beauty: yoga and female agency in 1930s Britain

Techniques of the body, claimed Marcel Mauss in 1935, were the vehicle societies employed to express their values. Arguing that politics goes nowhere without movement, this paper explores the visibility of movement aesthetics in Britain during the 1930s through the activities of the League of Health and Beauty and its mother–daughter leaders, Mary Bagot Stack and Prunella Stack. It argues that Mary Bagot Stacks introduction of yoga to the Leagues keep fit activities encouraged an element of female agency and embodied freedom that was diminished as Prunellas concerns were drawn increasingly toward national imperatives of fitness regimentation modeled upon fascist physical training schemes in Europe.

'Dancing class': schooling the dance in colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong.

Dance education has not played a significant role in Hong Kong schools. Teacher education may be at a crossroads in determining its future directions in relation to dance as art rather than physical activity. Taking Marcel Mausss characterizations of the techniques of the body as the ways in which, from society to society, people learn how to use their bodies, this paper looks back at the context in which forms of dance education were introduced into the physical education curriculum of Hong Kong schools and examines social, cultural and political constraints upon their directions and development in a colonial and post-colonial society. Viewing dance education as forms of socially mediated practices, we show how bodies that are subjected to formal and informal programmes of dance education can be both inscribed and inscribing. Developments in dance education inevitably involve statements about the body, attempts to capture it, impose disciplines upon it, or mitigate their force. To reflect upon Hong Kongs changing destiny is to ask how the history of colonialisms disciplining of the body can be shaken loose from the domination of categories and ideas it produced and incorporated into the educational system, and what potency might dance education practices have in the future for troubling and negotiating meanings around identity and ‘Chinese-ness’.

Reconsidering the female tradition in English physical education: the impact of transnational exchanges in modern dance.

Histories of the female tradition in physical education in England tend to celebrate the unique early twentieth-century achievements of dedicated women successfully creating their own profession to train the female body in healthful gymnastics and games through the establishment of specialist training colleges. Yet, the female tradition has also been painted as a ‘time-limited achievement’ where female physical educators erroneously tied their fortunes to particular movement practices and modes of training. Their perceived inability to change with the times has been blamed for their loss of power in determining the direction of post-WW2 physical education. Yet, the so-called ‘demise’ of the female tradition was not so straightforward. Female physical educators had already moved well beyond obedience to Lings gymnastic regulations or Labans notions of effort and flow by mid-century and were increasingly alert to emergent movement philosophies. Once interest in a variety of somatic practices along with the promise of modern dance had seeped into the worldview of forward-thinking female physical educators their authority to direct their profession may have been diminished, but it was also enhanced and diverted into important transnational streams of dance and therapeutic movement-related professional opportunities which have been less acknowledged.