The negative relationships between employee resilience and ambiguity, complexity, and inter-agency collaboration

Employee resilience (ER) is often needed to face demands inherent in public sector work. Some types of demands, however, may hinder its development, rather than provide the type of challenging adversity from which resilience can develop. Public sector job demands have been a long-standing issue for public workplaces and employees but are also growing in salience as organisations face an increasingly variable, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment. Drawing on the Job Demands–Resources model and the challenge/hindrance stress literature, this multi-level study of Aotearoa New Zealand civil servants (n = 11,533) in 65 public sector organisations shows that ER is negatively affected by demands such as job insecurity, unclear job and organisational goals, and inter-agency collaboration. However, organisational resource constraints are positively associated with ER. This study identifies core PA job and organisational demands that hinder ER and offers practical implications and suggestions for further research. Points for practitioners: Job role ambiguity, job insecurity, unclear organisational goals, and inter-agency collaboration are common job and organisational demands in public sector workplaces. For employees, these demands are stressors that employees do not feel they control, and may therefore hinder employee resilience: the ability to learn, adapt, and leverage networks in the face of challenges. Surprisingly, resource constraints, where employees have to ‘do more with less’, might help employees develop ER. While inter-agency collaboration has potentially many benefits, it appears to have negative spillover effects on employees unaware of it or not involved in it. To encourage ER, agencies should clarify both organisational and job goals, and assure job security, control, competency development, and supervisor support

On the need for an international effort to capture, share and use crystallization screening data

Development of an ontology for the description of crystallization experiments and results is proposed

Measuring the capability to raise revenue process and output dimensions and their application to the Zambia revenue authority

The worldwide diffusion of the good governance agenda and new public management has triggered a renewed focus on state capability and, more specifically, on the capability to raise revenue in developing countries. However, the analytical tools for a comprehensive understanding of the capability to raise revenue remain underdeveloped. This article aims at filling this gap and presents a model consisting of the three process dimensions ‘information collection and processing’, ‘merit orientation’ and ‘administrative accountability’. ‘Revenue performance’ constitutes the fourth capability dimension which assesses tax administration’s output. This model is applied to the case of the Zambia Revenue Authority. The dimensions prove to be valuable not only for assessing the how much but also the how of collecting taxes. They can be a useful tool for future comparative analyses of tax administrations’ capabilities in developing countries.Die weltweite Verbreitung der Good-Governance- und New-Public-Management-Konzepte hat zu einer zunehmenden Konzentration auf staatliche Leistungsfähigkeit und, im Besonderen, auf die Leistungsfähigkeit der Steuererhebung in Entwicklungsländern geführt. Allerdings bleiben die analytischen Werkzeuge für ein umfassendes Verständnis von Leistungsfähigkeit unterentwickelt. Dieser Artikel stellt hierfür ein Modell vor, das die drei Prozess-Dimensionen „Sammeln und Verarbeiten von Informationen“, „Leistungsorientierung der Mitarbeiter“ und „Verantwortlichkeit der Verwaltung“ beinhaltet. „Einnahmeperformanz“ ist die vierte Dimension und erfasst den Output der Steuerverwaltung. Das mehrdimensionale Modell wird für die Analyse der Leistungsfähigkeit der Steuerbehörde Zambias (Zambia Revenue Authority) genutzt. Es erweist sich nicht nur für die Untersuchung des Wieviel, sondern auch des Wie des Erhebens von Steuern als wertvoll. Die vier Dimensionen können in Zukunft zur umfassenden und vergleichenden Analyse der Leistungsfähigkeit verschiedener Steuerverwaltungen in Entwicklungsländern genutzt werden

The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition

This review article presents evidence for the claim that frequency effects are pervasive in children's first language acquisition, and hence constitute a phenomenon that any successful account must explain. The article is organized around four key domains of research: children's acquisition of single words, inflectional morphology, simple syntactic constructions, and more advanced constructions. In presenting this evidence, we develop five theses. (i) There exist different types of frequency effect, from effects at the level of concrete lexical strings to effects at the level of abstract cues to thematic-role assignment, as well as effects of both token and type, and absolute and relative, frequency. High-frequency forms are (ii) early acquired and (iii) prevent errors in contexts where they are the target, but also (iv) cause errors in contexts in which a competing lower-frequency form is the target. (v) Frequency effects interact with other factors (e.g. serial position, utterance length), and the patterning of these interactions is generally informative with regard to the nature of the learning mechanism. We conclude by arguing that any successful account of language acquisition, from whatever theoretical standpoint, must be frequency sensitive to the extent that it can explain the effects documented in this review, and outline some types of account that do and do not meet this criterion

The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment: Exploring Fundamental Symmetries of the Universe

