Developing criminal personas for designers

This paper describes a research method used to develop criminal personas for use by designers in a process called Cyclic Countering of Competitive Creativity (C4). Personas rather than profiles are developed to encourage designer ownership, to improve the level of engagement with countering the criminal mind, and encourage the responsibility to keep the personas live and developing, rather than be adopted as simple checklists built from available criminal profile data. In this case study indirect access to offender details was used to develop the personas. The aim was to give particular focus to the offenders’ ‘creative prompts’, which enable designers to more effectively counter their own design solutions, by a role-play approach to critical review and counter design. The C4 process enables learning through failure, and strengthens the development and selection that takes place within the design process, but C4 does rely upon the development of relevant and engaging personas to be effective

Writing to feel / feeling to write : utilizing emotion theory and performance studies in creative writing pedagogy

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on February 27, 2013).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisor: Dr. Donna StricklandIncludes bibliographical references.Vita.Ph. D. University of Missouri--Columbia 2012."December 2012"Although undergraduate creative writing courses routinely ask students to create “emotionally complex” characters, engage peers in the emotionally charged experience of workshopping, and scrutinize their personal investments in a story during its evaluation, very little attention has been paid to emotional schooling in creative writing instruction. When the role of emotion in creative writing is broached, it is typically presented in dualistic terms that preserve a binary opposition of feeling and thinking, even though the need to theorize emotions as a “tight braid of affect and judgment” has already been well-argued in feminist epistemology by Arlie Hochschild (1983) and Alison Jagger (1989), and in rhetoric and composition by Alice Brand (1989, 1994), Lynn Worsham (1998), and Megan Boler (1999). My dissertation argues that the core questions for emotion studies can be read as answers for the problems found in the scholarship of creative writing pedagogy, which currently seeks the “perfect combination of praxis and theory” and continues to argue for emotional investment in the writing process and emotional distancing in the workshop process (Blythe and Sweet 307). Specifically, I demonstrate, through pedagogical trials in my own classrooms, how aspects of Boler's “testimonial readings,” performance studies pedagogies, and recent translations of Stanislavski's “emotion memory” can be used to engage craft criticism and emotion theory in workshop and allow creative writing students to recognize emotions as both personally felt and socially constructed.Includes bibliographical reference

Mainely Gay, Vol.5, No.2 (March/April 1978)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/meg/1012/thumbnail.jp

Determining the Impact of Increased Physical Activity on Improving Sleep Quality in Young Adults

Determining the Impact of Increased Physical Activity on Improving Sleep Quality in Young Adults Disturbed sleep, defined as any alteration to normal sleep patterns, has been linked to poor cardiovascular health and an increase in cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. These negative sleep patterns are highly prevalent with 35% to 41% of individuals in the United States reported some form of disturbed sleep. Although high amounts of physical activity (PA) are often associated with high sleep quality, little is known about PA’s effectiveness to improve different aspects of sleep (e.g. duration vs quality) and the mechanisms to which it can improve sleep quality. Purpose: The study sought to determine the ability of increased PA to improve sleep efficiency in healthy young adults. Methods: Nineteen young adults (25±4 yrs) were recruited for this study. Subjects wore an accelerometer (Actigraph GT3x-BT) for a total of three weeks to record daily physical activity (step count; low, moderate, and vigorous physical activity) and sleep variables (efficiency, wake after sleep onset, number of nightly awakenings, time per awakening, and total sleep time). Subjects maintained normal physical activity levels for the first week (BL), then increased their step count by an average of 5,000 steps/day across the next two weeks (W1 and W2). Heart rate variability (HRV) and venous blood draws were collected weekly to assess sympathetic activity and inflammation, respectively. Results: The physical activity intervention resulted in significant increases (p \u3c 0.001) in step-count for both W1 (13163 ± 3184) and W2 (12168 ± 3619) when compared to BL (8648 ± 2615 steps/day). No significant differences from BL were observed when examining sleep efficiency (BL: 83.8 ± 6.4; W1: 85.5 ± 4.0; W2: 84.2 ± 6.1 %), sympathetic-vagal balance, and inflammatory marker concentrations in W1 and W2. A significant correlation was revealed when assessing the change in sleep efficiency from BL to W1 (r = 0.81, p \u3c 0.001) and BL to W2 (r = 0.52, p = 0.02) when compared to initial sleep efficiency values. Conclusion: This study revealed that although young healthy individuals appear to lack improvements in sleep efficiency with an increase in physical activity, those who reported the lowest sleep quality had the greatest improvements in sleep efficiency following an increase in physical activity. Therefore, the findings of the study suggest that although increasing physical activity can improve sleep quality, a potential “ceiling effect” may occur, as when sleep quality is adequate, augmenting physical activity no longer has a substantial effect.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/gradposters/1058/thumbnail.jp

What is the Meaning of This? Identity and Wellbeing in Sensemaking about Retention and Turnover

Explanations of turnover from extant management research focus on the what (content) and how (process) of turnover. This study explores the why (meaning) to employees of quitting or staying at an employing organization, in order to add a new layer to our understanding of retention and turnover. Analysis of data from in-depth interviews with leavers and stayers, both post hoc and in situ, using grounded theory methods, reveals identity and psychological wellbeing assessment sensemaking cycles, which occur periodically or when threat to core elements of identity and wellbeing across life domains is perceived. Core elements of identity and wellbeing include purpose, trajectory, relatedness, expression, acceptance, and differentiation (PTREAD). Perceived threat to PTREAD elements across life domains leads to coping, often with varying levels of psychophysiological strain, and re-assessments, often in repeated cycles. Successful coping and lack of threat to PTREAD elements result in retention. Unsuccessful coping with threat to PTREAD elements results in retention while repeated occur, and in voluntary turnover. Cycles of unsuccessful coping deplete resources over time, escalating strain and contributing to turnover. Overall, these findings suggest that from the perspective of the actors “being retained” or “turning over,” retention and turnover are part of a quest for positive, congruent identity and holistic psychological wellbeing. Implications for research on retention, turnover, identity, wellbeing, and psychophysiology in organizations, as well as practical implications, are discussed

Mainely Gay, Vol.5, No.4/5 (November/December & January/February 1978/1979)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/meg/1014/thumbnail.jp

Making a Market for Corporate Disclosure

It has long been said that market forces alone will result in a problematic under-sharing of information by public companies. Since the 1930s, the main regulatory response to this market failure has come in the form of the massive mandatory-disclosure regime that sits at the foundation of modern securities law. But this regime--especially when viewed along with its speech-chilling antifraud overlay-no doubt leaves society without all the corporate information from which it would benefit. The typical fix offered to the problem has been more of the same: add to the 100-plus-page list of what firms must disclose, often based on the latest Washington fad

Mainely Gay, Vol.5, No.3 (July 1978)

https://digitalcommons.usm.maine.edu/meg/1013/thumbnail.jp