3,532 research outputs found
Thoughts and feelings of a beginning tertiary group of adult learners in a human resource development course
This is a study of a case of adults entering tertiary study for the first time, and their mental life concerning their own self-performance, constructed across four instances. The purposes of the study were to identify some characteristics of the four participants’ covert behaviour during their learning in a course on Human Resource Development (1-IRD), to gain some insight into the conception of self-performance held by the participants and the attributions of this self-performance, to examine the approaches to learning held by each participant, and to contribute to closing the gap between adult education and educational psychology. Three consecutive three-hour learning sessions were videotaped for use with follow-up stimulated recall interviews. Four adult learners reported their interactive thoughts and feelings pertaining to self-performance in HRD. Transcripts of each of the participant\u27s reported thoughts and feelings were prepared. Pre-performance interviews were carried out and the Attribution Style Questionnaire, which reports a person\u27s explanatory style, and the Study Process Questionnaire, which reports a person\u27s approach to learning, were administered. Self-report journals and field notes were also utilised. Data on participant covert behaviour were gathered and categorised according to an adaptation of an established content analysis system. Participant interactive thoughts and feelings were categorised, quantified and described. Other student covert behaviour, including causal explanations of behaviour, was analysed by qualitative means. Thoughts and feelings about self-performance ranked highly for all participants. While such thoughts and feelings were a mixture of positive and negative, quantifiably, positive thoughts and feelings did dominate. As well, thoughts and feelings about fellow students and learning the content also ranked highly amongst the myriad of thoughts and feelings reported by the participants. Qualitatively, common thoughts and feelings reported by the participants concerned group work, beliefs about learning, sell-performance and perceptions of the facilitator. Underlying covert behaviour was found to be quite individualistic with a desire for content relevance to the world of work to be one common thread. As well, all four participants reported external pressures to be an important underlying influence on performance. Post hoc, the study proposed a tentative theory that adult learners attending a tertiary course for the first time undergo two phases of cognitive and affective change during their early time in a substantial learning experience. The first phase was termed an apprehension phase wherein there is a myriad of thoughts and feelings about possible personal inadequacy. As the student gains more exposure to the learning experience, and develops a certain amount of competency, a realisation phase emerges in which confidence grows and learning accelerates. This two-phase process was compared with two other pieces of research that deal with a similar phenomenon suggesting an idea for future research. Implications for facilitators of adult learning as a result of the findings were also presented
Collective Interview on the History of Town Meetings
As illustrated in the introduction, the special issue ends with a ‘collective interview’ to some distinguished
scholars that have given an important contribution to the study of New England Town Meetings. The collective interview has been realized by submitting three questions to our interviewees, who responded individually in written. The text of the answers has not been edited, if not minimally. However, the editors have broken up longer individual answers in shorter parts. These have been subsequently rearranged in an effort to provide, as much as possible, a fluid structure and a degree of interaction among the different perspectives provided by our interviewees on similar issues. The final version of this interview has been edited and approved by all interviewees
Minimal Supergravity with m_0^2 < 0
We extend the parameter space of minimal supergravity to negative values of
m_0^2, the universal scalar mass parameter defined at the grand unified scale.
After evolving to the weak scale, all scalars can be non-tachyonic with masses
consistent with collider constraints. This region of parameter space is
typically considered excluded by searches for charged dark matter, since the
lightest standard model superpartner is a charged slepton. However, if the
gravitino is the lightest supersymmetric particle, the charged slepton decays,
and this region is allowed. This region provides qualitatively new
possibilities for minimal supergravity, including spectra with light sleptons
and very heavy squarks, and models in which the lightest slepton is the
selectron. We show that the m_0^2 < 0 region is consistent with low energy
precision data and discuss its implications for particle colliders. These
models may provide signals of supersymmetry in even the first year of operation
at the Large Hadron Collider.Comment: 16 page
Leadership in higher education--its evolution and potential: A unique role facing critical challenges
Leadership is a key ingredient in the ultimate success or failure of any organization. In this article the authors review the research on leadership in general and then focus on how leadership in the academic world is similar to, yet distinct from, leadership in the private sector. Included in this discussion are a description of how leadership in colleges and universities has evolved, the characteristics that are unique to higher education together with their implications for effective leadership, and consideration of the immense challenges academic leaders face as they attempt to keep higher education responsive to the needs of business and industry. The authors also address the emergence of student affairs administration and the current crisis in academic leadership
The Chief Student Affairs Officer: What Constitutes Effective Leadership?
