Examining the Systemic Effects of Relational Trust and Network Trustworthiness on School Community: A Multi-Site Case Study of Three Independent Schools

Within the broader context of accountability imposed from beyond our schools, this mixed methods, multi-site case study investigated the development of relational trust and trustworthy relationships as internal accountability structures within three independent schools replicating responsible independence on the scale of the school as trustworthy freedom on the scale of the individual. Interviews, observations, artifacts, sociograms, and surveys were analyzed to identify teacher and administrator perceptions of structures supporting relational trust, accountability to community standards, and sustainable trust-based cultures. Survey data were also analyzed for corresponding evidence of organizational conditions associated with school improvement: teacher orientation to innovation, teacher commitment to school community, peer collaboration, reflective dialog, collective responsibility, focus on student learning, and teacher socialization. Structures found to support responsible freedom at these schools included their historic honor systems, programs for character education, strategic planning, and policies and schedules guiding daily life. Neither structure nor freedom alone was found to be sufficient to sustain cultures built on relational trust and mutual accountability. Inflexible structures or inauthentic, coercive, or incompetent leaders diminished social capital over time at all three schools. Schools enjoying the best organizational conditions for school improvement built capacity by fostering macro-micro feedback loops of honor and trust between the scales of the individual and the school as a professional learning community. Findings were applied to develop a model for individual and organizational capacity building, relating the dimensions of relational trust and accountability to standards. The two-dimensional model for capacity building identified four categories of school capacity based on levels of both relational trust and accountability to standards: low capacity schools, compliant schools, complacent schools, and high capacity schools. The model further developed associated strategies for moving schools in each category towards developing or sustaining high capacity

Income and Asset Disclosure Systems: Establishing Good Governance through Accountability

Financial declarations or income and asset disclosures (IADs) are quickly becoming an important tool for anticorruption agencies and governments to fight corruption. IAD systems can play two important roles within a broader framework of good governance: prevention and enforcement. In an effort to discover how best to design and implement an IAD system, the analysis conducted suggests that countries ultimately must design a system that best complements the environment in which it will function. However, there are several key principles that policy makers and practitioners need to consider: limit the number of filers to improve the odds of success, set modest and achievable expectations, provide resources commensurate with the mandate, prioritize verification procedures to align with available resources, and balance privacy concerns with public access to declarations.income, asset, disclosures, governance, accountability, financial declartations, corruption, anticorruption, privacy, public access

Once Upon A Time in the Fortune 500: How Storytelling Encouraged Businesses to Take a Second Look at Blogs

In the early 2000s about one third of the Fortune 500 hosted corporate blogs. By 2014, that number dropped significantly. Since then, the popularity of “storytelling” has been widely discussed by marketers. As Marketing began to use storytelling as a strategy, blogs began to mimic the structure of stories. The top companies in the 2018 Fortune 500 now have corporate blogs using this framework. Did storytelling help the Fortune 500 to rediscover blogging? This research investigates the use of storytelling as an impetus to blog and how the blogging of today has evolved away from the interactive experience first expected

On Being Social: How Social Identity Impacts Social Commerce for the Millennial Shopper

Millennials are a technologically sophisticated generation, who have the purchasing power to change the face of retailing. A significant proportion of their shopping is done online and they utilize their social networks while engaging in the shopping process- a current area of interest termed “social commerce.” No single group is better positioned to take advantage of social commerce, and yet, it’s possible that Millennials are participating in social networks and online shopping in order to better define their social identities. This study summarizes data from three years of longitudinal research into the use of social media by Millennials on three platforms: Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. The results show that Millennials prefer to utilize the identity shaping aspects of social media and commerce. We recommend that platforms allow more identity formation in order to increase the likelihood that Millennials not only use the platform, but also make purchases through them

