In Dear Old Arizona

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Revising SIOP’s Guidelines for Education and Training Graduate Program Director Survey Results

SIOP commissioned the Education and Training Committee to revise the Guidelines for Education and Training at the Master’s and Doctoral Levels in Industrial-Organizational Psychology. As a part of that effort, the committee sent a survey to all the directors of graduate programs in industrial and organizational psychology and related fields per SIOP records. To identify who to send the survey to, the following three lists of e-mail addresses were compiled and cross-referenced resulting in 317 potential respondents: (a) points of contact within SIOP’s Graduate Training Program database, (b) respondents to the 2011 SIOP program benchmarking survey (Tett, et al., 2012), and (c) the SIOP I-O Program Directors’ discussion list

The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology’s Guidelines for Education and Training: An Executive Summary of the 2016/2017 Revision

The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP, Division 14 of the American Psychological Association [APA]) maintains Guidelines for Education and Training to provide guidance for the training of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychologists. The 2016/2017 revision combines separate documents for master’s- and doctoral-level training into one document, because the competencies required for each degree are not very different. Instead, the degrees differ in breadth and depth. The updated Guidelines were approved as APA policy in August 2017. In this article, we briefly review the revision process and highlight the updates made in the latest version of the Guidelines. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved

Optimal wind patterns for biological production in shelf ecosystems driven by coastal upwelling

Major upwelling systems around the world provide marine productivity and fishery yield out of proportion to their area. Upwelling winds have the counteracting effects that stronger winds upwell more nutrients to the surface for higher production, but they also transport that production off continental shelves where it may not be consumed by shelf-dwelling species. Because the patterns of wind fluctuations vary in these systems, we determined the conditions for maximal biological production using a simple conveyor belt model. The conditions are that: (1) the average cross-shelf velocity produced by the winds be the value that provides the maximum production with constant winds and (2) that the wind pattern be periodic with period equal to the cross-shelf transport time that results from maximizing production with constant winds. Examination of an example using winds in central California indicated wind patterns optimal for phytoplankton occurred more frequently than those for zooplankton

Rapid Effects of Marine Reserves via Larval Dispersal

Marine reserves have been advocated worldwide as conservation and fishery management tools. It is argued that they can protect ecosystems and also benefit fisheries via density-dependent spillover of adults and enhanced larval dispersal into fishing areas. However, while evidence has shown that marine reserves can meet conservation targets, their effects on fisheries are less understood. In particular, the basic question of if and over what temporal and spatial scales reserves can benefit fished populations via larval dispersal remains unanswered. We tested predictions of a larval transport model for a marine reserve network in the Gulf of California, Mexico, via field oceanography and repeated density counts of recently settled juvenile commercial mollusks before and after reserve establishment. We show that local retention of larvae within a reserve network can take place with enhanced, but spatially-explicit, recruitment to local fisheries. Enhancement occurred rapidly (2 yrs), with up to a three-fold increase in density of juveniles found in fished areas at the downstream edge of the reserve network, but other fishing areas within the network were unaffected. These findings were consistent with our model predictions. Our findings underscore the potential benefits of protecting larval sources and show that enhancement in recruitment can be manifested rapidly. However, benefits can be markedly variable within a local seascape. Hence, effects of marine reserve networks, positive or negative, may be overlooked when only focusing on overall responses and not considering finer spatially-explicit responses within a reserve network and its adjacent fishing grounds. Our results therefore call for future research on marine reserves that addresses this variability in order to help frame appropriate scenarios for the spatial management scales of interest

Audible Image Description as an Accommodation in Statewide Assessments for Students with Visual and Print Disabilities.

Introduction:Although image description has been identified as an accommodation for presentations conducted in the classroom, only a few U.S. states have approved it for use in high-stakes assessments. This study examined the use of audible image description as an assessment accommodation for students with visual and print disabilities by investigating student comprehension under multiple conditions. Methods: Students in three western states in grades three through eight who had visual (n= 117) or print (n= 178) disabilities participated in an abbreviated test constructed of retired assessment questions in English language arts, mathematics, and science, that were aligned with each state's instructional standards, under conditions with and without standardized description of graphic images. The study used a within-subjects block design to collect and compare comprehension data under conditions where audible image description was both used and not used in an abbreviated test. Results: Results indicated that students who read braille were more likely to respond correctly under the audible image description condition, and students with visual and print disabilities who used print were equally likely to respond correctly regardless of condition. Discussion: Braille readers were more likely to obtain a correct answer when audible image description accompanied the question. Audible image description did not affect the likelihood of a correct response from students with print disabilities or students with visual disabilities who read print. Implications for practitioners: Audible image description is an accommodation that may help braille readers perform better on tests. Although the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced consortia are taking steps to include image (or picture) descriptions in their assessment accommodations, teachers may want to develop a standard method for describing images and familiarize their braille readers to the strategy by including it in instruction and in classroom tests. Readers are referred to the National Center on Accessible Media’s online guidelines for image description

Piecewise-Linear Models of Genetic Regulatory Networks: Theory and Example

International audienceThe experimental study of genetic regulatory networks has made tremendous progress in recent years resulting in a huge amount of data on the molecular interactions in model organisms. It is therefore not possible anymore to intuitively understand how the genes and interactions together influence the behavior of the system. In order to answer such questions, a rigorous modeling and analysis approach is necessary. In this chapter, we present a family of such models and analysis methods enabling us to better understand the dynam-ics of genetic regulatory networks. We apply such methods to the network that underlies the nutritional stress response of the bacterium E. coli. The functioning and development of living organisms is controlled by large and complex networks of genes, proteins, small molecules, and their interactions, so-called genetic regulatory networks. The study of these networks has recently taken a qualitative leap through the use of modern genomic techniques that allow for the simultaneous measurement of the expression levels of all genes of an organism. This has resulted in an ever growing description of the interactions in the studied genetic regulatory networks. However, it is necessary to go beyond the simple description of the interactions in order to understand the behavior of these networks and their relation with the actual functioning of the organism. Since the networks under study are usually very large, an intuitive approach for their understanding is out of ques-tion. In order to support this work, mathematical and computer tools are necessary: the unambiguous description of the phenomena that mathematical models provide allows for a detailed analysis of the behaviors at play, though they might not exactly represent the exact behavior of the networks. In this chapter, we will be mostly interested in the modeling of the genetic reg-ulatory networks by means of differential equations. This classical approach allows precise numerical predictions of deterministic dynamic properties of genetic regu-latory networks to be made. However, for most networks of biological interest the application of differential equations is far from straightforward. First, the biochemi-cal reaction mechanisms underlying the interactions are usually not or incompletel