Exploring Churn and Alignment between Retention and Occupational Culture as Perceived by Professional Truck Drivers

Despite advances in logistics software and increased driver pay, the trucking industry continues a historic wave of human capital risks in the form of driver turnover and driver shortages. Previous efforts to understand the phenomenon of driver turnover rely heavily on supply chain, transportation, and logistics based disciplines. The current study provides a human capital ontology towards understanding professional truck driver perceptions. Within the interpretive framework of pragmatism, the study applied a simultaneous ethnographic and phenomenological research design to explore the phenomenon of churn and professional truck driver perceptions of environmental alignment between trucking industry retention strategies and the occupational needs and culture of professional truck drivers. Perceived environmental alignment reduces barriers with external social and cultural institutions while facilitating improved organizational performance and individual performance and behavior. The study provides a network model of the occupational culture of professional truck drivers. The study found the occupational culture, cognitive and normative dimensions form the occupational needs of professional truck drivers. The study further found environmental alignment and environmental misalignment exists between trucking industry retention strategies and the occupational needs and culture of professional truck drivers. The study concluded that although the phenomenon of churn exists, the phenomenon is not an attribute of nor promulgated by the occupational culture of professional truck drivers. The study’s findings of strategies environmentally aligned with occupational needs and culture of professional truck drivers, could serve as the foundation for improving industry and individual driver performance beyond retention. The study’s conceptualization of the trucking industry as a population ecology and professional truck drivers as a culture sharing group, advances research of human capital risks at a collective or industry level. Finally, alignment between human capital strategies and occupational cultures has the potential to improve performance across industries and occupations beyond the trucking industry

What Extension Personnel Should Know About Midwestern Goat Producers

The growth of the goat industry has created opportunities for producers looking for a profitable alternative enterprise. Little is known about goat production or educational needs of producers in Missouri and Arkansas. A survey of goat producers in Missouri and Arkansas addressed farm characteristics, product marketing characteristics, preferred information sources, and educational topics of interest for goat producers. A better understanding of goat production and producer needs can support Extension\u27s development of education programs to further develop the emerging goat industry

Effects of Age, Sex, and Neuropsychological Performance on Financial Decision-Making

The capacity to make sound financial decisions across the lifespan is critical for interpersonal, occupational, and psychological health and success. In the present study, we explored how healthy younger and older adults make a series of increasingly complex financial decisions. One-hundred sixteen healthy older adults, aged 56–90 years, and 102 college undergraduates, completed the Financial Decision-Making Questionnaire, which requires selecting and justifying financial choices across four hypothetical scenarios and answering questions pertaining to financial knowledge. Results indicated that Older participants significantly outperformed Younger participants on a multiple-choice test of acquired financial knowledge. However, after controlling for such pre-existing knowledge, several age effects were observed. For example, Older participants were more likely to make immediate investment decisions, whereas Younger participants exhibited a preference for delaying decision-making pending additional information. Older participants also rated themselves as more concerned with avoiding monetary loss (i.e., a prevention orientation), whereas Younger participants reported greater interest in financial gain (i.e., a promotion orientation). In terms of sex differences, Older Males were more likely to pay credit card bills and utilize savings accounts than were Older Females. Multiple positive correlations were observed between Older participants’ financial decision-making ability and performance on neuropsychological measures of non-verbal intellect and executive functioning. Lastly, the ability to justify one’s financial decisions declined with age, among the Older participants. Several of the aforementioned results parallel findings from the medical decision-making literature, suggesting that older adults make decisions in a manner that conserves diminishing cognitive resources

Agronomic Traits in Oilseed Rape (Brassica napus) Can Predict Foraging Resources for Insect Pollinators

Mass-flowering crops, such as oilseed rape (OSR; Brassica napus), provide pulses of nectar and pollen, helping to support pollinators and their pollination services in agricultural landscapes. Despite their value to declining pollinators, varietal in-field OSR testing focusses on agronomic traits, with floral resources being largely overlooked. OSR has a high varietal turnover, and consequently, floral resource data collected for a specific variety quickly become redundant. Here, we explore the potential to predict floral resource availability using agronomic trait data routinely collected in varietal trials. To build predictive models, we investigated the relationships between agronomic traits and pollen and nectar availability in 19 OSR varieties. Nectar quality was positively influenced by early vigour, as well as winter hardiness in conventional varieties and stem stiffness in hybrid varieties. Pollen quantity was driven by different traits, with early maturation having a negative impact in conventional varieties and resistance to lodging having a positive impact in hybrid varieties. Our study highlights the potential to predict floral resources using agronomic trait data, enabling the rapid assessment of these key resources in future OSR varieties without costly sampling. Agronomic traits relating to increased nectar quality were also agronomically favourable, indicating benefits to both pollinators and growers. The inclusion of modelled floral resource data in recommended varietal lists would enable growers to make informed decisions about varietal selection based on local pollinator populations

The genetic architecture of divergence between threespine stickleback species.

The genetic and molecular basis of morphological evolution is poorly understood, particularly in vertebrates. Genetic studies of the differences between naturally occurring vertebrate species have been limited by the expense and difficulty of raising large numbers of animals and the absence of molecular linkage maps for all but a handful of laboratory and domesticated animals. We have developed a genome-wide linkage map for the three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), an extensively studied teleost fish that has undergone rapid divergence and speciation since the melting of glaciers 15,000 years ago. Here we use this map to analyse the genetic basis of recently evolved changes in skeletal armour and feeding morphologies seen in the benthic and limnetic stickleback species from Priest Lake, British Columbia. Substantial alterations in spine length, armour plate number, and gill raker number are controlled by genetic factors that map to independent chromosome regions. Further study of these regions will help to define the number and type of genetic changes that underlie morphological diversification during vertebrate evolution

Collaborative effort to operationalize the gender transformative approach in the Barotse Floodplain

Agricultural interventions that aim at alleviating rural poverty have important gender implications. The paper explores a Gender Transformative Approach recognizing that fishing, post- harvest processing, and trading are all gendered activities. On the Barotse Floodplain (Zambia) women are relegated to perform tasks within less profitable nodes of the fish value chain. The assessment of ecosystem services in a select number of Aquatic Agricultural Systems (AAS) focal communities included women’s and men’s perspectives and diverse provisioning, regulating and cultural ecosystem services.Cultivate Africa’s Future Fund (CULTIAF

Choice of activity-intensity classification thresholds impacts upon accelerometer-assessed physical activity-health relationships in children

It is unknown whether using different published thresholds (PTs) for classifying physical activity (PA) impacts upon activity-health relationships. This study explored whether relationships between PA (sedentary [SED], light PA [LPA], moderate PA [MPA], moderate-to-vigorous PA, vigorous PA [VPA]) and health markers differed in children when classified using three different PTs