The Academic Job Crisis: Some Possible Responses

The following article is a revised version of a paper originally presented at the Second National Women\u27s Studies Association Convention in Bloomington, Indiana, and at a meeting of the Pacific Southwest Women\u27s Studies Association. The Pacific Southwest region introduced a resolution at the 1980 Delegate Assembly calling for NWSA endorsement of policies beneficial to part-time faculty (see Women\u27s Studies Newsletter VIII:3 [Summer 1980], p. 23); the resolution was passed. I wish to suggest a perspective from which the National Women\u27s Studies Association can discuss the current retrenchment in higher education and the job crisis in particular. Above all, it is vital that we view these issues as a collective concern of this Association, not as a personal problem of some unfortunate and possibly unworthy individuals

Canon Barnett and the first thirty years of Toynbee Hall

PhDThis thesis is a study of the changing role which Toynbee Hall, the first university settlement, played in East London between 1884 and 1914. The first chapter presents a brief biography of Sainiel Augustus Barnett, the founder and first warden of the settlement, and analyzes his social thought in relation to the beliefs which were current in Britain during the period. The second chapter discusses the founding of the settlement, its organization, structure and the aims which underlay its early work. The third chapter, concentrating on three residents, C.R. Ashbee, .H. Beveridge and T. Edmund Harvey, shows the way in which subsequent settlement workers reformulated these aims In accordance with their own social and economic views. The subsequent chapters discuss the accomplishments of the settlement in various fields. The fourth shows that Toynbee Hall's educational program, which was largely an attempt to work out Matthew Arnold's theory of culture, left little impact on the life of East London. The fifth chapter discusses the settlement residents' ineffectual attempts to establish contact with working men's organizations. The final chapter seeks to demonstrate that In the field of philanthropy the residents were far more successful than in any other sphere in adapting the settlement to changing social thought

How Not to Panic in the Face of Panic

While tutors may not interact daily with students who have reached a point of panic, they should be prepared to handle these potentially precarious situations. A student who is truly at the end of their rope likely needs specific tutoring techniques not always focused on in other sessions. Tutors have the potential to be a turning point in a stressed student’s life, if they have taken the time to learn how. This essay equips tutors with a strategic plan, including specific phrases, to coax a student out of their panic and into state of confidence

Adaptive Deposition of Difficult Materials

When using a robotic arm, the path that the arm follows is typically unique to the task it completes, but not to the object upon which the task is performed. Additionally, when extruding materials, those materials are typically easy to work with (i.e. smooth and uniform). In this paper, we discuss our three-pronged approach, focusing on the imaging of the cupcake, the robotic arm’s movement about the cupcake, and the extrusion method, to achieve this goal of, simply-speaking, decorating a cupcake. While our results were not optimized or as broad as we’d initially hoped that they would be, we were able to decorate the cupcake in a reliable manner using all three components of the project. We ran into many issues along the way, but did find this to be a relatively successful project with many avenues for continuing research. Future research relating to this project should focus on three main avenues: an optimized image measurement system; increasing the vocabulary of designs for the robotic arm and optimizing them; and creating an automized system for the extruder with a frosting of a better consistency

Caring for the Caregiver: A Feasibility Study of an Online Program that Addresses Compassion Fatigue, Burnout, and Secondary Trauma

Background: Informal caregivers are susceptible to compassion fatigue in vicarious response to another’s suffering. The purpose of the study was to determine the feasibility of an online program that addresses compassion fatigue, burnout, and secondary traumatic stress in informal caregivers. Method: The study used a pre-post repeated measures feasibility design. Eighty-six participants were initially recruited. The intervention consisted of a 70-min online program. The participants completed surveys before and after program completion. The number of participants that completed each study phase was recorded to determine feasibility outcomes of acceptability, implementation, and demand. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test was employed to analyze survey results. Results: Ten participants completed all study phases. Of the participants recruited and consented to participate, 29% completed part of the program, 12% completed all phases, and 70% reported they would recommend the online program. The results of the Wilcoxon signed-rank test revealed that completion of the online program elicited a significant change in secondary traumatic stress-related outcomes. Conclusion: Findings provided preliminary evidence suggesting that the online program may be a feasible intervention to support informal caregiver mental health. Future efficacy testing of the online program is needed with specific consideration of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting social isolation impacting mental health

Knockdown of Amyloid Precursor Protein: Biological Consequences and Clinical Opportunities

Amyloid precursor protein (APP) and its cleavage fragment Amyloid-β (Aβ) have fundamental roles in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Genetic alterations that either increase the overall dosage of APP or alter its processing to favour the generation of longer, more aggregation prone Aβ species, are directly causative of the disease. People living with one copy of APP are asymptomatic and reducing APP has been shown to lower the relative production of aggregation-prone Aβ species in vitro. For these reasons, reducing APP expression is an attractive approach for AD treatment and prevention. In this review, we will describe the structure and the known functions of APP and go on to discuss the biological consequences of APP knockdown and knockout in model systems. We highlight progress in therapeutic strategies to reverse AD pathology via reducing APP expression. We conclude that new technologies that reduce the dosage of APP expression may allow disease modification and slow clinical progression, delaying or even preventing onset

Role of practices and Clinical Commissioning Groups in measures of patient experience: analysis of routine data.

Recent years have seen an increased focus on measuring how people experience health services to ensure that care and treatment is of the highest quality and safety.1 2 Better patient care experiences are associated with better adherence, clinical outcomes and patient safety, and with lower health care utilisation.3 4 In England, the national GP Patient Survey (GPPS) measures patients’ experience of Primary Care.5 As part of an NHS initiative to improve patient experience and facilitate patient-centred care, GPPS scores are currently reported at the level of general practices, Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and nationally.Not externally funde

NWSA News and Views

It\u27s been a little more than a year now that I\u27ve been reporting on the Association in these columns, a little more than two years since there has been a National Women\u27s Studies Association to report on. When friends and supporters ask, How is it going?\u27 I\u27ve been forced to give a rather cryptic-seeming reply: It\u27s going steadily better, so even more is expected; but we hardly have resources to meet the original expectation, so sometimes it feels like it\u27s going worse. Often the next question from members has been, When are we going to have the Convention?\u27 A Convention, so it seems, would indicate NWSA s progress in establishing itself as a functioning organization. NWSA is moving toward the milestone that the first Convention represents. There is every reason to believe that it will have been worth waiting for, and every reason to expect that the second and third Conventions will follow even more smoothly for groundwork laid this year

Diversity in pediatric behavioral sleep intervention studies

Studies designed to assess the efficacy of behavioral sleep interventions for infants and young children often report sleep improvements, but the generalization to children and families of diverse backgrounds is rarely assessed. The present study describes a systematic review of the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of behavioral sleep intervention studies for young children. Thirty-two behavioral sleep intervention studies (5474 children) were identified using PRISMA guidelines. Each study was coded for racial and ethnic composition, parental educational attainment (an index of socioeconomic resources), and country of origin. Racial or ethnic information was obtained for 19 studies (60%). Study participants were primarily White and from predominantly White countries. Overall, 21 (66%) of the included studies provided information on parental education. Most of these studies had samples with moderate to high educational attainment. Behavioral sleep intervention studies to date include samples with insufficient diversity. Overall, this study highlights a critical gap in pediatric sleep intervention research and supports a call to further include families from diverse backgrounds when assessing behavioral sleep interventions