Institutional Climate and Institutional Effectiveness at Three Community Colleges

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to explore the impact of employee morale, as manifested in institutional climate data, upon institutional effectiveness; and (2) to determine the extent to which information generated by climate survey data was used in developing and implementing change initiatives at each of the institutions studied. Three institutions were selected for this multiple site case study. Four sources of data from each institution were used to provide a picture of institutional climate. These sources of data were (a) the Personal Assessment of the College Environment (PACE) climate survey, (b) institutional self-study reports, (c) reaffirmation team reports, and (d) employee interviews. These four sources of data also provided opportunity for triangulation, a method to ensure internal validity. External validity was established by cross-case analysis and peer review. Indications of institutional climate were consistent across all four data sources. The institution in which climate was perceived as excellent was also recognized by the reaffirmation team of its accrediting agency as an exemplary institution ... Few institutions have such tremendous energy at all levels as (this) College. It holds the promise of being an exemplary institution for the rest of this century and the next (Reaffirmation Team Summary, 1996, p. 1). In contrast, the reaffirmation team of the institution in which the climate was dreadful indicated that The College is in a difficult position to demonstrate through verifiable means, its attainment of purposes and objective both inside and outside the classroom (Reaffirmation Team Report, 1995, p. 9). Results of the study indicated disparity in employee morale and thus in institutional climate. Employees of one institution consistently indicated that the climate is excellent (Professor, 1996). Employees of the second institution indicated that the climate is better, but could be improved (Support Staff, 1996), and employees of the third institution indicated that people here work under dreadful conditions (Professional Support Staff, 1996). Additionally, the results indicated that equally as important as conducting climate surveys was the use of the results in effecting change. Employees at all three institutions consistently stated that it was seeing the results (Associate Professor, 1996) that actually made the difference. At one institution evidence of change resulting from employee input indicated to them that there is not a \u27we-they\u27 atmosphere here ... that they (employees) are important to the overall mission of the College (Associate Professor, 1996). In contrast, employees of the second institution stated that we do not revisit the issues ... ten years is a long time (Instructor, 1996) and people are questioning whether we are going backwards toward a more autocratic system (Associate Dean, 1996). Employees at the third institution stated that unfortunately the results just sit in a drawer ... if we had followed some of the priorities and actually did some planning and implemented it, I am sure there would have been some positive changes (Professional Support Staff, 1996). It appeared that the difference in the three institutions studied was that employees of the institution in which the climate was perceived as excellent were respected for their intelligence, knowledge, and for their contributions to the success of the institution. Employees of the institution in which the climate was dreadful indicated a perception that they were not respected for their contributions to the institution and that there was a lack of trust among administrators and employees

Extended H? emission line sources from UWISH2

We present the extended source catalogue for the UKIRT Wide Field Infrared Survey for H2 (UWISH2). The survey is unbiased along the inner Galactic Plane from l ? 357° to l ? 65° and |b| ? 1.5° and covers 209 deg2. A further 42.0 and 35.5 deg2 of high dust column density regions have been targeted in Cygnus and Auriga. We have identified 33 200 individual extended H2 features. They have been classified to be associated with about 700 groups of jets and outflows, 284 individual (candidate) planetary nebulae, 30 supernova remnants and about 1300 photodissociation regions. We find a clear decline of star formation activity (traced by H2 emission from jets and photodissociation regions) with increasing distance from the Galactic Centre. About 60 per cent of the detected candidate planetary nebulae have no known counterpart and 25 per cent of all supernova remnants have detectable H2 emission associated with them

