Anytime Email and Work-Life Balance: An Exploration into the Views of Adventist Schools Australia Employees

Email has extended its reach beyond the traditional workplace into the non-work hours of employees, disrupting the work-life balance. What was once ‘anywhere any time’ has become ‘everywhere all the time’ (Mazmanian, Orlikowski, & Yates, 2013). This study examines the effects of email intrusion on work-life balance from the perspective of a Christian faith-based organisation, which has the additional dimension of espousing a ‘healthy’ balance between work and life. A survey of 500 employees of such an organisation, attracting 208 respondents, found that nearly all employees owned mobile devices that enable them to access work email outside work time,and that they frequently use these devices when not at work to access work emails. The employees perceived that anytime work emails have provided them with increased flexibility, but at the same time generated greater and frequently unrealistic expectations of them, by parents, students and to a minor degree school administrators. These employees also often felt that these anytime emails led them to working longer hours, generated a sense of being overloaded, contrary to the espoused values of a work and life balance and the importance of family. For these employees the solution to the anytime work email intrusion and resulting stress is not some external control. To most of these employees external control would be much too restrictive and teaching was perceived to be and has always been more than just an 8.30am to 3.30pm responsibility

Should Pastors Be Available All the Time?

New technology in the form of 24/7 email brings with it increased expectations of begin available, adding to the pressures of work-life balance for employees. Few studies have explored this from the perspective of the Christian pastor, and none within the Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDA) pastoral context. We extend the literature in this area by examining the impact of increased work-email on the work-life balance of SDA local church pastors. Based on responses from Australian SDA local church pastors we find that while pastors find there are some advantages in the flexibility offered by 24/7 work email, it also increases the work pressures on them, impacting on stress and relationships. Effective work-life balance is becoming more difficult for the SDA local church pastor to achieve

BSE versus StarTrack: implementations of new wind, remnant-formation, and natal-kick schemes in NBODY7 and their astrophysical consequences

The masses of stellar-remnant black holes (BH), as a result of their formation via massive single- and binary-stellar evolution, is of high interest in this era of gravitational-wave detection from binary black hole (BBH) and binary neutron star (BNS) mergers. Here we present new developments in the N-body evolution program NBODY7 in regards to its stellar-remnant formation and related schemes. We demonstrate that the newly-implemented stellar-wind and remnant-formation schemes in the NBODY7 code's BSE sector, such as the 'rapid' and the 'delayed' supernova (SN) schemes along with an implementation of pulsational-pair-instability and pair-instability supernova (PPSN/PSN), now produces neutron star (NS) and BH masses that agree nearly perfectly, over large ranges of zero-age-main sequence (ZAMS) mass and metallicity, with those from the StarTrack population-synthesis program. We also demonstrate the new implementations of various natal-kick mechanisms on NSs and BHs such as the 'convection-asymmetry-driven', 'collapse-asymmetry-driven', and 'neutrino-emission-driven' kicks, in addition to a fully consistent implementation of the standard, fallback-dependent, momentum-conserving natal kick. We find that the SN material fallback causes the convection-asymmetry kick to effectively retain similar number and mass of BHs in clusters as for the standard, momentum-conserving kick. The collapse-asymmetry kick would cause nearly all BHs to retain in clusters irrespective of remnant formation model and metallicity, whereas the inference of a large number of BHs in GCs would potentially rule out the neutrino-driven kick mechanism. Pre-SN mergers of massive primordial binaries would cause BH masses to deviate from the single-star ZAMS mass-remnant mass relation. Such mergers, at low metallicities, can produce low-spinning BHs within the PSN mass gap that can be retained in a stellar cluster.Comment: 27 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

What Employers in Christian-based Organisations Desire in Graduates from a Christian Business School

Employers of Christian-based organisations have expectations of the attributes of business school graduates, and of particular interest is whether there are different and/or additional skills for graduates from a Christian Business School. The purpose of this study is to engage with various Christian-based employers of business school graduates to discover views, requirements and expectations of graduates from a Christian Business School. An initial review of the literature reveals no published works on the graduate attributes expected by Christian employers of Christian business school graduates. This study seeks to add knowledge given the gap that exists in this literature. The needs of employers change over time, and academics are well advised to ensure the curricula of the courses they teach keep pace with these changing needs. This research was completed during 2019 by staff at the Avondale Business School, part of Avondale University College. Avondale was established in 1897, by the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and is a Christian based University College. One way that Christian business school academics can maintain awareness of employers’ preferred graduate attributes is to consult with a range of employers. This study will utilise both qualitative and quantitative approaches to address the research aims of finding out if there are different and/or additional requirements by Christian-based organisations, from graduates who attend a Christian business school. The participants are employees from Christian organisations, who commonly employ these new graduates

