The Impact of Live Cases on Student Skill Development in Marketing Courses

Live cases, where students work directly with an outside organization to solve real-world problems, can be an immersive learning experience for marketing students. Current scholarship on live case usage in marketing is limited to small samples from a handful of live case devotees. This article draws from a large, international sample of 169 marketing educators to investigate the perceived educational impacts of live cases on student skill development. Specifically, the paper explores student teamwork, conflict handling, time management, presentation, communication, and critical thinking skills. Additionally, the article explores how student skill development is affected by the amount of course time dedicated to the live case as well as faculty experience with live cases

The curvilinear and conditional effects of product line breadth on salesperson performance, role stress, and job satisfaction

The impact of how product line breadth affects a salesperson is unclear in the existing literature. While numerous product lines can provide certain benefits to the salesperson, they may also have a dark side. This research examines the impact of number product lines handled by the salespeople on their performance, role stress, and job satisfaction. Based on role and schema theories, we test a series of curvilinear and conditional effects, using data collected from salespeople across multiple industries. Our analysis indicates non-linear relationships between number of product lines handled by the salesperson and salesperson performance and role stress. Further, these relationships are contingent on the complexity of products, complementarity of product lines, and lines acquired through mergers and acquisitions. These results show the complex effects of product lines on the salesperson and recognize both the benefits and drawbacks of product line breadth

The Impact of Spatial Heterogeneity in Land Use Practices and Aquifer Characteristics on Groundwater Conservation Policy Cost

Estimation of agricultural policy cost for a given level of groundwater conservation requires the establishment of an accurate baseline condition. This is especially critical when the benefits and cost of any conservation program are generally estimated relative to the status quo policy or baseline situation. An inaccurate baseline estimate will lead to poor estimates of potential water conservation savings and agricultural policy cost. Over a 60-year planning horizon per acre net present value is as much as 29.8% higher for a study area when aquifer characteristics are assumed to be homogenous and set to their average area value than when the heterogeneity in aquifer characteristics is explicitly modeled.Aquifer Modeling, Economics, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The relationships between HCAHPS communication and discharge satisfaction items and hospital readmissions

The Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) survey has become a key metric used by organizations and patients to evaluate patient experience. Readmissions also continue to be a metric used to evaluate performance because of the added cost to both healthcare systems and patients. Both measures are also seen in programs such as Value Based Purchasing that have an effect on hospital reimbursements. Previous studies have demonstrated a relationship between patient perceptions and quality of care, and have found patients to be reliable evaluators of their care. While good communication and positive provider relationships have been related to higher satisfaction and higher rates of treatment compliance, past research has been limited to evaluating the relationship between readmissions and satisfaction at an organizational level. This retrospective, cross-sectional study will examine the relationship between communication and discharge HCAHPS questions and readmissions at 30 days, specifically at the patient level. Of the eight HCAHPS questions analyzed, higher scores on questions regarding “nurses listening” and “doctors explaining information” were linked to a decreased risk of readmission, while higher scores regarding “help after discharge” were linked to an increased risk for readmission. These results show the importance that a patient’s severity of illness and hospital procedures have on explaining HCAHPS results. This study’s seemingly paradoxical findings suggest the need to recognize potential trade-offs when reviewing HCAHPS results and using them to drive patient experience initiatives

Early Life Risk Factors for Incident Atrial Fibrillation in the Helsinki Birth Cohort Study

Background-Early life risk factors are associated with cardiometabolic disease, but have not been fully studied in atrial fibrillation (AF). There are discordant results from existing studies of birth weight and AF, and the impact of maternal body size, gestational age, placental size, and birth length is unknown. Methods and Results-The Helsinki Birth Cohort Study includes 13 345 people born as singletons in Helsinki in the years 1934-1944. Follow-up was through national registries, and ended on December 31, 2013, with 907 incident cases. Cox regression analyses stratified on year of birth were constructed for perinatal variables and incident AF, adjusting for offspring sex, gestational age, and socioeconomic status at birth. There was a significant U-shaped association between birth weight and AF (P for quadratic term = 0.01). The lowest risk of AF was found among those with a birth weight of 3.4 kg (3.8 kg for women [85th percentile] and 3.0 kg for men [17th percentile]). High maternal body mass index (>= 30 kg/m(2)) predicted offspring AF; hazard ratio 1.36 (95% CI 1.07-1.74, P = 0.01) compared with normal body mass index ( Conclusions-High maternal body mass index during pregnancy and maternal height are previously undescribed predictors of offspring AF. Efforts to prevent maternal obesity might reduce later AF in offspring. Birth weight has a U-shaped relation to incident AF independent of other perinatal variables.Peer reviewe

The Epithelial Sodium Channel (ENaC) Establishes a Trafficking Vesicle Pool Responsible for Its Regulation

