AFTER-HOURS MOBILE TECHNOLOGY USE AND ITS EFFECT ON BURNOUT EXPERIENCED BY STUDENT AFFAIRS PROFESSIONALS

This study examined the possible effect between the after-hours mobile technology use by student affairs professionals and work place burnout experienced by student affairs professionals. Similar to Owens (2014), data for this study were collected by employing the Maslach Burnout Inventory (Christina Maslach, Jackson, & Leiter, 1986). The collected data in this study were explored by the statistical method of multiple regression. While the number of responses was not high enough to determine statistically significant differences, the data did not show a strong correlation between after-hours mobile technology use and workplace burnout experienced by student affairs professionals

A randomised controlled trial of pelvic floor muscle training for stages I and II pelvic organ prolapse

Abstract Forty-seven women participated in a pilot study for a multi-centre randomized controlled trial of the effectiveness of pelvic floor muscle training (PFMT) for women with prolapse. Women with symptomatic stage I or II prolapse [measured by Pelvic Organ Prolapse Quantification (POP-Q)] were randomized to a 16-week physiotherapy intervention (PFMT and lifestyle advice; n=23) or a control group receiving a lifestyle advice sheet (n=24). Symptom severity and quality of life were measured via postal questionnaires. Blinded POP-Q was performed at baseline and follow-up. Intervention women had significantly greater improvement than controls in prolapse symptoms (mean score decrease 3.5 versus 0.1, p=0.021), were significantly more likely to have an improved prolapse stage (45% versus 0%, p=0.038) and were significantly more likely to say their prolapse was better (63% versus 24%, p=0.012). The data support the feasibility of a substantive trial of PFMT for prolapse. A multi-centre trial is underway.This study was funded by the Chief Scientist Office, Scottish Government (CZH/4/95)

Differential Object Marking in Corsican: Regularities and triggering factors

The paper deals with Differential Object Marking in Corsican. After a short introduction, it gives an overview of the main local triggering factors for marking direct objects in general (animacy, referentiality). It then presents the few main assumptions about Corsican DOM in the literature as well as findings of a new corpus study, based on written Corsican texts. Strong personal pronouns and proper names for human referents are consistently marked by the DOM marker à, but toponyms and metonymically used proper names are marked as well. Universal and negative quantifiers with a human denotation are also DOM-marked, whereas all other pronouns are not; thus animacy plays only a minor role in Corsican. The presence of determiners, quantifiers or numerals within nominals excludes the presence of à, irrespective of the nominals' denotation. Non-specific bare nominals are never DOM-marked, also irrespective of the nominals' denotation. The discussion then explains that the Corsican DOM is triggered much more by syntactic definiteness than animacy, a hypothesis strengthened by the most prominent morphosyntactic regularity at work in Corsican: nominals in combination with determiners and quantifiers cannot be marked by the DOM-marker à, even if they denote human beings. The complementary distribution of à and prenominal functional elements requires a further detailed syntactic analysi

Commensurability for certain right-angled Coxeter groups and geometric amalgams of free groups

We give explicit necessary and sufficient conditions for the abstract commensurability of certain families of 1-ended, hyperbolic groups, namely right-angled Coxeter groups defined by generalized ‚-graphs and cycles of generalized ‚-graphs, and geometric amalgams of free groups whose JSJ graphs are trees of diameter 4. We also show that if a geometric amalgam of free groups has JSJ graph a tree, then it is commensurable to a right-angled Coxeter group, and give an example of a geometric amalgam of free groups which is not quasi-isometric (hence not commensurable) to any group which is finitely generated by torsion elements. Our proofs involve a new geometric realization of the right-angled Coxeter groups we consider, such that covers corresponding to torsion-free, finite-index subgroups are surface amalgams

Student evaluations of teaching are not only unreliable, they are significantly biased against female instructors

A series of studies across countries and disciplines in higher education confirm that student evaluations of teaching (SET) are significantly correlated with instructor gender, with students regularly rating female instructors lower than male peers. Anne Boring, Kellie Ottoboni and Philip B. Stark argue the findings warrant serious attention in light of increasing pressure on universities to measure teaching effectiveness. Given the unreliability of the metric and the harmful impact these evaluations can have, universities should think carefully on the role of such evaluations in decision-making

Information Management Platform for the Application of Sustainable Product Development Methods

AbstractA multitude of information is required to address sustainability aspects in product design decisions. However, information required for applying methods in the field of sustainable product development often overlaps. Moreover, specific improvement measures can primarily be identified if method results can be traced back to data origin. This paper presents a concept and implementation of an information platform which is integrated into a PLM system and integrates an ontology based knowledge model and a semantic wiki. The information platform shall avoid double work, improve documentation of information and assist in understanding the data basis of method results. This paper discusses requirements and solution elements and presents findings from applying the methods Lifecycle Design Strategies (LiDS) Wheel and the Product Sustainability Index