Authorizing Tolkien: Control, Adaptation, and Dissemination of J.R.R. Tolkien\u27s Works

This article is the introduction to the special theme issue consisting of four essays on Authorizing Tolkien. Reid and Elam discuss medieval and postmodern theories of adaptation and interpretation and introduce the essays in the issue

Tailored emails prompt electric vehicle owners to engage with tariff switching information

The carbon intensity of the electricity used to charge an electric vehicle (EV) is dependent on when in the day charging occurs. However, persuading EV owners to adopt incentives to charge during off-peak hours is challenging. Here we show that governments could exploit the ‘window of opportunity’ created when people purchase their first EV to promote time-of-use tariffs. Email recipients (n = 7,038 EV owners) were more likely to click-through to an information webpage when the email emphasized specific reductions in home-charging costs versus general bill savings. However, the ‘window of opportunity’ for maximizing potential adoption is short; email open rates declined from over 70% immediately after purchase to 40% for recipients owning their EV for over three months. These results demonstrate the potential of prompts to change behaviours for which opt-out enrolment (where enrolment is automatic unless people explicitly opt out) would be unethical or less effective

Fuzzy short-run control charts

Statistical control charts are useful tools in monitoring the state of a manufacturing process. Control charts are used to plot process data and compare it to the limits set for the process. Points plotting outside these limits indicate an out-of-control condition. Standard control charting procedures, however, are limited in that they cannot take into account the case when data is of a fuzzy nature. Another limitation of standard charting methods is when the data produced by the process is short-run data. Often, the situation where the data is short-run occurs in conjunction with data that is considered fuzzy. This paper dicusses the development of a fuzzy control chartting technique, called short-Run α-cut p Control Chart, to account for fuzzy data in a short-run situation. The developed chart parameters accounted for the fuzzy nature of the data in a short-run situation. The parameters were validated by comparing the false alarm rates for various combinations of subgroup numbers (m) and subgroup sizes (n). It was shown that for every combination of m and n, the Short-Run α-cut p Control Chart limits produced a lower false alarm rate than that of the standard fuzzy α-cut control chart.Peer Reviewe

Main and Regional Campus Assessments of Applicants to a Rural Physician Leadership Program: A Generalizability Analysis

While the selection of qualified applicants often relies, in part, on scores generated from a medical school pre-admission interview (MSPI), the growth of regional medical campuses (RMCs) – many with specialized rural tracks, programs, or missions – has challenged schools to accommodate a wider range of stakeholder input. This study examines the reliabilities of main (urban) and regional (rural) campus interviewers’ assessments of applicants to a Rural Physician Leadership Program (RPLP) located in the southeastern United States. Data from RPLP applicants completing MSPIs on two campuses from 2009-2017 (n = 232) were examined in a generalizability analysis. In two separate interviews on each campus (4 total), raters independently evaluated applicants’ overall acceptability and likelihood of practicing in a rural area of the state. Results provided campus-specific and combined (composite) estimates of obtained and projected reliabilities. The person-by-campus interaction accounted for 11% and 5% of the respective variance in interviewers’ ratings of overall applicant acceptability and likelihood of rural in-state practice, and the reliability of mean scores across the four independent interviews (each with a single, unique rater) was 0.73 and 0.82. Error variances were higher among main campus interviewers, but scores correlated highly between the two campuses. While broadening the universe of generalization often results in decreased reliability, reliability was shown to be enhanced with the addition of regional (rural) campus interviews. As the RPLP matures, an examination of graduates’ actual practice locations should yield insights into the predictive validity of these pre-admissions assessments. More generally, research may wish to explore the conditions under which increasing the diversity of stakeholder input can be accommodated without concomitant reductions in overall reliability

The Freshman Academy and Its Effect on Ninth Graders’ Attendance, Discipline, and Academic Achievement

The transition from middle school to high school is challenging for students and canmanifest in poor academic performance, chronic absenteeism, and increased discipline incidents. The Freshman Academy (FA) is designed to improve these outcomes. The problem is that FA has been mainly studied in suburban and urban schools, not rural schools. The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to compare the FA program on rural 9th graders’ attendance, behavior, and end-of-course achievement test scores to a control-group school. Eccles and Midgley’s stage-environment fit theory framed this study. Research questions focused on whether there were any significant differences between the two groups. Archived data on 95 freshman students from each rural high school were collected. A two-way multivariate analysis of variance was used to analyze whether the FA intervention significantly improved outcomes. Statistically significant results were obtained; however, findings only showed a moderate effect size for improving attendance and a small effect size for raising achievement and improving discipline. The findings did not demonstrate that the FA implemented in the rural school setting had an overall practical benefit on academic achievement, discipline, or school attendance compared to the control school. The main implication of the results is that, to improve freshman student transition outcomes, FA needs additional, research-based interventions combined with it. The social change implications of this study are that these results will inform public school leaders about whether the FA program is a practical and worthwhile use of district resources

Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and California Psychological Inventory as predictors of performance for a municipal and a state police agency.

This study examined the utility of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) and California Psychological Inventory (CPI) scale scores in predicting three levels of performance, pass/fail for academy training, grade point average (GPA) earned during academy training, and field performance rating (FPR) after completion of academy training, for two groups of police recruits. The first group consisted of 85 Oklahoma Highway Patrol (OHP) recruits, and the second group consisted of 99 Oklahoma City Police Department (OCPD) recruits. There were significant correlations between several scales on the MMPI and both the pass/fail and GPA criterion for both agencies. No significant correlations with FPR were found for either agency. Several scales on the CPI were significantly correlated with pass/fail and GPA for both agencies. Several scales on the CPI could be used to predict FPR for OCPD, but not for OHP. When the two tests were combined, several scales were significantly correlated with all three levels of performance for both agencies

University of Kentucky Rural Physician Leadership Program: A Programmatic Review

This article describes the characteristics and results of the Rural Physician Leadership Program (RPLP) at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. RPLP is a successful example of a regional medical campus designed to train physicians at a regional medical campus to serve rural areas through local partnerships

Wear particle dynamics drive the difference between repeated and non-repeated reciprocated sliding

The dependence of the sliding mode (repeated vs. non-repeated reciprocated sliding) on the friction and wear behavior of ball-on-flat, brittle non-metallic interfaces in ambient air conditions is evaluated. Repeated sliding promotes the formation of a third body (compressed wear particles) that stabilizes the friction. Non-repeated sliding shows reduced evidence of third body formation, and instead a steady increase in friction. The proposed mechanism driving the non-repeated friction behavior is attributed to a gradual reduction in the ball surface roughness, leading to an increased area of real contact and greater capillary bridge forming across non-contact regions of the interface