Academic Council Meeting Agenda and Minutes, June 5, 1978

Agenda and minutes from the Wright State University Academic Council Meeting held on June 5, 1978

Winter Quarter Faculty Meeting Agenda and Minutes, February 21, 1979

Agenda and minutes from the Winter Quarter Faculty Meeting held on February 21, 1979

Fall Quarter Faculty Meeting Agenda and Minutes, November 14, 1978

Agenda and minutes from the Fall Quarter Faculty Meeting Agenda and Minutes, November 14, 197

A Strategy for Teaching Critical Thinking: The Sellmore Case

The importance of teaching and applying critical thinking skills is apparently matched by its difficulty in doing so. Sara Rimer, writing for the January 18, 2011, edition of The Hechinger Report, discussed a study by Richard Arum that followed several thousand undergraduates from when they entered college in fall 2005 to when they graduated in spring 2009. Arum’s research, published in his book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, found that large numbers of students did not learn critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication skills. Arum used testing data and student surveys from 24 colleges and universities ranging from the highly selective to the least selective. The study found that after the first two years of college, 45% of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning, or writing skills. After four years, 36% showed no significant gains in what Arum called the “higher order” thinking skills. The good news is that students majoring in the liberal arts showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, reasoning, and writing skills. The bad news is that students majoring in business, education, social work, and communication showed the least number of gains in learning. Paul Hurd, in the article “The State of Critical Thinking Today,” written for The Critical Thinking Community website (www.criticalthinking.org), examined the current state of critical thinking in higher education. Citing numerous studies, Hurd pointed out that while the overwhelming majority of faculty understand the importance of developing critical thinking skills in their students and believe it is the primary objective of their instructional methodology, a majority of faculty lacks a substantive concept of critical thinking. He says that, given this lack of understanding, it is difficult to make the case that critical thinking is the norm in the design of most instructional methodologies. For Hurd, an understanding of critical thinking at the level he is proposing requires that we “teach content through thinking, not content, and then thinking.” While the development of critical thinking skills is important for any discipline, it must be a vital component in how we prepare students for entry into the accounting profession. For example, management accountants are often called on to identify problems, gather relevant information in assessing those problems, and explore and interpret information in developing alternative strategies for solving these problems. In this capacity, the management accountant is expected to formulate questions, highlight and identify relevant assumptions, and challenge those assumptions, all with a view toward developing and articulating alternative strategies aimed at resolving these problems. Management accountants are also called on to construct and defend arguments by using and evaluating evidence either in favor of or in opposition to proposals that require managerial decisions. All of the above tasks are important components that must be developed through an understanding and application of critical thinking skills

Why Audit Teams Need the Confidence to Speak Up

A climate of psychological safety is an important prerequisite for effective interpersonal relationships among audit team members and for audit teams to properly meet their fiduciary responsibilities. Audit processes can be more effective and the quality of audits can be improved if auditors understand the concept of psychological safety and its application for audit teams. The failure to create a climate of psychological safety among audit team members can have harmful effects on audit quality, but fortunately CPA firms can take steps to enhance psychological safety and enable more effective audit processes and audit work

How Corporate Culture Impacts Unethical Distortion of Financial Numbers

The recent accounting scandals have highlighted the critical role that investor confidence in the accuracy and lack of distortion of accounting data plays in the health of capital markets and, indeed, the whole economy. The legal and moral culpability of top-level company managers (as well as auditors) is an issue that will be addressed by the nation in the coming months. Whether or not legal sanctions are imposed on managers, it would be well to examine some of the reasons managers may feel compelled to distort accounting numbers as well as engage in other actions that damage the interests of company stakeholders, such as stockholders, employees, and the community. Tom Morris, in his poignant book If Aristotle Ran General Motors, makes a compelling case that creating an ethical climate in the workplace is about more than promulgating clear guidelines for ethical behavior and developing codes of conduct. He argues persuasively that creating an ethical climate must transcend a compliance approach to ethics and focus instead on fostering socially harmonious relationships. While Morris does an outstanding job of defining and illustrating these socially harmonious relationships that lead not only to more productive effort but ultimately to a more ethical climate, we believe most organizations may fail to see how current management policies and practices, in fact, may defeat or inhibit development of the kind of climate Morris is advocating. Consequently, we explore here those policies and managerial practices that militate against a culture of socially harmonious relationships in the workplace

