Why Engagement Matters in Sport Volunteer Motivation

Over the years, sport management scholars have been interested in sport volunteer research. Considering there is a heavy reliance on sport volunteers to successfully stage of sporting events, knowing how to recruit and retain these volunteers allows sport event managers and organizers to continue this success. One such way is through understanding the engagement of sport volunteers, specifically the influences of engagement. Through survey methodology, this study examined how engagement of 464 sport volunteers at college football bowl games influenced motivational aspects. Structural Equation Modeling found that meaningfulness and safety had a significant impact on love and purposive motivation through engagement, but there was no significant relationship with rewards. With these results in mind, there are implications for sport event organizers to remember when working with volunteers. Keywords: Human resource management, volunteer engagement, volunteer motivatio

How the Perception of Athletic Academic Services affects the overall College Experience of Freshmen Student-Athletes

More and more intercollegiate athletics programs are allocating strategic resources towards building attractive athletics facilities, lavish training and academic complexes, and high-quality support services. Strategic investments in these areas continue to be a high priority for major college athletics programs, all with the hopes of enhancing the overall college experience for student-athletes. As such, researchers have begun to examine the role these various support services play in the overall athletic program. In this aim, the present study seeks to understand how academic support services are successful in enhancing this experience. Findings indicate that freshmen student-athletes’ perceptions of service quality provided by their academic athletic services, influence satisfaction, student involvement, and emotional adjustment. Building from these findings, university athletic departments should reevaluate and adjust their academic services based on the perception of student-athletes and how the provided services influence their overall college experience

From DSM to DM-ID

ABSTRACTRecognizing the diagnostic challenges that clinicians face when attempting to arrive at an accurate psychiatric diagnosis for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) co-occurring with mental illness (MI), in 2007 the National Association for the Dually Diagnosed (NADD), in association with the American Psychiatric Association (APA), published Diagnostic Manual—Intellectual Disability (DM-ID): A Textbook of Diagnosis of Mental Disorders in Persons with Intellectual Disability (Fletcher, Loschen, Stavrakaki, & First, 2007). The DM-ID was designed as a companion to the DSM-IV-TR and aimed to assist clinicians to arrive at a more accurate DSM-IV-TR diagnosis for individuals with IDD. In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association published the DSM-5, thus necessitating revision of the DM-ID to incorporate the changes from the DSM-IV-TR to the DSM-5. The authors discuss the need for and development of the original DM-ID and changes in the DSM-5. The authors then offer insight ..

Evaluation of protection in a mouse model after vaccination with Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculois protein cocktails

Whole-cell vaccines successfully reduce signs of clinical disease and fecal shedding of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP), however, these vaccines have some limitations. The present study was conducted to identify MAP proteins that might be candidates for the development of an improved vaccine. MAP proteins were screened for immunogenicity in naturally infected cattle and selected based upon reactivity in the interferon- (IFN-) and Western blot assays. Proteins (MAP1087, MAP1204, MAP1272c, and MAP2077c) were arrayed into 4 overlapping cocktails containing 3 proteins each. The efficacy of the proteins within these cocktails as vaccine candidates was evaluated by subcutaneous immunization of mice, followed by challenge with live, virulent MAP. All MAP protein cocktails significantly reduced the recovery of live MAP from the ileum, while cocktails 1 and 3 reduced colonization in the liver. No significant differences were seen in the mesenteric lymph node or spleen, however, cocktail 1 reduced viable MAP in the mesenteric lymph node compared to other treatments. Stimulation of splenocytes upregulated antigen-specific IFN- and IL-23 secretion in all treatment groups, regardless of vaccination. Interestingly, IL-4 was moderately downregulated for vaccinates compared to control infected mice. An increase in total CD25 expression was noted for 3 of the 4 vaccinate groups upon stimulation of splenocytes with a whole-cell sonicate of MAP, with this effect becoming more significant within CD4CD25+ and CD8CD25+ subpopulations. The present study demonstrated that MAP proteins are useful as vaccine candidates to reduce MAP tissue burden

The MRE inverse problem for the elastic shear modulus

Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) is a powerful technique for noninvasive determination of the biomechanical properties of tissue, with important applications in disease diagnosis. A typical experimental scenario is to induce waves in the tissue by time-harmonic external mechanical oscillation and then measure the tissue's displacement at fixed spatial positions 8 times during a complete time-period, extracting the dominant frequency signal from the discrete Fourier transform in time. Accurate reconstruction of the tissue's elastic moduli from MRE data is a challenging inverse problem, and we derive and analyze two new methods which address different aspects. The first of these concerns the time signal: using only the dominant frequency component loses information for noisy data and typically gives a complex value for the (real) shear modulus, which is then hard to interpret. Our new reconstruction method is based on the Fourier time-interpolant of the displacement: it uses all the measured information and automatically gives a real value of shear modulus up to rounding error. This derivation is for homogeneous materials, and our second new method (stacked frequency wave inversion, SFWI) concerns the inhomogeneous shear modulus in the time-harmonic case. The underlying problem is ill-conditioned because the coefficient of the shear modulus in the governing equations can be zero or small, and the SFWI approach overcomes this by combining approximations at different frequencies into a single overdetermined matrix--vector equation. Careful numerical tests confirm that both these new algorithms perform well