The preponderance of matter over antimatter in the early Universe, the dynamics of the supernova bursts that produced the heavy elements necessary for life and whether protons eventually decay --- these mysteries at the forefront of particle physics and astrophysics are key to understanding the early evolution of our Universe, its current state and its eventual fate. The Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) represents an extensively developed plan for a world-class experiment dedicated to addressing these questions. LBNE is conceived around three central components: (1) a new, high-intensity neutrino source generated from a megawatt-class proton accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, (2) a near neutrino detector just downstream of the source, and (3) a massive liquid argon time-projection chamber deployed as a far detector deep underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility. This facility, located at the site of the former Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota, is approximately 1,300 km from the neutrino source at Fermilab -- a distance (baseline) that delivers optimal sensitivity to neutrino charge-parity symmetry violation and mass ordering effects. This ambitious yet cost-effective design incorporates scalability and flexibility and can accommodate a variety of upgrades and contributions. With its exceptional combination of experimental configuration, technical capabilities, and potential for transformative discoveries, LBNE promises to be a vital facility for the field of particle physics worldwide, providing physicists from around the globe with opportunities to collaborate in a twenty to thirty year program of exciting science. In this document we provide a comprehensive overview of LBNE's scientific objectives, its place in the landscape of neutrino physics worldwide, the technologies it will incorporate and the capabilities it will possess.Comment: Major update of previous version. This is the reference document for LBNE science program and current status. Chapters 1, 3, and 9 provide a comprehensive overview of LBNE's scientific objectives, its place in the landscape of neutrino physics worldwide, the technologies it will incorporate and the capabilities it will possess. 288 pages, 116 figure

Self-Renewal of Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia Cells Is Limited by the Hedgehog Pathway Inhibitors Cyclopamine and IPI-926

Conserved embryonic signaling pathways such as Hedgehog (Hh), Wingless and Notch have been implicated in the pathogenesis of several malignancies. Recent data suggests that Hh signaling plays a role in normal B-cell development, and we hypothesized that Hh signaling may be important in precursor B-cell acute lymphocytic leukemia (B-ALL). We found that the expression of Hh pathway components was common in human B-ALL cell lines and clinical samples. Moreover, pathway activity could be modulated by Hh ligand or several pathway inhibitors including cyclopamine and the novel SMOOTHENED (SMO) inhibitor IPI-926. The inhibition of pathway activity primarily impacted highly clonogenic B-ALL cells expressing aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) by limiting their self-renewal potential both in vitro and in vivo. These data demonstrate that Hh pathway activation is common in B-ALL and represents a novel therapeutic target regulating self-renewal and persistence of the malignant clone

Clinical Presentation of a Complex Neurodevelopmental Disorder Caused by Mutations in ADNP

Background In genome-wide screening studies for de novo mutations underlying autism and intellectual disability, mutations in the ADNP gene are consistently reported among the most frequent. ADNP mutations have been identified in children with autism spectrum disorder comorbid with intellectual disability, distinctive facial features, and deficits in multiple organ systems. However, a comprehensive clinical description of the Helsmoortel-Van der Aa syndrome is lacking. Methods We identified a worldwide cohort of 78 individuals with likely disruptive mutations in ADNP from January 2014 to October 2016 through systematic literature search, by contacting collaborators, and through direct interaction with parents. Clinicians filled in a structured questionnaire on genetic and clinical findings to enable correlations between genotype and phenotype. Clinical photographs and specialist reports were gathered. Parents were interviewed to complement the written questionnaires. Results We report on the detailed clinical characterization of a large cohort of individuals with an ADNP mutation and demonstrate a distinctive combination of clinical features, including mild to severe intellectual disability, autism, severe speech and motor delay, and common facial characteristics. Brain abnormalities, behavioral problems, sleep disturbance, epilepsy, hypotonia, visual problems, congenital heart defects, gastrointestinal problems, short stature, and hormonal deficiencies are common comorbidities. Strikingly, individuals with the recurrent p.Tyr719* mutation were more severely affected. Conclusions This overview defines the full clinical spectrum of individuals with ADNP mutations, a specific autism subtype. We show that individuals with mutations in ADNP have many overlapping clinical features that are distinctive from those of other autism and/or intellectual disability syndromes. In addition, our data show preliminary evidence of a correlation between genotype and phenotype.This work was supported by grants from the European Research Area Networks Network of European Funding for Neuroscience Research through the Research Foundation–Flanders and the Chief Scientist Office–Ministry of Health (to RFK, GV, IG). This research was supported, in part, by grants from the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (Grant No. SFARI 303241 to EEE) and National Institutes of Health (Grant No. R01MH101221 to EEE). This work was also supported by the Italian Ministry of Health and ‘5 per mille’ funding (to CR). For many individuals, sequencing was provided by research initiatives like the Care4Rare Research Consortium in Canada or the Deciphering Developmental Disorders (DDD) study in the UK. The DDD Study presents independent research commissioned by the Health Innovation Challenge Fund (Grant No. HICF-1009–003), a parallel funding partnership between the Wellcome Trust and the Department of Health, and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Grant No. WT098051). The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Wellcome Trust or the Department of Health. The study has UK Research Ethics Committee approval (10/H0305/83, granted by the Cambridge South Research Ethics Committee, and GEN/284/12 granted by the Republic of Ireland Research Ethics Committee). The research team acknowledges the support of the National Institute for Health Research, through the Comprehensive Clinical Research Network