Delayed positive effects of acute coordinative exercise on children’s attention

Since attention is an important prerequisite for learning, it is particularly worthwhile to promote it in schools, through specific interventions. The present study examined the effects of an acute bout of coordinative exercise in physical education on the attention of primary school children. A total of 90 fifth grade primary school children (41 boys, 49 girls; M = 11.0 yr., SD = 0.6) participated in the study and were randomly assigned to either the experimental or the control group. The experimental group received a cognitively demanding physical education lesson consisting of different coordinative exercises; the control group attended a normal sedentary school lesson. Before, immediately after, and 90 min. after each experimental condition, the children's attentional performance was tested using the revised version of the d2 Test of Attention (d2-R). Results of the repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed that children's attentional performance increased through the specifically designed physical education lesson, not immediately but 90 min. after cessation. The results are discussed in terms of mechanisms explaining the relationship between acute physical exercise, and immediate and delayed effects on attention.

Humanitarian intervention and the issue of state sovereignty in the discourse of legal experts between the 1830s and the First World War

This article discusses the tensions between the principle of state sovereignty and the idea of a "humanitarian intervention" (or a intervention on humanitarian grounds) as they resulted from the debate of leading legal scholars in the 19th and early 20th century. While prominent scholars such as Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Gustave Rolin Jaequemyns or Aegidius Arntz spoke out in favour of a form of "humanitarian interventions", others such as August Wilhelm Heffter or Pasquale Fiore were much more critical and in many cases spoke out in favour of absolute state sovereignty.

Placing Strategy Discourse in Context : Sociomateriality, Sensemaking, and Power

There has been increasing interest in the discursive aspects of strategy over the last two decades. In this editorial we review the existing literature, focusing on six major bodies of discursive scholarship: post-structural, critical discourse analysis, narrative, rhetoric, conversation analysis and metaphor. Our review reveals the significant contributions of research on strategy and discourse, but also the potential to advance research in this area by bringing together research on discursive practices and research on other practices we know to be important in strategy work. We explore the potential of discursive scholarship in integrating between significant theoretical domains (sensemaking, power and sociomateriality), and realms of analysis (institutional, organizational and the episodic), relevant to strategy scholarship. This allows us to place the papers published in the special issue Strategy as Discourse: Its Significance, Challenges and Future Directions among the body of knowledge accumulated thus far, and to suggest a way forward for future scholarship.

Annotating discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique

The various meanings of discourse connectives like while and however are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human annotators. This problem is all the more important that connectives are salient textual markers of cohesion and need to be correctly interpreted for many NLP applications. In this paper, we suggest an alternative route to reach a reliable annotation of connectives, by making use of the information provided by their translation in large parallel corpora. This method thus replaces the difficult explicit reasoning involved in traditional sense annotation by an empirical clustering of the senses emerging from the translations. We argue that this method has the advantage of providing more reliable reference data than traditional sense annotation. In addition, its simplicity allows for the rapid constitution of large annotated datasets.