The leadership characteristics of a 21 chief student affairs officers (CSAOs) within four-year, postsecondary institutions in the Southeast were examined using The Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) developed by Kouzes and Posner. The LPI measures five fundamental leadership factors: challenge the process, inspire a shared vision, enable others to act, model the way, and encourage the heart. Each of these factors was investigated in relation to length of time in the current position, length in the student affairs profession, gender, and geographic location. Statistical analyses of performance on the LPI suggest that CSAOs tend to be most effective in leadership practices of challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart. CSAOs seem to be effective in the leadership practices of model the way and inspire a shared vision. Gender and geographic location were not found to be statistically significant to any of the leadership factors
Statistical Computations with AstroGrid and the Grid
We outline our first steps towards marrying two new and emerging
technologies; the Virtual Observatory (e.g, AstroGrid) and the computational
grid. We discuss the construction of VOTechBroker, which is a modular software
tool designed to abstract the tasks of submission and management of a large
number of computational jobs to a distributed computer system. The broker will
also interact with the AstroGrid workflow and MySpace environments. We present
our planned usage of the VOTechBroker in computing a huge number of n-point
correlation functions from the SDSS, as well as fitting over a million CMBfast
models to the WMAP data.Comment: Invited talk to appear in "Proceedings of PHYSTAT05: Statistical
Problems in Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology
Numerical Simulations of Supernova Dust Destruction. II. Metal-Enriched Ejecta Knots
Following our previous work, we investigate through hydrodynamic simulations
the destruction of newly-formed dust grains by sputtering in the reverse shocks
of supernova remnants. Using an idealized setup of a planar shock impacting a
dense, spherical clump, we implant a population of Lagrangian particles into
the clump to represent a distribution of dust grains in size and composition.
We vary the relative velocity between the reverse shock and ejecta clump to
explore the effects of shock-heating and cloud compression. Because supernova
ejecta will be metal-enriched, we consider gas metallicities from Z/Zsun = 1 to
100 and their influence on cooling properties of the cloud and the thermal
sputtering rates of embedded dust grains. We post-process the simulation output
to calculate grain sputtering for a variety of species and size distributions.
In the metallicity regime considered in this paper, the balance between
increased radiative cooling and increased grain erosion depends on the impact
velocity of the reverse shock. For slow shocks (velocity less than or equal to
3000 km/s), the amount of dust destruction is comparable across metallicities,
or in some cases is decreased with increased metallicity. For higher shock
velocities (velocity greater than or equal to 5000 km/s), an increase in
metallicity from Z/Zsun = 10 to 100 can lead to an additional 24% destruction
of the initial dust mass. While the total dust destruction varies widely across
grain species and simulation parameters, our most extreme cases result in
complete destruction for some grain species and only 44% dust mass survival for
the most robust species. These survival rates are important in understanding
how early supernovae contribute to the observed dust masses in high-redshift
galaxies.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables, changes made to the text and figures
as suggested by the anonymous referee, accepted by the Astrophysical Journa
The Properties of X-ray Cold Fronts in a Statistical Sample of Simulated Galaxy Clusters
We examine the incidence of cold fronts in a large sample of galaxy clusters
extracted from a (512h^-1 Mpc) hydrodynamic/N-body cosmological simulation with
adiabatic gas physics computed with the Enzo adaptive mesh refinement code.