Mice expressing HLA-DQ6α8β transgenes develop polychondritis spontaneously

Relapsing polychondritis (RP) is a human autoimmune disease of unknown etiology in which cartilaginous sites are destroyed by cyclic inflammatory episodes beginning, most commonly, during the fourth or fifth decade of life. We have previously described collagen-induced polychondritis that closely mirrors RP occurring in young (6–8 weeks old) HLA-DQ6αβ8αβ transgenic Aβ0 mice, following immunization with heterologous type II collagen (CII). We present evidence here that transgenic strains expressing the DQ6α8β transgene develop spontaneous polychondritis (SP) at the mouse equivalent of human middle age (4.5–6 months and 40–50 years old, respectively) and display polyarthritis, auricular chondritis and nasal chondritis – three of the most common sites affected in RP. Auricular chondritis in SP, like RP but unlike CII-induced polychondritis, exhibited a relapsing/remitting phenotype, requiring several inflammatory cycles before the cartilage is destroyed. Elevated serum levels of total IgG corresponded with the onset of disease in SP, as in RP and CII-induced polychondritis. No CII-specific immune response was detected in SP, however – more closely mirroring RP, in which as few as 30% of RP patients have been reported to have CII-specific IgG. CII-induced polychondritis displays a strong CII-specific immune response. SP also demonstrated a strong female preponderance, as some workers have reported in RP but has not observed in CII-induced polychondritis. These characteristics of SP allow for the examination of the immunopathogenesis of polychondritis in the absence of an overwhelming CII-specific immune response and the strong adjuvant-induced immunostimulatory influence in CII-induced polychondritis. This spontaneous model of polychondritis provides a new and unique tool to investigate both the initiatory events as well as the immunopathogenic mechanisms occurring at cartilaginous sites during the cyclic inflammatory assaults of polychondritis

Properties of star clusters - II. Scaleheight evolution of clusters

Until now, it has been impossible to observationally measure how star cluster scaleheight evolves beyond 1 Gyr as only small samples have been available. Here, we establish a novel method to determine the scaleheight of a cluster sample using modelled distributions and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests. This allows us to determine the scaleheight with a 25 per cent accuracy for samples of 38 clusters or more. We apply our method to investigate the temporal evolution of cluster scaleheight, using homogeneously selected sub-samples of Kharchenko et al. (MWSC), Dias et al. (DAML02), WEBDA, and Froebrich et al. (FSR). We identify a linear relationship between scaleheight and log(age/yr) of clusters, considerably different from field stars. The scaleheight increases from about 40 pc at 1Myr to 75 pc at 1 Gyr,most likely due to internal evolution and external scattering events. After 1 Gyr, there is amarked change of the behaviour, with the scaleheight linearly increasing with log(age/yr) to about 550 pc at 3.5 Gyr. The most likely interpretation is that the surviving clusters are only observable because they have been scattered away from the mid-plane in their past. A detailed understanding of this observational evidence can only be achieved with numerical simulations of the evolution of cluster samples in the Galactic disc. Furthermore, we find a weak trend of an age-independent increase in scaleheight with Galactocentric distance. There are no significant temporal or spatial variations of the cluster distribution zero-point. We determine the Sun's vertical displacement from the Galactic plane as Z± = 18.5 ± 1.2 pc. ©2014 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society

Dictionary Learning and Sparse Coding-based Denoising for High-Resolution Task Functional Connectivity MRI Analysis

We propose a novel denoising framework for task functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (tfMRI) data to delineate the high-resolution spatial pattern of the brain functional connectivity via dictionary learning and sparse coding (DLSC). In order to address the limitations of the unsupervised DLSC-based fMRI studies, we utilize the prior knowledge of task paradigm in the learning step to train a data-driven dictionary and to model the sparse representation. We apply the proposed DLSC-based method to Human Connectome Project (HCP) motor tfMRI dataset. Studies on the functional connectivity of cerebrocerebellar circuits in somatomotor networks show that the DLSC-based denoising framework can significantly improve the prominent connectivity patterns, in comparison to the temporal non-local means (tNLM)-based denoising method as well as the case without denoising, which is consistent and neuroscientifically meaningful within motor area. The promising results show that the proposed method can provide an important foundation for the high-resolution functional connectivity analysis, and provide a better approach for fMRI preprocessing.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, MLMI201