Targeted Critical Thinking: Effective Use of Critical Thinking Activities

Library instruction can be primed for failure if participants believe librarians have a canned answer for every research effort. Instruction must take place with an understanding of the unique needs of first-year classes and assignments relative to higher level classes and their assignments. Efforts to incorporate critical thinking exercises in suboptimal research efforts contribute to instruction-fatigue for students and librarians. This workshop will embrace the K-12 strategy of identifying the scope and sequence ideal for teaching library research techniques.It will consider appropriate courses and assignments in which to apply critical thinking activities and present ideas for optimizing assignments. Participants will have an opportunity to compare courses and assignments in their own institutions then determine which critical thinking activities are most suitable for their students’ needs

Exploring young people\u27s concepts of smoking addiction: Perceived opportunities to try smoking without becoming addicted

This study explores how young people conceptualise addiction to smoking and, also the relationship between young people\u27s addiction beliefs and intentions to smoke cigarettes. Addiction to smoking is a major health problem, not just for adults, but also for young smokers, up to 60% of whom are dependent on nicotine. However, anti-smoking prevention efforts targeted at young people generally emphasise ill-health effects and little attention is paid to addiction education which is generally considered relevant only to adult smoking and cessation efforts. Perhaps as a consequence, young people appear to have many misconceptions and unrealistic ideas about addiction, and these may possibly have influenced initial decisions to take up smoking. For example, between 50% and 60% of young smokers believe that it would be easy or very easy to stop smoking altogether if and when they choose to and the majority of daily smokers mistakenly believe that they will not be smoking for more than five years. For these young smokers, becoming addicted is often an unforeseen consequence and most are surprised to find that they cannot give up smoking as easily as they thought. The majority of addicted smokers regret ever taking up smoking but nevertheless continue to smoke cigarettes for perhaps 30 to 40 years because they find it very difficult to stop. This backdrop provides the impetus for the present study

Connecting Aphordably: The Place of Memorably and Succinctly Stated Truths in Library Research Instruction

This informal effort sought to generate a list of aphorisms to use in library research instruction sessions that are appropriate for audience members of all abilities and backgrounds. Aphorisms are succinct phrases of truth or opinion. They can be both established phrases that have been repurposed or novel ones that have been fabricated. The result of this effort is a collection that this instructor can employ readily and that audience members understand quickly and can remember easily. This presentation provides a strategy that recipients can individually validate and imitate

Tendons: structure, function and challenges to clinical treatment

As dense connective tissues, tendons play a vital role in the transmission of contractile forces from muscle to bone. This link between muscles and bones provides the means in transferring tensile forces produced by muscles on to the connected bone. During movement, tendons slide over surrounding bony and articular surfaces and are thus commonly subjected to shear and compression forces in addition to tensile force. Fibrillar collagen, proteoglycan and various glycoproteins make up the composition of tendinous tissue and contribute to its ability to withstand these forces. Tendons contain a distinct population of cells, called tenocytes. Tenocytes undertake a flattened morphology within the tendon matrix and contain cytoplasmic projections which extend longitudinally and laterally towards other tenocytes. An intercellular network of cells thus maintains the extracellular environment of the tendon and allows a coordinated response to external mechanical stimuli. Defects to load-bearing connective tissue elements such as tendons whether due to trauma, overuse, age-related diseases or degenerative diseases, are often limited in their healing potential and thus contributes often to persistent, chronic clinical symptoms. Chronic disease, overuse or acute injuries damages the tendon. This damage compromises the transmission of tensile forces and because of the hypovascularity of some tendinous tissues and many other reasons, a healing response often is severely insufficient in regenerating tissue back to its original constitution. Even the best treatment options for such tendinopathies, supplemented with the body’s own healing response fail to produce quality outcomes. An understanding of the molecular, cellular and mechanical characteristics of tenocytes, tendon matrix and the tendon system as a whole will be vital for the development of effective therapies for all tendinopathies. It is the goal of this current work to outline the current molecular, cellular, mechanical and clinical understanding of tendons. A broad address to tendon biology should help illustrate the key dimensional aspects that must be considered when attempting the effective translation of research into useful clinical therapies

Tendons: structure, function and challenges to clinical treatment

As dense connective tissues, tendons play a vital role in the transmission of contractile forces from muscle to bone. This link between muscles and bones provides the means in transferring tensile forces produced by muscles on to the connected bone. During movement, tendons slide over surrounding bony and articular surfaces and are thus commonly subjected to shear and compression forces in addition to tensile force. Fibrillar collagen, proteoglycan and various glycoproteins make up the composition of tendinous tissue and contribute to its ability to withstand these forces. Tendons contain a distinct population of cells, called tenocytes. Tenocytes undertake a flattened morphology within the tendon matrix and contain cytoplasmic projections which extend longitudinally and laterally towards other tenocytes. An intercellular network of cells thus maintains the extracellular environment of the tendon and allows a coordinated response to external mechanical stimuli. Defects to load-bearing connective tissue elements such as tendons whether due to trauma, overuse, age-related diseases or degenerative diseases, are often limited in their healing potential and thus contributes often to persistent, chronic clinical symptoms. Chronic disease, overuse or acute injuries damages the tendon. This damage compromises the transmission of tensile forces and because of the hypovascularity of some tendinous tissues and many other reasons, a healing response often is severely insufficient in regenerating tissue back to its original constitution. Even the best treatment options for such tendinopathies, supplemented with the body’s own healing response fail to produce quality outcomes. An understanding of the molecular, cellular and mechanical characteristics of tenocytes, tendon matrix and the tendon system as a whole will be vital for the development of effective therapies for all tendinopathies. It is the goal of this current work to outline the current molecular, cellular, mechanical and clinical understanding of tendons. A broad address to tendon biology should help illustrate the key dimensional aspects that must be considered when attempting the effective translation of research into useful clinical therapies

Ownership motivation and strategic planning in small business

This study investigates whether strategic planning in small businesses is related to the business ownership motivations of operators. In particular, the study compares the propensity of operators motivated by financial versus personal/non-financial goals to engage in strategic planning for their businesses

Bounds for Blind Rate Adaptation

A core challenge in wireless communication is choosing appropriate transmission rates for packets. This rate selection problem is well understood in the context of unicast communication from a sender to a known receiver that can reply with acknowledgments. The problem is more difficult, however, in the multicast scenario where a sender must communicate with a potentially large and changing group of receivers with varied link qualities. In such settings, it is inefficient to gather feedback, and achieving good performance for every receiver is complicated by the potential diversity of their link conditions. This paper tackles this problem from an algorithmic perspective: identifying near optimal strategies for selecting rates that guarantee every receiver achieves throughput within reasonable factors of the optimal capacity of its link to the sender. Our algorithms have the added benefit that they are blind: they assume the sender has no information about the network and receives no feedback on its transmissions. We then prove new lower bounds on the fundamental difficulty of achieving good performance in the presence of fast fading (rapid and frequent changes to link quality), and conclude by studying strategies for achieving good throughput over multiple hops. We argue that the implementation of our algorithms should be easy because of the feature of being blind (it is independent to the network structure and the quality of links, so it\u27s robust to changes). Our theoretical framework yields many new open problems within this important general topic of distributed transmission rate selection