The Vedic Personality Inventory was devised to assess the validity of the Vedic concept of the three gunas or modes of nature as a psychological categorization system. The sample of 619 subjects included persons of varying ages and occupations from a middle-size city in southeastern United States, and also of subscribers to a magazine focusing on Eastern-style spirituality. The original 90-item inventory was shortened to 56 items on the basis of reliability and validity analyses. Cronbach alpha for the three subscales ranged from .93 to .94, and the corrected item-total correlation of every item score with its subscale score was greater than .50. Three measures of convergent validity and four measures of discriminant validity provide evidence for construct validity. The loading of every item on the scale is stronger for the intended subscale than for any other subscale. Although each subscale contains congeneric items, the factors are not independent. The nonorthogonality is consistent with Vedic theory. This inventory requires psychometric development and testing cross-culturally as well as to be experimentally implemented in group research and individual assessment.
Objective: An experiment was conducted to determine the effects of chanting the maha mantra on stress, depression, and the three gunas—sattva (enlightenment), rajas (passion), and tamas (inertia)—described in the Vedas as the basis of human psychology. Primary hypotheses of the study were that the maha mantra group would increase sattva and decrease stress, depression, rajas, and tamas significantly more than the other groups. Method: Participants were tested at pretest, posttest, and follow-up, with testing times separated by 4 weeks. Participants were randomly assigned to a maha mantra group, an alternate mantra (placebo) group, and a control group. Results: MANOVA results supported these hypotheses from pretest to posttest at p < .05 for all dependent variables except rajas. Conclusions: The authors suggest that the maha mantra has potential in addressing problems related to stress and depression and that it be considered as one possible component of a spiritual approach to social work practice.
The nation's community colleges recently celebrated their one hundredth anniversary. With the founding of Joliet Junior College in 1901 in Joliet, Illinois, an entirely new higher education institution emerged in our country. This unique type of institution requires unique leaders. Yet, leadership development over the decades has paralleled the development of secondary school leaders, usually without a credential requirement.Secondary school principals and superintendents were the first junior college leaders. Their preparation, including on-the-job training and graduate education, may have served our colleges well as they expanded and met educational needs not served by universities in the first half of the twentieth century. When junior colleges became comprehensive community colleges during the 1960s and 1970s, they became complex institutions of higher education and more like their university peers than the public schools from which they sprang. However, community colleges could be served by taking some leadership development practices from the K-12 sector, such as those requiring formal training for new faculty that emphasizes understanding of institutional mission and history, student characteristics, and appropriate classroom practices.Universities, on the other hand, could not provide role models for community college leadership development. University leaders were frequently selected because of their records as scholars. Scholarly productivity, including research, writing, grants, and theory building, were, and continue to be,
This report describes important future research directions in nanoscale science, engineering and technology. It was prepared in connection with an anticipated national research initiative on nanotechnology for the twenty-first century. The research directions described are not expected to be inclusive but illustrate the wide range of research opportunities and challenges that could be undertaken through the national laboratories and their major national scientific user facilities with the support of universities and industry.ii CONTROLLED SYNTHESIS AND PROCESSING AT THE NANOSCALE (PRIMARILY INORGANIC EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThe principal missions of the Department of Energy (DOE) in Energy, Defense, and Environment will benefit greatly from future developments in nanoscale science, engineering and technology. For example, nanoscale synthesis and assembly methods will result in significant improvements in solar energy conversion; more energy-efficient lighting; stronger, lighter materials that will improve efficiency in transportation; greatly improved chemical and biological sensing; use of low-energy chemical pathways to break down toxic substances for environmental remediation and restoration; and better sensors and controls to increase efficiency in manufacturing.The DOE's Office of Science has a strong focus on nanoscience discovery, the development of fundamental scientific understanding, and the conversion of these into useful technological solutions. A key challenge in nanoscience is to understand how deliberate tailoring of materials on the nanoscale can lead to novel and enhanced functionalities. The DOE National Laboratories are already making a broad range of contributions in this area. The enhanced properties of nanocrystals for novel catalysts, tailored light emission and propagation, and supercapacitors are being explored, as are hierachical nanocomposite structures for chemical separations, adaptive/responsive behavior and impurity gettering. Nanocrystals and layered structures offer unique opportunities for tailoring the optical, magnetic, electronic, mechanical and chemical properties of materials. The Laboratories are currently synthesizing layered structures for electronics/photonics, novel magnets and surfaces with tailored hardness. This report supplies numerous other examples of new properties and functionalities that can be achieved through nanoscale materials control. These include:• Nanoscale layered materials that can yield a four-fold increase in the performance of permanent magnets • Addition of aluminum oxide nanoparticles that converts aluminum metal into a material with wear resistance equal to that of the best bearing steel • New optical properties achieved by fabricating photonic band gap superlattices to guide and switch optical signals with nearly 100% transmission, in very compact architectures • Layered quantum well structures to produce highly efficient, low-power light sources and photovoltaic cells • Novel optical properties of semiconducting nanocrystals that are used ...
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