COMMUNICATING INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE MINDFULNESS: UNDERSTANDING LISTENING AND SENSECHECKING AT WORK

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations made workplace changes, which added an additional challenge to employees’ communication. However, mindfulness may help members strengthen their workplace interactions. Mindfulness is an intentional open awareness to the present moment (Shapiro, 2009). The theoretical framework of collective mindfulness includes organizational mindfulness, which is mindfulness from a top-down approach and mindful organizing, which is a bottom-up approach to mindfulness at work. This dissertation extends research on collective mindfulness by including listening, individual mindfulness aspects, and sensemaking to examine how collective mindfulness members make meaning of changes due to COVID-19. I observed 26 meetings and interviewed 23 employees in an automotive organization in the East Coast of the United States (U.S.) that conducts annual leadership and communicating mindfully training. Findings indicate that (a) employees communicated collective mindfulness as they managed conflict through open discussions to solve problems, (b) employees communicated individual mindfulness practices of listening to form collective mindfulness by conducting their annual leadership training and creating open learning environments, (c) employees made sense together through a new term called sensechecking, and (d) employees made sense of changes due to COVID-19 by appreciating their company’s support and by being resilient. Sensechecking is an extension of sensemaking, in which employees check with their teams to understand how their message is perceived and ask their teams to make meaning collectively. The results of this dissertation also expand on the theoretical components of collective mindfulness by adding the following: focusing on the bright side of situations, building trust among employees, and making operations more efficient. Organizations may adopt trainings that teach employees how to mindfully communicate to create collective mindfulness. Additionally, employees may learn how to engage in the sensechecking process to strengthen team communication at work

Incorporating Aural Skills in The Teaching of Middle and High School Instrumental Ensembles

University undergraduate instrumental music students possess a variety of abilities in ear-training regardless of their ability to perform on their major instrument. Some students may have received prior aural skills instruction in their middle and high school ensembles; their teachers may have included singing activities in their rehearsals. Scholarly research indicates incorporating aural skills in the teaching of instrumental ensembles improves students’ abilities in sight-reading, error detection, sense of tonality, and intonation. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the extent to which aural skills activities are being taught in U.S. middle and high school instrumental classrooms, and to advocate for their use by creating resources and example lessons for future classroom implementation. To discover what aural skills content middle and high school teachers include in their ensemble rehearsals, a survey was created to investigate current teaching practices of secondary instrumental teachers, with an emphasis on aural skills activities. The survey, written in QuestionPro, was distributed through the “Band Directors Group” on Facebook, a professional development community with over 25,000 members. The total number of participants in this study was 281 instrumental middle and high school teachers. The results of the survey indicate that a majority of teachers do include aural skills in their ensemble teaching. However, teachers wish they could include more aural skills in their ensembles, but lack the rehearsal time or resources to successfully implement these lessons prevent its implementation. Survey participants provided a list of published method books and resources they currently use as well as a short list of repertoire performed by their ensembles in the past year. Example exercises and sample lessons were created from these resources and repertoire to encourage teachers to discover creative ways to teach aural skills to their students

Asylum for Trafficked Women: Escape Strategies Beyond the T Visa

Trafficking in persons is a global trade sustained by the profits from forced labor. Human traffickers exploit poverty, disparate female rights and emergent political situations. Trafficking violates the human rights of people who are bought and sold, enslaved by debt bondage schemes, and manipulated by contracts. Increasingly, these human commodities end up in the United States. The U.S. government recognized the gravity of the situation by enacting the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act of 2000. This note examines how the Act protects victims and trafficking, and suggests an alternative route to protection under U.S. asylum jurisprudence. It examines trafficking in the United States, its historical context and underlying causes. Trafficking is placed within the understanding of slavery in the modem world and addresses definitional issues that must precede any attempts to remedy this crisis. While the Act attempts to protect trafficked individuals ,vith immigration alternative, namely the T visa, survivors of trafficking may better served with the pre-existing protections of asylum

A STATement on vemurafenib-resistant melanoma.

