The role of organizational and individual variables in aircraft maintenance performance

Aviation maintenance has been identified by the FAA as an area where better efficiency is needed to cope with ever increasing workloads. However, aviation maintenance has also been identified as one of the major causes of accidents. Consequently, if further efficiencies are to be achieved, they cannot come at the cost of reduced safety margins. The present study employed a safety climate approach to assist in the development of a model that can help to explain morale, psychological health, turnover intentions, and error in the aviation maintenance environment. An instrument called the Maintenance Environment Survey was developed and administered to 240 personnel responsible for maintenance of a large military helicopter fleet. Data collected through the survey were used to develop a structural model that predicted 45 per cent of the variance in psychological health, 67 per cent of the variance in morale, 27 per cent of the variance in turnover intentions, and 44 per cent of the variance in self-reported maintenance errors. The model shows the pathways through which organizational level and individual level variables can influence work outcomes and leads to suggestions for interventions that can help to improve maintenance efficiency

Reading on Grade Level in Third Grade: How Is It Related to High School Performance and College Enrollment?

Illustrates how third-grade reading level correlates with eighth-grade reading level, which, along with ninth-grade school traits, correlates with ninth-grade performance, which in turn correlates with high school graduation and college attendance rates

After-School Programs and Academic Impact: A Study of Chicago's After School Matters

What impact can after-school programs have on the educational achievement of high school students? A new study of Chicago's After School Matters (ASM) program -- which offers paid internships in the arts, technology, sports, and communications to teenagers in some of the city's most underserved schools -- finds a relationship between participating in after-school activities and higher class attendance, lower course failures and higher graduation rates.Even after taking into account student demographic characteristics and prior attendance records, students who participate in ASM miss fewer days of school than their classmates. Similarly, students who participated at the highest levels in the after-school program tended to fail fewer core academic courses (English, Math, Science, and Social Studies). Furthermore, over the course of their time in high school, students who were enrolled in ASM for three or more semesters and those who participated at the highest levels had higher rates of graduation and lower dropout rates than similar students who did not participate in the program.The findings in this report highlight the importance of further research into what leads students to participate in after-school programs and the factors that lead to higher engagement and retention once they are enrolled. A better understanding is crucial for improving enrollment in after-school programs such as ASM. Moreover, accounting for student factors that lead to a greater engagement in the program will lead to a clearer understanding of ASM's contribution to the positive outcomes -- independent of hard-to-observe student characteristics such as enthusiasm or dedication

Civil War Termination

Civil wars typically have been terminated by a variety of means, including military victories, negotiated settlements and ceasefires, and “draws.” Three very different historical trends in the means by which civil wars have ended can be identified for the post–World War II period. A number of explanations have been developed to account for those trends, some of which focus on international factors and others on national or actor-level variables. Efforts to explain why civil wars end as they do are considered important because one of the most contested issues among political scientists who study civil wars is how “best” to end a civil war if the goal is to achieve a stable peace. Several factors have contributed to this debate, among them conflicting results produced by various studies on this topic as well as different understandings of the concepts war termination, civil war resolution, peace-building, and stable peace

Barriers to Innovation and Public Policy in Catalonia.

The present paper analyses the link between firms’ decisions to innovate and the barriers that prevent them from being innovative. The aim is twofold. First, it analyses three groups of barriers to innovation: the cost of innovation projects, lack of knowledge and market conditions. Second, it presents the main steps taken by Catalan Government to promote the creation of new firms and to reduce barriers to innovation. The data set used is based on the 2004 official innovation survey of Catalonia which was taken from the Spanish CIS-4 sample. This sample includes individual information on 2,954 Catalan firms in manufacturing industries and knowledge-intensive services (KIS). The empirical analysis reveals pronounced differences regarding a firm’s propensity to innovate and its perception of barriers. Moreover, the results show that cost and knowledge barriers seem to be the most important and that there are substantial sectoral differences in the way that firms react to barriers. The results of this paper have important implications for the design of future public policy to promote entrepreneurship and innovation together.Obstacles to innovation, Industrial policy, Innovation system

Informatics: the fuel for pharmacometric analysis

The current informal practice of pharmacometrics as a combination art and science makes it hard to appreciate the role that informatics can and should play in the future of the discipline and to comprehend the gaps that exist because of its absence. The development of pharmacometric informatics has important implications for expediting decision making and for improving the reliability of decisions made in model-based development. We argue that well-defined informatics for pharmacometrics can lead to much needed improvements in the efficiency, effectiveness, and reliability of the pharmacometrics process. The purpose of this paper is to provide a description of the pervasive yet often poorly appreciated role of informatics in improving the process of data assembly, a critical task in the delivery of pharmacometric analysis results. First, we provide a brief description of the pharmacometric analysis process. Second, we describe the business processes required to create analysis-ready data sets for the pharmacometrician. Third, we describe selected informatic elements required to support the pharmacometrics and data assembly processes. Finally, we offer specific suggestions for performing a systematic analysis of existing challenges as an approach to defi ning the next generation of pharmacometric informatics

The Costs and Benefits of Forensics

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote that states can be laboratories for experimentation in law and policy. Disappointingly, however, the actual laboratories that states and local governments run are not a home for experimentation. We do not have adequate information about either the costs or the benefits of forensic testing or allocation of resources. Increased spending and expansion of crime laboratories has perversely accompanied growing backlogs. Poor quality control has resulted in a series of audits and even closures of crime laboratories. In response to these problems, however, some laboratories and some entire states have developed new approaches toward oversight. In this Article, I will describe the growth of crime labs and the resources dedicated to them, but also the backlogs that have resulted from far too much in the way of quantity. Second, I will discuss the problem of resource allocation in forensics, including the differing perspectives and interests of police and forensic agencies that should both be taken into account. Third, I will describe quality control challenges that have accompanied the explosion in the use of forensics. Fourth, I will describe how regulation could better address both resource allocation and quality control, as well as how the Houston Forensic Science Center has become a model for regulating both the quality and the quantity of forensics. Finally, I will ask why the federal government has not done more to help improve the quality of forensics even as it has helped to encourage overwhelming and unnecessary quantity