This simulation contains a sample of roughly 4000 galaxy clusters with M >
10^14 M_sun at z=0. For each simulated galaxy cluster, we have created mock
0.3-8.0 keV X-ray observations and spectroscopic-like temperature maps. We have
searched these maps with a new automated algorithm to identify the presence of
cold fronts in projection. Using a threshold of a minimum of 10 cold front
pixels in our images, corresponding to a total comoving length L_cf > 156h^-1
kpc, we find that roughly 10-12% of all projections in a mass-limited sample
would be classified as cold front clusters. Interestingly, the fraction of
clusters with extended cold front features in our synthetic maps of a
mass-limited sample trends only weakly with redshift out to z=1.0. However,
when using different selection functions, including a simulated flux limit, the
trending with redshift changes significantly. The likelihood of finding cold
fronts in the simulated clusters in our sample is a strong function of cluster
mass. In clusters with M>7.5x10^14 M_sun the cold front fraction is 40-50%. We
also show that the presence of cold fronts is strongly correlated with
disturbed morphology as measured by quantitative structure measures. Finally,
we find that the incidence of cold fronts in the simulated cluster images is
strongly dependent on baryonic physics.Comment: 16 pages, 21 figures, Accepted to Ap
Susceptibility Provision Enhances Effective De-escalation (SPEED): utilizing rapid phenotypic susceptibility testing in Gram-negative bloodstream infections and its potential clinical impact
Abstract
Objectives
We evaluated the performance and time to result for pathogen identification (ID) and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) of the Accelerate Phenoâ„¢ system (AXDX) compared with standard of care (SOC) methods. We also assessed the hypothetical improvement in antibiotic utilization if AXDX had been implemented.
Methods
Clinical samples from patients with monomicrobial Gram-negative bacteraemia were tested and compared between AXDX and the SOC methods of the VERIGENE® and Bruker MALDI Biotyper® systems for ID and the VITEK® 2 system for AST. Additionally, charts were reviewed to calculate theoretical times to antibiotic de-escalation, escalation and active and optimal therapy
Results
ID mean time was 21 h for MALDI-TOF MS, 4.4 h for VERIGENE® and 3.7 h for AXDX. AST mean time was 35 h for VITEK® 2 and 9.0 h for AXDX. For ID, positive percentage agreement was 95.9% and negative percentage agreement was 99.9%. For AST, essential agreement was 94.5% and categorical agreement was 93.5%. If AXDX results had been available to inform patient care, 25% of patients could have been put on active therapy sooner, while 78% of patients who had therapy optimized during hospitalization could have had therapy optimized sooner. Additionally, AXDX could have reduced time to de-escalation (16 versus 31 h) and escalation (19 versus 31 h) compared with SOC.
Conclusions
By providing fast and reliable ID and AST results, AXDX has the potential to improve antimicrobial utilization and enhance antimicrobial stewardship
Implementation of the LANS-alpha turbulence model in a primitive equation ocean model
This paper presents the first numerical implementation and tests of the
Lagrangian-averaged Navier-Stokes-alpha (LANS-alpha) turbulence model in a
primitive equation ocean model. The ocean model in which we work is the Los
Alamos Parallel Ocean Program (POP); we refer to POP and our implementation of
LANS-alpha as POP-alpha. Two versions of POP-alpha are presented: the full
POP-alpha algorithm is derived from the LANS-alpha primitive equations, but
requires a nested iteration that makes it too slow for practical simulations; a
reduced POP-alpha algorithm is proposed, which lacks the nested iteration and
is two to three times faster than the full algorithm. The reduced algorithm
does not follow from a formal derivation of the LANS-alpha model equations.
Despite this, simulations of the reduced algorithm are nearly identical to the
full algorithm, as judged by globally averaged temperature and kinetic energy,
and snapshots of temperature and velocity fields. Both POP-alpha algorithms can
run stably with longer timesteps than standard POP.
Comparison of implementations of full and reduced POP-alpha algorithms are
made within an idealized test problem that captures some aspects of the
Antarctic Circumpolar Current, a problem in which baroclinic instability is
prominent. Both POP-alpha algorithms produce statistics that resemble
higher-resolution simulations of standard POP.
A linear stability analysis shows that both the full and reduced POP-alpha
algorithms benefit from the way the LANS-alpha equations take into account the
effects of the small scales on the large. Both algorithms (1) are stable; (2)
make the Rossby Radius effectively larger; and (3) slow down Rossby and gravity
waves.Comment: Submitted to J. Computational Physics March 21, 200
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