Selenoprotein gene nomenclature

The human genome contains 25 genes coding for selenocysteine-containing proteins (selenoproteins). These proteins are involved in a variety of functions, most notably redox homeostasis. Selenoprotein enzymes with known functions are designated according to these functions: TXNRD1, TXNRD2, and TXNRD3 (thioredoxin reductases), GPX1, GPX2, GPX3, GPX4 and GPX6 (glutathione peroxidases), DIO1, DIO2, and DIO3 (iodothyronine deiodinases), MSRB1 (methionine-R-sulfoxide reductase 1) and SEPHS2 (selenophosphate synthetase 2). Selenoproteins without known functions have traditionally been denoted by SEL or SEP symbols. However, these symbols are sometimes ambiguous and conflict with the approved nomenclature for several other genes. Therefore, there is a need to implement a rational and coherent nomenclature system for selenoprotein-encoding genes. Our solution is to use the root symbol SELENO followed by a letter. This nomenclature applies to SELENOF (selenoprotein F, the 15 kDa selenoprotein, SEP15), SELENOH (selenoprotein H, SELH, C11orf31), SELENOI (selenoprotein I, SELI, EPT1), SELENOK (selenoprotein K, SELK), SELENOM (selenoprotein M, SELM), SELENON (selenoprotein N, SEPN1, SELN), SELENOO (selenoprotein O, SELO), SELENOP (selenoprotein P, SeP, SEPP1, SELP), SELENOS (selenoprotein S, SELS, SEPS1, VIMP), SELENOT (selenoprotein T, SELT), SELENOV (selenoprotein V, SELV) and SELENOW (selenoprotein W, SELW, SEPW1). This system, approved by the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee, also resolves conflicting, missing and ambiguous designations for selenoprotein genes and is applicable to selenoproteins across vertebrates

Multivariate Protein Signatures of Pre-Clinical Alzheimer's Disease in the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) Plasma Proteome Dataset

Background: Recent Alzheimer's disease (AD) research has focused on finding biomarkers to identify disease at the pre-clinical stage of mild cognitive impairment (MCI), allowing treatment to be initiated before irreversible damage occurs. Many studies have examined brain imaging or cerebrospinal fluid but there is also growing interest in blood biomarkers. The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) has generated data on 190 plasma analytes in 566 individuals with MCI, AD or normal cognition. We conducted independent analyses of this dataset to identify plasma protein signatures predicting pre-clinical AD. Methods and Findings: We focused on identifying signatures that discriminate cognitively normal controls (n = 54) from individuals with MCI who subsequently progress to AD (n = 163). Based on p value, apolipoprotein E (APOE) showed the strongest difference between these groups (p = 2.3×10−13). We applied a multivariate approach based on combinatorial optimization ((α,β)-k Feature Set Selection), which retains information about individual participants and maintains the context of interrelationships between different analytes, to identify the optimal set of analytes (signature) to discriminate these two groups. We identified 11-analyte signatures achieving values of sensitivity and specificity between 65% and 86% for both MCI and AD groups, depending on whether APOE was included and other factors. Classification accuracy was improved by considering “meta-features,” representing the difference in relative abundance of two analytes, with an 8-meta-feature signature consistently achieving sensitivity and specificity both over 85%. Generating signatures based on longitudinal rather than cross-sectional data further improved classification accuracy, returning sensitivities and specificities of approximately 90%. Conclusions: Applying these novel analysis approaches to the powerful and well-characterized ADNI dataset has identified sets of plasma biomarkers for pre-clinical AD. While studies of independent test sets are required to validate the signatures, these analyses provide a starting point for developing a cost-effective and minimally invasive test capable of diagnosing AD in its pre-clinical stages

Tracking the X-ray Polarization of the Black Hole Transient Swift J1727.8-1613 during a State Transition

We report on a campaign on the bright black hole X-ray binary Swift J1727.8$-$1613 centered around five observations by the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). This is the first time it has been possible to trace the evolution of the X-ray polarization of a black hole X-ray binary across a hard to soft state transition. The 2--8 keV polarization degree slowly decreased from $\sim$4\% to $\sim$3\% across the five observations, but remained in the North-South direction throughout. Using the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), we measure the intrinsic 7.25 GHz radio polarization to align in the same direction. Assuming the radio polarization aligns with the jet direction (which can be tested in the future with resolved jet images), this implies that the X-ray corona is extended in the disk plane, rather than along the jet axis, for the entire hard intermediate state. This in turn implies that the long ($\gtrsim$10 ms) soft lags that we measure with the Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER) are dominated by processes other than pure light-crossing delays. Moreover, we find that the evolution of the soft lag amplitude with spectral state differs from the common trend seen for other sources, implying that Swift J1727.8$-$1613 is a member of a hitherto under-sampled sub-population.Comment: Submitted to ApJ. 20 pages, 8 figure