Less is More? Publicness, Management Strategy, and Organizational Performance in Mental Health Treatment Facilities

In this study, the authors seek to identify mechanisms of publicness present within mental health treatment facilities and, subsequently, explore the constraints these mechanisms impose on facilities’ capacities to achieve public outcomes. Through grounded insights from senior managers in this field, political authority, namely through governmental funding and regulation, is identified by 43 of 46 respondents as being an influence on publicness. Authors then uncover the conditions during which publicness, in the form of political authority, constrains organizational achievement of public outcomes. In leveraging managerial perspectives, two distinct constraints emerged: publicness often inhibits organizational efficiency and produces mission drift within these facilities. Findings suggest that managers, under certain conditions (and where legally feasible), may provide greater effectiveness in fulfilling organizational goals and objectives and in achieving public outcomes by maintaining or decreasing an organization’s publicness. Fundamental to effectively managing publicness is understanding the mechanisms germane to both public outcome attainment and failure—the latter of which is explored here

Sampling Time Effects for Persistence and Survival in Step Structural Fluctuations

The effects of sampling rate and total measurement time have been determined for single-point measurements of step fluctuations within the context of first-passage properties. Time dependent STM has been used to evaluate step fluctuations on Ag(111) films grown on mica as a function of temperature (300-410 K), on screw dislocations on the facets of Pb crystallites at 320K, and on Al-terminated Si(111) over the temperature range 770K - 970K. Although the fundamental time constant for step fluctuations on Ag and Al/Si varies by orders of magnitude over the temperature ranges of measurement, no dependence of the persistence amplitude on temperature is observed. Instead, the persistence probability is found to scale directly with t/Dt where Dt is the time interval used for sampling. Survival probabilities show a more complex scaling dependence which includes both the sampling interval and the total measurement time tm. Scaling with t/Dt occurs only when Dt/tm is a constant. We show that this observation is equivalent to theoretical predictions that the survival probability will scale as Dt/L^z, where L is the effective length of a step. This implies that the survival probability for large systems, when measured with fixed values of tm or Dt should also show little or no temperature dependence.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figure

Developing Organizational Leaders to Manage Publicness: A Conceptual Framework

Students enrolled in programs accredited by the Network of Schools of Public Policy, Affairs, and Administration (NASPAA) are increasingly seeking careers outside of classic government organizations. Considering the diversity of job placements with respect to sector (i.e., government, private for-profit, nonprofit), public affairs students may benefit from in-course instruction that aims to develop management competencies that are applicable to any sector. Educating students on publicness theory, specifically managing to achieve public outcomes (i.e., managing publicness), may position these current and future organizational leaders to identify and effectively manage certain structures and institutions in their organization and the external environment. Accordingly, this study provides a conceptual framework in the form of a research-intensive assignment that will equip public affairs students with a working view of how publicness applies to their organizations. By engaging in this research, students acquire practical tools that allow them to consider publicness in their management strategies and decisions regardless of their sector of employment

The Civic Dimension of School Voucher Programs

America’s public schools have not been exempt from the movement to privatization and contracting out that has characterized government innovations over at least the past quarter century. A number of the issues raised by school voucher programs mirror the management and efficacy questions raised by privatization generally; however, because public education is often said to be “constitutive of the public,” using tax dollars to send the nation’s children to private schools implicates the distinctive role of public education in a democratic society in ways that more traditional contracting arrangements do not. Using a content analysis, the authors explore the extent to which school choice voucher programs are mandated by state statutes to integrate civics education into their curriculum. Findings reveal that across the fourteen states (and the District of Columbia) that have enacted school choice voucher programs, statutes exempt these programs from curriculum oversight, including civics requirements, and grant them considerable autonomy in designing their curricula. This study concludes by discussing the implications for ethical and accountable governance when primary and secondary schools fail to cultivate civic competence and civic literacy

Disappearing galaxies: the orientation dependence of JWST-bright, HST-dark, star-forming galaxy selection

Galaxies that are invisible in deep optical-NIR imaging but detected at longer wavelengths have been the focus of several recent observational studies, with speculation that they could constitute a substantial missing population and even dominate the cosmic star formation rate density at $z\gtrsim4$. The depths now achievable with JWST at the longest wavelengths probed by HST, coupled with the transformative resolution at longer wavelengths, are already enabling detailed, spatially-resolved characterisation of sources that were invisible to HST, often known as `HST-dark' galaxies. However, until now, there has been little theoretical work to compare against. We present the first simulation-based study of this population, using highly-resolved galaxies from the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) project, with multi-wavelength images along several lines of sight forward-modelled using radiative transfer. We naturally recover a population of modelled sources that meet commonly-used selection criteria ($H_{\rm{AB}}>27\,\rm{mag}$ and $H_{\rm{AB}}-\rm{F444W}>2.3$). These simulated HST-dark galaxies lie at high redshifts ($z=4-7$), have high levels of dust attenuation ($A_{V}=2-4$), and display compact recent star formation ($R_{1/2,\,\rm{4.4\,\mu\rm{m}}}\lesssim1\,\rm{kpc}$). Orientation is very important: for all but one of the 17 simulated galaxy snapshots with HST-dark sightlines, there exist other sightlines that do not meet the criteria. This result has important implications for comparisons between observations and models that do not resolve the detailed star-dust geometry, such as semi-analytic models or coarsely-resolved hydrodynamical simulations. Critically, we demonstrate that HST-dark sources are not an unexpected or exotic population, but a subset of high-redshift, highly-dust-attenuated sources viewed along certain lines of sight.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap

Additive effects of two growth QTL on cattle chromosome 14

The document attached has been archived with permission from the World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production.DNA-marker technology has the potential to assist seed-stock beef producers with genetic improvement of traits that are difficult to measure, and to assist research workers in identifying chromosomal regions containing quantitative trait loci (QTL), and eventually genes, which control animal performance traits. A collaborative study was established in 1995 between AgResearch in New Zealand (NZ) and Adelaide University in Australia to search for DNA markers significantly linked to production, carcass and meat quality traits in beef cattle. The present paper reports on a sub-set of that data, namely evidence from microsatellite markers on chromosome (Chr) 14 of significant linkage to growth traits and hot carcass weight (HSCW) at a standard level of trim