The impact of strictly protected areas in a deforestation hotspot

Protected areas are often thought of as a key conservation strategy for avoiding deforestation and retaining biodiversity; therefore, it is crucial to know how effective they are at achieving this purpose. Using a case study from Queensland, Australia, we identified and controlled for bias in allocating strictly protected areas (IUCN Class I and II) and evaluated their impact (in terms of avoiding deforestation) using statistical matching methods. Over the 30 years between 1988 and 2018, approximately 70,481 km2 of native forest was cleared in the study region. Using statistical matching, we estimated that 10.5% (1,447 km2) of Category I and II (strict) protected areas would have been cleared in the absence of protection. Put differently, 89.5% of strictly protected areas are unlikely to have been cleared, even if they were never protected. While previous studies have used statistical matching at a country or state level, we conducted an analysis that allows regional comparison across a single State. Our research indicates that strictly protected areas are marginally effective at preventing deforestation, and this likely due to biases in establishing protected areas on unproductive land

Towards a ‘just’ conservation psychology

Climate change and biodiversity loss are serious concerns for environmental researchers and conservationists. However, the impact of climate change and biodiversity loss disproportionately affects low-income communities, indigenous groups, and people of colour. Conservation initiatives, however, sometimes perpetuate historical injustices of marginalised people. We argue that environmental justice may be effectively merged with conservation psychology to promote a just conservation psychology. We discuss a case study of a South African community impacted by conservation-related environmental injustices under apartheid. We discuss the role of capacity building in a community-based conservation initiative that promotes justice, human wellbeing, and conservation goals

Tuning transcriptional regulation through signaling: A predictive theory of allosteric induction

Allosteric regulation is found across all domains of life, yet we still lack simple, predictive theories that directly link the experimentally tunable parameters of a system to its input-output response. To that end, we present a general theory of allosteric transcriptional regulation using the Monod-Wyman-Changeux model. We rigorously test this model using the ubiquitous simple repression motif in bacteria by first predicting the behavior of strains that span a large range of repressor copy numbers and DNA binding strengths and then constructing and measuring their response. Our model not only accurately captures the induction profiles of these strains but also enables us to derive analytic expressions for key properties such as the dynamic range and $[EC_{50}]$. Finally, we derive an expression for the free energy of allosteric repressors which enables us to collapse our experimental data onto a single master curve that captures the diverse phenomenology of the induction profiles.Comment: Substantial revisions for resubmission (3 new figures, significantly elaborated discussion); added Professor Mitchell Lewis as another author for his continuing contributions to the projec

Becoming Librarian OER Advocates & Leaders: Spotlight on the SPARC Open Education Leadership Fellows

Presentation given at the 15th Annual Open Education Conference in Niagara Falls, New York

The Energetics of Molecular Adaptation in Transcriptional Regulation

Mutation is a critical mechanism by which evolution explores the functional landscape of proteins. Despite our ability to experimentally inflict mutations at will, it remains difficult to link sequence-level perturbations to systems-level responses. Here, we present a framework centered on measuring changes in the free energy of the system to link individual mutations in an allosteric transcriptional repressor to the parameters which govern its response. We find the energetic effects of the mutations can be categorized into several classes which have characteristic curves as a function of the inducer concentration. We experimentally test these diagnostic predictions using the well-characterized LacI repressor of Escherichia coli, probing several mutations in the DNA binding and inducer binding domains. We find that the change in gene expression due to a point mutation can be captured by modifying only a subset of the model parameters that describe the respective domain of the wild-type protein. These parameters appear to be insulated, with mutations in the DNA binding domain altering only the DNA affinity and those in the inducer binding domain altering only the allosteric parameters. Changing these subsets of parameters tunes the free energy of the system in a way that is concordant with theoretical expectations. Finally, we show that the induction profiles and resulting free energies associated with pairwise double mutants can be predicted with quantitative accuracy given knowledge of the single mutants, providing an avenue for identifying and quantifying epistatic interactions.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, supplemental info. available via http://rpgroup.caltech.edu/mwc_mutant