Discourses of change ownership in higher education

PURPOSE - This paper demonstrates how the positioning of self and others affects change in higher education. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH - The discourse of various educators was collected during various interviews and discussion groups. A positioning theory framework was used to analyse the data and derive conclusions. FINDINGS - It is shown that if individuals are understood in terms of their agendas in relation to the organisational context that they can be better led. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS - The quantity and quality of data available has limited the integrity of conclusions drawn from this paper. Further research is proposed that will provide a more robust understanding. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS - An approach to understand how to deal with various stakeholders is presented for leaders. There is a need to deal with each person as an individual depending on how their personal agendas influence their priorities. ORIGINALITY/VALUE - This paper introduces a social constructionist perspective to leading academics

Using positioning theory to understand how senior managers deal with sustainability

Social pressure for sustainability has become a significant factor in Australian business. Made popular by a variety of diverse social movements that employ various tactics, sustainability is increasingly being debated in boardrooms and work areas of both large and small businesses. In this research, sustainability issues are treated as a set of a wider range of obligatory and externally imposed (OEI) issues that are increasingly confronting contemporary business. Of interest to this research is how senior managers deal with sustainability issues. While some businesses excel in dealing with OEI issues, others prevaricate. This research focuses on those businesses that appear to excel in resolving sustainability issues to explore how senior managers deal with sustainability issues. Such understanding is essential for contemporary practising senior managers, as it provides guidance for management behaviour that will enable sustainability and other OEI issues to be dealt with. The author's effort to understand how senior managers deal with sustainability issues has led to the first business context application of Harré's positioning theory. A social constructionist approach, positioning theory is concerned with ordinary conversations, and presumes that these are the building blocks of all other discursive phenomena. The resulting theory builds on positioning theory and provides a point of departure to conduct related research on other organizations that excel in dealing with OEI issues and those that prevaricate. With positioning theory it has been shown that, in dealing with sustainability issues, senior managers engage in a range of positioning of themselves and others. In doing so, power and knowledge have been considered in the light of Foucault's unique and penetrating concepts. This has led to the proposed augmentation of positioning theory to include a concept of social flux, which is put forward as an indication of social order or culture. Through this development, it has shown how senior managers confront opposition and reinforce support to enable them to achieve and preserve sustainability objectives. In practical terms, senior managers alter four components of the social order to align the culture with the issues that need to be dealt with. These components - rights, duties, morals and actions - are parameters that senior managers tune or level when they deal with sustainability issues. When the social order is appropriately tuned or levelled, it is aligned with the issues that need to be dealt with. That alignment enables issues to be resolved in a way appropriate for the organization

Long-Term Effects of Parents\u27 Education on Children\u27s Educational and Occupational Success Mediation by Family Interactions, Child Aggression, and Teenage Aspirations

We examine the prediction of individuals\u27 educational and occupational success at age 48 from contextual and personal variables assessed during their middle childhood and late adolescence. We focus particularly on the predictive role of the parents\u27 educational level during middle childhood, controlling for other indices of socioeconomic status and children\u27s IQ, and the mediating roles of negative family interactions, childhood behavior, and late adolescent aspirations. Data come from the Columbia County Longitudinal Study, which began in 1960 when all 856 third graders in a semirural county in New York State were interviewed along with their parents; participants were reinterviewed at ages 19, 30, and 48 (Eron et al., 197 1; Huesmann et al., 2002). Parents\u27 educational level when the child was 8 years old significantly predicted educational and occupational success for the child 40 years later. Structural models showed that parental educational level had no direct effects on child educational level or occupational prestige at age 48 but had significant indirect effects that were independent of the other predictor variables\u27 effects. These indirect effects were mediated through age 19 educational aspirations and age 19 educational level. These results provide strong support for the unique predictive role of parental education on adult outcomes 40 years later and underscore the developmental importance of mediators of parent education effects such as late adolescent achievement and achievement-related aspirations

Digitally Continuous Multivalued Functions, Morphological Operations and Thinning Algorithms