Despite recent advancements in the treatment of late-stage mutant BRAF (V600E/K) melanomas, a major hurdle continues to be acquired resistance to BRAF inhibitors such as vemurafenib. The mechanisms for resistance have proven to be heterogeneous, emphasizing the need to use broad therapeutic approaches. In this issue, the study Stat3-targeted therapies overcome the acquired resistance to vemurafenib in melanomas by Liu et al. proposes that signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3)-paired box 3 (PAX3) signaling may be a mechanism that is used by melanomas to resist RAF inhibitors

Mercuric Iodide Anticoincidence Shield for Gamma-Ray Spectrometer

A film-growth process was developed for polycrystalline mercuric iodide that creates cost-effective, large-area detectors for high-energy charged-particle detection. A material, called a barrier film, is introduced onto the substrate before the normal mercuric iodide film growth process. The barrier film improves the quality of the normal film grown and enhances the adhesion between the film and the substrate. The films grown using this improved technique were found to have adequate signal-to-noise properties so that individual high-energy charged -particle interactions could be distinguished from noise, and thus, could be used to provide an anticoincidence veto function as desired

Operational Trials of Cut-To-Length Harvesting of Poplar in a Mixed Wood Stand

Cut-to-length harvesting systems offer an alternative to conventional mechanical systems for thinning mixedwood stands. We evaluated the performance of a single-grip harvester and forwarder in a poplar-dominated mixedwood stand in Southern Ontario to quantify the effect of tree size and tree form on harvester productivity and harvesting cost, and to assess the damage caused by the harvesting operation to advance regeneration and residual trees. A single-tree selection silvicultural system was used. Individual trees were assigned a form index based on their visual estimates of limb size and stem form. The cut-to-length harvester produced 23.1 m3 per productive machine hour (PMH). Forwarder productivity was 17.2 m3/PMH. The results indicate a significant and positive relationship between harvester productivity and tree size (dbh) and tree form. Tree size (dbh) has the greatest influence on the unit cost of harvesting. At an average 27 cm dbh and extraction distance of 200 m, the stump-to-landing cost was approximately 10 US$/m3. As tree size increased, the unit cost of wood produced decreased. Damage to residual trees and advance regeneration was minimal. The results suggest that single-grip cut-to-length harvesting systems can be effective in managing poplar-dominated mixedwood stands

Testing Mobile Chippers for Chip Size Distribution

Nine chippers were tested for particle size distribution, in order to a) see how chips produced with these machines matched the quality specifications set by the district heating plants of Northeastern Italy and b) detect significant differences between machines. The benchmark was set by collecting chip samples from fourteen district heating plants in the region of interest. The effect of operator skill was minimized and all machines were fed with the same assortment: logs, supplied in lengths varying between 2.4 and 6 m. All logs had similar moisture contents, which typically ranged between 33 and 37 % on a fresh weight base. Mobile in-woods chippers fed with limb-free logs produce high-quality chips, whose particle size distribution matches that of the best chips normally fed to the Italian district heating plants. Indeed, all the tested machines produced chip samples containing almost no oversize particles, very little fines (0.5 to 1 %), and a large majority of chips within the 3-45mm range (95 to 99 %), except the auger-equipped Laimet, which is designed to produce larger chips. There were statistically significant differences between machines and machine types, which were not affected by possible variations of the tree species processed

Fiber Recovery with Chain Flail Delimbing/Debarking and Chipping of Hybrid Poplar

This study determined how much wood was potentially available from short rotation hybrid poplar, and how much was actually recovered when trees were delimbed and debarked with chain flails and chipped. 31 groups of five trees each were measured and then processed. For trees larger than 50 kg total dry weight, potentially recoverable wood averaged 75% of total weight. Over 95% of this wood was converted into chips. Losses due to breakage by the flails, which show up in the bark discharge, amounted to 0.8 dry kg per tree and were relatively independent of tree size. Chipper reject wood losses averaged 2.3 dry kg per tree, but increased in almost direct proportion to tree size, from 1.2 kg for 50 kg trees, to 3.2 kg for 120 kg trees. For trees less than 50 kg total dry weight, potentially recoverable wood fraction was highly variable _ from 50 to 75% of total weight. Because of breakage of small stems by the flail, wood recovery was also relatively low, ranging from 40 to 95%. Most of the wood loss for smaller trees showed up in the bark discharge rather than as chipper rejects. For larger trees, the chipper rejects represent the biggest opportunity for improving the recovery of wood fiber. Sharp chipper knives appear to be important for minimiz ing losses. Beyond that, it is not clear whether wood in the chipper rejects is the result of bole damage by the flail or chipper design characteristics

Modeling the Obstacle Performance of Cable-Towed Vehicles

The forces required to pull wheeled vehicles over idealized terrain obstacles were studied. Scale models and computer simulations were used to evaluate the peak forces for single-axle vehicles equipped with rigid wheels and pneumatic tires. A scale model of a rimless spoke wheel was also tested. The results from the rigid wheel and pneumatic-tired simulations approximated those for the scale models. The rimless spoke wheel model required relatively high towing forces. The computer results indicated that towing forces could be reduced by a factor of three in some situations by using low pressure tires instead of rigid wheels. Even with low pressure tires, it is not possible to pull vehicles over obstacles larger than approximately 1 / 5 of the wheel diameter, if towing forces are not to exceed the vehicle weight