Fusing creativity: Cultural metacognition and teamwork in multicultural teams

This study elaborates theoretically and tests empirically a model linking fusion teamwork to creativity in multicultural teams (Janssens & Brett, 2006). The study also introduces cultural metacognition, a dimension of cultural intelligence (Earley & Ang, 2003), as an antecedent of fusion teamwork and creativity. Data were from 246 members of 37 multicultural teams. Results generated from a multilevel modeling analysis were consistent with hypotheses: Across teams, when team members were more highly culturally metacognitive, fusion teamwork and creativity were more likely. All analyses were controlled for generalized affect toward the team to reduce threats to validity of common method bias and affect. The results suggest the value of fusion teamwork for generating creativity in multicultural teams and the importance of having members of multicultural teams who have high versus low levels of cultural metacognition. © 2012 International Association for Conflict Management and Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Characterization of grain boundaries in silicon

Zero-bias conductance and capacitance measurements at various temperatures were used to study trapped charges and potential barrier height at the boundaries. Deep-level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) was applied to measure the density of states at the boundary. A study of photoconductivity of grain boundaries in p-type silicon demonstrated the applicability of the technique in the measurement of minority carrier recombination velocity at the grain boundary. Enhanced diffusion of phosphorus at grain boundaries in three cast polycrystalline photovoltaic materials was studied. Enhancements for the three were the same, indicating that the properties of boundaries are similar, although grown by different techniques. Grain boundaries capable of enhancing the diffusion were found always to have strong recombination activities; the phenomena could be related to dangling bonds at the boundaries. Evidence that incoherent second-order twins of (111)/(115) type are diffusion-active is presented

Are people in residential care entitled to receive rehabilitation services following hip fracture? Views of the public from a citizens' jury.

BACKGROUND:Access to rehabilitation services for people living in residential care facilities is frequently limited. A randomised trial of a hospital outreach hip fracture rehabilitation program in residential care facilities has demonstrated improvements in mobility at four weeks and quality of life at 12 months but was not considered cost-effective by standard health economic metrics. The current study aimed to explore the general public's views on issues involved in the allocation of rehabilitation resources for residents of care facilities. METHODS:A citizens' jury comprising 13 purposively sampled members of the general public, representative of the South Australian age, gender and household income profile. The jury considered the questions "Should there be an investment of physical rehabilitation services in residential care for older people following a hip fracture? If so, what is the best way of providing this service (considering funding, models of service delivery and equity)?" Deliberations were in the context of a state-wide health reform program. The jury was conducted over two days with an experienced independent facilitator, addressing questions developed by a steering group of research academics and clinicians. RESULTS:The mean age of the citizens' jury members was 43 (range 26 to 61). Eleven members voted for investment in outreach hospital rehabilitation services in residential aged care. All jurors agreed a number of strategies in addition to investment should be implemented, including health care planning and decision making, increased emphasis on hip fracture prevention, training of aged care staff in rehabilitation and routine provision of hospital discharge summaries to families. The jury further advocated for an increased focus on rehabilitation in residential care, potentially through accreditation criteria, increasing health literacy of residents and families, implementation of age friendly environment strategies and improving connections of care facilities with community, hospital and tertiary services. CONCLUSIONS:This citizens' jury representative of the general public recommends that regardless of dementia and frailty, people who live in residential care and are walking and fracture their hips should have access to hospital outreach rehabilitation and recovery services

The Impact of Wine Tourism Involvement on Winery Owners' Identity Processes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Tourism Planning & Development on 20/02/2020, available online: doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/21568316.2020.1730945This paper examines how involvement in wine tourism has affected winery owners’ identity processes. Using Breakwell’s Identity Process Theory (IPT) as a conceptual framework, we investigate the extent to which place is a part of winery owners’ self-identities, thereby giving them senses of belonging, distinctiveness, continuity, and self-esteem. Simultaneously, we find that these senses and feelings influence winery owners’ perceptions of the benefits and dis-benefits of wine tourism development in their region. We also discover how personal involvement in tourism can strengthen or threaten winery owners’ identities and thereby affect their support or otherwise for wine tourism. Empirical evidence is provided via a sample of twenty-eight winery owners in Langhe, Italy, who have recently engaged in various tourism-related activities due to the continuous development of the local tourism industry. Our research recognises that place is an integral part of the identity process

Effects of cover crops on phosphatase activity in a clay arable soil in the UK

The effect of five cover crop species (radish, buckwheat, vetch, phacelia and oat) alongside an un-cropped control, on the activity and persistence of soil acid and alkaline phosphatase activity was investigated. There was no effect on alkaline phosphatase activity at the time of cover crop incorporation (March), but by the point of maturation of the following oat cash crop (June) significant differences were detected, with the greatest activity following an oat cover crop. Acid phosphatase activity showed species-related significant differences at both sampling dates, with the magnitude increasing by June. Again, plots following an oat cover crop showed the greatest activity, followed by phacelia. This has shown that soil phosphatase enzymes are affected by the presence of a cover crop, that this effect is apparently species-dependent – and not dependent on the amount of biomass from the cover crop – and that cover crops could be a potential means to enhance soil phosphorus cycling

Promoting Activity in Geriatric Rehabilitation: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Accelerometry