In a recent paper (Escribano et al. in Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4992, pp. 81–92, 2008) we have introduced a notion of continuity in digital spaces which extends the usual notion of digital continuity. Our approach, which uses multivalued functions, provides a better framework to define topological notions, like retractions, in a far more realistic way than by using just single-valued digitally continuous functions. In this work we develop properties of this family of continuous functions, now concentrating on morphological operations and thinning algorithms. We show that our notion of continuity provides a suitable framework for the basic operations in mathematical morphology: erosion, dilation, closing, and opening. On the other hand, concerning thinning algorithms, we give conditions under which the existence of a retraction F:X⟶X∖D guarantees that D is deletable. The converse is not true, in general, although it is in certain particular important cases which are at the basis of many thinning algorithms

Foreign Wars and Domestic Prejudice: How Media Exposure to the Israeli‐Palestinian Conflict Predicts Ethnic Stereotyping by Jewish and Arab American Adolescents

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93529/1/jora785.pd

Promoting tau secretion and propagation by hyperactive p300/CBP via autophagy-lysosomal pathway in tauopathy.

BackgroundThe trans-neuronal propagation of tau has been implicated in the progression of tau-mediated neurodegeneration. There is critical knowledge gap in understanding how tau is released and transmitted, and how that is dysregulated in diseases. Previously, we reported that lysine acetyltransferase p300/CBP acetylates tau and regulates its degradation and toxicity. However, whether p300/CBP is involved in regulation of tau secretion and propagation is unknown.MethodWe investigated the relationship between p300/CBP activity, the autophagy-lysosomal pathway (ALP) and tau secretion in mouse models of tauopathy and in cultured rodent and human neurons. Through a high-through-put compound screen, we identified a new p300 inhibitor that promotes autophagic flux and reduces tau secretion. Using fibril-induced tau spreading models in vitro and in vivo, we examined how p300/CBP regulates tau propagation.ResultsIncreased p300/CBP activity was associated with aberrant accumulation of ALP markers in a tau transgenic mouse model. p300/CBP hyperactivation blocked autophagic flux and increased tau secretion in neurons. Conversely, inhibiting p300/CBP promoted autophagic flux, reduced tau secretion, and reduced tau propagation in fibril-induced tau spreading models in vitro and in vivo.ConclusionsWe report that p300/CBP, a lysine acetyltransferase aberrantly activated in tauopathies, causes impairment in ALP, leading to excess tau secretion. This effect, together with increased intracellular tau accumulation, contributes to enhanced spreading of tau. Our findings suggest that inhibition of p300/CBP as a novel approach to correct ALP dysfunction and block disease progression in tauopathy

Tissue-specific regulatory elements in mammalian promoters

Transcription factor-binding sites and the cis-regulatory modules they compose are central determinants of gene expression. We previously showed that binding site motifs and modules in proximal promoters can be used to predict a significant portion of mammalian tissue-specific transcription. Here, we report on a systematic analysis of promoters controlling tissue-specific expression in heart, kidney, liver, pancreas, skeletal muscle, testis and CD4 T cells, for both human and mouse. We integrated multiple sources of expression data to compile sets of transcripts with strong evidence for tissue-specific regulation. The analysis of the promoters corresponding to these sets produced a catalog of predicted tissue-specific motifs and modules, and cis-regulatory elements. Predicted regulatory interactions are supported by statistical evidence, and provide a foundation for targeted experiments that will improve our understanding of tissue-specific regulatory networks. In a broader context, methods used to construct the catalog provide a model for the analysis of genomic regions that regulate differentially expressed genes

Contexts of diffusion: Adoption of research synthesis in Social Work and Women's Studies

Texts reveal the subjects of interest in research fields, and the values, beliefs, and practices of researchers. In this study, texts are examined through bibliometric mapping and topic modeling to provide a birds eye view of the social dynamics associated with the diffusion of research synthesis methods in the contexts of Social Work and Women's Studies. Research synthesis texts are especially revealing because the methods, which include meta-analysis and systematic review, are reliant on the availability of past research and data, sometimes idealized as objective, egalitarian approaches to research evaluation, fundamentally tied to past research practices, and performed with the goal informing future research and practice. This study highlights the co-influence of past and subsequent research within research fields; illustrates dynamics of the diffusion process; and provides insight into the cultural contexts of research in Social Work and Women's Studies. This study suggests the potential to further develop bibliometric mapping and topic modeling techniques to inform research problem selection and resource allocation.Comment: To appear in proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, and Prediction (SBP2014