We demonstrate that it is relatively easy in a real life situation to make reasonably intelligent adults believe that they have witnessed something they actually have not seen themselves, but only heard reports about from others, and to make them report about particular details of the event. The event concerns the crashing of an El Al Boeing 747 on apartment buildings in Amsterdam. Over sixty per cent of the subjects said they had seen the crash on television, although no television film exists. Unexpectedly, women proved themselves significantly more vulnerable to this effect than men.

An experiment on cooperation and competition by Raven and Eachus was replicated. Most hypotheses formulated by other investigators in the field of cooperation and competition in small groups were confirmed. There were 2 exceptions, however. Contrary to Raven and Eachus' results, coalition formation was shown to occur more frequently in competitive groups than in cooperative groups. Differences between the 2 experimental conditions in spontaneous leadership could not be demonstrated. * t < .05, df = 4.

Learning environments have been studied less thoroughly in European universities than they have in American colleges and universities. Several research strategies which have been developed in the United States are discussed. One strategy, adapted to analyze the special conditions found in European universities, and an instrument which provides evidence about student perceptions of their environments, are described. The results of a study of one university in the Netherlands indicate that there are distinctive atmospheres found in various departments; departments differ from one another in understandable ways, and each department has its own kind of educational problems. It is argued that systematic analyses of learning environments might identify problems in universities and permit solutions to be found so that more effective educational contexts may be created.The environment of a university is shaped by the totality of the university's programs,,personnel, policies, and procedures which are designed to promote learning. Although universities provide environments which are widely assumed to facilitate learning, there has been surprisingly little systematic analysis of the qualities of those environments and the ways in which they affect the learners; this lack is particularly evident in European universities.University environments have generally been conceived of in terms of certain formal, rather superficial categories, such as their degree programs, * This paper is based on a study conducted at

In this paper "quality of graduates" is distinguished from "quality of education", which is renamed "efficiency of education". The first concept is defined in a quantitative manner, the second by way of a set of 66 statements concerning the efficiency of education derived from judgements about the effectiveness of particular teaching methods in the achievement of different types of teaching objectives.

The numbering of the levels in the pyramid starts at the top. Ponzi schemes illustrate that it may be extremely difficult to capture in a legal definition the dividing line between normal business practices and criminal behaviour. Lending money to a bank is usually based on the belief that the bank will invest the money and pay the interest from the profits thus made. But the lender has no influence on the investments. In fact, he does not receive any promise about the type of investment or, more generally, about the source from which the interest will be obtained. The lender has no influence on the bank's financial performance and is not insured against a sudden breakdown of the bank's solvency. The same can be said about buying shares in a commercial enterprise: the buyer of shares is speculating on the outcome of a probabilistic process on which he or she has no influence whatsoever. Is this gambling? Should it be deemed illegal? Even more disturbing is the similarity between pyramid games and the wellknown and widely accepted system of multilevel marketing (MLM). The idea here is that a manufacturer of, for instance, a health product does not distribute the products market-wide in health shops himself but recruits a number of level-1 individual distributors. These distributors buy the products from the manufacturer and sell them on their own account. Often the level-1 distributors recruit level-2 distributors, who buy their products through the level-1 distributors and pay a cut of their profits to the level-1 distributor by whom they were recruited. These level-2 distributors in turn may enlist level-3 distributors, and so on. In this way each distributor will sell the health product directly, hopefully with some profit,but may also act as an entrepreneur who employs a number of salespeople. The biggest MLM scheme in the world is the Amway company, with bases in a vast number of countries. Amway produces a large variety of household goods, which are sold through the pyramidal structure of recruited private entrepreneurs, called Independent Business Owners (IBOs). In 2004, Amway has recruited 3 million IBOs worldwide, with sales worth US$ 6 billion (www.amway.com). Still, the Skeptic's Dictionary (www.skeptic.com) alleges that, in the year 2000, the average Amway IBO earned an average of US$ 700, but spent about US$ 1.000 on Amway products. Amway has often been prosecuted for organising an illegal and deceptive gambling system. The landmark trial was in 1978-79, when it was decided by the American Federal Trade Commission 3 that MLM in this form is acceptable, provided that certain rules are observed. Most prominent were three rules already in use with Amway: the 'buy-back rule' , the '70 percent rule' , and the 'ten customers 