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Background Low activity levels in inpatient rehabilitation are associated with adverse outcomes. The study aimed to test whether activity levels can be increased by the provision of monitored activity data to patients and clinicians in the context of explicit goal setting. Methods A randomized controlled trial in three sites in Australia included 255 inpatients aged 60 and older who had a rehabilitation goal to become ambulant. The primary outcome was patients’ walking time measured by accelerometers during the rehabilitation admission. Walking times from accelerometry were made available daily to treating therapists and intervention participants to motivate patients to improve incidental activity levels and reach set goals. For the control group, ‘usual care’ was followed, including the setting of mobility goals; however, for this group, neither staff nor patients received data on walking times to aid the setting of daily walking time targets. Results The median daily walking time in the intervention group increased from 10.3 minutes at baseline to 32.1 minutes at day 28, compared with an increase from 9.5 to 26.5 minutes per day in the control group. Subjects in the intervention group had significantly higher non-therapy walking time by about 7 minutes [mean (95% CI): 24.6 (21.7, 27.4)] compared to those in the control group [mean(95% CI): 17.3 (14.4, 20.3)] (p = 0.001). Conclusions Daily feedback to patients and therapists using an accelerometer increased walking times during rehabilitation admissions. The results of this study suggest objective monitoring of activity levels could provide clinicians with information on clinically important, mobility-related activities to assist goal setting. Trial Registration Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12611000034932 http://www.ANZCTR.org.au

On the gravitational production of superheavy dark matter

The dark matter in the universe can be in the form of a superheavy matter species (WIMPZILLA). Several mechanisms have been proposed for the production of WIMPZILLA particles during or immediately following the inflationary epoch. Perhaps the most attractive mechanism is through gravitational particle production, where particles are produced simply as a result of the expansion of the universe. In this paper we present a detailed numerical calculation of WIMPZILLA gravitational production in hybrid-inflation models and natural-inflation models. Generalizing these findings, we also explore the dependence of the gravitational production mechanism on various models of inflation. We show that superheavy dark matter production seems to be robust, with Omega_X h^2 ~ (M_X / (10^11 GeV))^2 (T_RH / (10^9 GeV)), so long as M_X < H_I, where M_X is the WIMPZILLA mass, T_RH is the reheat temperature, and H_I is the expansion rate of the universe during inflation.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figures; LaTeX; submitted to Physical Review D; minor typographical error correcte

Study of avidity of antigen-specific antibody as a means of understanding development of long-term immunological memory after Vibrio cholerae O1 infection

The avidity of antibodies to specific antigens and the relationship of avidity to memory B cell responses to these antigens have not been studied in patients with cholera or those receiving oral cholera vaccines. We measured the avidity of antibodies to cholera toxin B subunit (CTB) and Vibrio cholerae O1 lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in Bangladeshi adult cholera patients (n = 30), as well as vaccinees (n = 30) after administration of two doses of a killed oral cholera vaccine. We assessed antibody and memory B cell responses at the acute stage in patients or prior to vaccination in vaccinees and then in follow-up over a year. Both patients and vaccinees mounted CTB-specific IgG and IgA antibodies of high avidity. Patients showed longer persistence of these antibodies than vaccinees, with persistence lasting in patients up to day 270 to 360. The avidity of LPS-specific IgG and IgA antibodies in patients remained elevated up to 180 days of follow-up. Vaccinees mounted highly avid LPS-specific antibodies at day 17 (3 days after the second dose of vaccine), but the avidity waned rapidly to baseline by 30 days. We examined the correlation between antigen-specific memory B cell responses and avidity indices for both antigens. We found that numbers of CTB- and LPS-specific memory B cells significantly correlated with the avidity indices of the corresponding antibodies (P < 0.05; Spearman's ρ = 0.28 to 0.45). These findings suggest that antibody avidity after infection and immunization is a good correlate of the development and maintenance of memory B cell responses to Vibrio cholerae O1 antigens

The Error and Repair Catastrophes: A Two-Dimensional Phase Diagram in the Quasispecies Model

This paper develops a two gene, single fitness peak model for determining the equilibrium distribution of genotypes in a unicellular population which is capable of genetic damage repair. The first gene, denoted by $\sigma_{via}$, yields a viable organism with first order growth rate constant $k > 1$ if it is equal to some target ``master'' sequence $\sigma_{via, 0}$. The second gene, denoted by $\sigma_{rep}$, yields an organism capable of genetic repair if it is equal to some target ``master'' sequence $\sigma_{rep, 0}$. This model is analytically solvable in the limit of infinite sequence length, and gives an equilibrium distribution which depends on \mu \equiv L\eps , the product of sequence length and per base pair replication error probability, and \eps_r , the probability of repair failure per base pair. The equilibrium distribution is shown to exist in one of three possible ``phases.'' In the first phase, the population is localized about the viability and repairing master sequences. As \eps_r exceeds the fraction of deleterious mutations, the population undergoes a ``repair'' catastrophe, in which the equilibrium distribution is still localized about the viability master sequence, but is spread ergodically over the sequence subspace defined by the repair gene. Below the repair catastrophe, the distribution undergoes the error catastrophe when $\mu$ exceeds \ln k/\eps_r , while above the repair catastrophe, the distribution undergoes the error catastrophe when $\mu$ exceeds $\ln k/f_{del}$, where $f_{del}$ denotes the fraction of deleterious mutations.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to Physical Review

Unveiling Neutrino Mixing and Leptonic CP Violation

We review the present understanding of neutrino masses and mixings, discussing what are the unknowns in the three family oscillation scenario. Despite the anticipated success coming from the planned long baseline neutrino experiments in unraveling the leptonic mixing sector, there are two important unknowns which may remain obscure: the mixing angle $\theta_{13}$ and the CP-phase $\delta$. The measurement of these two parameters has led us to consider the combination of superbeams and neutrino factories as the key to unveil the neutrino oscillation picture.Comment: Invited brief review, 18 pages, 6 figure