What Counts in Brain Aging? Design-Based Stereological Analysis of Cell Number

The advent and implementation of new design-based stereological techniques allows the quantification of cell number without the assumptions required when obtaining areal densities. These new techniques are rapidly becoming the standard for quantifying cell number, particularly in aging studies. Recently, studies using stereological techniques have failed to confirm earlier findings regarding age-associated neural loss. This newly emerging view of retained cell number during aging is having a major impact on biogerontology, prompting revaluation of long-standing hypotheses of age-related cell loss as causal for age-related impairments in brain functioning. Rather than focus on neuronal loss as the end-result of a negative cascade of neuronal injury, research has begun to consider that age-related behavioral declines may reflect neuronal dysfunction (e.g., synaptic or receptor loss, signal transduction deficits) instead of neuronal death. Here we discuss design-based stereology in the context of age-related change in brain cell number and its impact on consideration of structural change in brain aging. Emergence of this method of morphometries, however, can have relevance to many areas of gerontological researc

Differential retinoic acid signaling in the hippocampus of aged rats with and without memory impairment

Funding Information: This work was entirely supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, National institute on Aging.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Sensitivity of global terrestrial ecosystems to climate variability

The identification of properties that contribute to the persistence and resilience of ecosystems despite climate change constitutes a research priority of global relevance1. Here we present a novel, empirical approach to assess the relative sensitivity of ecosystems to climate variability, one property of resilience that builds on theoretical modelling work recognizing that systems closer to critical thresholds respond more sensitively to external perturbations2. We develop a new metric, the vegetation sensitivity index, that identifies areas sensitive to climate variability over the past 14 years. The metric uses time series data derived from the moderate-resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) enhanced vegetation index3, and three climatic variables that drive vegetation productivity4 (air temperature, water availability and cloud cover). Underlying the analysis is an autoregressive modelling approach used to identify climate drivers of vegetation productivity on monthly timescales, in addition to regions with memory effects and reduced response rates to external forcing5. We find ecologically sensitive regions with amplified responses to climate variability in the Arctic tundra, parts of the boreal forest belt, the tropical rainforest, alpine regions worldwide, steppe and prairie regions of central Asia and North and South America, the Caatinga deciduous forest in eastern South America, and eastern areas of Australia. Our study provides a quantitative methodology for assessing the relative response rate of ecosystems—be they natural or with a strong anthropogenic signature—to environmental variability, which is the first step towards addressing why some regions appear to be more sensitive than others, and what impact this has on the resilience of ecosystem service provision and human well-being.acceptedVersio

Efficient regret bounds for online bid optimisation in budget-limited sponsored search auctions

We study the problem of an advertising agent who needs to intelligently distribute her budget across a sequence of online keyword bidding auctions. We assume the closing price of each auction is governed by the same unknown distribution, and study the problem of making provably optimal bidding decisions. Learning the distribution is done under censored observations, i.e. the closing price of an auction is revealed only if the bid we place is above it. We consider three algorithms, namely ε—First, Greedy Product-Limit (GPL) and LuekerLearn, respectively, and we show that these algorithms provably achieve Hannan-consistency. In particular, we show that the regret bound of ε—First is at most O(T⅔) with high probability. For the other two algorithms, we first prove that, by using a censored data distribution estimator proposed by Zeng [19], the empirical distribution of the closing market price converges in probability to its true distribution with a O(1/√t) rate, where t is the number of updates. Based on this result, we prove that both GPL and LuekerLearn achieve O(√T) regret bound with high probability. This in fact provides an affirmative answer to the research question raised in [1]. We also evaluate the abovementioned algorithms using real bidding data, and show that although GPL achieves the best performance on average (up to 90% of the optimal solution), its long running time may limit its suitability in practice. By contrast, LuekerLearn and ε— First proposed in this paper achieve up to 85% of the optimal, but with an exponential reduction in computational complexity (a saving up to 95%, compared to GPL)