The epithelial sodium channel (ENaC) is the rate-limiting step for sodium reabsorption across tight epithelia. Cyclic-AMP (cAMP) stimulation promotes ENaC trafficking to the apical surface to increase channel number and transcellular Na+ transport. Removal of corticosteroid supplementation in a cultured cortical collecting duct cell line reduced ENaC expression. Concurrently, the number of vesicles trafficked in response to cAMP stimulation, as measured by a change in membrane capacitance, also decreased. Stimulation with aldosterone restored both the basal and cAMP-stimulated ENaC activity and increased the number of exocytosed vesicles. Knocking down ENaC directly decreased both the cAMP-stimulated short-circuit current and capacitance response in the presence of aldosterone. However, constitutive apical recycling of the Immunoglobulin A receptor was unaffected by alterations in ENaC expression or trafficking. Fischer Rat Thyroid cells, transfected with α,β,γ-mENaC had a significantly greater membrane capacitance response to cAMP stimulation compared to non-ENaC controls. Finally, immunofluorescent labeling and quantitation revealed a smaller number of vesicles in cells where ENaC expression was reduced. These findings indicate that ENaC is not a passive passenger in regulated epithelial vesicle trafficking, but plays a role in establishing and maintaining the pool of vesicles that respond to cAMP stimulation. © 2012 Edinger et al

Greenstone burial–exhumation cycles at the late Archean transition to plate tectonics

Converging lines of evidence suggest that, during the late Archean, Earth completed its transition from a stagnant-lid to a plate tectonics regime,although how and when this transition occurred is debated. The geological record indicates that some form of subduction, a key component of plate tectonics—has operated since the Mesoarchean, even though the tectonic style and timescales of burial and exhumation cycles within ancient convergent margins are poorly constrained.Here, we present a Neoarchean pressure–temperature–time (P–T–t) path from supracrustal rocks of the transpressional Yilgarn orogen (Western Australia), which documents how sea-floor-altered rocks underwent deep burial then exhumation during shortening that was unrelated to the episode of burial. Archean subduction, even if generally short-lived, was capable of producing eclogites along converging lithosphere boundaries, although exhumation processes in those environments were likely less efficient than today, such that return of high-pressure rocks to the surface was rare

The N2K Consortium VI: Doppler Shifts Without Templates and Three New Short-Period Planets

We present a modification to the iodine cell Doppler technique that eliminates the need for an observed stellar template spectrum. For a given target star, we iterate toward a synthetic template spectrum beginning with an existing spectrum of a similar star. We then perturb the shape of this first-guess template to match the program observation of the target star taken through an iodine cell. The elimination of a separate template observation saves valuable telescope time, a feature that is ideally suited for the quick-look strategy employed by the ``Next 2000 Stars'' (N2K) planet search program. Tests using Keck/HIRES spectra indicate that synthetic templates yield a short-term precision of 3 m/s and a long-term, run-to-run precision of 5 m/s. We used this new Doppler technique to discover three new planets: a 1.5 Mjup planet in a 2.1375 d orbit around HD 86081; a 0.71 Mjup planet in circular, 26.73 d orbit around HD 224693; and a Saturn-mass planet in an 18.179 d orbit around HD 33283. The remarkably short period of HD 86081b bridges the gap between the extremely short-period planets detected in the OGLE survey and the 16 Doppler-detected hot jupiters (P < 15 d), which have an orbital period distribution that piles up at about three days. We have acquired photometric observations of two of the planetary host stars with the automated photometric telescopes at Fairborn Observatory. HD 86081 and HD 224693 both lack detectable brightness variability on their radial velocity periods, supporting planetary-reflex motion as the cause of the radial velocity variability. HD 86081 shows no evidence of planetary transits in spite of a 17.6% transit probability.Comment: 39 pages, 12 figures, 8 tables (ApJ Accepted

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER)

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER) is a balloon-borne cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarimeter designed to search for evidence of inflation by measuring the large-angular scale CMB polarization signal. BICEP2 recently reported a detection of B-mode power corresponding to the tensor-to-scalar ratio r = 0.2 on ~2 degree scales. If the BICEP2 signal is caused by inflationary gravitational waves (IGWs), then there should be a corresponding increase in B-mode power on angular scales larger than 18 degrees. PIPER is currently the only suborbital instrument capable of fully testing and extending the BICEP2 results by measuring the B-mode power spectrum on angular scales $\theta$ = ~0.6 deg to 90 deg, covering both the reionization bump and recombination peak, with sensitivity to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio down to r = 0.007, and four frequency bands to distinguish foregrounds. PIPER will accomplish this by mapping 85% of the sky in four frequency bands (200, 270, 350, 600 GHz) over a series of 8 conventional balloon flights from the northern and southern hemispheres. The instrument has background-limited sensitivity provided by fully cryogenic (1.5 K) optics focusing the sky signal onto four 32x40-pixel arrays of time-domain multiplexed Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers held at 140 mK. Polarization sensitivity and systematic control are provided by front-end Variable-delay Polarization Modulators (VPMs), which rapidly modulate only the polarized sky signal at 3 Hz and allow PIPER to instantaneously measure the full Stokes vector (I, Q, U, V) for each pointing. We describe the PIPER instrument and progress towards its first flight.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures. To be published in Proceedings of SPIE Volume 9153. Presented at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2014, conference 915